Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - NASA’s Science Leader John Grunsfeld

Episode Date: May 17, 2016

John Grunsfeld closes our coverage of the Space Foundation’s 32nd annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. We also meet the leaders of the New Generation Space Leaders Program.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

NASA Associate Administrator John Grunsfeld, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. I've saved former astronaut Grunsfeld for our last stop at last month's Space Symposium. You'll also meet two women who headed a young professional contingent at that annual gathering. Bill Nye has the week off as he heads to D.C. for the Humans to Mars Summit. But Bruce will drop by for a what's up with a great new contest prize.

And we've got senior editor Emily Lakdawalla with a report on the European Space Agency's visitor to Comet 67P. Emily, watching a comet do what a comet does, oh my goodness. Yeah, Rosetta's images of the comet, they never get old. And you look at this thing from different angles and different light, and it's just endlessly fascinating. Tell us about this camera that delivered these amazing images. It's the science camera on the Rosetta mission, the OSIRIS camera.

Many of the images that you see of the comet are not from this science camera. Most of the time when you see public articles about the comet, you're looking at nav cam images, images from a camera that was designed just to help the spacecraft navigate its way around in space. The pictures I'm showing you on this blog entry are from a science camera that is capable of seeing much more rich variations in brightness and darkness. And it also has a huge detector. It's a four megapixel camera, which is pretty unusual for deep space cameras. So the detail is just tremendous. What kind of detail, what kind of resolution are we seeing in these? Well, this blog entry is about a recent release of science data from a period late in 2014 when Rosetta was getting closer and closer to the comet to pick a landing site for the Philae lander. And during one period, it was orbiting

within 10 kilometers, 10,000 meters, 30,000 feet, that's airplane cruising altitude of this comet. And so you can see fascinating variety in the surface of the comet. You see these smooth terrains that break up into sort of granules and boulders when seen up close. You see places that are full of pits. You see places that have enormous boulders and steep cliffs and fractured terrain. There's all different kinds of places on this very small world, and yet it's diverse from place to place. It's wonderful. And we get to watch it spinning, spinning and doing, like I said, what comets do.

Those jets are amazing. They're pretty tremendous. And all of these OSIRIS images, if you fiddle around with the brightness and contrast and really crank up the brightness, you can suddenly see that the comet is, like you say, doing what a comet does. It's jetting all over the place. Those jets tend to be invisible, and the images that I've exposed for that the comet is, like you say, doing what a comet does. It's jetting all over the place. Those jets tend to be invisible in the images that I've exposed for viewing the comet's surface. But if you play around with the photos, you can see jets everywhere jetting off into space, making the comet's beautiful coma and tail.

And the comet rightly gets most of the attention. But there is a bonus. Here and there, you point out a few little pixels that show us something else that actually visited the surface. Yep. On November 12th, of course, Rosetta watched as the Philae lander landed, not once, but three times on the surface of the comet. And I found one particular pair of images that I thought was really cool, that I was able to mosaic together and show the teeny tiny lander floating in space above in a gravitational sense, but below in the image sense, this image of the comet. And it's just really striking. All gorgeous. Thank you, Emily. Thank you, Matt. It's her May 11 entry in her blog at planetary.org. You can and probably should check it out. She's our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, Emily Lakdawalla.

There were so many great people to talk to at the Space Foundation's 32nd Annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. Mixed into the 11,000 attendees were several hundred members of the New Generation Space Leaders Program. Bernadette Maisel and Jillian Pierce of Space Foundation led a special track for these fast-rising young professionals. The pair had just introduced Buzz Aldrin when I caught them outside the main hall. What are the advantages? Why does this organization exist? To foster the relationships between the young professionals and ones that who never maybe not get the opportunity. So we've created this program to really foster these meaningful relationships especially with our mentorship program where young professionals get to talk with mentors in the industry and get advice and listen to how they

have moved up in their careers and how they've become successful. There's something kind of unique about this conference where it's kind of a flat networking scheme and what I mean by that is you have a four-star general talking to a college student, talking to the CEO of a launch company, and you're kind of all on the same par and that's really neat because we're all here for our shared interest in space. The relationships that we're looking to foster are both between peers, young professionals, and with those senior mentors. I know people I met here last year, I can call them at midnight on a Friday and they'll answer my question if I need it for work on Monday. And I'm not going to necessarily do that with the four-star, with the CEO. So it is a broad scope of networking

