Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - NASA’s Home for the Bleeding Edge: The 2019 NIAC Symposium

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program gathers its “fellows” each year to share what they’ve learned about some of the most fascinating science and engineering imaginable. Mat Kaplan visits with Program Executive Jason Derleth and seven leaders of funded studies. Astronaut Mae Jemison also attended and returns to Planetary Radio. Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov passed away last week at 85. He is remembered and praised by space historian John Logsdon. All this, headlines from The Downlink, and Bruce Betts! Learn more about this week’s guests and topics at:  http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/1016-2019-niac-symposium-leonov.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Space innovation so crazy, they just might work. This week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. I exaggerate. Not all of the concepts, studies, and projects presented at this year's NIAC symposium were on the bleeding edge. But there wasn't one of them that bored this gearhead.

We'll share a sampling in minutes, and you'll hear a conversation with the leader of the NASA Innovative and Advanced Concepts Program, Jason Derleth. I'll also talk with NIAC keynoter, astronaut, engineer, and MD, Mae Jemison. with NIAC keynoter, astronaut, engineer, and MD, Mae Jemison. Cosmonaut, artist, and world citizen Alexei Leonov passed away last week. Space historian and policy expert John Logsdon met him a couple of times and wrote about his front and center role in the Soviet space program. John will look back with us right after a few headlines from around the solar system, courtesy of The Downlink. October 11th brought only the second edition of this Planetary Science and Exploration Digest,

courtesy of my colleague, Planetary Society Editorial Director Jason Davis. Here are three of Jason's capsule stories. Scientists have announced the discovery of 20 new moons around Saturn. The wide-ringed gas giant now officially has 82, surpassing Jupiter's 79 to become the solar system's current champion. Okay, it's not a contest. Both are likely to have more, and Jupiter probably has more in total. Want to help name Saturn's new moons? There's a link, what else, in the downlink at planetary.org.

In other Saturn news, the Hubble Space Telescope has now been in space for an entire Saturn year, 10,764 Earth days as I record this, or roughly 30 Earth years. You can see how Hubble's view of Saturn has changed over that time in the Planetary Society image library. NASA's latest efforts to save the heat flow experiment on the InSight mission appear promising. That self-hammering mole was supposed to bury itself in the Martian soil to record changes in temperature, but it's still stuck near the surface. Engineers are now using Insight's scoop to apply pressure on the mole while it digs. The rest of the downlink is online at planetary.org in the blog, where all the stories have links for further exploration. Thanks, Jason.

John Logsdon was at home in Washington, D.C. when I caught him on the morning of October 15th. Washington, D.C. when I caught him on the morning of October 15th. John, I wasn't a bit surprised to hear that you had run into Alexei Leonov a couple of times, at least a couple of times. And I already knew because, of course, I've read a lot of your writing that you have things to say about his significance in the history of space exploration. So thank you for taking a couple of minutes to help us pay tribute to him this morning. Happy to do it. Was he among the greatest of the greats? Was he up there with, you know, Glenn and Armstrong and Gagarin? Oh, I think so. I mean, he was a world citizen. He was the first person to do an EVA, of course, and nearly died in the process, trained to be the

first Russian on the moon if the Soviet Union had ever gotten the chance to attempt a landing, but they couldn't get their big N1 rocket to work. And then he was selected to command the Apollo-Soyuz handshake and space mission. And I think he was regarded by the space flyers of the world as kind of one of the granddaddies of the space community. He was outgoing. He was easy to get along with. He liked everybody, almost everybody. And I think he was indeed one of the greats. So how did you cross paths with him? Well, one incidentally was through the Planetary Society. It was a meeting at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences sometime in the 80s, probably the 10th anniversary of Apollo Soyuz, I showed him the U.S. intelligence satellite pictures of the N1 launch site.

So that was interesting. I mean, I never had an extended conversation with Leonov, unfortunately. And then I know in Moscow in 1987, I was part of a Planetary Society group that went to the 30th anniversary of Sputnik and ran into him telling him that Buzz Aldrin was looking for him and he had the other way. Now, there's an interesting insight. He's one of these guys who apparently was changed by space travel. I mean, he became an artist and I just read. No, he did not become an artist. He was an artist first. Oh, I didn't know that. He went to art school before he went to flight school.

Wow. Okay. He brought his art to space and did some very beautiful work. And I just read in his updated Wikipedia biography about some of the things he said toward the end of his life about how he thought that we had missed an opportunity, the United States and the Soviet Union, to collaborate, to cooperate in space. Oh, I think that's right. I mean, again, little known factoid, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had

agreed after Apollo-Soyuz to work together with the shuttle rendezvousing with the Soviet space station and work together on planning a space station in the 80s. And then we didn't follow through on that agreement, first of all, because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and then the early years of the Reagan administration. So there were missed opportunities along the way to do then what we ended up doing 20, 30 years later. John, I knew you'd be the right person to call. Thank you for this, helping us mark the passing of one of the greats in space exploration. Yes, he will be missed. John Logsdon, full disclosure, a board member, a member of the board of directors of the Planetary Society.

He was also the founder and ran the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. The author of several books, including John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon. The NIAC symposium spread across three days early this month. We met in Huntsville, Alabama, not far from the Marshall Space Flight Center. NIAC began in 1998 as the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts. It went away for a few years and then returned as the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program. Jason Derleth is its program executive, working out of the agency's Space Technology Mission Directorate in Washington. He joined me online a few days after the symposium. Jason, thanks for joining me, And what a pleasure it was. Thank you for

allowing me to be a fly on the wall at this NIAC symposium at which we heard all of these fascinating and very exciting proposals. Maybe some more likely to become reality than others, but that's why you're out there doing this stuff, right? Yes, it's wonderful that you were able to come. We really appreciated having you there. I think it adds a lot when we have folks who are generalists like yourself with a large amount of experience talking to people coming, and you can ask questions to the fellows, and questions like that just make the studies stronger.

We're really excited to have everybody there. Anyone who can come is welcome, of course. And that is pretty special as well, that it is open to the public. And you had some interesting members of the public there. Frank Drake, one of the inventors, talk about radically or entirely new concepts, one of the inventors of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He wasn't a fellow. He was just there to listen to your fellows make their presentations. And I know that he was very happy to be there. Yeah, Frank is a wonderful friend of the program. He's been on our external council for a little while, but this was his last meeting

with us. So he may or may not come in the future, but if we have one nearby, I think he would just love to come. He's always been able to provide helpful thoughts on astronomy and radio astronomy concepts in our program. Give me, give us please the thumbnail description of what NIAC is about and what NASA hopes to accomplish, if that's not already obvious from what we've said so far. NIAC is a technology development program that looks at new technologies that are 10 or more years out from final use. Some of these concepts are a little farther out than others. But it's amazing how excited and enthusiastic people are about their concepts and about other people's concepts as well. So the basic gist of it is we provide a small amount of money in a small amount of time. Our phase one studies are only $125,000 over nine months to do a quick turn of

