Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - New Era of Science on the International Space Station

Episode Date: September 27, 2010

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A new era opens on the International Space Station, 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. The ISS is about to transition from construction to application in a big way. This is the work that may keep space station crews busy for another 10 years or more. We'll review this milestone with NASA's Assistant Associate Administrator for the ISS, Mark Uran. Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, joins us from an international conference in Prague, while Bruce Betts and I will welcome our first listener-created random space fact rendition,

and it's a doozy. There's no better way to get underway than another conversation with Emily Lakdawalla. She is the Planetary Society's science and technology coordinator, the editor of its blog that you can find at planetary.org, and, as you're about to hear, a very busy mom. Emily has always a lot to talk about, beginning with opportunity and a great image that proves they are still stopping to smell the roses, or otherwise. Well, yeah, stopping to smell the meteorites, after all. It's pretty amazing, this landscape at Meridiani Planum. Yeah, stopping to smell the meteorites after all. It's pretty amazing, this landscape at Meridiani Planum. It's flat, it's nearly featureless, and then once in a while you see off in the distance this dark blob,

and it turns out to be a stony or iron meteorite that landed there a billion years ago. Ailan Ruah is another such meteorite. It's a relatively small one, they say about the size of a toaster. And there's actually another one visible in the distance in this recent Opportunity image, which I've learned. It looked huge to me, but somebody pointed out to me by measuring pixels that it's only about a foot across, about 30 centimeters. Just looking at those low dunes and that beautiful ridge off in the distance is well worth the trip to the blog. Absolutely. With those ridges in the distance and the Opportunity panoramas, it's such a scenic drive now that Opportunity is doing. I'm never going to get tired of it.

Let's talk about Venus, which continues to surprise scientists. That's right. This one's kind of funny because, you know, I remember the press releases that came out in 2006 when Venus Express went into orbit and found this thing called a double vortex, a dipole at the South Pole. And they said, this is awesome. It confirms something that Pioneer Venus saw in 1979 at the North Pole. So we saw it at the North Pole, we saw it at the South

Pole, we understand Venus. And now after four years of orbiting Venus and taking more and more pictures of the South Pole, they find that the South Pole doesn't always have a dipole. It has all kinds of different cloud patterns. So now after much further thought, they say, huh, you know, it's not quite so easy to understand after all, but the Venus Express data set is really rich and it's been fun to interpret. You know that I have to comment on these images of that vortex, which I guess is at the South Pole. What came to my mind is what has been coming to many other people's minds, that it looks like an interplanetary, pardon me for this, colonoscopy.

that it looks like an interplanetary, pardon me for this, colonoscopy. Yeah, some kinder people mentioned bronchoscopies, but yeah, any kind of scopy that you can name, it does kind of look like that, I'm afraid. Yeah, Mary Roach would love it. She's into this kind of stuff. Anyway, lots left to learn all over our solar system. One last thing we saved a few moments for, and this for the other parents of young children out there. You found a great new band. It's awesome. They're called Recess Monkey. They're three kindergarten teachers out of Seattle. They have this incredible, funky, poppy sound,

and their music is just great. I reviewed it in the... And Sanaya is trapped under the desk. Hold on. Appropriate. Here, I'm going to spin her on my chair while I'm talking about this. And their songs are just so fun. And they've got a new album out called The Final Funktier, where all the songs are almost entirely space-themed. And it's just great. So danceable and so enjoyable to listen to. And I've already enjoyed Jetpack, which you have on the blog.

Thanks so much, Emily. And good luck there with the kids. Play them some music. Thank you, Matt. Emily Lactewal is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. We'll be right back to talk about the International Space Station and a new era of science up there in low Earth orbit.

Say bye-bye. Bye. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy here, Executive Director of the Planetary Society, and I'm in Prague in the Czech Republic for the International Astronautical Federation Congress, the IAC. Everybody's here. That is to say, people from all over the world who are involved in space exploration are here to meet each other, to exchange business cards, and especially to present papers. These would be technical papers that people have written about their work.

And I have gotten included on our technical paper, the Planetary Society's technical paper, about the LightSail-1 project, which is our solar sail, paper about the LightSail-1 project, which is our solar sail, which will be pushed through space by the momentum of photons. On Monday of this week, Tom Svitek, Tomas Svitek, who is Czechoslovakian, and I presented our paper about how we're going to deploy these fantastically thin sails. They're a 20th of the thickness of a human hair. The whole spacecraft would fit very easily in a typical shoebox, and it deploys to be 32 square meters. It's almost four meters on a side, and it only would weigh, if you're measuring weight even though you're in space, less than five kilos. It's a cool thing that the Planetary Society, students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo,

Stellar Aerospace Systems, Georgia Tech, have worked to build this spacecraft. It is a remarkable small thing, and we're very excited to be presenting a paper about it tomorrow. And I, as executive director, am getting more and more in the aerospace community here. It's a lot of fun, and for me, it's really an honor. I'm very excited to be presenting and very excited to meet everybody over the coming week.

And I hope we can ever so slightly change the world. Thanks for listening. I've got to fly. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. Argonne, Brookhaven, Fermilab, Lawrence Livermore, what do they have in common with the American segment of the International Space Station? All have been designated by the federal government as national laboratories. And now, after 12 years of assembly, humanity's permanent outpost on orbit is about to make science job one. Mark Urand says the award of three Biomed ISS grants is good evidence of that transition.

