Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Episode Date: May 6, 2014

The host of COSMOS: A Spacetime Odyssey, returns to our show with a behind the scenes look at the spectacular television series.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, 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. This time that final frontier is Cosmos, a space-time odyssey, the awe-inspiring television series hosted by Dr. Tyson. We get a behind-the-scenes look, and we'll talk to Neil about where he'll go after he completes this tour of life, the universe, and everything.

Bill Nye and Bruce Betts are also here. Got a great prize for the winner of the new space trivia contest. And you can't go wrong if you begin with senior editor Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, I'm looking back to an April 30 blog entry that you did. Let me start with this question. Who is the Kuiper Belt big shot, Pluto or Eris? We don't actually know yet. And I kind of hope that this answer gets solved or this question gets solved by discovering something that's bigger than both of them out there. But in the meantime, we have a tie for the largest thing in the Kuiper Belt. We don't know whether Pluto or Eris is bigger.

We do know that Eris is more massive. But when school kids ask which thing is the biggest in the solar system or rank things in order, they don't care about how many kilograms something is. They care about diameter. And within the error that we can measure them at, we do not know which is bigger, Pluto or Eris. Why is this such a complicated thing to figure out? I mean, you even talked to Alan Stern of the New Horizons mission about this. Yes, well, it's complicated for a number of reasons. One of the reasons is that these things are very far away, so you can't directly image them to measure their size. They're generally not more than one pixel across a detector in your image. So the only way to measure their size is to watch them cross in front of a background star and use what you know about its orbit to calculate from how long

the star winked out just how big a thing was across in front of the star. And that's called an occultation. And that's how we get accurate diameters for these very distant, very small objects. So that worked great for Eris. And we figured out that it was somewhere between 2,324 and 2,348 kilometers wide, which is pretty big. The problem with Pluto is that Pluto has an atmosphere. It refracts the starlight. It may block the starlight before the star gets all the way down to sample Pluto's surface. So we just don't

know how big Pluto is. It's somewhere between 2,300 and 2,400 kilometers across, but we don't know what the number is yet. Will New Horizons maybe provide the conclusive answer? Probably. So New Horizons will, without a doubt, give us a better estimate of Pluto's size. It will get a much more accurate number. So if Pluto is either substantially bigger or substantially smaller than Eris, then we'll figure that out pretty much right away after the flyby. But if they are pathologically close to each other in size, it's possible that we'll measure Pluto's diameter to be some number that's within this error that we have on Eris's diameter,

and we still won't know which one is bigger, which is kind of fun, actually, kind of a fun problem to have. It's one of the things that makes solar system exploration both so frustrating and so fun. Pathologically, I love that description for this challenge, and maybe we'll know more in a little bit more than a year when that flyby takes place. It is an April 30 entry. You can even see the little video here of Eris, indeed, occulting a star. It's pretty cool. And I love this illustration. Who did this?

That was Alex Parker, who is the go-to person for me for all things fun and wonderful and illustrating Kuiper Belt objects. Well, it's at planetary.org in the usual place. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society and our planetary evangelist, also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Emily, talk to you again next week. See you then, Matt. Up next, as usual, Bill Nye, the science guy. Bill, the fight for planetary science funding continues in Washington. I guess you're going to have a busy week this week. Yes, we're going to visit with Senator Dianne Feinstein.

And we're going to visit with Charlie Bolden. Call me Charlie, the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the administrator of NASA. We're going to meet with him. And here's the big idea, Matt. You know, we got this space launch system. Everybody loves it. Who doesn't? No, it's a big rocket that's being built to launch first in 2017.

It was going to launch a second time in 2021. These are years in the future, Matt. And so what we're going to propose to him is that he can use that rocket for deep space missions to the outer planets. My idea personally between you and me, wait, the radio audience, is that we'll build more of them and actually speed up the pace and use them to do the missions that everybody's, if I may, arms akimbo about. That is to say missions to Enceladus, to Europa, the moon of Jupiter, the moon of Saturn, in the other order, out to Uranus and Neptune. These extraordinary way out there destinations. And I'll bet you enthusiasm for these missions goes way up next summer when New Horizons flies by Pluto. I bet it will too. And of course, decisions like this about how to use a huge new rocket, there's no political angle to

this at all in Washington. Oh, no, no, not at all. No, nobody in any congressional district has any interest at all in building a huge rocket in his or her district. No, no, no. Right, it's all world good. Wouldn't this be, I would think, attractive to those aforementioned congresspeople who are responding? They're districts. Attractive, it's exactly what they want. Everyone's going to go crazy. It's going to be brilliant.