the analysis crank to find out if a really interesting idea that someone's had is rooted in reality. I mean, we try and weed out anything that's beyond the laws of physics before they ever get funding. But the job of the phase one fellow, we call all of our winners fellows, not PIs, is to show that not only is this idea within the realm of feasibility, but that it's a good idea to do. And that's what they have nine months and $125,000 to show NASA that this idea is so good that we ought to implement it. The best ones go on to a phase two of study. Phase twos are two years long and $500,000. And we have had some people show up to the midterm review of their phase two with multiple robots ready to go to demonstrate. two with multiple robots ready to go to demonstrate. These people have often students working for them and sometimes volunteering their spare time just to work for NASA. It's really

exciting to some students to be able to do so. The products that come out of the phase two are usually really solid mission analysis with sometimes some breadboard, brass board, or mission analysis with sometimes some breadboard, brass board, or prototype robots to show that what they're thinking about doing is feasible, and a full technology implementation roadmap. So what would need to happen before something could fly in space or fly in the air if it's an aeronautics concept? Then you have this newest phase for very few proposals make it to this, but your phase three, which I guess we heard some of the first presentations about some of these projects this year. Yes, that's correct. Our phase three, we intend to fund one per year. And it's for the concepts that after a phase two still have too much risk

left in them for a traditional spaceflight engineering system to accept them as a new technology. So you can't imagine, for instance, a new mission, a mission manager choosing to do asteroid mining, for instance, at the moment. That's going to take a little bit more work and a little bit more investment. And the idea of the phase three is to go all the way to a prototype stage of development or a development stage in software where a future mission could pick that up and start funding it after that. And one of the requirements for a phase three is to have a customer that's interested before we would consider funding it. How many people did we hear from? How many current fellows are there? Well, there's 12 phase ones from last year. We have six phase twos, and there were eight phase twos from the year before,

and two phase threes. You were telling me just before we started recording that you were going through some of the new proposals that you've got there. You must get far more than you can possibly fund. Yes, and we get a lot of fundable proposals as well. But NIAC is a little bit funny in NASA. It's not your average everyday NASA program in a lot of ways. And one of those is that we take proposals from non-traditional aerospace folks and from, in fact, non-aerospace folks. We have had quite literally garage inventors in NIAC. One of them has an optics bench in his detached garage up in New York State. Another one was a physical therapist that came up with a method of moving people in space to create artificial gravity that was in a line. We've always heard about artificial gravity by rotating your spacecraft, and you put the astronauts on the inside surface, and they rotate around and have artificial gravity from that rotation.

This gentleman came up with a sled that could be slid back and forth with a twist in the middle. And every person that I've ever shown this concept to says, that is not going to work, but I want to see the results of the study because it's really interesting. And it turns out, in fact, that, well, it might could work. I'm not sure that we would do it, but it's actually a reasonable idea and it provides no Coriolis effect on the body when you're doing the artificial gravity. It's quite interesting. Of course, you can find that study up on the website.

Which we'll provide a link to as well, because you can find out about all of these projects that we're hearing about from Jason. I'm also thinking of the ones that won't become reality. And there is still value in these, isn't there? If they explore something that no one has ever thought about before and discover doesn't look like this will work, at least with our current understanding of the challenge, that's still valuable to know. I fully agree. early stage technology development programs ought to be looking at our failures as successes, because we're still adding to human knowledge and making it publicly available. I can think of one in the new program that didn't work, at least as currently envisioned. The basic idea was to have a spacecraft that was in very low Earth orbit, deep in the atmosphere, or perhaps even a plane that caused a small explosion up in the upper atmosphere, which would then push that upper

atmosphere up into space for a short period of time, where orbital debris would run into the atmosphere that was suddenly thicker. And it would slow the debris run into the atmosphere that was suddenly thicker, and it would slow the debris down because the atmosphere was thicker than it had been before. And you might be able to deorbit quite a bit of debris that way. And after running the analysis, unfortunately, it showed that it really didn't slow things down very much unless you had a very large explosion and you'd have to do it multiple times. And so that very creative and intriguing idea didn't pan out. But we only spent $100,000 to find out that that wouldn't work.

That wasn't very much money in the NASA world, of course. I think it was a good use of the taxpayer dollars since the research was able to be put up online for anyone to see, hey, don't go down this path right now because it's probably not going to work unless there's something substantially different in the future. What are some of your favorites? Or if you don't want to favor some of your children over others, what are a couple more that demonstrate the diversity of projects that get funded? Let me think carefully. We had a study from Ames Research Center that took a look at what would it take to take a human spacecraft

and line the walls with bags, bags of water at first. As the astronauts drank the water and made waste, the bags were designed to take the waste in and chemically treat that waste to purify it back into water. The obvious benefit of this is that you're increasing your radiation shielding while using these bags to purify waste, which will reduce the amount of water that you need to bring along with you. That was a fascinating study that showed real benefits to doing so. We had a study on what would it take to reach Alpha Centauri with a spacecraft for real. You take a very small spacecraft, perhaps even smaller than a phone, no more than a chipset. You put a light sail around it,

something that could solar sail, but then instead of using the solar photons, you would shine lasers at it as brightly as you could, maybe 50 very high power lasers. Well, the mathematics show that you can accelerate something from essentially zero velocity to approximately two-tenths the speed of light in about 10 minutes. At two-tenths of the speed of light, you reach Alpha Centauri in only 20 years. And it takes about five years to get the data back, which would be done through minuscule lasers pointing back at the Earth. But it turns out that the laser array that you used to push the solar sail at the beginning can be used in coherent receive mode and might, in fact, be able to receive a direct laser signal from five light years away. The mathematics works out. Implementing that system will, of course, provide many challenges.

What you're describing there certainly sounds like it's the Breakthrough Starshot project, which we have talked about before on this show. If you watch the initial Breakthrough Starshot video where Pete Worden got up and introduced the three luminaries that were on the stage, Mark Zuckerberg and Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire who funded it. Pete Warden, about 35 minutes in, mentions that this was an outgrowth from, in fact, the NIAC study that I just mentioned. So Breakthrough Starshot was created because of a NIAC. Every one of the projects that I heard about is deserving of some conversation, of sharing with our audience.

