Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - New Beginnings With Lou Friedman

Episode Date: September 20, 2010

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New beginnings for exploration of our solar system and beyond, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Dr. Louis Friedman joins us once again, but there's a difference this time. Lou has retired as executive director of the Planetary Society, a job he held for 30 years, right from the time he, Bruce Murray, and Carl Sagan founded the organization. As you'll hear in a few minutes, Lou is not looking back, not when there is such a bright future to look forward to.

Bill Nye, the new executive director, will report on his recent visit to JPL, where the next Mars rover was on display. Bruce Betts will tell us what to look for in the night sky when he joins me for What's Up. You'll also learn how you can be the next person to deliver a random space fact. Emily Lakdawalla has been busy with the Planetary Society blog. Let's start with a piece about Opportunity. Is it smooth sailing now to that crater called Endeavor? Well, I wouldn't say smooth sailing too soon because, of course, Mars always has surprises to throw at us. But it's certainly looking much better for Opportunity's

future driving. You know, she takes these drive direction panoramas at the end of every driving saw that look ahead toward the terrain that she's going to be driving into. And over time, the sand dunes have been getting smaller and smaller and more and more widely scattered with larger patches of bedrock in between them. And all of that is good news for Opportunity's driving. Her wheels get much better traction on the bedrock, and she's also able to autonomously navigate better through landscapes that don't just have repetitive dune after dune in them. So all in all, we're looking at long drives for opportunity up ahead and eating up the miles to Endeavor Crater. That's good news, and you can even see the rim of the crater in the distance now. Yeah, the shocking thing is that much of the rim that we see is actually the far rim of Endeavor Crater, not the near rim.

So it's going to be quite a view as we approach the near rim. We're going to have one line of mountains in the foreground and an even more spectacular one in the background. All right. I don't want to hear people starting to ask us, are we there yet? Oh, it's way too late, Matt. They've been asking that for a long time. Let's go farther out and farther back. You had a really interesting piece about dredging up old treasures from a mission of many years ago. That's right. You know, we're spoiled now because we have the web and we can get instantaneous updates on the status of all the missions that are

exploring the solar system. But not so long ago, it wasn't at all like that. And people had to wait for the mail to come. And imagine that with black and white photos of what these exploration spacecraft had sent back from all these planets. And one of them, of course, was Voyager, which was exploring Jupiter in around 1979. And somebody just out of the blue, this guy named Tom Faber emailed me with scans that he had made of the Voyager status bulletins. And there are these two- to four-page newsletters that were sent out on a weekly to monthly basis, updating all of the space fans out there with what the Voyager missions were doing. And it's just been so fun to relive the missions through these newsletters.

Are we, or are you, or somebody making these available to others? I am. There were a total of 99. we or you or somebody making these available to others? I am. There were a total of 99. I've put 42 of them on the web so far and am hoping to get them all on the web in the coming couple of weeks. All right. Well, you can look for those on planetary.org as well.

Almost the last thing, a t-shirt that I really want now. Yeah, I'm excited about this t-shirt. It's by a company called Chop Shop that seems to specialize in t-shirts that have multiple silhouettes of various recognizable objects on them. And in this case, Thomas Romer put together a design with 23 missions of exploration. And some of them are pretty easy to guess.

Spirit and opportunity are very obvious. But there's a lot of older spacecraft that you might want to challenge yourself trying to figure out what they are. And I will, in the most mercenary way possible, say that he's got a deal on this right now. You get a good deal on the shirt, and about $5 in the purchase comes to the Planetary Society. So enough said about that. Something to look forward to, though. You had a nice look at the next big rover.

That's right. On Thursday, Bill Nye and I went over to JPL to get a good look at the new Curiosity rover being built, and I'll have a post about that on Monday. All right. We'll probably be talking about that next week. Thanks so much, Emily. Thank you, Matt. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society

and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. I'll be back with Lou Friedman. First, here's Bill. Hey, hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, Executive Director of the Planetary Society. And this week, our own Emily Lakdawalla and I got to go to the Jet Propulsion Lab, JPL, in Pasadena, California, here in the United States, to see Curiosity. What? Yes, to see Curiosity.