opportunities, but we endeavor to provide a separate track that complements the main agenda, and NewGen can hop in and out between those two. Tell me if this is true. I have heard that even in the short time NewGen has existed, some of the people, young people who've gone through the program, are now in pretty high positions of responsibility in this business, in this industry. Yep, that's correct, and that just shows the success of the program, because we are creating that relationship to help the young professionals understand the ways to move up in their

organizations and the way to get promotions and, you know, figure out what their own mission is for their careers. So last question, if somebody likes what they hear, they're under 35, which I think is the cutoff, how do they find out more? Thank you for the plug. So we have a Facebook group, we have a LinkedIn group, we have a new Twitter handle, which is at SF New Gen. You can also go to the spacefoundation.org website and go to our New Gen Initiatives page. Bernadette Maisel and Jillian Pierce of Space Foundation. John Grunsfeld is no longer qualified to join the new generation crowd, but his passion for space science and exploration equals anything you'd find among those younger folks. He has been NASA's

Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate since early 2012. The space agency hired him away from the Space Telescope Science Institute, where he managed the science program for the Hubble Space Telescope and the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope. Dr. Grunsfeld is an astrophysicist and an astronaut. He made five space shuttle flights that included eight spacewalks to service and upgrade the Hubble. We talked just after he had left the Space Symposium stage. You opened with saying that this is the first time in history that we have the capabilities to answer that towering question, are we alone? Are we really there or are we just almost there?

In the 1970s, we thought we were there with Viking 1 and 2. What we discovered on Mars is that Mars is a relatively dry, desert, apparently lifeless planet. And that set us back decades in planetary exploration. We are now much more sophisticated about what life might be like on Mars, in the ocean of Europa, or on an exoplanet. But the real key to finding life is finding potential habitable environments. And the fact is we now know that Mars once had a habitable environment and that there probably still are habitable environments on Mars today. We really do believe that the oceans of these icy moons, Europa and Celadus, harbor habitable environments. And we're going to go find out with our Europa mission in the next decade. But we also know what we didn't know in the Viking time

is that we are surrounded by solar systems that have rocky exoplanets and some significant fraction will be in the habitable zone. By some estimates, there may be 40 billion habitable rocky planets in our galaxy. Now that's a nice abstract thought, but the fact is that there are probably quite a number very close to us. Astronomy has advanced. We have spectroscopic capability. We have tools that can give us the contrast that we need to see the planet around a nearby star. And so I really do believe that we have the technology today to be able nearby star. And so I really do believe that we have the technology today to be able to do these measurements to find out if we're alone in the universe by interrogating the atmosphere of a planet around a nearby star. But we have to invest

in it. You know, we have to build the actual flight instruments. We're not quite there yet because we haven't made the decision that those are our next missions. But I think we will because we have all of the tools to do it here on Earth. At the same time, observatories on Earth are making great progress. Now, what we don't have yet that's absolutely critical is the address or telephone number, if you will, of where those rocky planets are. We haven't discovered which of our nearby stars have solar systems, have rocky planets around them.

And for that, we have ground-based technologies that are helping, but it's going to take a space-borne observatory to be able to identify those. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which we're going to launch in 2017, will identify a lot of those, but only in that unique geometry where the solar system plane is in our line of sight. And then we will be able to do spectroscopy of those atmospheres. It's sort of like Clint Eastwood, you know, do you feel lucky? We may get really lucky and find a very close rocky planet

where existing telescopes, WFIRST maybe, Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb, will be able to tell us if there's any hints of something going on, and then probably a big telescope after that. You had Gary Blackwood of JPL on your panel that just finished a few minutes ago here at Space Symposium. As great as JWST is going to be, and we've talked about that a lot on this show, he talked about it as really a pathfinder in terms of technology for some really monster space telescopes that could be in our future. JWST is going to be an amazing science machine. And I like to describe it, and for your listeners,

is it's our outer solar system planetary explorer. Because for Neptune and Uranus and Pluto and Kuiper Belt, it is going to be an amazing discovery machine. If scientists can win the time on the telescope, it's going to be very competitive, and I'm sure they will. You know, we're going to be able to watch weather on Neptune in detail we have never seen before. We're going to make discoveries because how often do we get to see them up close and personal? Twice. Twice. Anytime you point James Webb there, you're going to be able to see what's going on in unprecedented detail. Of course, James Webb is also going to see

