Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - NASA's Charlie Bolden Visits Earth Missions at JPL

Episode Date: August 19, 2013

Two missions are coming together in a high bay clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. SMAP and ISS RapidScat went on display for a visit by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. Mat Kaplan and Emily Lakdawalla provide special coverage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Music Visiting missions in the clean room with the head of NASA, this week on Planetary Radio. Music Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Join Emily Lakdawalla and me as we look in on two missions that will reveal vital information about our home planet. We'll talk to some of the people behind SMAP and RapidSCAT,

and then we'll throw a few questions at the NASA Administrator, Charles Bolden. First, though, our regular conversation with Bill Nye, the science guy. Bill, I guess we have to bid a fond farewell to Kepler, or at least to its planet-finding days. Yeah, it doesn't aim accurately enough anymore because the reaction wheels, gyroscopes used to point it, isn't working very well. It's really an extraordinary thing.

You get this spinning mass driven by an electric motor powered by solar panels, and you use it to point this very massive telescope precisely at stars so you can observe a slight darkening as a planet goes in front of it. It's amazing. She's wore out. Her bushings is wore. Moving parts in space, just not a great thing.

Well, you've got to have a few. Yeah. If you're going to run a rocket motor, you got to open a valve somewhere. But still an enormously successful mission. Oh, man. This is fantastic. And as we say at the Planetary Society all the time, the cost of these things is so low compared to the cost of so many other things you do in space and compared to any other kind of discovery you go trying to make. If you want to learn about our place in space, you can't beat an instrument like Kepler.

Man. We've still got a minute left. Can you tell me why you were on the phone with Buzz Aldrin? Let me start by saying, yeah, but I'm not sure. Dr. Aldrin has this great scheme to use the Orion capsule, the Space Launch System, and what he calls the cycler spacecraft. These would be spacecraft that will cycle in an orbit that crosses the Earth's orbit and Mars's orbit. I mean, I'll just tell you, at one point on the phone call, I said, Dr. Aldrin,

how are we going to pay for this? And his response is, well, it's great. It brings out the best in us. This is a wonderful thing for all governments around the world to be doing. OK, but how are we going to pay for it? So we're still back at the same thing. But here's what we did talk about on the call, that it would be an outstanding use of the International Space Station to get taikonauts, Chinese astronauts, on the space station. astronauts, Chinese astronauts on the space station. So they could literally shake hands in space, as was done with the United States and the former Soviet Union, to help taper off the Cold War. And this might help everybody work together in space so that we can go farther and deeper with people who are the best explorers we know. And dare I say it, Matt, change the world.

You both basically have the same goal. Oh, absolutely. The thing about Dr. Aldrin, about Buzz Aldrin, in contrast to many other people from that era, he wants to go forward. He wants to look farther, deeper into space. He does not long to return to the moon. He said that explicitly several times. In other words, he's been to the moon. He's the guy that said magnificent desolation. And he doesn't see, at least yesterday, he did not express any sentiment about any desire to go back there. Which is quite a thing.

We have the U.S. Congress passing laws saying you've got to go back to the moon and build a moon base. Contrary point of view to the guy who walked there. It's quite a thing. Magnificent conversation, Bill. Thank you. Thank you, Matt. He's Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill Nye the science guy. We're going to head for JPL and a conversation with the NASA administrator.

I love that. When we were here for Curiosity, I said, I want one of these for my home. That small but noisy cubicle was the airlock between the changing room and High Bay No. 1 at the Jet Propulsion Lab near Pasadena, California. After having any remaining dust blown from my white smock and booties, I joined a large group of reporters already in the bay. Emily Lakdawalla was right behind me.

And then came the two biggest VIPs who would also drop by to visit two of three missions to Earth that will launch in the near future. My name is Charles Elash. I'm the director of JPL. We want to welcome all of you here. Last year was the year of Mars, with Curiosity landing. Next year is the year of Earth science. We'll be looking at our own planet. There'll be a number of launches.