We won't be able to do all of them, but I said we will hear from some, and we may hear from more over the coming weeks and months as I follow up with some others of your fellows. I'm going to bet that there are some people out there, whether they are academics or people in a garage or people at an asset center or maybe with a big company, who'd like to know, how do you get into this? I mean, I already ran into one person from a university at the Starship Congress here in San Diego a few weeks ago who had never heard of NIAC. And yet he is working on something that seemed like it was well within the kind of project that NIAC would consider. That's a great point. NIAC is a challenging program to get into because we are

open to the public. We receive between 200 and 300 proposals every year, and we're very aware that we don't want to have people spending a lot of time proposing if they have only a 5% chance of winning. And so what we do to make that a little bit better is we do a step proposal system where you provide us with a three-page white paper. And if you are in scope for our program and exciting enough, then we will invite you to provide us with an eight-page proposal that will have a full peer review, an expert panel review, technical panel review. We open that solicitation every year in August, but we're about to change the date to mesh a

little bit better with the grant processing folks that work down at the NASA Shared Services Center. processing folks that work down at the NASA Shared Services Center. We're expecting the solicitation to come out in early June next year. Now, what a lot of people don't know is that they can email us. We have an email address that Matt can provide on the show page for anyone who's interested. That email address, you can send us a white paper to quickly review as long as we're not in an open competition. If we're in an open competition, we are not allowed to review somebody's white paper and give them any feedback. If we're not, we are allowed to. And so if you send an email to us with a three-page white paper, we can tell you, yeah, that's in scope, or no, it's not in scope. It would be better if you did the following thing. The main thing that we find people doing when they propose to NIAC is they don't understand what the C means in NASA Innovative Advanced

Concepts. Because we're open to any and all technology areas, we need a little bit of help from the proposers to tell us how good their concept is. Otherwise, we would be looking at, let's just say, a new material that could really revolutionize the way that we do space. And we'd be comparing that to a new architecture for just, again, for example, how you might get a large human-sized lander down to the surface of Mars. And we might be comparing that to a new spacesuit. And we might be comparing that to a new instrument that could measure the quantities of dark matter in the universe. How do we do that? Well, we ask the proposers to put their new technologies into a mission context. And we don't mean, hey, this is something that's relatable to human spaceflight. And so any future

human spaceflight that's extended will use this technology. No, what we mean is you tell us a mission that you might do. It doesn't have to be on NASA's books, just a potential future mission. that you might do. It doesn't have to be on NASA's books, just a potential future mission, and then show what the impact of your technology is. Explain to us why your technology is better than sliced bread, right? And a good example of that might be the fusion-propelled Pluto orbiter and lander, which we hold up quite frequently to talk about this. and lander, which we hold up quite frequently to talk about this. Fusion is a very difficult concept, and some people think that we shouldn't be funding any fusion at NIAC. The dollars are far too small to make any progress.

Well, that might be true unless we're talking about a new method of fusion or a new way of doing it where $125,000 in nine months might actually show people, hey, this could be feasible sometime in the future. And that's what Stephanie Thomas did with this study of the Pluto fusion orbiter and lander. We might be able to reach Pluto in five years, orbit Pluto in five years, and beam power to a lander that could then be power rich and have more instruments on it. That is a really exciting mission analysis that can only be done by her fusion engine. Now, the reason why she chose Pluto is, well, by golly, the farther you go with a fusion engine, the better it's going to look. And we had just flown by Pluto, NASA had, and so it was hot in the news,

and it was topical, but it also really showed off the benefits of her technology. And that's really the key. If you can show us in a Step A white paper that you have done a back of the envelope calculation and put that back of the envelope calculation into your proposal and show us that this is going to really make an impact, that's how you get into NIAC. It is a terrific opportunity, and I won't be surprised if a few of our listeners out there, many of them bleeding edge thinkers. If you don't hear from them at some point, at least- That would be wonderful. I'd like to hear about that if anybody has those ideas. Jason, I know it's a lot of work, but you seem to have an exciting job. Well, thank you. I work at NASA headquarters, and so a lot of it is paper pushing, but I do get to interact with these really smart people that are doing really creative things all across all technology areas for space.

And that's just exciting every day. And it occurs to me, not just the people who make the proposals, but the people who help you evaluate them are a pretty interesting group. Actually, everybody who works in the program office at NIAC is a spectacular human being, both professionally and personally. I'm really fortunate to have these folks working with me. Thanks, Jason. I can't wait to see what the next batch of NIAC-funded projects will put on the table for the rest of us to marvel at. I can't wait myself.

It'll be a fun about eight months before we learn. Thanks. Jason Derleth is the program executive for NIAC, the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program. When we return, we'll meet seven NIAC fellows, including science fiction writer and physicist Jeffrey Landis, and we'll wrap up our symposium coverage with the great Mae Jemison. Bruce is still ahead, too. This is Planetary Radio. Taking a minute to talk again about the Great Courses Plus and about exoplanets. You know how often we talk about exoplanets on this show.

It's one of the courses, not surprisingly, offered by the Great Courses Plus. It's the search for exoplanets, what astronomers know. And it really could not be taught by anybody better. Joshua Wynn, a physicist at MIT, he's on the Kepler team, and he is the deputy science director for TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Another great course presented by a great professor. And they've got everything, the human brain, nuclear energy, Greek mythology, stress management, playing guitar, you name it, all kinds of personal improvement stuff that they've wrapped into their lineup as well. Now, you can expand your mind by signing up for The Great Courses Plus.

And right now, listeners to Planetary Radio get this deal an entire month for free. To start your free month, sign up today using my special URL, thegreatcoursesplus.com slash planetary, thegreatcoursesplus.com slash planetary. I wish I could bring you conversations about all 28 of the presentations I enjoyed at this year's NIAC Symposium. Here are short explorations of just seven. I think they represent a pretty good range of both topics and NIAC fellows. By the way, what you'll hear are mostly excerpts from the live streaming videos I hosted on behalf of NIAC during breaks in the symposium action.

We'll start our warp speed tour with a concept that reminds me just a little bit of the Star Trek transporter. Good Trekkies know that the transporter scans and breaks down matter, sending raw stuff and information from the Enterprise to the surface of a planet in a stream of both particles and energy. That beam somehow stays coherent. It doesn't spread out. Sound crazy? Well, it turns out that particles of matter and photons may actually be able to interact with each other to do exactly this.

Not to send Captain Kirk to the rescue, but just possibly to someday drive a light sail across the solar system or to the stars. Chris Limbach from Texas A&M University. Two things come to mind which set your work apart a little bit, I think. This is NIAC, so we've heard from a whole bunch of fellows who are out there at the bleeding edge, pushing what we understand about what is possible with technology and science. But I don't think anybody has come as close to seeming like magic as yours. Except, of course, that it's Nobel Prize science-backed science.

Yeah, I mean, you think about the optical trapping, right? The Nobel Prize was awarded recently, but that technology was actually developed by Arthur Ashkin at Bell Labs back in the 1980s they started trapping particles using that type of force and you know optical guiding has been around you know people have known of that and mirages for a long time so you know that's one of the amazing things to me is that the the ingredients that go into this self guiding and the beam are actually pretty well known and and I think that the the thing that gets me excited is the novelty of combining that together and then using that for propulsion.

And, you know, it's just really exciting to be part of the NIAC program. And the second thing that I think may set your work apart a little bit is that unlike so many of the other projects here, very worthy projects that deserve more attention generally, yours has gotten some popular media coverage, and I can't for the life of me remember where, but I know I'd read about it before coming here to NIAC. It does seem to be exciting the imaginations of a lot of people.

Yeah, I hope so. I mean, it's one of those things that you see some of the concept that we propose, and I think I couldn't have come up with that just as a science fiction type of concept because it came about by trying to understand the physics of how do you build a beam which does not diffract in the vacuum of space. It led us to something which is just so unusual, but at the same time we understand, I think now after the phase one, how it's actually going to be working.