That's one of the things we're going to talk about. And we'll talk about the asteroid redirect mission and the details of that. The premise of that right now is asteroid redirect will be used as part of the roadmap to Mars, which is kind of a redirection of the redirect mission. But it's perhaps all to the good. We'll take a meeting as we say, would you please, as we wrap up, take 15 seconds to,

uh, say hello or say something nice about your friend, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who we're going to be hearing from in just a moment on this show. I have not seen Neil since yesterday. We hung out. It was real nice. We had a nice talk.

We talked about space policy and these rockets and and stuff neil is doing a great job with cosmos man he's out there it's real i gotta say anecdotally matt it's generational people who uh had never been exposed to cosmos and carl sagan before are all talking about it that's the goal yes get a new generation of people excited about our place in space, about the cosmos. I couldn't agree more. And I will ask him the couple of questions that you gave me by email. Bill, I'll let you go.

Thanks. Thank you, Matt. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy. Yes, indeed. Neil deGrasse Tyson in just a moment. Neil deGrasse Tyson in just a moment. Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist, author, host of Nova Science Now, StarTalk, radio, and many other programs. He's a daily show regular and the face and voice of Cosmos, a space-time odyssey. The magnificent series airing on Fox, the Nat Geo channel, and elsewhere around

the world. And that is already more introduction than he needs. Neil Tyson, I am so happy to get you back on Planetary Radio. How come I'm not on more often? You don't call, you don't text me, I'm there waiting for you. You want to be on every week? It's okay with me. I think the boss will say it's okay.

for you you want to be on every week it's okay with me i think the i think the boss will say it's okay by the way the boss your your buddy the science guy he said he says hello and he i asked him if he had any questions ceo yes he is he is the boss as you were once bill nye the ceo and and tsg the science guy. Thank you for this. May I just say what I have already told you in email? I love Cosmos. I think it is gorgeous. I think they are using you to the absolute best of your magnificent ability. And I can't wait to watch the rest of the show.

Well, thank you. As you know, it's a huge collaboration. Ann Druyan and Steve Soder were two of the original three writers of the original 1980 series, and they reprised that effort in this series. So you all see me, you know, as host. And when I'm hosting on location, I see the hundred people who are making the product. So it's very different depending on which direction you're looking in. And as an academic, I don't think of myself as a tv person so so much of what it took to make cosmos was novel to me for example now i know what a gaffer does as opposed to a key grip right a key grip

yeah yeah the grip and then the key grip see i to recognize the level of collaboration necessary to pull off a project that large with the visual effects and the – and also unlike when it first appeared – aired on PBS, this is on commercial television. So they're commercials, right? And so you have to actually write to the commercials breaks. It turned out I was delightfully surprised because I was thinking, well, that would really cramp the writing breaks. Uh-huh. It turned out I was delightfully surprised because I was thinking, well, that would really cramp the writing style. And with some help from Brandon Braga, who's known to Star Trek fans as a recurring director and writer

of Star Trek Next Generation, has a huge following, and he's been director and writer of many other projects on film and television. He was able to guide us on how to think about the storytelling between commercial breaks. So it allowed what would otherwise be a one run long story to be chapterized in the hour that you're watching the program. And that actually has value in the parceling of how you tell the story. So that is the silver lining of the

of the dreaded commercial break. I suspected that Brandon Braga had a lot to do with that since he knows how to build things and make people stick around during, uh, during the commercial break. Can I, I want to mention to you one of my favorite sequences and, and my wife feels the same way. It's a ways back. It was part of the, uh, one, Oh shoot was it Hiding in the Light? The whole sequence about this fellow, Joseph von Fraunhofer, which was so, oh, it was just a

gem. Where that mostly comes from, you know, I have astrophysics fluency being an astrophysicist, and I have partial fluency of the history of science. The person who has the complete fluency in the history of science and the stories who has the complete fluency in the history of science in the stories we're telling is Steve Soder. Of course, I knew some rudimentary details about

Joseph Fraunhofer, and Steve digs up the rest and compares it with notes that Anne has, and they come together and they tell the story. And so in a way, I think of these characters that are portrayed in each of these episodes, I think of them in some cases a literal martyr, as in the story of Giordano Bruno, a scientific martyr, a philosophical martyr, but also people who have struggled in ways that probably most of us would have never survived. Yet they nonetheless rose up to become the great intellects and contributors to our understanding of science that they were and fraunhofer is one of the leading leaders of the pack but there's still more episodes to come and i'm looking yeah he's your he's your favorite at the moment no no

no he's not even my favorite personality that you've presented but the it's just so well told and what really got to me is i mean here's the guy who is, as you explained in the show, laid the basis for spectroscopic analysis, the roots of your profession, astrophysics. But he was also this severely disadvantaged kid who got a leg up basically from his government, the king. And look what came of it. Yeah, and when I hear stories like that, I lose sleep at night wondering what genius lay undiscovered in the depth of the night because they're hungry or because their access to opportunity and education is not forthcoming. How different the world would be if everyone had access. It's a beautiful story reminding you of how tragic it is when

you reflect on how many people didn't have such opportunities. I also want to say about Andruyan because I've had the pleasure of having her on the show a few times. And there are times when I just want to rest my chin on my hands and just listen to her talk because i think exactly she is like the most eloquent person when she goes on a roll you just you can hear a pin drop and you're just sitting there i agree 100 you just want her to keep talking yeah keep talking she has a certain humanity to what she says and how she says it that is so warming and so easy to embrace. When I say easy, I don't mean you knew it already.

I mean she understands what matters in the world. She understands what it is to be good to one another and to use the powers of science for greater gain of our health and our well-being and the stability of our civilization. And as she gets on a roll, oh my gosh. Yeah. Everybody shut up and listen. I heard you say that of all the locations that the series was shot in, that Iceland was your favorite. But in my mind, I don't think you can beat rowing a boat in a gigantic underground neutrino

detector. I just cracked up when I saw that because I knew where you were. I mean, just can you say something about that? They actually let you in that boat? They let you touch their water? So about 80, well, hmm, I didn't get the exact numerics of it. But somewhere around two-thirds to three-quarters of all the scenes were on location in real places. And a remaining sort of one-fourth of the places were green screen.

You're not going to tell me that was CGI. That was green screen. It was green screen. I'll be damned. Because I figured they're not going to let him touch that ultra-clean water. Of course not. I could be contaminating. But you see, remember, I move through space and time, with

the ship or without it, and I'm carrying you with me as passive observers of phenomena, not as active interrupters of the behavior of nature. So, what's the Star Trek

mission statement? Cannot interfere with the civilization. Yeah, the prime directive. Of course. Don't mess with the neutrino detector. The prime directive. So, yeah, I can put a paddle in the neutrino detector, but I'm not actually touching anything.

There's a couple you'd be surprised. So I was really at the Grand Canyon. Most people, that was the odds-on favorite of being the most likely to have been green screen. We were on an Indian reservation where they don't have guardrails to prevent you from falling over. I was a little worried about you. Exactly. As was I.

Thank you for being concerned about my health. And so the shots that scale up the side of the Grand Canyon and find me, those are real. And I'm there. And I'm about four or five feet from the ledge. But they were all looking very – they were wondering if they should park someone at the next ledge down to break my fall. So the Grand Canyon was real. And the part where I split the layers, we did that in CGI just in case you were wondering. No, I really thought that was well within your powers. And we should say what happens is that Neil actually appears to raise his hands and separate the strata of the Grand Canyon.

So take that, young Earth creationists. So people were saying that was my sort of Moses moment with the Red Sea. We parted the oceans. We parted the sedimentary layers. That was not green screen. I mean, the Grand Canyon scenes. But you know what was green screen is the scenes of Lower Manhattan. Those were green screen.