That's the name of the next rover, MSL, Mars Science Laboratory. And it will land on Mars and drive around just like Spirit and Opportunity are doing now, except it's quite a bit bigger. The way everybody describes it, the size of a Mini Cooper, if you know that automobile. It's the size of a small car. And it will not have the limitation of having solar panels that have to be energized by the sun. In the Martian winter, they have to almost shut down. This has a little piece of plutonium, RTG, a radiothermetric generator, and it cranks out so much heat when you first fire it up, if I may, that it has all these remarkably sophisticated heat dissipation devices and systems on it on the cruise phase from here to Mars.

It's just an interesting thing. And it will not bounce down with airbags. It's going to be lowered by a sky crane. This is the coolest idea. It's got these retro rockets and these cables lower the rover down like a James Bond movie, lower it down onto the surface and then cut loose. It's going to be really good. Now, people said the airbag systems used on the previous rovers were just too crazy to ever work. And they're saying that about this thing, but I'll bet you it works. These guys are

very thoughtful. They're very careful. So this rover will be able to work all winter. Its electronics will stay warm all winter and it will make the next steps in discovery. It'll have a real rock hammer, not just a scraper, but a real hammer that goes bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, like an impact drill. And they're going to find out more about the rocks, more about Mars' past, more logical places to look for water, and then signs of life. And we will make discoveries on that other world that will change this one, because we're curious. And there will be a photometric calibration target. It's the spare part from the Spirit and Opportunity that says, to those who visit here, we wish a safe journey and the joy of

discovery. That's what this is all about, my friends, the joy of discovery. I gotta fly, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. I've got to fly. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. Now, usually as you get into the main segment of the show, I have a little intro that I write, and then we say hello to our guest. But this time, we're going to go right into talking to our guest who's sitting across from me, and that's because it is Lou Friedman, the ex-ex-executive, no, I screwed it up, the ex-executive director of the Planetary Society, and I promised I would give you credit for that. Hi, Matt. I'm glad to be here, and this is the first time I can truly say I am a guest on your show. That's true. Before, I was kind of almost a host in a way. Really, really. At least I felt like that. And I don't even have to ask all the questions that you always ordered me to ask. That's right.

You don't have to pay any attention to me. All right. So anyway, he's not really gone, folks. As I heard him say once, he hasn't stepped down. He stepped aside. Horizontal movement, right? That's right. Staying very involved with the Planetary Society. In fact, the first week, my wife finally looked at me yesterday and said, so it's going to be volunteering seven days a week. Is that it? I was busier last week than I had been the few previous weeks. I expect I'll have some adjustments in my schedule, but I really am very involved. Of course, the Light Sail Project is a major activity for us, and I am excited to be doing new things, as we'll talk about. But I hope that you're spending a

little bit of time at home, sitting with your lovely wife, in those wonderful seats from Yankee Stadium. Well, I have sat in the seats from Yankee Stadium, and all of my friends are jealous, so I now have more friends. They come over, and they sit in the seats. Now, I, and all of my friends are jealous, so I now have more friends. They come over, and they sit in the seats. Now, I talked to Bill Nye when he was mounting those on the wooden base, and he was scraping the gum off. I said, don't scrape that gum off. That may have been there since Babe Ruth, and he said, no, no, these seats are much newer than that. They are much newer than that, and I didn't know about this little story you said. What I think is true is that's actually my gum from when I was a kid sitting in Yankee Stadium. Does your chewing gum

lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight? You know what? We should really talk about substance here, beginning with the guy that I just mentioned. We talked before he took over when you were getting ready to step aside, as we've said. But Bill Nye is now only the second executive director in history for the Planetary Society. That's right. And observing him in his first couple of weeks has been great. He is going to bring a freshness and a new outlook, and I hope a much broader outlook. That's the thing that excites me the most. And I hope a much broader outlook.

That's the thing that excites me the most. If you want to get at the heart of why I stepped aside and why I'm really excited about Bill taking over, is we have to appeal to more and more people, not just our space community, but the whole public community interested in science, interested in exploration. And I think Bill is starting out in a great way. Me too. That's a beginning, but you wrote extensively about beginnings, new beginnings, not long ago. And we'll put a link up to that column that you wrote in the Planetary Society blog.