And I'm just so excited to get in the lab. I'm an experimentalist, so actually building some of these things in the lab and testing out our theories of how this is working is really going to be so exciting in the next two years. And your slides gave some examples of where you're headed with this experimental work, proving out this technology. But certainly from the modeling that you've done and other efforts, it looks pretty good. Well, it does look good. And, you know, we didn't always think it was going to all work out.

So the modeling actually turned out to be, I think, a little bit better, at least the preliminary modeling, than I expected. Because when we started out, we weren't sure whether or not these forces, the guiding and then the particle trapping, whether that needed to be a precise balance where you're kind of, you know of standing on the tip of a needle. And if that was the case, it would be easy for some kind of perturbation to cause that to decay. But what the modeling, I think, has shown, at least preliminarily,

is that the guiding is more robust under the conditions we've modeled than I had expected. And so that was one of those areas where you're a little surprised at a good result. Doesn't always happen. In fact it's more rare. It's the other way. Yeah, usually it's the other way around. Do you see this as something, I mean certainly not a mature technology, not yet, but you can see this is reaching those higher limits of TRL as as we say, readiness level. Do you see this maybe someday reaching the level where it could be pushing something across our little neighborhood of the galaxy? Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, it's not, I think, you're not going to go directly from where we are now to the Proxima b mission. You're going to start using it for travel around the solar system. And so we have the tools now from the phase one to scope out what the parameters would be, for example, a five megawatt total power budget and what we can do with that. And there's a lot of interesting things you can do, even with a lower power or something more achievable in the next 10, 20 years. And so I think that there's a lot of opportunities, but then again, I see all of the challenges.

Have you thought about other uses of this self-correcting beam for things like communication across distances that would have been unimaginable? We've thought about it a little bit. I think that one of the things I can say is that the propagation distance of the beam I mentioned was only about half of an AU because of the collisions with solar wind particles, actually. So that attenuates the particle beam, and then you lose the self-guiding. So I think that we can do communications over that distance. Of course, you need the power to actually build the whole system. And so I'm not sure I agree that there's a case there. In terms of the SETI implications, after that half an AU of propagation,

then you have a, you know, a one meter laser beam, and that then diffracts out into space. And so I'm not sure that gives you a tighter beam at the next star system than anything else. Okay, so we're not ready to say hello to the Centaurians quite yet. Maybe not quite yet. We can send something there, a gift pack. We'll send them a gift. Yeah, right. Well, FedEx. Speaking of light sails, and we do, Grover Schwartzelander of the Rochester Institute of Technology. Welcome, Grover. Thank you. Nice to be here. You know, I'm with the Planetary Society, so I'm a little partial to solar sails. I also bring you greetings from our chief scientist, Bruce Betts.. Thanks Bruce. And you attended or he

attended a conference you did about metamaterials for solar cells? That's right we're trying to develop next generation solar cells based on metamaterials and so I had an incubator meeting in Washington DC and Bruce was one of our invited guests for that. And he enjoyed it enormously and we're going to meet a couple of your students. But first, we won't fully review what you presented here, but you talked about making sails out of basically diffraction gratings. Now, what's so great about a diffraction grating compared to a nice shiny piece of mylar? Well, diffraction gratings have come a long ways in the last decade or so because of metamaterials. There's new ways of engineering them, make them highly efficient and functional. You can basically design them to accomplish things that have not

been imagined before because of material constraints. So a metal is a metal. It reflects, and that's about it. You can put coatings on it, but it can't achieve the functionality you can with metamaterials. How does this compare to the great Japanese solar sail Icaros? It wasn't diffraction graded, but it had those LCD panels built into it? That's right. So Icaros had an ingenious approach of having an electro-optic diffuser. So rather than diffracting their light, they just scattered it all over the place. That changed the amount of force on that area of the sail. Ours will be, I think, more efficient and a little bit more functional. But they follow similar approaches.

They both involve advanced metamaterial diffraction materials and advanced liquid crystal materials. And you'd like to send maybe 12 of these circling the sun, but at high inclination so we could see, as you demonstrated, that the poles of the sun, which we've had more difficult imaging than, we can say this now since last spring, than a black hole. That's right. It amazes me that no one's ever had a good picture of the north or south pole of the sun before because it's so hard to get up there. It takes a lot of energy. Rockets won't do it. So we need another kind of propulsion, and solar sailing provides us that opportunity. solar sailing provides us that opportunity. All right, another constant theme from many of the fellows that we've been hearing from across these three days has been not just the technology

accomplishments that they're making and the exciting concepts, but how they have been using this research and spreading it out to young people like the two who are standing here next to you. You want to introduce them? Yeah, this is Lucy Chu. She's from Taiwan. She's a PhD student. And this is Amber Dubill. She's an undergraduate MSBS student in mechanical engineering at RIT. She's my mission specialist. And I'm going to cross in front of you here and I'll start with you, Amber. How's it been to be involved as an undergraduate with a project like this? Honestly, I've been very lucky with the opportunities that I've been given, and people like Dr. Swartzpanner come up with fantastic ideas, and they just want excited people who want to do the work,

and there's a lot of students and young people out there that are willing to do that, and I myself am one of them. So you're a little bit ahead of Amber here, but still, I'm sure, an exciting opportunity. It is. I was starting from just investigating and optics, but it's really cool opportunity that I'm sure an exciting opportunity. It is. I was starting from just investigating in optics, but it's really cool opportunity that I'm involved in the solar cells, and then also

hearing all these space cool symposium in these three days. Best of luck to both of you, particularly with this great start in doing real space research. It must be rewarding to be able to offer these opportunities. It is. That's what makes being a professor gratifying. Grading exams and proposals hard, but when you see these kids get excited and take jobs in the real world following their passions, there's nothing like it in the world. Thank you, Grover, very much. Congratulations for LightSail 2. Way to go. Fantastic. I'll pass that along to my colleagues who had a lot more to do with it, but thank you so much.

I look forward to seeing that diffraction grating up there, grazing the sun. Great. Me too. And now for something almost completely different. NIAC fellow Yu Gu came to the symposium from West Virginia University. Like so many of the projects here, you really caught the imagination of a lot of people, including me, with your project. Are you familiar with David Bowie? No. David Bowie, who did one work called The Spiders from Mars.

You want to send spiders to Mars. Not exactly spiders, but remind us, particularly for people who didn't hear your presentation on the first day, of what your project entails. Okay, so we're trying to build those bi-inspired microprobes inspired by ballooning spiders. Some spiders can fly for thousands of kilometers dangling underneath a little strain they produce. So we want to make similar probes, like dangling off this little string and kind of litter around the Mars atmosphere so we can get a lot of measurements. So many of them that I was tempted to call them a swarm,

but they may be more of a cloud. Cloud is probably a better, dust, storm, yeah. But I do think of them as swarms because they are individual entities and there's lots of them. Up to, I mean, if I got the math right, releasing up to 100,000 of these tiny probes. Yes, exactly.