You'll be seeing two of them that we have here. And with this, I want to introduce one, the Honorable Charlie Bolton, the administrator of NASA. Thank you. And I'll make it very quickly. I think most of you know the President is really focused on our environment on Earth. He has actually announced an Earth Science Initiative, or if you want to put it this way,

a Climate Change Initiative. We're going to see two of the satellites that are playing a critical role in our Earth Science effort. Last week I was privileged to be in Phoenix, Arizona, where I visited the Orbital Sciences Facility and had a chance to look at OCO-2, which is the Orbiting Carbon Observatory. The two instruments that I'm gonna look at here today

are the Soil Moisture Active Passive, and then we're gonna take a look at RapidSat, which is RapidScat, which to me is the most exciting of the three because it finally recognizes our ability to marry human exploration and human spaceflight with science in a real sense by putting this on the International Space Station and helping us to enhance the utilization of Space Station as a true science platform. So I'm really excited about those three missions that we're going to fly in the next couple of years. JPL Director Charles Elachi

escorting NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden. We're going to hear more from them later in the show. Other reporters and I got to throw some pointed questions their way. But our August 13th tour was just beginning. Let's talk about it with Senior Editor and Planetary Evangelist Emily Lakdawalla. Wanted to get your impressions of that trip we made to JPL.

Well, this was my second trip inside the clean room, also known as the high bay or the spacecraft assembly facility at JPL. It was quite different to the last one. Last time I went in and saw Curiosity, and that was a spacecraft headed to Mars. There were planetary protection issues. Everybody was head to toe in sterile garments with our faces covered. This was two missions, actually, that were going to be observing Earth. And for Earth, the protections are much less stringent. I kind of enjoyed those bunny suit extremes they put us in for Curiosity.

That's okay, though. It did make it easier to recognize people across the room and get some really good stories about what's going on with SMAP and with ISS RapidSCAT. One is a whole spacecraft. The other one is an instrument that's going to be bolted to the side of the space station. And both of them are radar instruments that will help us understand some very important aspects of Earth's weather. You got to talk to a number of people, some of whom we're going to be hearing from, but one, unfortunately, we missed. And I guess you had a really good conversation. Yeah, it was a young engineer named Julia Stalder. And she's very proud about how this ISS

rapid scat instrument is taking advantage of a lot of hardware that had been built for its predecessor spacecraft that had been left in storage. And this is quite common. Space missions often build two copies of things, one of which they perform a lot of testing on. The other one, they subject to slightly less stringent tests, and that's the one that they wind up sending to space. Well, the one that was sent to space, a quick scat, failed after a very long time in service. And so they decided to pivot and take some of this older hardware out of storage and try to recertify it for flight. And that's what they're doing now. So actually, their biggest engineering challenge is really figuring out how to attach it to the side of the space station.

And so one of the newest pieces of equipment that they're working on is basically just a big space-qualified L bracket that will hold it to the side of the station and allow it to look down and to measure wind speeds on the surface of the Earth. And we have some great photos of all of this, or you have put some of the photos that I took in your blog entry for the 14th. And with any luck, we'll have some video up as well. If people go to planetary.org slash radio, look for the page with this week's show, and there should be some links there to a lot of this stuff. Back to JPL now. Stretched out before

us in the huge high bay were the pristine components of what would become SMAP and ISS Rapid SCAT. Many of the proud engineers and scientists behind these missions were there to talk with us and Charlie Bolden. High above us, looking through windows at the clean room below, the gallery was full of additional visitors. As I ran the Planetary Society video camera, Emily introduced herself to a member of the team working on soil moisture active passive, SMAP, the satellite that will point a huge rotating antenna at Earth, using radar to detect moisture in the soil. My name is Sean Goodman. I've been with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for about 22 years here. I'm the project system engineer for SMAP. I'm also the engineering technical authority here. I'm the project system engineer for SMAP. I'm also the engineering technical authority, so I'm the technical conscience of the project.

Supposed to make sure that we do everything the right way without cutting corners that are irresponsible in any way. So I glue the system together as the project system engineer, and then I make sure that we follow best practices as the engineering technical authority. What's the exciting about this particular mission? What do you hope to accomplish with it? Well, I think this mission is fundamental to all of us. We're trying to understand the water cycle and where the fresh water is on our planet and what the interaction is with the weather, with the climate.

I think we all understand we need water for recreation, we need water for sustenance. We have such an intimate relationship with it. It's something we really need to develop that relationship on. This mission is going to make global measurements that help us better understand how water works in our system and what we need to do to be good caretakers of it. Are there spacecraft out there that are like this one, that this is just a new and improved one, or is this a totally new kind of measurement that they're doing? I don't think it's a totally new one. I think it's a more accurate measurement than other missions that are out there.