the first stars and galaxies in the universe, whether there's primordial black holes, look inside of the molecular cloud cocoons, the dusty cocoons where new solar systems are forming that we've never been able to penetrate before with the Hubble or other telescopes. So it's going to be an amazing machine. But specifically to answer the question of, you know, does a rocky planet around a nearby star have characteristics that might look like life? Only if they're really close, and if it's a particular combination of star and exoplanet, will we be able to get the kind of information we would need. But we may see on super-Earths evidence of water vapor in the atmosphere that would hint at oceans and continents on such a planet. So I think we're going to get much closer than we think to answering the question of is there another place like Earth out there? But it will depend on those star systems and those solar

systems, exoplanet solar systems being very close, because James Webb just isn't a big enough telescope to resolve the planet around the nearby star. And that really will take a larger telescope. I wouldn't characterize them as monster telescopes at all. These are segmented optics, so they're very modular. James Webb Space Telescope is six and a half meters across, and it's just adding a couple more rings of segments to get to 16 meters. And this is the experience we've had on the ground. The Keck telescopes are 10 meters. But of course the European Southern Observatory folks are building a 38 meter telescope out of segments. They're not afraid of big size. We have the 30 meter telescope that the U.S. is building and the giant Magellan telescope. These are going to be incredible machines, but because they're sitting on the Earth's surface looking through the Earth's

atmosphere, they're not going to have the capability of a space-based telescope, which I think is what will be required, 16 meters, maybe 20 meters, really to answer this question, are we alone in the universe outside of our own solar system? Let's bring it back closer to home. I'm glad you mentioned oceans because, of course, you know that the audience for this show, and Planetary Society, we're pretty excited about a Europa mission. I think you are too. Well, this is something that we are just so fortunate. In the decadal survey last time, it said, build a Mars rover that can cache samples. And if you can, go to Europa.

See if you can learn about Europa from a planetary science point of view. Well, one of my jobs is to pay attention to what I call emergent science. And because of the amazing Cassini mission and what it's done on Enceladus, looking at the plumes, because Hubble has observed plumes coming out of Europa, we think this is just an extraordinary opportunity. And so I worked very hard to make sure that we were ready to do a Europa mission. We did instrument investments. And Congress came through and appropriated the

funding so that we could get started this year and say we are going to Europa. I'm not a betting person, but if I were, you know, I think we're going to find signs of life on Europa. But that's the great thing about science. It's a very definitive question. Do we see complex organic molecules in the plumes or on the surface of Europa that would be indicative of life in the ocean? That's a scientific question. We're going to be able to answer that. More from NASA Associate Administrator John Grunsfeld is a minute away. This is Planetary Radio. This is Robert Picardo. I've been a member of the Planetary Society since my Star Trek Voyager days. You may have even heard me on several episodes of Planetary Radio. Now I'm proud to be the newest member of the board of directors. I'll be able to do even more

to help the society achieve its goals for space exploration across our solar system and beyond. You can join me in this exciting quest. The journey starts at planetary.org. I'll see you there. Planetary.org. I'll see you there. Do you know what your favorite presidential candidate thinks about space exploration? Hi, I'm Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy. You can learn that answer, and what all the other candidates think, at planetary.org slash election2016. You know what? We could use your help. If you find anything we've missed, you can let us know. It's all at planetary dot org slash election 2016. Thank you.

Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan with the last conversation at the 32nd Annual Space Symposium. John Grunsfeld is NASA's Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate. Part of his job is sharing and generating excitement about space science in others. Perhaps most important are the 535 men and women in Congress who put up the money for missions across our solar system and beyond. You have members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who are wonderfully excited about exploring and in fact have said, you're going to go do this. I mean, there was mention on the panel of this congressional directive for not just an orbiter,

but a lander at Europa. And then talk about this Ocean Worlds Initiative. Obviously, I'm sure NASA would like to go to all of these places, but it's interesting coming from Congress. Well, we have always had bipartisan support, and both houses of Congress support for science, for basic research, and especially in space science because, one, it's incredibly inspirational. It inspires a nation of people to learn about science, technology, engineering, and math. It gives people hope for the future. But also going to Europa and the instruments to look at penetrating the ice with some kind of radar, doing the imaging that we need to see if

there are places we could land, measuring the tides on Europa, doing mass spectrometry to look at the organic molecules that might be in the plumes. These are very hard instruments to build. And when we ask our scientists, our engineers, our companies to build instruments for a mission like Europa, it expands our capability to do lots of other things in this modern world. And I just have to remind your listeners, the Earth is an ocean world too. And so the kind of things we do in planetary science, the instruments we build,