And we thought maybe we would use that as the focus for the rest of our conversation today. And I think that's okay with you because you're pretty excited about the things that you see happening, getting underway. Well, I am fortunate to be working on some new things, and I'm excited about the new opportunities they represent. One thing I want to mention, and I dealt with some of these things a little bit in the column, is the whole idea of the exploration of Mars going to a new level, an international level. It has to be thought of differently. Spirit and Opportunity have been great. Opportunity is doing some really great things as we speak right now in making its way across Mars. But the newer projects,

as exploration gets bigger and bigger, are going to be more complex. They're going to require more resources than the science budget can afford and more resources than any one nation can afford. And so it's moved to become international. The United States and Europe have already joined forces for the 2016-2018 opportunity. Mars sample return is on the horizon now. There's a meeting helping to define it here in a few weeks that I hope to participate in. They've got to bring Russia involved in that. After all, they're the only country that's ever done

automated sample return from a planetary surface, except for Japan. Now Japan has to be involved too. So Russia and Japan, two players, also need to join the United States and Europe and maybe more nations because it's going to require a lot of resources and a lot of different vehicles and a lot of different components to bring back samples from Mars. And of course, what we hope is that this presages the way for humans to explore Mars, and that

clearly will be an international venture. MR. Now, certainly international exploration, cooperative exploration of space, that's an old theme here at the Planetary Society. Is the new part of this, it's now we've reached the point where it's really the economic realities are such that it's not going to happen otherwise? Well, yeah, I think it's the economic realities and the political realities. Look at the International Space Station.

It was a piece of paper, drawings, until it became truly international. It couldn't have been done by the United States alone. And a lot of people want to say, well, we can do it alone. Even the Russians tell me they want to do sample return. They can do it alone. Of course, they can do it alone, but they won't. And the United States won't. Political realities and the economic realities are that exploration is an international venture.

It's the way it should be. Earth should be exploring the solar system. And I see these new things as one way of doing the big, complex ventures that we want to do. On the other scale, if I can, there's another new aspect of what we're doing, and that's the solar sail spacecraft, which is just the opposite. It's four and a half kilograms, a tiny little thing that I can carry in my hands and put into my baggage compartment over my seat in an airplane. It's a small spacecraft, and yet I think it's the way of the future in many respects. And there's certainly some new things we're doing with this spacecraft that are tremendously exciting. Well, now this is

another of your new beginnings, because you said as excited as you are about solar sailing, and Japan, of course, their tremendous success with a big solar sail, you're more excited about these nanocraft. Yeah, I really am am because, you know, I always talked about interstellar flight being the goal of solar sailing, but that's way off into the future. But the future of that requires these very small spacecraft. You want a spacecraft with near zero mass and near infinite area. Well, you're not going to get quite that, but you're going to get masses down below one kilogram and you're going to get large areas, and that's the step we're taking with LightSail. This LightSail vehicle of ours is going to be the highest acceleration solar sail craft ever built

because it's only four and a half kilograms weight, and yet it's still 32 square meters can be packaged up inside that tiny little spacecraft. So it's a step forward in that interstellar flight direction, which is centuries away, but we'll have a lot of practical applications to do first. And so I think some of the things we're doing on LightSail is another new beginning for me that I'm excited to work on. Is this move towards smaller yet just as capable, if not more capable, spacecraft? Do you see this as something that's being adopted elsewhere? Well, I see a lot more.

You know, CubeSats and small spacecraft used to be considered toys by the pros, and now the Department of Defense and NASA and the National Reconnaissance Office and the big boys are all beginning to be very interested in CubeSats because you can sure pack a lot of capability into these very small spacecraft. And that, of course, brings down the cost and it brings up the ability to launch them more often. So, yeah, I think this is the way of the future in new spacecraft. One of the things we're doing on this spacecraft is testing out some ultra, ultra small and sensitive accelerometers. They could become the guidance system of the future.

You may not even need to track spacecraft in the future. You may be able to just equip every one of them with an inertial measuring unit. You don't need GPS. You don't need a tracking station. They'll all know where they are just by having tiny little guidance components inside of them. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Well, this is an experiment. Well, and it does make me excited both about the future of solar sailing, because obviously

small spacecraft make that a more realizable thing. At the same time, it makes me excited about the future of spacecraft to be part of a new development. What else did you have on your list of new beginnings? I think you had human spaceflight on. Well, I did, and that, of course, gets into the political brouhaha that's going over with the human spaceflight program in the United States. The administration has proposed a really radical new approach, basically saying, NASA, no longer are you in the transportation, now it's exploration business,

getting out of transportation and into exploration, which is what we want for NASA. We want NASA to be on the cutting edge. Building rockets is getting like building cars. We've been doing it for many, many years. It's not the same old, same old. And the rockets really are the same old. A lot of people have come up with thinking about how they can beat the rocket equation and beat gravity. Well, you can't.

And the staging of rockets to get them off the Earth and out of the Earth's gravity well is pretty much the same business now as it was 40 and 50 years ago. And witness some of the successful launch vehicles that the Russians have had have been the same. They're not just the same style, but the same rockets. And our Atlases and Deltas are derivatives of things we were flying 40 or 50 years ago. So it's great that NASA will get into a new direction and take exploration, take human spaceflight to a really higher purpose, exploring other worlds, getting beyond the moon, something we did

back in the 70s, and going out with steps into the solar system. So I am excited about this new approach. I think the administration totally bundled it in presenting it to the American public and presenting it to the political system. They kind of were wringing their hands about what was wrong and what they were going to do and some of the bureaucratic changes they were going to make. What they should have said is, no, they're setting their sights on a new way of doing something that is going to – they should have made the mantra for NASA,

exploration, not transportation, and gotten the public behind it. I think it is very exciting. Now, we're going to borrow a trick here that I've learned from John Stewart of The Daily Show. We're going to stop now, for those of you listening to the regular show. But my conversation with Lou Friedman, the executive, I can't say it, the just half. Executive director. Thank you so much. That's going to continue.

We've got a lot more to talk about, mostly about what's ahead, because he'd much rather talk about what's ahead than what's behind in our exploration of the universe. So we'll be back in a minute with Bruce Betts in this week's edition of What's Up, but if you want to hear the rest of the conversation with Lou, well, join us on the planetary.org website. Just look for the show page, the page where this show is featured, or go to planetary.org slash radio. But I'll be back with Bruce in just a minute and on the web with Lou Friedman. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the

secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us.

You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, And I hope you'll consider joining us. This is the acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. We're back in the big room, the grown-up room, for this week's edition of What's Up with Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. The acoustics here are actually not quite as good as in your office. I think we should go back there next time I'm up. My office, which by implication is the kids' room?

Yes. I thought that was obvious. Yeah, I guess it is. You got all the good toys. Well, that's true. So what's up? Hey, I'll tell you one thing. Oh, please do.

Jupiter is really spectacular. It's getting a lot of attention. It is spectacular. And it's at opposition this week. Opposition. Opposition. I stole your line. Opposite side of the Earth from the Sun is where Jupiter is on September 20th. First day this show gets out there, meaning it's as close as it is any time during the year.

But also, it is closer than it ever has been in my lifetime but not in yours how kind of you to point that out but close it's the closest it uh will be on the 20th closest it'll be from 1963 until 2022 yeah yeah that's that's within my frame of reference but it really did you know it's not huge differences. It's not like Mars. It isn't a huge difference. Although it will be so close this week, they will appear as big as the full moon. No, wait, that's an urban legend email hoax about Mars. I'm sorry.

Anyway, we've, yeah, and Venus still being brighter, but you can only check it out shortly after sunset down there low in the west. Jupiter dominating the eastern sky in the early evening. That's when you'll see it. And Uranus less than one degree from Jupiter. And Neptune is going to come up in a couple of minutes. And also Mercury. Mercury making an apparition in the pre-dawn over the next couple weeks.

And so you can check it out as a bright object, but not nearly as bright as these other two. Low in the east in the pre-dawn, before sunrise. We move on to this week in space history. 40 years ago, Luna 16 returned samples from the moon. The Soviet robotic mission bringing back their first set of samples and a little bit farther back 1874 that would be luna 15 wouldn't it luna 13 can't you no no no no no gustav holst oh yeah no. Is that when he was born? Oh, born. So he was born.

He wrote The Planets in the early 1900s. Speaking of Jupiter, my favorite among The Planets suite is Jupiter, you know, for many, many years. It's mine, too, for the last few months since my 12-year-old son helped me discover such things. Yes, it'll be featured in part of a soundtrack for one of his upcoming movies. Don't miss it coming to a theater near you. Or a YouTube channel near you. Yeah, something like that. We move on. I feel so much pressure with what you're going to talk

about later. I don't think I can do it justice. But we move on to Random Space Flight! Oh, that was like the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet. You ever hear that with the theremin? It's actually the worst part of the movie in my opinion, but you know, you just grin and bear it and it's, but that was very good and very appropriate. But I should actually give you a random space fact.

The solar wind, particles coming out from the sun, mostly protons, electrons, the sun loses an equivalent mass through shedding the solar wind, an earth mass, once every 150 million years. Oh, God, I thought you were going to say every 15 days or something. Okay, I feel better. It's still a lot of stuff. That's like 6.7 billion tons an hour. Yeah. Bruce, his renditions of Random Space Fact are lovely, but he's ready for a break. And that means we need your help.

We need you to help us do Random Space Fact. Not to provide the fact, but to provide the lovely intro. So all you have to do is send us an MP3 file, a good quality MP3 file, 128 kilobit per second, for those of you to whom that means something. I don't know. It could be your kids saying it in unison or not. It can be you and a synthesizer. saying it in unison or not.

It can be you and a synthesizer. At least to get things started here, if we use your version of saying Random Space Fact! And it need not be quite so grand, but what the heck. If we use it, we'll send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. What a deal.

So just send it to the usual place, which is... If you go to planetary.org slash radio, you'll find out where to send the trivia contest entry, which is the same place you will send this. Okay, once again, your version of random space fact. Let's get to the trivia contest. Okay, we asked you for every three orbits Neptune makes, how many does Pluto make? Yes, and you knew, you knew, you dog, that there was a special relationship there, which you can tell us about. I did.

Two. They're in a three to two resonance. So for every three orbits Neptune makes, Pluto makes two orbits. What this means, kind of another little side implication, is that their positions repeat relative to each other about every 500 years. And it's not a coincidence. No, it's not. It's one of those cool gravitational things where things like to get in these resonant orbits, the Neptune dominating the gravitational tug, obviously,

but it's more stable to have your orbit tied to some type of resonance uh same reason that all the the moons are similar reason to why the moons get locked into resonances with their parent planets why mercury is an unorbital resonance with its rotation it's all cool tidal gravitational stuff it's the music of the spheres. That's what it is. Why, yes, it is. You know, if only we could get someone to write a symphony about that. You probably want to know who won. He'd certainly like to know that he won.

Pat Foster, longtime listener to the radio show. As far as I can tell, it's been about two and a quarter years since Pat won the contest. And so, congratulations. You you should know Matt has all the winners scribbled onto his forearms. He's had to like cover both forearms and it's like, it's like memento, you know? Uh, so Pat, he neglected to tell us where he lives, but we know where to find him and we're going to send him a copy of packing for Mars by Mary Roach, that terrific book, which is why we got a huge response for this contest.

I just wanted to let you know that we got a whole bunch of nice comments from people, including Pat, who once again talked about how much they enjoyed the open house video and that it was great to see you and me kidding each other as opposed to only hearing it. And he said, gee, it looks like a really nice place, the new TPS HQ, where we're sitting right now. So because that video has been kind of buried in the blog, we're going to put a link up to it at the show page. Go to the homepage, planetary.org, look up on the top left there,

click the little picture that goes with the show, and you'll see all the links. All right, I got a new trivia contest for you this time around. What was the prime recovery ship for Apollo 11? The prime recovery ship for Apollo 11. I happen to know and I will reveal why I know in a couple of weeks. Were you there? No, but the next best thing. I watched it on TV. No, no, no it's no i have actually a better story but that's okay that is wait i will say no more i will say no more in two weeks you have until the 27th i believe it is monday the 27th of september at 2 p.m pacific time to get us that answer and we're done all

right everybody go out there look up the night, and think about the smell of grass. The kind you walk on. I don't think I like that. Don't draw any significance from the fact that we're in California regarding that question. Like football fields. Where are you going with this? He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation.

Clear skies. Thank you.