I know that a SMOS mission is there. I believe we've got five times the resolution that the SMOS mission has. So we'll get some fairly precise measurements that are unheard of before on a global scale for the next three years. We'll get global measurements every three days for three years of where the water is on our planet. We can measure how climate changes. We can perhaps measurements every three days for three years of where the water is on our planet. We can measure how climate changes. We can perhaps forecast weather better.

We all care about where the water is going in terms of droughts and floods and natural disasters and what impact that might have on disease. So, yeah, I think we're really going to be in a unique position to improve the quality of life for all of us. I was looking at the model of the spacecraft that they have at Von Kármán, and, of course, a large chunk of the spacecraft spins. Is that common or uncommon for spacecraft, and does that present any engineering difficulties? I believe there were a few predecessors to us that spun relatively large antennas, particularly of this type. I think you'll see later on that Quicksat even has a spinning antenna.

But for us the challenge is that it's so inertially massive. When you look at the spacecraft compared to the antenna, that inertial mass tends to want to make the spacecraft itself spin. So there were some early questions about, well, how do you control something spinning so large when you're so small? It seems relatively flexible. How do you keep the whole thing from shaking when you're effectively trying to hold a magnifying glass to the planet? All of those were initial challenges. We had a number of peer reviews from inside academia and outside of JPL to make sure we really were addressing the problem right. We developed a lot of margins, a lot of design opportunities, some verification

approaches to convince ourselves we have a robust system, a unique system, but a robust system. So it's not completely unique in the application of a rotating antenna to get a larger ground patch, but it's unique in that by scale it's considerably larger than the base body that it's spinning in. Sean Goodman of the SMAP mission to Earth talking to Emily Lakdawalla. After the break, we'll hear about yet another radar instrument, one that will soon be headed to the International Space Station. 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 and 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, joined this week by my colleague Emily Lakdawalla. Emily and I went to JPL's High Bay One to visit two radar

missions being readied for launch. We heard about SMAP, the Soil Moisture Active Passive Satellite, before the break. We'll turn now to ISS RAPIDSCAT. The ISS stands for International Space Station, to which this big instrument will be attached. RAPID is for how quickly it came together, basically from spare parts. And SCAT is for scatter. Emily talked with instrument systems engineer Dragana Perkovic-Martin to learn more. Here you're seeing just a part of our instrument. You're seeing the antenna assembly and you're seeing the spinning mechanism that will be spinning this antenna around. So what we're doing is you're

going to have two beams coming down to the ground and they're going to rotate around. So you're going to get the circular pattern. And then as the space station moves across the sky, you're going to get the circular pattern and then as the space station moves across the sky you're gonna get this pattern start to fill in and it will create sort of a road that we call swath and this is sort of a road over which we collect the data so what happens then the the orbit of the space station repeats so we observe the whole earth in about two days and what we're getting from this is basically wind speeds and wind directions but the repeats. So we observe the whole earth in about two days and what we're getting from this is basically wind speeds and wind directions. But the instrument that's doing that is a radar. Tell me how radar gets us wind speed. I understand

reflecting off of something and getting a reflected power so how do you get speed out of that? Right, so this particular radar, what it does it actually detects how strong of an echo is coming back from the ground. So what's happening is you send the energy down, it reflects back and it comes back to the radar. And depending on how strong something is or how strong of a wind you have, you're gonna get more power or less power back. But really what we're sensitive to are little tiny waves on the surface of the large waves that everybody surfs on and that everybody knows of.

So depending on the wind speed, these teeny little waves are going to be rougher. So there's going to be a rougher surface, and this is what gives us signal. So this is what gives you power. Depending on which direction the wind is blowing, these little waves are going to align themselves with the wind direction. And then the radar is going to observe this from different points of view. Once this data is collected and then processed, you can actually get both the speed, so how fast the wind was blowing over this little patch, and also the direction of the wind. With their tour of the high bay complete, JPL Director Charles Elachi

and NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden paused to answer a few questions. Earth is a strange place. It makes us pay dear prices for things that we do that we shouldn't do. And this will help us understand something. You know that 70% of the fresh produce in the United States comes from the Central Valley. You talk to the farmer, soil moisture is the most critical element because water is what makes everything grow. And this mission is going to help us in addition to the climate change, in addition to the flooding. It will help the farmers to be able to know how much moisture is there in the ground and when they