come right back and help us in our Earth observations, understanding climate change, understanding human impacts to changes on the Earth. With one particular member of Congress who is a little bit of a climate change skeptic, I like to point out that life has always changed. The rock in the Earth, we see evidence of ancient stromatolites in fossil records, so we know that life was changing the geology of the Earth, the carbon cycle, limestone, sediments in the oceans. And, of course, when life started breathing CO2 and producing oxygen,

we had a radical change in the Earth's atmosphere, including wild temperature swings. And so life has always had an impact on planet Earth. And now we're learning that humans have an impact on climate Earth too. And it's part of our planetary science story is that we're understanding how our own planet works. That's helping us with Mars climate models, with Venus climate models, Titan climate models. The science is just amazing. We have great support from Congress. Got to come back to Mars before we finish. Ellen Stofan, geologist, recognizes, like the rest of us, we got these great robots down on the surface, beginning with Viking, the Viking 1 and 2, way ahead of their time. She still says, don't let anybody tell you robots are going to replace people, that we need humans on the surface. All of our science exploration is human exploration.

on the surface? All of our science exploration is human exploration. We use the rovers as our surrogates. I was NASA chief scientist when we landed Opportunity on the surface of Mars. I was out at JPL. I was with Steve Squires, the principal investigator. And at that time, we thought the rovers were going to have a 90-day mission. That was their requirement. And I was having a discussion with one of my colleagues, and I said, you know, I think that an astronaut like myself could do the entire 90-day mission in about four hours. The person I was with said, no, it's just not possible. And Steve Squires, the PI, came in and so I said, Steve, you're a planetary geologist. If you were on the surface of the Mars in a space suit and you had the right tools,

how long would it take you to do the entire mission of the Opportunity Rover? And he kind of looked up at the sky for a moment, and I think he said something like 40 minutes. Humans have an amazing ability to understand the geological context from what they see, to know to pass up, you know, a whole bunch of spots saying, I know what that is. That's not that interesting. Oh, look here. This is unique. And then with our eyes, our hands, our brains, the ability to manipulate the environment, to understand, and to use modern geological tools that just exponentially speed up the pace of discovery. Humans are easily a hundred times more efficient than our best rover today and our Curiosity rover on the surface is really good. But when we get humans there, I think

that's when we're really going to see our knowledge of Mars and maybe even the detection of life accelerated. Close with a word about the human need to explore and discover. Well, I know this personally, and I think it's true for humanity. We are born scientists. Our curiosity is what drives our early development. As babies, we try and understand the world around us. We try and learn the laws of physics. We try and learn what's safe to eat and what's not, a very important skill. And for some reason, many people in modern society lose the awe and wonder of nature around them. But some of us survive. I wish it was more. And we become scientists. I think that that drive to explore is deeply embedded in our DNA. I think we are coded to explore. And I think we will. And we are entering the most exciting time ever in human

history in terms of our science exploration in terms of you know new projects that nasa is doing to organize the worldwide community so that we can send scientists and planetary scientists and astrobiologists to the surface of mars and i can't wait john thank you for great words great work nice tie too thank you very much. A pleasure. NASA Associate Administrator John Grunsfeld. You can see his and my space ties on the show page at planetary.org slash radio.

Bruce Betts is here, ready to deliver another edition of What's Up. Why? Because he's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. Welcome back. Thank you. What's up there? It is time to drop everything and pay attention to Mars. Because Mars is getting, well, I mean, don't hurt yourself. And it only really counts at nighttime.

But still, Mars is going to be brighter than it has been in 11 years. It is at opposition on May 22nd, which is the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun. Because of the elliptical nature of orbits, its closest approach, so when it will be actually brightest, is about May 30th. And by the time we reach the end of May, it'll be rising around sunset. It's rising a little bit later until then. And it's in the east looking like the bright red thing over there. And it is much brighter than two other stars that it makes a nice triangle with. Well, one's a star, which is Antares, which is much dimmer right now, looking reddish. And then yellowish Saturn, not a star, but looks like one.

Mars Mars. All right, we move on to this speak in haste wistry. I love it. That's much better than this week in space history. It was one year ago, Matt, one year ago that the Planetary Society launched LightSail 1. The LightSail test mission ended up with a successful test mission after a roller coaster ride. And coming up in two weeks, right? The day-in-the-life test.