Most interesting, I think, the principle by which you are proposing not only to power them, to give them the power to do the science that they'll be doing, but to propel them. How does that work? Well, it turns out spiders, they have electric propulsion systems. So their strings are statically charged, and there is this atmosphere electric reading potential. So the interacting force between the two helps them generate more lift.

So we're hoping to capture the same type of lift to propel our probes. And they would do these by, I mean, they have little filaments, basically, that they release? Yeah, that's their circuitry, right? We all have seen them. They're annoying, but yeah. I'm going to think twice the next time I see one land on my shirt that there's really some impressive science going on there. What do you think they might be well-su suited for, this cloud or swarm of tiny, I think you said like 50 milligram, did I get that right?

It's in my notes, 50 milligram, basically spacecraft. Yeah, but if you think about the real spiders, the flying ones, they are one milligram. And they pack a lot more complexity than we were proposing. They have a sensing, they have atturation, they have a power system. They can reproduce themselves, which we're not even worried about that kind of sense. So we're hoping that the microelectronics will catch up and we can pack a lot of sensors on those little guys. So it sounds like you are one of those who sees great potential in learning from the things that life has been able to do for millions of years. Biomimicry?

Yeah, I was kind of intrigued by that. So I was looking for examples. I'm a robotist. I'm trying to learn from nature in many different ways. As I've been asking most of our guests during the breaks, how important was the support of NIAC for encouraging and furthering this work? Well, extremely important because otherwise it's just a dream and just something went through my head. I wouldn't even pursue it. I would just say, oh, cool, if I can do that, that would be great. But now I actually have a project and I can actually work on it and hopefully there will be more projects coming along and hopefully a mission down the road.

So you might be a phase two candidate. Well, I'm definitely going to be a candidate. Whether I get it or not is a different story. I wish you the best of luck and thank you for taking a couple of minutes to join us here today. Thank you very much. I am joined by someone who's already made one presentation today and has another one coming up. And it's Joel Sursell. Welcome, Joel. Hey, it's great to see you. Thanks for having me. You thought a 15-minute presentation was short.

How about an elevator speech presentation that just reviews what you presented? Sure. So we talked about our concept for the Lunar Polar Mining Outpost, which is a way to mine water on the Moon near the lunar North Pole. This is a really important problem to solve because once you can get cost-effective water on the Moon, you can make rocket propellant, drinking water, breathable air, and that really gets us off to the races for not only NASA style science outposts but even commercial hotels towns and settlements we've invented some approaches here and we think and the NIACC reviewers tend to agree can really revolutionize the cost-effectiveness of going to the Moon.

So we've found a spot, an area on the Moon about the size of Manhattan. And this is at the North Pole, roughly. Right. Right near the North Pole, we found a beautiful area on the Moon about the size of Manhattan, which all the science indicators say it's just loaded with permafrost ice. say it's just loaded with permafrost ice. The geography of the area is such that we can land a spacecraft and then deploy a tower up in the low lunar gravity that can put a large solar panel out and generate megawatts of power to power this outpost. And then we've invented mining technology that we call radiant gas dynamic mining, which we build into rovers that go out, heat the regolith, capture the released volatile material as gases, cryo pump that into water tanks, and then carry that water back to processing plants. So this is a patent-pending technology called radiant gas dynamic mining. And the concept of building towers on the moon we call the lunar power tower.

And there is even more to it than that. It is absolutely awe-inspiring. It's kind of an end-to-end solution. But to talk a little bit more about the towers, which use this principle called tensegrity. One of the greatest experiences of my life was interviewing Buckminster Fuller. That's awesome. Yeah, it was a great, great experience. And he invented the concept, as I understand it, and wrote a book called Tensegrity. You describe these towers as having their feet in the ice, I think, and their heads in the sky, in the sun.

That's right. These towers, using tensegrity structure on the moon, taking advantage of the low lunar gravity and the vacuum, so you don't have to worry about winds and that sort of thing. It turns out that you can build a self-erecting tower on the moon that you can land in a package that can go up at least a kilometer and carry 20% of its mass as payload. With three new Glenn flights, we can package this system together as a very, very large lander, land it on the moon, and one of those landers can put out a megawatt and a half of power. So Buckminster Fuller was the guy who invented tensegrity, and my colleague Dr. Robert Skelton, who's a member of the National Academy of Engineering

and a tenured professor at two different schools, actually developed the rigorous scientific modeling of tensegrity structures so we can confidently predict their mass. With today's materials and 20% safety factors, we can build towers a kilometer high on the moon. And then we've done detailed illumination studies, actually going back billions of years in the moon's history with its orbital wobble, to calculate where are the places on the moon that have been dark for billions of years, collecting dark and cryogenically cold, collecting this water and other volatile ices? And with those same illumination models, we can predict where we can put a lander so that its feet are in the ice, and then when it deploys the tower, its head is in the sun.

In a region that I like to call New Mesopotamia. A new cradle of civilization. The cradle of a space civilization. It's between two prominent, well-known craters, just like the Mesopotamia was between two rivers. And it was there that humanity started to thrive on Earth and form more complex civilizations because the resources and the environment was

just right for it. It turns out, I think we found that area on the moon that can be the beginning of a human extraterrestrial civilization. It's very exciting. Joel Sursell of TransAstra Corporation. Jay McMahon from University of Colorado, right? Yes, yep. You want to send what look like flowers, soft flowers, to fascinating places around the solar system. Yeah, the idea is to send soft robots. The design we have right now, the limbs that stick out the side look kind of like flower petals, and we're trying to send them to small near-Earth asteroids to mine for water, basically. The combination of technologies that you described to us seemed to me that any one of those might have made a good NIAC project, but you had lots.

Electroadhesion, solar sailing, which I'm from the Planetary Society, that's near and dear to us. And just this idea of ejecting regolith from the surface of these things, basically using what looked like a catapult. Yeah, yeah, that was the basic idea for the ejection was at these small asteroids, it's a microgravity environment, so the escape speed is quite low. So we can basically just toss something up and it'll fly long distances or maybe even escape from the asteroid environment.