Mark is the Assistant Associate Administrator for ISS at NASA headquarters. That makes him the top official in the agency whose work is entirely devoted to the station. And he is devoted. His work on what would become the ISS began more than 25 years ago. The three rounds of Biomed ISS grants are coming from the National Institutes of Health, building on a long history of collaboration with NASA. When I talked to Mark in his Washington office last week, he had just attended a meeting that once again confirmed the international nature of this laboratory in space. Mark,

thanks so much for joining us on Planetary Radio. I think probably congratulations are in order, since it was just a couple of days ago, as we speak, that this group called the MCB got together to talk about the future of the International Space Station. Have I got that right? That's right, Matt. They're our top-level management directorate that spans across Europe, Japan, Canada, Russia, and the United States. Truly international. Really kind of satisfies one of the goals of this project, doesn't it, to see all these agencies working together?

Well, international cooperation is going to be essential no matter what we do in space in the future. And what we're doing is we're setting the stage for that with the demonstration of the assembly and the R&D program that we're about to mount on the space station over the next decade. It's really a very productive effort when you take all of these international partners and have them working together in a collaborative environment. Let's talk about what you've described as really a new phase for the ISS. Turning a corner, I think, is specifically how you described it, going from the construction phase, which is very close to finish,

to one of actual utilization for research. It's not that research hasn't been going on up there, right? Oh, no. We've been doing research since the very first assembly flight. And in fact, we've been planning for it ever since the earliest phases of the program. So we're well prepared, and we're just in the final stages of now positioning both the on-orbit physical assembly of the space station and our ground-based management approaches in order to make sure that this is the highest possible

productivity over the next decade as we ramp it up. Well, one of these research projects that apparently came up at the meeting a couple of days ago is the one we hope to talk about for most of this conversation, and that is this Biomed ISS effort. What really is different about this? Is it that you've collaborated with the National Institutes of Health? Well, of course, we've been collaborating with NIH for almost the entire history of NASA. But for the first time, NIH wants to pursue research that is solely focused on their national health objectives. And we're happy to see that because we think we have a facility that can contribute to it.

So it's a great partnership, and we signed a memorandum of understanding with them back in 2007 for them to pursue this research. It's taking them some time to organize for their competitive announcement process, but it's very encouraging to us because it's going to be a three-year rolling announcement process, and we're just seeing the first year's results now. Talk about those first-year results with this announcement of three research projects that, I guess, will eventually be up on the ISS. Right. They've selected their first three investigators, and you can see from our prior announcements the types of research that they're going to be involved in. One of them is looking at bone loss, and it's looking at it from the perspective

of how can we apply the knowledge we learn in space under microgravity environments to addressing some of the chronic conditions that we experience on the ground in aging patients. Another one is by a principal investigator from California who has a lot of experience with our program and will be looking into the immune responses that occur in the elderly. The immune system is what protects the body against foreign substances, and it's suppressed in space. So the more we can understand in space about what's causing that suppression, the more we can apply it to similar problems on the ground. And then finally, a third investigation, rather, is on the ability of toxins to go across the barriers, the cell membranes in the body.

And of course, toxins transferring across cell membranes is one of the leading sources of infection and disease. We'll be using three-dimensional cell culture models in space to help NIH understand what the mechanics and dynamics of these transfers are and what limits them. And by the way, pardon me for this, but I am obligated by my daughter at UC San Diego to say about that last project, go Tritons. Well, we're excited about all three. The other ones that you mentioned, one out of the Northern California Institute for Research and Education, and that first on bone loss from Massachusetts General Hospital. Really fascinating that all three of these were able to take advantage of the fact that human physiology is simply different in space.

It's something we've talked about on this show many times. It would appear that all three of these also have potential not just to help the billions of us down here, but people who will be living and working in space and perhaps someday going to Mars. Right, and that's the whole point of this, is by going into a partnership with the NIH, we can advance both of our research goals. with the NIH, we can advance both of our research goals. And we both need to see progress in these areas because they're persistent problems to human health that we can make a contribution to. What other kinds of research should we be looking to in the next few years on the ISS now that it will, well, within just a few months, will have been fully configured? Well, I think you'll see a gradual ramp up in

cellular and molecular biology. It's at these cellular and molecular levels that a lot of the root causes occur for processes in our body. And when you're working in a microgravity environment and you factor the gravitational force out of the equation, then the forces between molecules are different. And these manifest at the cellular level, at the cell membrane level, in the cytoplasm, and it's a very unique condition that we believe is information-rich, now that we can get to it and work in a laboratory environment literally 365 days per year. That's Mark Uran.

We'll hear more from NASA's Assistant Associate Administrator for International Space Station after a break. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail,

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That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Mark Uran wants to share his excitement about a national laboratory that is also one of the greatest peaceful international collaborations in history. You know it as the International Space Station. Mark is NASA's Assistant Associate Administrator for ISS in Washington, D.C. We've been talking about the new Biomed ISS grant program

NASA is facilitating for the National Institutes of Health. But there is much more science underway and still to come, about 350 kilometers over our heads. