Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Neil Gehrels and WFIRST—A Space Telescope for the 2020s

Episode Date: March 15, 2016

NASA has given the go-ahead for creation of the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope. It might help reveal the nature of dark energy and point the way to life among the stars.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello again, podcast listeners. I've got a couple of quick notes and a request. I'll be in California's Silicon Valley on April 1st and 2nd, that's Friday and Saturday, for Contact Cultures of the Imagination, a little conference I had never heard of until Kim Stanley Robinson told me about it a couple of weeks ago. It actually runs through the 3rd, but I can't stay that long. A whole bunch of my favorite people will be there, including Stan, Andy Weir, Seth Shostak, Rick Sternbach will be a keynote speaker. You can check it out at contact-conference.com. A week later, I'll be sitting down with Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute and Tyler Nordgren,

the great astronomer and photographer of night skies in our national parks at Death Valley National Parks. Family friendly, celestial centennial. This is, you know, the national park celebrating their 100th anniversary. I hope the flowers are still blooming and that the pupfish are still swimming. Finally, there's Yuri's Night. The April 9th Los Angeles celebration will once again be under Space Shuttle Endeavor at the California Science Center, but there are space parties all over our pale blue dot. You can find out if there's one near you at yurisnight.net. And here's the request. Please consider helping us out by posting a review or rating or both

wherever you hear the show. iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Spreaker, iHeartRadio. You can share us with your space geek friends, even if they don't yet know that they are space geeks. Thanks, folks. On with the show. New Space Telescope for New Worlds and Dark Energy, 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. Neil Gerrels returns to our show as we celebrate NASA's decision to build WFIRST, a new telescope that will help us answer some of humankind's greatest questions about life, the universe, and everything. Bill Nye is traveling, so we've given him the week off.

Bruce Betts will take us on some harrowing extravehicular activity when we join him on the What's Up segment. Great news for Mars exploration came just in time for me to talk about it with Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, it's all about Mars this week, at least in talking with you. I guess congratulations are in order for Europe and Russia. Congratulations and relief. It's been very hard for Russia to launch spacecraft to Mars, so ExoMars' safe departure from Earth today has been a huge relief and hopefully the beginning of a fantastic next mission for Europe at Mars. So ExoMars' safe departure from Earth today has been a huge relief and hopefully the beginning of a fantastic next mission for Europe at Mars.

Tell us a little bit about this mission. Well, it's called the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, and its main purpose is to follow up on the possible discovery of methane in Mars' atmosphere, which is a very small quantity in Mars' atmosphere, and to try to understand where it's coming from and where it's located within Mars' atmosphere. And so ExoMars has several instruments to trace that. Then, in addition, it's carrying the Schiaparelli lander, a landing demonstration module that's designed to last about three days on the surface and mostly just try out technologies that Europe will need for its next Mars mission. Such a short life on the surface that you said it really ought to be considered

just an instrument on the orbiter? Pretty much. It's not really loaded down with much in the way of science instruments. It does have a few, including a couple that came from Beagle 2, which was Europe's first attempt at putting a lander on Mars. So hopefully it will be better luck for Schiaparelli and then a really good start for the ExoMars rover, which is supposed to launch in two or four years. There was other good news, but it was only following fairly bad news for yet another visitor to the red planet. Yeah, this is somewhat ambivalent news. It's great

news for the InSight mission, which is a discovery mission that's designed to study the interior of Mars. InSight received terrible news earlier this year when it was revealed that one of its instruments was not ready for launch, and so the launch had to be postponed for two years. So NASA investigated whether it was going to be worth launching in two more years, and they have decided yes, it is, on May 5, 2018. Unfortunately, it doesn't come for free. It's going to cost an extra $150 million at least to do that, and that money has to come out of other discovery programs. $150 million at least to do that, and that money has to come out of other discovery programs. You sounded like you might still be a little bit concerned whether the primary instrument can be redeveloped in time. Well, the fact is it's a new kind of instrument that hasn't been built before, and that instrument's complexity and difficulty is the reason that the mission

didn't lost on time. So until I know that that instrument is ready for launch, I'm going to be worried about this mission. Well, fingers crossed for both of these missions and all the others that are out there delivering great data back to Earth. Thanks, Emily. Thank you, Matt. That's Emily Lakdawalla, Senior Editor for the Planetary Society, our Planetary Evangelist, also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Next week, she will be on her way to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, but you're still going to hear her because we will have excerpts of the really terrific conversation we had

with Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin and Linda Spilker about our expanding solar system. Emily was on stage with me the whole time. That'll be featured in next week's show. Let's talk now about another big telescope headed for space, not the James Webb Space Telescope, but the one that will follow it, the WFIRST, with Neil Gerrills. We last talked with Neil Gerols way back in 2009. Neil has stayed very busy since that conversation about the amazing space-based gamma-ray observatory called SWIFT.

His work was rewarded a month ago when NASA decided to go forward with the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, better known as WFIRST. Infrared Survey Telescope, better known as WFIRST. Neil serves as project scientist for this powerful new instrument that will be a flagship effort like the Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST. He talked with me a few days ago from his office at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where he is chief of the Astroparticle Physics Lab. Neil Gerols, welcome back to Planetary Radio and congratulations on this big announcement from NASA. What does this mean for WFIRST? Nice to be with you, Matt. WFIRST is now going to move into development.

We've been studying this large space mission for the last seven years, and we put in a proposal to the Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics, this 10-year prioritization of missions back in 2012. It was the top-ranked space mission, and we've been in what they call pre-formulation up until now, which is where we're doing studies trying to refine the mission. But now, as of February 17th, we're a formal mission starting the design phase, so-called Phase A. Let's go back to basics to begin with. Remind us of why infrared astronomy

is so important. Well, the infrared light doesn't come to the Earth's surface, or it comes in just in bands. So you really need to go to space to make a really detailed, good infrared observation. Infrared also allows you to, has many, many nice characteristics. It allows you to peer into much more obscured regions of space. For example, some of the WFIRST observations will be looking in the galactic bulge, the bulge central area of our own Milky Way galaxy, and we'll be able to see much more clearly the stars there. Also, as galaxies and stars are at larger distance from us in the universe, the light from them is redshifted by Hubble's law,

and so we can see much more clearly in the infrared, and we can see further away in the infrared than we can with visible light. I'm looking forward to talking more about the science that WFIRST will be conducting, but before we get to that, obviously this won't be the first infrared telescope in space. It's not even the first wide field infrared instrument. And then there's the giant James Webb Space Telescope, which will be coming, we hope, of course, in a couple of years. Why is WFIRST such an important addition to this family? Well, it'll have unique capabilities that are completely complementary to the previous surveys of the infrared sky, for instance, done by the WISE spacecraft, and very different capabilities than JWST.

Compared to JWST, we will have this much wider field of view. That's our main new capability. That's the W in WFIRST. That's right. And we'll be able to see 100 times as much sky with each observation, which means that WFIRST will be surveying the sky, the infrared sky, looking for new interesting objects and detecting billions of galaxies.

JWST is fantastic because it's so large and powerful. In its very small field of view, it can do very sensitive observations. One of our dreams and goals with WFIRST is to fly at the same time, overlap the last five years of JWST operations, and find interesting objects throughout the universe for them to go look at more deeply. There is a very powerful visual demonstration of this wide view that WFIRST will have. It's part of the Goddard Space Flight Center website. The page is about WFIRST. It's very impressive. The Hubble had to be repointed 432 times to capture the entire Andromeda Galaxy and to do the same thing. And apparently at the same resolution, WFIRST would be able to do this in only two moves? That's right. We can cover the whole galaxy in two snapshots.

We're going to do thousands of galaxies like that because we can do them so efficiently. And see what the differences are between these galaxies and what kind of stars are being formed. Where are the young stars and nucleosynthesis taking place, making the elements that create life. You know, where are these places? Where are these factories going on? So the field of view is so important. That's the other powerful part of WFIRST. Not that it has just a wide field of view,

because there have been previous infrared surveys like that, but it has a Hubble-class telescope. So we're going to get the, you know, like the ultra-deep field, that Hubble image that it took that had 10,000 galaxies in it. Yep, we have it on the wall. Wonderful to look at. So our field of view will be a hundred times that. We'll have a million galaxies in every one of those because it'll have the same Hubble-class imaging. Well, it looks like we'll have to take down the current picture and replace it before too long.

You can cover a bigger wall space. Yeah, and we do have some to cover at our new headquarters. Here's something else that impressed me. I mean, you've talked about these views of distant galaxies. The website lists 50 different areas of science, this amazing array of possible investigations that astronomers around the world might be able to undertake with WFIRST. It's a very impressive list. It was fun putting that together because we didn't write all of those descriptions.

We just put out an announcement to the community that we were interested in other ways that people would use the observatory. And it just came pouring in all of these fairly detailed white papers. People put a lot of work into it. I'm speaking on behalf of the Planetary Society, at least in part. And so I have to ask about exoplanets. Will WFIRST advance the search for maybe not just exoplanets, but the habitable ones? Yes, absolutely. In fact, WFIRST has two main priorities.

One is to do cosmology, study galaxies and the expansion history of the universe to see what this dark energy is. And the other part of it is to do exoplanet studies. And we're going to use both this wide field instrument that we have to study exoplanets via a technique called microlensing. And we also have a coronagraph instrument on board that will do direct imaging of exoplanets around nearby stars. That's extremely exciting. Say a little bit more about the coronagraph, because I know that the technology, at least the concept, goes back quite a ways.

But applying this in space is pretty new. Interesting story about the chronograph. The Decadal Survey had recommended a telescope of 1.5 meter diameter. And then in 2012, NASA acquired some already built telescopes from a different agency, two of them, 2.4-meter telescopes, Hubble-class telescopes, beautiful instruments. And the decision was made to use one of those for WFIRST because of the free telescope. It was pretty much a wash in cost because it takes a little more money to launch it, but we got it for free. cost because it takes a little more money to launch it, but we got it for free. This larger telescope enabled having a coronagraph because the larger mirror has a smaller diffraction limit.

It has much finer scene capability, finer imaging. And so a coronagraph was added. And there's so much science that can be done with that. It greatly expanded the community of interested scientists. This may be the greatest war surplus purchase in the history of science. Absolutely. Everyone's so excited about it. You'll hopefully be able to pick out and image individual exoplanets. Is there a chance that WFIRST will find what could be the signatures of life, signs of life itself.

Yes, there is. The real purpose of the chronograph on WFIRST is a sort of technology demonstration and advancement. So, you know, it's a sort of tech demo instrument to move towards a future generation that would actually image Earth planets. But with this current chronograph, as we've been developing it at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the WFIRST project is managed at Goddard, but we have the chronograph at JPL. The capabilities that we're finding in the test lab are really pretty remarkable. And so although we won't image Earth-like planets, we'll image planets that are just a little bit larger, but we will be looking with the spectrograph and the chronograph for signatures of life, exactly as you were saying. What are

the constituents of the atmosphere or the surface of this planet? Do we see biosignatures? Is there oxygen, water on the planet? We'll be able to do that with this chronograph. So there is at least the possibility of making what could be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. Absolutely. And that's what's gotten people so excited about this new, quote, add-on instrument. But I get more questions about, or at least as many questions about the chronograph as about the cosmology of the mission. Ah, but we'll return to the cosmology research to be conducted by WFIRST when our conversation with Neil Gerols continues. 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. The journey starts at Planetary.org. I'll see you there. 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.org slash election2016. Thank you.

Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Project Scientist Neil Gerrels of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is sharing his excitement about WFIRST, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, that may begin spying on exoplanets and distant galaxies in less than 10 years. He told us how WFIRST has a shot at revealing signs of life elsewhere in the Milky Way, but scientists who want to look much deeper into our universe are also looking forward to this new instrument. There's this mysterious stuff, dark energy, dark matter, and WFIRST is going to help us understand those too, right? Yes, very much so. This wide-field instrument was designed to make the measurements to try to

understand the expansion history of the universe and pin down what this dark energy is. It's pretty remarkable that our universe first slowed down as expected for 7 billion years of its lifetime as energy from the Big Bang had the galaxies flying apart, but they were self-gravitating and slowing down. And then for some reason that astronomers still don't understand, it's the top question in astrophysics right now, the universe started accelerating. For the last six billion years, it's been going faster and faster, flying apart. So it's a huge problem, and we will make the measurements that hopefully can answer the reason for it. And that, of course, is dark energy you were describing. We're getting, am I right in saying that we're getting a slightly better handle on dark matter, but still a lot we don't know there too, right? Right. WFIRST will address dark matter also, but you're right. There are many different avenues of pursuit on dark matter, although we still have no real solution to that problem either. But it is certainly thought for dark matter that there's some kind of physical particle. We haven't detected it yet, and it doesn't interact through the electromagnetic force.

It interacts with matter only through the gravitational force, so it's a very exotic particle. But all the theories point to there being the existence of such a particle. Of course, if we don't find it for the next 10 years, the theorists will scratch their head in a different way, but we're making progress. Whereas in dark energy, we don't know, is it some kind of real oddball particle with negative pressure, or was Einstein's general relativity equation incorrect? They're much bigger problems, issues, questions to answer for dark energy. Oh, we'll never know if we don't keep looking. And with that in mind, I mean, you've got a real mission now.

When can we hope to see WFIRST gather first light? Our current plan is to launch it by 2025. There's so much interest in the public, but particularly at NASA and Congress, there has been an effort to try to advance the launch date to 2024. But it's the mid years of the next decade. Would you be surprised, Neil, if WFIRST delivered surprises that we don't even see hints of today? Not at all. In fact, the Decadal Survey kind of specified a triad of discovery areas. Dark energy, exoplanets, and general astrophysics. And in the general astrophysics area, the

main capability it has for finding new things we don't know about yet is the same wide field of view. We'll be covering so much of the sky, thousands of square degrees with this precise imaging and sensitivity, that we are assured of finding very exotic, sometimes transient objects. The bets are that our biggest discovery may come from that search over the sky. Got a couple of other things to ask you about before I let you go. Of course, in the past on this show, when we've talked, it's been about Swift, that spacecraft, which has built quite a legacy for itself. So we're at the opposite end of the spectrum in many ways.

That's true. Swift has been up for 11 years already, so it's already an old mission. It's in its extended phase. It's a very small mission. So, WWFIRST is a large strategic mission for NASA, like JWST. And SWIFT is an explorer mission, low budget. But it has the capabilities of detecting exploding new objects in the sky, transient objects. Most of them are exploding stars or gamma-ray bursts. And then it slews rapidly and looks at them with other sensitive telescopes. And it's been such a joy working on SWIFT all these years because it's a different kind of

science. Every day we detect new transients. It was built for gamma-ray bursts, but we see other things. And people call us up three or four times a day on our, actually they enter these requests on our website for new objects that they want to look at. So every morning at 9 a.m. we get on the phone and say, you know, what are the new things to look at today? Other projects plan their observing schedule for months at a time, but it's really a joy working on SWIFT and trying to see every morning what new things we found. There's a phrase I'm trying to remember. I didn't write it down. Time duration astronomy or something with the word duration. No, it's something with the word time.

Time domain astronomy. Oh, that's it. i knew there was a d word yeah and and the idea is that previous missions have looked in the spatial domain they've mapped the sky and now we're looking in the time domain which is we're looking at the time evolution of objects that their variability or their bursting characteristics you can can direct SWIFT, but these quick reorientations, this repointing that SWIFT often does, it sometimes just does on its own, right? It does it on its own. In fact, it does that almost every day for some kind of new object it finds. And it repoints itself within two minutes. When you do it by ground control, the best you can do is a day.

With Swift, we've been able to get the ground control ones down to an hour. But, yeah, it's this automatic two-minute response which catches us much of our best science. Spacecraft getting smarter and smarter. You were telling me just before we started recording that it was Swift that got you as a part of the LIGO team, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory. That certainly got a lot of press just a few weeks ago. Absolutely.

It's so exciting. Swift has partnered with LIGO on their previous runs when they had detections that everybody, even they, thought probably weren't real, but they could have been real. And so we used our rapid response capability of SWIFT to follow up those previous triggers. And so during that time period, I actually joined the LIGO team for their follow-up group. It's electromagnetic astronomers that follow up the LIGO triggers. It's an important part of LIGO because they detect sources of gravitational waves, but they want to see also what kind of light they make. And it was, of course, wonderful in September when they detected, just after they turned on for their engineering run, completely unexpected,

a really bright gravitational wave burst from two black holes merging. It was wonderful. I really love that you are someone who has helped to expand astronomy across more of the electromagnetic spectrum. And now we're talking about gravitational astronomy. It's neat to be in these new fields that are developing like this. That's my greatest pleasure. Exciting times. You also told me that in a couple of weeks, you're going to be out at your alma mater, Caltech, to pick up an award. You're one of that distinguished institution's honored alumni this year. I just wonder if you're going to run into your old mentor, Ed Stone.

Nye this year. I just wonder if you're going to run into your old mentor, Ed Stone. Oh, I'm sure I will. I'm really looking forward to see Ed. Had such a good relationship with him when I was his graduate student, working on Voyager data back in the 70s. Did he help shape your career or your attitude toward your work or science? Absolutely. I fell in love with space astrophysics at that time. And, you know, it was through colleagues that he knew and that I became friends with and colleagues with that I got my first job at Goddard. And I still, you know, run into him at conferences and at Caltech every year or so. So it's a wonderful relationship. Neil, there's just one more thing I want to congratulate you for before we say goodbye this time. And that has to do with an accomplishment, a very personal accomplishment.

Last year, you climbed the face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park for the second time. Do you draw any parallels between scaling sheer cliffs of granite and leading missions that unveil our universe? Well, I wasn't expecting that question, but... Good. I don't know if I draw a parallel except that I love doing both of them. It is so enjoyable to be climbing. Of course, I'm climbing the easiest route on El Capitan, the nose route, but it still does take five days.

You're sleeping on these ledges. One of the parallels is certainly looking out every night and just staring at the stars and enjoying that being outside under the heavens while you're climbing this amazing creation of rock. I have stood down at the foot of El Capitan and watched people like you making their way slowly up that piece of granite. You won't catch me up there. I will only ask that if you ever do this again, please be very careful where you put your hands and feet because we need you to be around for this great new project and lots of other good science. Thank you, Matt. I appreciate that. I will be extremely careful.

Neil, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure once again to talk with you, and I look forward to following the progress of WFIRST and your other work as time goes by. As always, it's been my pleasure. Neil Gerrels is an experimental physicist working in, there it is in front of me, I did have it written down, time domain astronomy, who is active in instrument development, data analysis, dabbles in theory. Dabbles, that's how his NASA bio puts it. He is the principal investigator for the Swift Gamma Ray Burst mission. His title at the Goddard Space Flight Center is Chief of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory.

He's led or been involved with many other missions, but our conversation has mostly focused on his work as project scientist for WFIRST, this great new telescope flagship project from NASA and others, that hopefully will be scanning the skies in the mid-2020s. We'll do our own much less powerful scan of the skies now as we go to the What's Up segment with Bruce Betts. Bruce Betts is on the Skype line once again for this week's edition of What's Up. Welcome back.

Thank you, Matt. How you doing? I'm sleepy. I was working, editing away here, and I don't know, a big weekend, I guess. Had to go take a nap. Not very tough. Not like astronauts who step outside their spacecraft. Wow, nice segue. We'll come back to that later in the show.

We will. What's up? Jupiter just passed opposition, basically up by sunset in the east, and you can see it throughout the early evening looking like the brightest star-like object in the evening sky. And then around midnight, Mars joins it, rising in the east, looking reddish, and Mars will keep getting brighter as we get closer to it in its orbit over the next few weeks. And then Saturn's rising a little bit later.

And Venus, you might still catch low in the east in the pre-dawn. We move on to this week in space history. It was a busy week. 1958, Vanguard I launched. It is the oldest spacecraft still in orbit. 1965, and we'll talk about EVAs, extravehicular activity, more later, but Alexei Leonov took the very first spacewalk, or EVA. And in 2011, five years ago, Messenger began orbiting Mercury, enlightening us to that inner planet and its strange ways.

So as we go into random space fact, I've got a nice surprise for you from the folks who attended the Planetary Radio Live that we did last Tuesday. I mentioned already to Emily that we'll have excerpts of that. A great discussion on next week's show, but here's what people had for you. Hey Bruce, I got your random space fact right here. Thanks, I think. Okay, so good. The point was to crack you up a little bit.

So we succeeded, everyone. Great job. Scared me a little bit, too. Well, I'll be okay. So, random space fact, and we're going to talk about Soyuz 5, Soviet mission from 1969. We'll talk about this a little bit more in the trivia contest, but I'm going to talk about a different part right now. Boris Volianov was the only cosmonaut on Soyuz 5 when it returned to Earth, and it had a rather remarkable reentry. The service module of the Soyuz failed to separate, so it entered the atmosphere the wrong way around, with nose first and not with the heat shield, although eventually,

fortunately, the heat apparently caused the service module to separate. It turned around and all was mostly happy until the retro rockets didn't fire and other problems happened. So there was an incredibly hard landing really, really far from where he was supposed to land and he had to walk for hours to find shelter in the cold

at a house. Oh my gosh. Boy, just listening to that, I need another nap. I'm kind of tired just listening to it too. We move on to the trivia contest. And related to this, I asked you the somewhat confusing question, who was the first person to do an EVA in a spacesuit that did not have life support coming from an umbilical, though there could have been safety umbilicals. How'd we do, Matt?

This was a tough one, and it did obviously depress the number of entries a little bit, but there were a lot of people who also thanked you for pushing them. Many of those people came up with the wrong answer. Some said that it was the guys on the space shuttle who tried the man maneuvering unit. But you did say this was for somebody who still was using an umbilical. It just wasn't carrying the life support. Or at least they could be. Certainly not flying free.

We also had a bunch of people who said it was Rusty Schweikert of Apollo 9. A good answer. And depending on how one phrased it, one could argue that because he tested out what they would later use on the moon in the Apollo missions. That was the first use of that in space with the life support built into the suit. A couple months earlier than that, a couple other guys were carrying their life support along with them. And who were they? That was Yevgeny Kruyanov and Alexei Yeliseyev. And they were on the Soyuz 4 and 5 missions, which were two missions launched. Soyuz 4 with one person in it, Soyuz 5 with three, and then those two transferred after they docked, transferred from Soyuz 5 to Soyuz 4, leading to our fiery reentry story for the person left on 5.

But the Soviets had not built a tunnel between the spacecraft, so they actually had to get outside the spacecraft, travel along the spacecraft, and get in the other one. And obviously for that, they needed portable life support. Well, you've just made Tom Burns very happy. Tom in Chicago, Illinois, indeed said it was those two cosmonauts who beat out Rusty Schweikert and the American Space Program for this, I don't know, decent achievement, minor achievement, I guess. By the way, he says, I'm entering for my 10-year-old daughter, Ava, who says hi to Emily. And now you'll have even more stuff for Ava and yourself, because, Tom, we're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt and a 200-point

itelescope.net astronomy account. All right, we move on. And in celebration of the successful launch of ExoMars part one, how many science instruments, not counting any science they do from radio relay, does the ExoMars trace gas orbiter carry? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. To answer this one, you've got until the 21st. That would be March 21st, Tuesday at 8 a.m slash radio contest. To answer this one, you've got until the 21st. That would be March 21st, Tuesday at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And if you have it right and are chosen by random.org, we're going to give you a Planetary Radio t-shirt, of course, and a 200-point itelescope.net account on that worldwide nonprofit network of telescopes,

and another one of those signed t-shirts from the group. Okay. Go signed by two of the leaders of the group, Damien Kulash and Tim Nordwin from our conversation. We had leading into their new zero G music video, not long ago. So not a bad prize package. Awesome sauce.

All right, everybody go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about vibrating woofers. Thank you, and good night. Well, I guess that's more to think about than bleach, which troubled a lot of people. Our listener, Daniel Kazard, said that he could think of nothing but bleach over the last week sitting in a corner by himself.

That's Bruce Betts. He is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its astronomically generous members. Danielle Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle created the theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan.

Clear skies.