have, you know, to irrigate. So when you go and eat dinner tonight, when you're eating that produce, think of NASA. Matt Kaplan with the Planetary Society. We've already heard the key role that Falcon 9 and Dragon are going to play in getting ISS Rabbit SCAT up to the station. With the departure of your deputy, the imminent departure of Lori Garver,

some of these commercial providers may be a little bit nervous. Can you give them any reassurance? I don't nervous. Can you give them any reassurance? I don't think I have to give them any reassurance. NASA has been, you can say that under, at least under President Obama's term, we have done what we were told to do as long ago as 1958 when they said NASA should take advantage of every commercially available asset possible. NASA should take advantage of every commercially available asset possible.

In 2004, when the decision was made then to phase out the space shuttle by 2010, which we missed by a year, I have to admit, we were supposed to bring along a commercial capability to provide access to low Earth orbit. That wasn't done in actuality until we came into place. And so we now have the capability to get cargo to the International Space Station and to low-Earth orbit, something we didn't have before. When Orbital Sciences flies next month, we'll have two American providers carrying cargo. We're really hopeful that by next summer this time we'll be able to announce that we now are contracting with Boeing, Sierra Nevada, or SpaceX,

or multiples to provide transportation for our crews to low Earth orbit. And that's not anything that a person does. You're looking at the people that make things happen. Lori and I come and go. People need to understand that. I don't think you're going to see any change in the way that commercial space is done while the Obama administration is at least in office. How rough of a patch is it going to be for this place in terms of unmanned space exploration because of the budget squeeze in Washington? I mean, it's going to be rough for everybody.

And JPL is no different. We have, you know, when we count JPL, we have 10 NASA centers around the country. And what we're trying to do, what my job now as the leader of this organization is to help rely on them to tell me what they feel their critical contribution to the nation is. So whereas a center before may have done, I mean, a broad array of things, Some, just because they wanted to keep their fingers in the game. We're asking now for centers to identify, if you were to go away today, what would it be that you would want everybody to think about instantly when they thought of JPL?

People instantly think of planetary science when they think of JPL. So anytime we're doing planetary science, I think you know that JPL is going to be involved in some manner. What people don't frequently know is the intimate involvement of JPL in Earth science. And since that's not going away, I see that the future here is pretty sound. So I would say everybody's going to be okay. Nobody's going to be great. Oh, without a doubt.

We're already talking about things that, when I talked about this critical period or the critical milestone, anything that has not reached that critical milestone right now is a candidate for not flying. It just depends on how the budget turns out. And that's what we continually try to tell members of our committees in Congress. Every action has a reaction or every action has a consequence. Every inaction has a consequence. The failure to sufficiently fund the president's budget means that some of the things that we proposed are not going to get done. Dr. Alachi, is this a good time to make a pitch for a Europa mission? Look, I mean, we have a long-term program for planetary exploration, and NASA and Charlie have been very supportive of that.

So we're following the Decado plan. They said the highest priority is March 2020, and NASA has agreed to support March 2020. We're conducting studies on Europa, but it all depends on future budgets. So, again, the message is really for Congress and our sponsors in Congress that NASA does unique things that nobody else can do and look at the benefit we get from it. So with proper funding, of course, all of these could be done. JPL Director Charles Elachi and NASA Administrator

Charles Bolden in the Jet Propulsion Lab's High Bay One, checking out SMAP and ISS RapidScat, two missions that will tell us about water and wind on this complicated and precious blue dot known as Earth. Bruce Fetz is on the Skype line because we're going to do What's Up. That's our segment that has ended this program for going on 11 years. Really interesting both question and responses to your trivia question today. So I look forward to getting to that with you. Oh, good. But first, got Venus still looking stupid bright over in the West

in the early evening, soon after sunset, really, really, really bright. Then in the pre-dawn, we've got Jupiter looking very bright, and below that, reddish Mars, which over the course of the next days and couple weeks is also doing a nice lineup with similarly bright but differently colored Gemini's two bright stars, Castor and Pollux. So Castor, Pollux, and Mars kind of lining up, Mars being the reddish one. And then we've got things that are changing. a nova that was discovered during this last week in Delphinius, the dolphin constellation, which is particularly easy to see in the northern hemisphere in the evening sky high overhead. The nova's brightened to around, should be around four and a half to five magnitude now.