Are you joking? Really? I live in Lower Manhattan. Well, I thought that's an awful lot of extras that they had to hire. So now I understand. No, I thought that's an awful lot of extras that they had to hire. So now I understand. No, wait, wait, wait. So the lower Manhattan scenes where you see Manhattan at night,

that's green screens. There were scenes in the Manhattan streets that was on a back lot of Hollywood that is the New York City lot. And all those people were extras, every single one of them. God, I love showbiz. And speaking of New York, there is a sequence set to Gershwin where we get to see that city of cities, the Big Apple.

That was the scene that I'm referring to when you see the lower Manhattan skyline. That's correct. Yeah, across the entire spectrum. So we're back to the spectrum does seem to be coming up frequently in this series. Well, it's the only way we know anything about the world. So many people, too many people, and astronomers are partly to blame for this, think that what we do is look at pretty pictures of the universe and deduce the nature of reality. People are thinking that all we want and can't wait for is the next beautiful Hubble photo to advance our science. And that's not how it works. We're getting spectra. We're analyzing light. And there's information hidden in the light. And it's one of my educational points

that I try to make when people want to understand how do astrophysicists know what we're talking about as we look around the universe. Yeah, and that's a big challenge because spectra is not a trivial topic to convey. It attacks the visualizers. It attacks the storytelling. But I think we succeeded or at least certainly whetted a person's appetite for wondering further about what spectra are and how they work. Well, I'm highly prejudiced, of course, but I think one of the most successful illustrations of this was maybe also one of the simplest. And it's in As We Speak, the episode that is most recently aired about stars. There is the animated sequence with these women who were pioneers whose names are far from being well known. And there is a scene where one of them holds up an image of the spectra of different stars and matches it to the actual star field.

And that's like that's a real aha moment. So now you know that that star made that spectrum. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Oh, it was beautiful. There's just one other thing I'll mention about the show. And that is to please congratulate and thank the folks who did all that magical CGI work because it is just gorgeous.

And I think, what do you call it? The giant calendar of the universe that you stand on? The cosmic calendar, yeah. Yeah, that traces the entire history of the universe. Exactly. And that's a reprise of the cosmic calendar from the original series, but of course done up in a 21st century visualized sensibilities. That's a pretty potent pedagogical tool for conveying,

because we all know what a month is and an hour and a minute and a second. So if I say that history as we've come to think of it on earth, where you have information about people, places and things began 14 seconds ago on the cosmic calendar. And you know what seconds are, right, relative to a year. We found this to be a very potent and illuminating way to convey time. Neil deGrasse Tyson. More in a minute, including the lightning round. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars.

This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from, and are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do, and together we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Your name carried to an asteroid. How cool is that? You, your family, your friends, your cat, we're inviting everyone to travel along on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu. All the details are at planetary.org slash b-e-n-n-u. You can submit your name and then print your beautiful certificate.

That's planetary.org slash Bennu. Planetary Society members, your name is already on the list. The Planetary Society, we're your place in space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. This is the extended podcast edition of my conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson. We could have spent hours talking about nothing but Cosmos, a space-time odyssey, the television series created with Andrew Ian, Seth MacFarlane, Brannon Braga, and many others. As we spoke a few days ago, there were only a few more weeks of new

episodes left to go. There will come a time in a few weeks, I'm sorry to say, when Cosmos will have run its course, this edition of Cosmos. Who knows? Maybe there'll be another one someday. Wrong time to ask me about that. Sorry. It's like the woman just gives birth and says, are you ready to have another kid? Yeah, right. I'm thinking we need some time to sort of recover, and then we can have that conversation.

Well, other than being an astrophysicist and running the Rose Center, what's going to be keeping you busy as the series ends? Thanks for asking. There are some writing projects that I fell behind on while we were making the series, and one book is half written, and I have a co author on that, and two other books. So I want to get back to that. I also want to become a scientist again, rather than just play one on TV. So I have some research projects I'm going to get back into with two feet, one on the structure of our galaxy and another one on a dwarf galaxies that are in the neighborhood of the Milky

Way. So those are some longtime loves of mine professionally. Also, I still have a radio program, Star Talk Radio, which is kind of the inversion of the science radio program. You know, the ones we're familiar with, typically there's a journalist interviewing a scientist. And those are time tested. But when you tune in, you know what you're tuning in for. You're going to say, I like science, and I want to hear who they're interviewing this week, and it's going to be a scientist. And Science Friday comes to mind in that example. I can think of another show that's kind of like that. Oh, yeah, this one.