Yeah, we have a lot going on in this project, but thankfully I have a really strong team. The students at CU are incredible and they do all the real work, so I count on them to make it happen. That's been a regular theme here. The opportunities that a lot of these projects are providing, particularly in the academic environment like yours, for students to gain tremendous experience. Yeah, and that's a huge goal for me to have a project like this, to get as many students involved, both for them to get experience, but also to expose them and hopefully motivate them to work on these types of projects

in the future. So we have a really strong program at CU in aerospace. One of the ways that students can get masters in aerospace at CU is they can do what's called a graduate project. So that's basically a year-long, it's kind of a higher level senior project that lots of engineering students do as a capstone to their undergrad program. And we allow them to do that in place of a thesis so they can get a year-long project-based experience. And so we've had those students for both years of our phase two working on this project and they provide a lot of expertise and then gain a lot of expertise. Back to this spacecraft. For one thing, I was just impressed by how low mass

it is. What, 116 kilograms? Yeah, that's the current design, and that can be scaled up or down a little bit depending on what exactly we want to do. But yeah, it's large, but we're designing it to have a large area-to-mass ratio so it can solar sail, as you mentioned, and so it can stick to the surface and needs a large contact area for the surface anchoring using electro adhesion so that those pedals are large but thin and so they're not that massive I also liked your analogy and not just an analogy because we saw the computer modeling of it of crawling across the surface of a body like a

zombie yeah yeah you know and in the movies when only the top half of the modeling of it, of crawling across the surface of a body like a zombie. Yeah, yeah. You know, in the movies when only the top half of the zombie is crawling with their arms, that's our motivation, I suppose. The support from NIAC that you got to be able to take this project on, or at least to provide a substantial support for it, how important? Yeah, absolutely crucial. These types of projects are really hard to get off the ground without a program like NIAC to allow you to do even the

feasibility study to start. One of the things I think is really great about NIAC is the number of phase one proposals that they fund, which allows people to investigate feasibility of some of these kind of more far out ideas. And if they don't all pan out, that's fine. And that's part of the NIAC program's opinion of this, but that allows us to look at things that otherwise would never be funded. And so that's really important, I think, for the community. And you're a phase two. You're going to be going for a phase three grant? We might, yeah. I think we'll continue to work on this and develop it a little bit further to make sure that we're ready for that, but having the opportunity to propose for a Phase 3 and try and get these systems actually advanced more and hopefully built and flown Landis of the NASA Glenn Research Center is also a scientist. Though it's through his fiction that I knew the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award winner, it was his leadership of a NIAC study called Power for Interstellar Flyby that brought him to my microphone at the symposium.

It was a return to the breakthrough starshot-like concept of tiny light sails driven to other stars, but considers how these visitors from Earth will find the power to do any science and send data home as they zoom past. Which is more fun, making this stuff up for science fiction or finding it in real physics? I love the idea that actually you can do both. You can make stuff up and also justify it with real world physics. So I just think real science is as fascinating as anything that we can come up with and that there's more great ideas out there if we were just

clever enough to find them. Back to the real, if speculative, science that you presented to us. I would be depressed by the first portion of your proposal, because basically you took all of the potential power sources that we've imagined so far for interstellar craft, at least once they reach their destination, maybe Proxima Centauri or Alpha Centauri, and you just destroyed them. You said none of them are going to be adequate, even for a tiny, tiny spacecraft. But then you sort of brought us back.

You redeemed yourself by talking about drawing that power directly from space. And it sounds like, at least in your initial work, it could work. Well, I have to say we're still doing the analysis. This is sort of the back of the envelope calculation shows, no, I'm not crazy. You know, it might be sometimes that when we get to the real world, we'll discover that there is some obstacle, some barrier that we haven't thought of yet. But at the sort of the fundamental level, it looks like, yeah, there's enough power there and the ability that we can use it. So that'll be great. Maybe we can send these tiny, tiny chipsets to the nearest

star and get some images of planets. I mean, how cool would that be to actually see these extrasolar planets that we've been discovering for years? You talked a little bit about the breakthrough Starshot work that is developing these light sail, laser-driven light sails with tiny, tiny spacecraft. And you were saying that it looks like probably we'll have to look at payloads at spacecraft a little bit bigger than they're talking about. Well, this is a real question. The Breakthrough Starshot is a very ambitious program. Keep in mind that it's only one of several people that are looking at how we can go to the nearest star. But all of them have that problem. It has so much energy to get to the nearest star that

you want to make that payload that goes to the to the flyby of the extrasolar planet, you want to make that payload as tiny as you possibly can. So people are trying to look at three gram payloads or even less if it were possible. So we're just hoping that the microelectronics and the sort of artificial intelligence that might be needed to take these measurements can all keep developing enough that it'll be ready by the time we're ready to launch these burbs. So whether it's a breakthrough Starshot craft or not, you were talking about something reaching about 0.2

C, 20% of the speed of light. And I was really struck by your statement about how, well, why didn't we use this energy? We pumped, I think you said, a gigawatt or so of kinetic energy into it. We should make use of that. The bad thing about having all this energy is it turns out everybody says, oh, once we've gone that far, why don't we stop? Well, stopping turns out to be really hard. On the other hand, we've got all this energy.

Well, let's see if we can't find a way to use it. We need energy. We've got energy. Let's find a way to make what we've got handle what we need. Let me turn to the fact that you are a NIAC fellow. That's why you were able to make that presentation. The question that I'm really asking everybody that we talked to today is how you feel about the NIAC program and the fact that it enabled you to take on this work.

I love the NIAC program. I've been working with NIAC actually ever since it was the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts several decades ago. But this is one of the things that you just have to do if you're going to develop better concepts for space flight in the future. You have to look at these advanced ideas. It is NASA's primary mission to not just use the technology we have, but to come up with new technologies because we need it. If we're going to go out into the solar system, if we're going to

expand humanity, if we're going to expand the range of our robots and exploration, we've got to do better things. We need better, faster, cheaper, and more powerful technologies to explore space. Your science fiction colleague David David Brin, is also here. Have you heard any ideas that have suggested new science fiction stories to you that I don't know if you'd want to share them? I have to say pretty much any of the concepts that we've been hearing today, you could write a science fiction story around.

I mean, I've also, like Noam, I've been looking at the idea of diving deep into Saturn's atmosphere. Man, we know nothing about Saturn's atmosphere. Everything we know about the gas giants comes from looking at the tops of the clouds, plus one descent into the atmosphere with the Galileo probe on one spot. But these atmospheres are thousands of kilometers thick. What's below the atmosphere, nobody knows. We have a lot to learn. In the meantime, we'll have to depend on you science fiction folks to fill in some of the gaps. Who knows? Sometimes it turns out to be pretty accurate.

Well, science and science fiction have always worked together. Sometimes the science has been stimulating and giving ideas to the science fiction writers, and sometimes it's the other way around, and the science fiction writers are ahead of the science. So let's see. It's a healthy cycle. Thank you, Jeff, very much. Okay, thank you as well. Like most science conferences, the NIAC Symposium had a poster room. It was there, amidst lots of enthusiastic discussions, that I found Noam Eisenberg of the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University. It has this wonderful throwback quality. You described it yesterday as being kind of steampunk, although there's no steam involved, but wind-up toys. In fact,

you started your presentation with one. The whole concept is called R.I.P.S. for Ripcord Innovative Power System. And the best visual to think about it is, remember those old toys from the 70s where you had these racing cars that had this T-stick that you would pull out really rapidly and it would spin up this flywheel, which was the main driving wheel of the car. You'd stick it on the ground and go 100 feet, 200 feet, and you'd race your friends and do all that kind of stuff. So this ripcord, this notion of getting a ton of power from this really quick pulling of a string or a cord to spin up a generator,

it's really the primary way of thinking about what we're trying to do. It's a form of unspooling power, which is sort of a broader term for using a cord or using a line or using some kind of pull, a yo-yo device or something like that, to turn the wheel of a motor or generator and provide power. Without having, although you might have batteries or you talked about a supercapacitor or something like that to store some of that energy, you don't have to. I mean, you talked about this in connection with like a mission through the clouds of Saturn or maybe down through that thick atmosphere on Venus.