So not something that's going to catch your eye. In fact, it won't even be visible with your eye from most locations, but you can pick it up with binoculars. Or if you're in a really dark site, it actually is naked eye. And so it just looks like a star, but it's cool because we couldn't see it naked eye just a week ago. Let me clarify here. This is a nova, not a supernova.

That is correct. And patience, my friend. I anticipated your question. and patience, my friend. I anticipated your question. Ten years ago, the Spitzer Space Telescope was launched and Fred Great Observatory that's done amazing things. Some beautiful pictures. Voyager 2 was busy this week in 1981 flying past Saturn,

then again eight years later during this week flying past Neptune in 1989. Now, just for you, Matt, we move on to random space fact. A nova is typically caused by a binary star system where one star is shedding hydrogen that's getting sucked onto the surface of a white dwarf companion. And when you pile up enough hydrogen and you get enough pressure and temperature, then suddenly it starts to fuse and fusion once again starts on the otherwise dead white dwarf. And so it causes this brightening, significant brightening, like we see now in the Delphinus Nova. Typically, it would be something we'd see within the galaxy like this one.

So it's a star not that far away by cosmic standards. This is in contrast to supernova, which is enormously brighter, can outshine a whole galaxy for a period of weeks and can be seen to appear in galaxies. In the case of one that's out there right now, it's 30 million light years away, and we can see that individual star supernova can form by a couple different processes one that actually is kind of related to nova if you pile up lots and lots and lots and lots of material on the white dwarf and the white dwarf is just the right size you may kick the whole thing into burning hydrogen down deep in the star and it goes boom we'll skip the details or the more commonly thought of is when a really massive star collapses at the end of its life and explodes and forms a supernova

and the nova is also a car but that's different thank you though for taking us exactly where we needed to go in a nova exactly so anyway we move on to the trivia contest that you're excited about. And so am I. What was the first object successfully recovered from orbit? How'd we do, Matt? I'm going to give you a wrong answer first, but one that deserves an honorable mention. It came from John Gallant, longtime listener. It came from John Gallant, longtime listener.

John said it was Coral Bowl Sputnik 2, first spaceflight to send animals into orbit and return them safely back to Earth. It launched on August 19, 1960, and those animals came back, mostly safely, mostly intact, the next day, August 20, 1960. They were doggies. And mice, and a gray rabbit, and two rats, and a variety of plants. Wow. But they were not the first.

It was not the first object recovered. You know what it was. I do indeed. It was Discoverer 13. Turns out, came back only about nine days before the animals were launched and came back from space. But it did indeed beat it. And it was Discover 13 was a test article to test the process of recovering film from spy satellites and having airplanes catch the capsules on parachutes as they flew through the air. Now, I'm old enough to remember the Discoverer series.

Little did I know that they were really Corona spy satellites. I mean, the whole idea of sending these film cameras up into space and then catching the film as it falls back through the air in basically a net behind an airplane. Crazy stuff. Crazy the kind of stuff you do when you don't have digital photos being taken. Yeah. I should say that our winner, and we had

many people who did get this, was Eric Bruner, long-time listener as well. And he indeed said that it was Discover 13, otherwise known as one of the Corona series, the top secret series. He's in Cary, North Carolina. And Eric, we owe you a

new Planetary Radio t-shirt. I got one more I have to tell you about. Wojtek Nabilak, out there in the Czech Republic. I wonder where the legendary Juan Hu guy who strapped some rockets to his chair ended up. I don't think it was a successful

recovery. I don't think it was a successful recovery. I don't think it was quite successful to space either. No. Good answer, though. We're running out of time. What's the next question? Speaking of things that go boom, in what galaxy did a supernova occur in late July of this year, 2013?

As I mentioned earlier, about 30 million light years away. Go to planetary.org slash radiocontest and enter to win what? And by when, Matt? You need to do this by the 26th of August, August 26th. That's Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific time. And no surprise,

you'll get another of those beautiful new Planetary Radio t-shirts. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about annoying, buzzing flies flying around and then suddenly bursting into flames due to a Jedi mind trick. I thought maybe they were shedding hydrogen. That works. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, and by the spotless members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.