That's right. Okay. All right. So I'm glad you think the format is still valid. But yours is quite different. It's different. So I'm the host rather than the journalist. And my guests are hardly ever scientists. It kind of inverts the model.

And I just talk about all the ways science impacts the livelihood of the people who are my guests. You get some fun revelations there. You know, we had Morgan Freeman, for example, as a guest. And these are people hewn from pop culture. So you heard of them or you know of the work they do. And so you follow them to that radio show, even if you had never listened to science on the radio before or in a podcast. And so that's when you learn that he looked up at the night sky from his porch in Louisiana when he grew up. And he always wondered what was beyond there. And it became a partial

lifelong quest for him. And one of his favorite things he's doing is that he's got a TV show on, is it on the Science Channel? Through the Wormhole. And it's his way to celebrate this lifelong interest in the universe that he has had. So it's that kind of conversation. We're finding new ways to bring that to the public as had. So it's that kind of conversation. We're finding new ways to bring that to the public as well. So that's pretty much what I'll be. I think I'm going to recede a little bit from the public limelight, let others sort of rise up. I think the ground is fertile enough for that to happen.

But I'm tired. I'm very happy to hear that you'll be back doing astrophysics because there's so much more to learn about the universe. Doing the research is a fuel source for the energy I have to even bring any of it to the public. We're going to put up links to Cosmos on TV. I think it is the website. Yeah, Cosmos on TV. Yeah, to that, to StarTalk as well. Of course, you can just Google these.

But we'll put up links on the show page at planetary.org slash radio. Can we do what you do in StarTalk and do a lightning round? Oh, sure. Go for it. Great, because I have two questions from your bud, the science guy. I asked Bill— Your boss is asking me questions through you? Yes.

What, he can't ask them himself? Well, I kind of solicited them, so— Is he too scared? He's intimidated. No doubt he's intimidated. Well, I kind of solicited them. Is he too scared? He's intimidated. No doubt he's intimidated. Well, he's new in New York. He comes from, you know, laid-back L.A. and the even more laid-back Northwest. We're all high-strung over here on the East Coast.

Yeah, well, that's the rumor. I mean, after all, I'm married to a New Yorker, so I guess I have evidence of that. All right, so here are his two questions, which I will follow with two of mine. Asteroids, if you were in charge, what would you do about or with them? Well, it's one thing to be in charge. It's another thing, do you have the power? You can be in charge but really have no power to do anything. And so that's not good.

You want to be in charge and have power. So if I had unlimited power, I would gather up all the metallic asteroids, put them in and bring them to Earth and mine them, use them to serve our civilization. And it wouldn't take many asteroids to pull this off because the metallic ones are highly concentrated in all of the many of the rare Earth elements that we've heard about. Well, they're not rare on asteroids. And so they're common asteroid elements compared with rare Earth elements. So no, I think I would try to create a whole mining I would

turn the asteroid belt into our backyard and use it as resources, either on Earth or in space, probably in space to start. Icy asteroids or intercept comets that are all ice. And I think here we are fighting

wars over the scarcity of resources when there's the grand universe beyond us where the resources are unlimited. So I would just, yeah, I'd turn the asteroid belt into our backyard. I think I'm going to sell that piece of tape of your response to Chris

Lewicki at Planetary Resources because that's the business. I believe the folks at Planetary Resources when they say the world's first trillionaire will be the one who exploits the resources on asteroids. Wow. All right. Chris will say thank you, I'm sure. All right. Here's the other one from the boss. As you know, there are folks right now, both realistically and maybe somewhat less so, who want to put humans on Mars. I mean, NASA in the realistic category, one would hope, but then there are other folks who just want to build a colony of people who are there to stay, one-way trip. If there were humans on Mars, what would they do there? What would you have them do,

or what do you think would be appropriate? Yeah, I think if you go to Mars, it's because it's a vacation. And the folks that are going one way, I don't understand that. And they're trying to be like the pilgrims. We made a one-way trip across the Atlantic. Dangerous. And you had to be brave. And not everyone survived. And they came to the New World.

And they stepped off their boat onto the land. And they could breathe the air okay that's different from going to mars one way no you can't breathe the air unless we terraformed mars and we're not really there yet so what are they going to have to build a hab module or something that resembles an earth environment so if you're going to be living in a hab module with coke machines in the corner, are you really on Mars at that point? What are you speaking of when you say you're on Mars?

I think it's a little bit of a charade to say let's go one way and it'll be just like what the Pilgrims did and you'll live and work there. I don't think people really understand how hostile Mars is. And this is pretty much the response that Bill gives people nowadays, so I think you're in complete agreement. All right, here are my two, and I promise after that we'll draw this to a close, and you can come back next week and we'll do more. Here's the first.

What would you most like to see happen in space science and exploration? Everything. See, so I mean, literally, I don't like to prioritize space destinations. The way I would answer you is we would create a suite of launch vehicles that can be arranged with various rocket booster combinations to serve any need anybody has who wants to go into space. Scientists, if we want to look at the, you know, look for life on Mars and mineralogists and miners who want to actually mine asteroids, it's a different spaceship configuration to get there. Maybe the military has some concerns about abuses within cislunar space. Maybe there

are tourists who want to look at what Earth looks like from the moon. So everybody will be able to do whatever is their initiative. And I never want to prioritize missions because then you end up focusing on the one priority. And then when you accomplish it, you've got nothing to speak for after that. Shades of Apollo. Exactly. We got to the moon. It's like, oh, let's go to Mars. Well, there's no budget for it.

There's no spacecraft for it. Well, what are you talking about? And I don't want to be stuck in that situation. Okay, last one. Do you think that we could be on the cusp of a revolution in our understanding of the universe that will rival the quantum and relativity revolutions? Hmm. Are you referring to, for example, if I understand your question, there are these profound areas of ignorance that surround the modern astrophysicist. Yeah.

Bingo. universe to accelerate. If you combine those, we are profoundly ignorant. And I'd like to think that the solution to one or both of those problems comes with solutions to many other problems we've been towing along behind us over the years. Those make the best kinds of scientific discovery. I was just reading in the New Scientific American, there may be challenges to the standard model of how we understand the way the universe is built. I mean, it all says to me, these are exciting times in science. They really should always be exciting times, shouldn't they? Well, yeah. It's just a different thing you're talking about that's exciting from one year to the

next or from one month to the next. When you live in a period of exponential growth in discovery, then every day looks like it is the most fortunate time to be alive. Every day, because of the rate at which the investigations of the universe are increasing. So I will not assert that today is more special than five years ago. I will say that this entire epic represents a chapter of special times in the history of science. Thank you, Neil. I look forward to seeing you again on Sunday night, the next episode of Cosmos, Waiting with Betas. Exactly.

And it repeats, as you know, on Monday night on National Geographic Channel, which is responsible for the world distribution of the program. It's in 181 countries, 45 languages. Half a billion homes? That's what they say, and of course not everyone is watching at the same instant, although we would really love it if that were the case. Yeah, and there's a cool iPad app, too, so you'll hear about that if you watch the show, as you should. cool iPad app too. So you'll hear about that if you watch the show, as you should. Please don't entirely retire to the hallowed halls of astrophysics. I'm very happy to know and assume that you will continue to be a force out there in the public as well because you're No, there are people, I mean, I won't go disappear completely, but I'm going to be directing

inquiries to people, media inquiries to colleagues of mine who I know can bear the load. Thank you, Neil. This has been delightful. Okay, Matt. Sorry I got on late. I hope I didn't cramp you too much. No, not in the least. Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator.

Can you tell this is right out of the Wikipedia? He directs the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space. astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. Can you tell this is right out of the Wikipedia? He directs the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space. He's also a research associate in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. And full disclosure, he is a member and past president of the Planetary Society Board, and you can hear him on StarTalk, too, if you want some more laughs. I will be back, hopefully for a few laughs, with the now, too, if you want some more laughs. I will be back, hopefully, for a few laughs with the now, well, he's got a new title. He's no longer the director

of projects. I'll leave it to talk with him about it. It's Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the... Wait a minute. What are you? People have been asking that for decades. I know there's a change. Give it to us. I am now the Planetary Society Director of Science and Technology.

Yay! Hey, that's terrific. There's a big raise, corner office. Do you still have to iron Bill's bow ties? Yes. But I do it scientifically and technologically rather than just having it be a project. You don't use that hot rock anymore. No, we've moved up to irons heated in the fire.