Right, right. So part of the question, part of the trade space you want to do is whether you want to or need to utilize all the power as you generate it, in which case all you need is some kind of modulation to make sure you get the proper voltages out, or you're generating so much power that you need to or want to store it for a short term during the duration of your mission, or some combination of both, where you use some of it immediately and you store some of it for later. For example, if you're going to build use some of it immediately and you store some of it for later. For example,

if you're going to build up some of your information and then transmit it to your waiting spacecraft, your relay spacecraft, or directly to Earth, or if there are some high power instruments that you want to use, like a mass spectrometer that you want to do some really, you want to pump down a vacuum chamber, or you want to use a radar system or millimeter wave like radar system to map out cloud structures and stuff like that. All those are kind of higher power instruments that mean a duration of higher power applied and you're not going to use it all the time. You're a phase one NIAC grant recipient, which by definition means you're just getting

started with this. But how does it look? We're leaning more towards yes, that it should work. The big question we need to ask is, is it better or competitive with the other kinds of ways to power a descent probe, primarily primary batteries? Or does it enable a different kind of mission that batteries can't do, like some of these really high short-term power applications? So as I walked up to you today, there was another fellow here who was talking to you, gave you his card, and you quickly wrote down some notes.

That's part of the value of this kind of a meeting, isn't it? Oh, God, yeah. It's amazing. I mean, just some of the feedback from the questions and answer period and stuff like that, I get to take this back to my team and say, well, what about this? We really have to answer this question or here's an idea. We need to talk to this guy about this kind of generator, this kind of regenerative system. You know, maybe this is where we need to go. I'm going to put in a little bit of a plug because I'm working with Johns Hopkins University with the senior design course

of mechanical engineering up there. I have this cadre of students that some of their work is on my poster. Some of their work was on the slides I was showing. You know, they're helping to tackle some of these questions. And they came up with some really cool extra ideas that we're all, you know, beginning to pursue and investigate. So all that kind of feedback between this and between them, it pushes things further along than, even though we're still kind of at the beginning, I think we're going to get farther than I'd hoped. It is kind of charming to think about something traveling all the way to Venus or Saturn and then working as a mechanical device that you could have imagined in the 19th century. I love the concept of, it's a kind of throwback, it's using simple principles to do

some really cool stuff. It's also a form of in-situ resource utilization, which is a really big buzzword these days. They're primarily talking about harvesting materials and water from the surface of the moon, but we're talking about harvesting kinetic energy from the motion of a spacecraft. It's very cool. Thanks, Noam. Thank you very much. It is a great honor, not the first time we've talked before, but a great honor to welcome Mae Jemison, astronaut, medical doctor, chemical engineer, and now rabble rouser for space and innovation and science. You really captured this audience of scientists and engineers, they were so enthusiastic and the passion really came out during and after your presentation.

Well I think what we all want is permission to be as excited about our work as we were when we went into it. So frequently these days the mark of professionalism is to sit there and just sort of not show the energy. But that excitement about doing extraordinary things is what brought us to science many times, what brought us to art, what brought us to space exploration. And so I like to be able to bring that forward and give people permission to recapture that excitement. So I work for the Planetary Society, Planetary Radio, and my boss, Bill Nye, likes to talk about the passion, beauty,

and joy of science and space exploration, and that children are natural scientists. But if we don't keep that in them, if we don't encourage that, by the time they're 10, they lose it. Well, I think there's what the so kids come out of the chute I do a lot of work on science literacy as well they come out of shoot excited about the world around them right they explore the bugs the snails the stuff in between the couch really excited about the world

around them and the issue is that they don't lose it we beat it out of them right we train it out of them and so, how do we allow them to do it? And it's by experiential education. But I'll tell you a secret. Adults have it inside of them, too. They're just afraid that if they let it out, people are going to think that they're being inappropriate or immature. You won't believe the times where people come up to me and they said, my son or daughter wants to know about XYZ. You know, how does the potty work? What did you feel? And it would be really a thrill. I wish they

were here with you. But it's really their son or daughter inside of them, right? And that's okay. And we should have that excitement as adults as we go out in the world. That's the whole reason when I talked about a little bit about the look up, right? The term look up, it's remember when you looked up outside when you're a little kid? And I wonder where their children around the world were feeling. But when you look up now, it makes you feel really great. The term things are looking up, right? You just go along the way. And that's that excitement, that inspiration inside of us. What's that Ashanti proverb that you used? It is, no one shows a child the sky. It's very much a part of us. And it made me think of, because as you said, you're a child of the 60s, so am I,

the opening of that great series, Roots. the thing that most stayed with me out of that was the father holding up his newborn son to this beautiful sky with the Milky Way stretching across it, saying, and I hope I get the line right, Behold, the only thing greater than yourself. Can you imagine the connectedness? And I think that that's what sometimes we're missing these days, is the connectedness to the universe. And I remember very clearly from my space flight, it wasn't looking down at Earth that built the connectedness

to me. It was actually looking out and imagining myself at another star system, imagining myself in this environment that wasn't very hospitable to my life form. And feeling connected to it nonetheless. How wonderful are things when you can feel that connection, that I belong in this universe, and I think that's the piece. Speaking of connections, you originated, and you still are, the 100-Year Starship Project, a DARPA-funded effort in the initial stage, and here we are at NIAC, more innovative advanced concepts. You see the connection between these, I think. Well, I think what we're both looking at is how

do you really push radical leaps in innovation? Not those little evolutionary steps where you do a little advanced improvement on something, which we need to do, right? You have to get the screw exactly right. But how do you change things so that you bring in new ways and new possibilities, whether it's propulsion systems, whether it's clothing, whether it's telling the story differently, communications, financial structure. And that's what 100-Year Starship was really about, about pushing radical leaps in innovation and also connecting it to things that we can do here every day in the world. I think you stated it very well with the theme for the presentation you gave this morning.

The pursuit of the extraordinary was it? Right. It was you, the sky, and the pursuit of the extraordinary. It comes from some of the work that we did with 100 Year Starship in trying to understand how this is connected to our world. We believe pursuing an extraordinary tomorrow creates a better world today. Thank you, Mae. How do people learn more? I know on Twitter you're at Mae Jemison.

Pretty easy. I'm at Mae Jemison. They can also, I believe, go to 100YSS.org. They can go to LookUpOneSky.org. And also they can go and download the Skyfee app, right? Skyfee, like Sky Selfie, Apple app, and Google Play. Nice. Thanks again, May. Great to talk to you. You're welcome. Thank you.