Yes, indeed. LightSail 2 will be putting it through its paces. Undergoing lots of testing right now on LightSail 2. We're going to go on to random space fact. And Bruce, I don't have a celebrity intro. Well, he is a celebrity. It's John Grunsfeld, who we just heard from on the show today. We were testing microphones and he did this cute little thing. Hello, you're listening to KHST Hubble Radio, home of amazing astronomical discoveries. I'm John Grunsfeld. Welcome.

I'm John Grunsfeld. Welcome. I wish there really was a KHST. We'd all be listening, I'm sure. Anyway, that's your Random Space Fact intro. That was fun. Random Space Fact based on estimates of the number of galaxies in the observable universe at 100 to 200 billion. There are more than 13 galaxies for every human on Earth. Wow. Do I get to choose? Yes. So go ahead and put your reservations in now. You're the first one to hear that, so you get first choice. Okay. Well- No, you don't. I take Andromeda. That's fine. I was going to say take Andromeda because it's just a copycat.

Exactly. We are ready to go on to the contest. We asked you, after May 9th, 2016, when is the next Mercury transit of the sun as seen from Earth? Random.org selected, he's a longtime listener apparently, but I don't think I've seen his name even as an entrant in the contest before. It's Mike Prokosh of Huntsville, Texas.

He says the next Mercury Transit, the one we might get to see since we missed this one, is November 11, 2019. Well, the world didn't miss it, just you and I and cloudy weather, but there's some lovely imagery on the web. Yes. That settles it, Mike. Congratulations. You are the winner of the contest this week, and that means you're going to get those Tyler Nordgren posters. TylerNordgren.com, he's that terrific astronomer, artist, photographer, who does those great retro sort of WPA-style posters about the national parks and the beautiful night sky. posters about the national parks and the beautiful night sky. Also a Planetary Society rubber asteroid and a 200-point itelescope.net account. We're going to award another itelescope.net account, so it's 200 points worth a couple hundred bucks, American, U.S., on that international network of telescopes. But in addition to that, we're going to have something else that's great. Before we go

on, I've got these other interesting ones to read. Mark Little, faithful listener in Port Stewart, Ireland. He had a right as well, November 11, 2019. He points out that that's 184 random space facts away. Well, I am very excited that this new unit of measure. I thought you would like that one. Ilya Schwartz, another regular in Columbia, Maryland. He says if we miss 2019, we only have to wait until November 13th, 2032 for the next one. But Todd Yampole has an even better solution. All we have to do is go to Venus.

There'll be one on December 17th of this year. Wow. Road trip. He says book soon. Space is limited. Actually, space is really big. I don't think it's that limited. Which reminds me, that's something I try to teach people in my class. I did want to let people know I finished all the lectures for

my intro astronomy class this year, once again, at Cal State Dominguez Hills. You can find them online at planetary.org slash Betts class. Congratulations. Great class. Great class. I always love dropping in. What do you got for us this time? I want people to get fired up about this. We have an outer solar system orbiter coming up here. On what date is Juno scheduled to enter Jupiter orbit? You know, within a day, I'll give you because that whole time zone thing, but on what date is Juno scheduled to enter Jupiter orbit? And we're going to be talking in, I don't know, a couple of weeks

before that date with Candy Hanson. She's the principal investigator for JunoCam, the people's camera on that Jupiter orbiter. You have this time until the, let's say it's the 24th. Yes, that'd be Tuesday, May 24th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And get a load of these prizes. Yes, the itelescope.net account we already mentioned. Also, a brand new game called Offworld Trading Company, which Bruce has played. I have indeed. It's fun. It's from some of the key creators of some other past popular games like Civilization IV. You're on Mars and you're trying to gather resources and build the best business you can to support a futuristic Mars colony kind of thing. It's a fun, complex simulation game that you can find on Steam.

It looks absolutely lovely. It's called Offworld Trading Company. You can read more about it at www.offworldgame.com. Get this. We're going to give away the keys for three versions, three copies of the game. So we'll have three winners of this current contest. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about basketball hoops.

Thank you, and good night. I'm still thinking about Mars. I want to put Mars through a basketball hoop now. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Matt shoots from the outside and scores! More space wonder next week

when I return from the Humans to Mars Summit in Washington, D.C. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its three-point shot members. Josh Doyle created our theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.