Well, congratulations. And if you're still qualified to do so, in fact, you're probably more qualified. Tell us about the night sky. It's more a title change to reflect where I've always fit in the organization. But we'll see. You can judge whether I'm still qualified. Up in the night sky, you can see rocks. This week in space history, nothing happened.

Random space fact. No way. All right, let me try that again. Take two. Don't air this, whatever you do. Oh, no, I promise. Oh, thank you. That always makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

Speaking not at all of warm and fuzzy, in the evening sky, so there's a cool three all of warm and fuzzy, in the evening sky. So there's a cool three-planet thing going on in the evening sky. You've got Jupiter looking super bright over in the west. This is the early evening, so go out 8, 9 o'clock, depending on where you are. Maybe 10. Jupiter will be getting lower. But then on the other side of the sky in the east, you you got Mars looking reddish up high, pretty high by that time.

And then Saturn down below it in the east. And you can play the game where you connect the dots of the planets and note that they do kind of connect in a roughly straight line, once again proving that the solar system disk of planets is pretty much a disk. All right. I'm going to keep checking, though. Oh, and in the predawn, Venus, super bright, low. I'm going to keep checking, though. Oh, and in the pre-dawn, Venus, super bright, low in the east. You keep checking, Matt. You let us know how that works out. We move

on to this week in space history. In 1961, the first American flew in space, Alan Shepard, on Freedom 7. And five years ago, the launch of the last Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission occurred. STS-125 Atlantis.

We move on to... Random Space Fact! Well, nice job. And it's only now that I remember I have some more celebrity Random Space Fact folks for us. I guess I'll have to try it next week. Thank you for not squelching my brilliance. So speaking of Alan Shepard, Freedom 7, Mercury, suborbital flight, first American space, it lasted only 15 minutes and 22 seconds from launch to landing. Up and back, yeah. Up and back, but space in between. All right, so we move on to the trivia contest.

And I asked you, what is the name of the moon of the trans-Neptunian object Quarwar? Quarwar, war, war, war. And it's moon, also with an entertaining name. How'd we do? A nice response to this. And our winner, first-time entrant, who also is apparently new to the program because she says, I just discovered you guys. I'm so excited to get involved. Well, we're excited too, Tracy, and we're even more excited that Tracy Meyer was chosen by Random.org as this week's winner.

Tracy says that the answer is Waywatt. Indeed, Quarwar and Waywatt. Waywot. Waywot. Many other people, including Stephen Coulter, who told us Waywot, named after the Tongva sky god, is the son of Quarwar. Exactly. It's all in the family. Now, here's the best response. Oh, by the way, Tracy is going to get a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Cool.

And a cool prize coming up, so don't go away. Here is the response that entertained me the most from Russ Black. I will read it exactly as sent. What an interesting quarry. Wait, what was the question again? Russ, you almost deserve a shirt for that. Okay, back to Alan Shepard, Freedom shepherd freedom seven first american in space suborbital flight measured across the earth's surface how far did alan shepherd travel in freedom seven

so from the launch point to the landing point not counting the vertical distance going up and down but as the crow flies as opposed to the spacecraft, how far did Alan Shepard travel on Freedom 7? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Get us your entry. And what are they competing for this week, Matt? A very cool prize. We have been given by the Little Bits people, littlebits.cc is the website, a Little Bits

kit, specifically their new space kit developed in cooperation, collaboration with NASA. And it is pretty much what it sounds like. It's little bits of electronics. These things are so cute. In fact, this is what Fast Company said about them. I'm looking at their website. Life is like a box of adorable electric components. But they're really fun. And they have these cool space-related projects. You can assemble them. It's got, you know, like little

light sensors and a microphone and a motor, and anyway, it's fun. We're going to give it away to the winner of this new question that Bruce has just posed. You'll need to get it to us by the 13th, is it? Yes, May 13th, Tuesday the 13th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. Very cool prize. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about adorable electronic parts. Thank you, and good night. Should I tell Bruce I broke my promise? He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. What?

NASA's newest space spinoffs. That's next time on Planetary Radio, which is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the totally cosmic members of the Society. Clear skies.