May Jemison, medical doctor, chemical engineer, and incidentally an astronaut, space shuttle astronaut. That's our brief visit to the 2019 NIAC Symposium. I hope you enjoyed it as much as this gearhead did. I'm grateful to NIAC and NASA for making it possible for me to cover this year's gathering. Don't touch that dial. Bruce is about to pay us another visit from his home planet. Hi, I'm Jason Davis, Editorial Director for the Planetary Society. Did you know there are more than 20 planetary science missions exploring our solar system? That means a lot of news happens in any given week. Here's how to keep up with it all.

The downlink is our new roundup of planetary exploration headlines. It connects you to the details when you want to dive deeper. From Mercury to interstellar space, we'll catch you up on what you might have missed. That's the downlink every Friday at planetary.org. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. So we are joined again by the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. It's Bruce Betts. Welcome back. Yay! Fun contest today. The answer, I really had to drill down to find somebody who could answer the question that you posed two weeks ago. So there's a little bit of a tease after we hear about the night sky and other stuff.

I'm so tricky. Not really. Not this time, anyway. Not this time. All right, up in the night sky. We've got Jupiter and Saturn, as we have had in the low in the southwest in the early evening. Fairly low, still easily visible. Interesting hanging out with the moon as a crescent moon, including for those who do Halloween,

if you look up on Halloween, October 31st, whether you play with Halloween or not, it's still October 31st. You look up and the crescent moon will be between Jupiter, which is much brighter, and yellowish Saturn to its upper left. And just generally the moon will be playing for a few days around Jupiter and Saturn. Fun.

In the pre-dawn, we've got action. Pretty low, in fact, very low right now, but in the next couple weeks, we'll be getting much easier to see is Mars. Not a super bright Mars, but still brighter than most stars, and that will be in the east in the pre-dawn, and it will be hanging out next to a very, very crescent moon. This is not a technical term. On the morning of October 26th. And then, as I think I mentioned last week, Uranus is at opposition on October 27th, meaning it's rising around sunset and setting around sunrise, but will require either a really dark sight and good eyes or some binoculars or a telescope to

check out. On to this week in space history, 1967, Mariner 5 flew by Venus successfully, and it was the second Venus flyby after Mariner 2. Interesting story about Mariner 5 is it's actually a refurbished but not gently used backup for Mariner 4. Mariner 4 went to Mars and when it was successful, they ripped some things apart and changed things around and re-equipped what was to head to Mars and sent it to Venus. Hey, and I was just looking at one of those images from Mariner 4 that disappointed so many people who wanted to believe in Martians after its flyby of Mars. But then we wanted to believe Venus was a nice place to live too. Oh, it is. You should go down there. I hear it cooks. It does. But in just a moment, we'll talk about something that cooks even more.

We move on to... We're going to have a hand on the space fact! Just give you a megaphone and, Rudy Valli, watch out. Indeed. The exoplanet WASP-121b is twice the diameter of Jupiter, and it orbits its parent star, speaking of cooking, in just 1.1 Earth days. And this is a star that's brighter and hotter than the sun. Oh, gosh.

A recent study this year, just a couple months ago, came out, found that heavier elements, including iron and magnesium, are being stripped away from the star. The star's temperature is like 4,000 to 5,000 degrees, depending on what system you're using. And as a result, the planet is egg-shaped, with the hot, tidally locked side of the atmosphere bulging out. side of the atmosphere bulging out. And you should get your real estate quickly, not that there's expected to be a solid surface, because it's expected to be completely consumed within a few million years. I'll eat your heart out. It's crazy, crazy, I tell you. And speaking of crazy, we move on to the trivia contest. I don't know. It's really not that crazy.

And I asked you, as of September 2019, what spacecraft are active on the moon's surface? How do we do, Matt? We've been doing this for nearly 17 years. Late November, it'll be our 17th anniversary. Never before have I had to drill down to the 14th random number from random.org to find a winner because so many people misunderstood. They gave us orbiters. They gave us stuff that is on the surface, but in little pieces or simply dead. Going down that far meant though that we came up with Patrick Luski. And Patrick has been entering the contest every week since he, I think, discovered the show in January of this year.

Congratulations, Patrick. He said there are two active missions, Chang'e 3 and Chang'e 4, on the surface of the moon. We're including with that, we're throwing in, what is it, U-2-2? U-2-2? U-2-2. The U-2 rover number two, which is the U-2 rover number one. The Chang'e 3 has stopped working, but U-2-2, which is just fun to say, frankly, is still partying with Chang'e 4. So congratulations, Patrick, you did it.

for. So congratulations, Patrick. You did it. And we're going to send you a gorgeous Planetary Radio t-shirt from Chop Shop and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. Of course, I have stuff from other people to share with you. William Lidden, down under, one of our Australian listeners, and we've got a lot. He said, honorable mention to Wallace and Gromit's mission to collect lunar cheese, which is a really fun movie. I highly recommend. There are some physics issues with it, but I am a big fan of Gromit. If you kick a ball on the moon, it doesn't just keep going up. I just had to say that. But the moon is made of cheese. So other than that, it was a very logical production. One of my favorite lines from any movie, different Wallace and Gromit movie,

these are the wrong trousers. Elizabeth Spaff in New Albany, Indiana. She says, while roving across the lunar surface, I like to think that the original U-2 was wearing a tutu, and now U-2-2 does too. U-2-2-2, I can't do it. You have to read it fast to make it work. Robert Klain, who we get a lot of good puns from, and not so good puns from, he says, with no active United States probes on the moon's surface, could it be that the times they are a Chang-ing? And he says, because we ask people on the forum,

how do you listen to the show? He says, vibrations from stolen lunar samples. Do we need to report that? Our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild, wraps things up this time. Dave in Shawnee, Kansas. Chang'e 3 and Chang'e 4 are active on the moon. Other landers tried it, but their rockets stopped too soon. If you want to reach the moon, these words you will regard. Once you've cut those surly bonds, remember, space is hard. That's it. That's it for this round.

What do you got for next time? All right. Here's the question. What was the first star system besides our own found to have eight planets? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Okay. We'll ignore the fact that there are some people out there that you've just angered. Sorry, Alan. This time you have until the 23rd. That would be October 23rd, Wednesday at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And we just spent time talking to the leader of NIAC,

the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, and a bunch of the NIAC fellows, those people who got the grants. I picked up a bunch of NIAC pins. We're going to throw in a NIAC pin. In fact, you can stick it into your rubber asteroid if you so choose, because we will send you both of those, along with a 200 point itelescope.net account to do astronomy from down here on Earth, from any of their remote telescopes spread around the globe. And with that, we are done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky and think about trees. Thank you and good night. So that planet that takes barely a day to circle its sun, you didn't say. So that planet that takes barely a day to circle its sun, you didn't say anything

about the trees that grow there. They're really cool? That's Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, who joins us every week. Well, for what's up. For what's up. You're a professional.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and it's made possible by its concept-advancing members. You know you want to join them. Visit us at planetary.org slash membership to find out how. Mark Hilverda is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan at Astra.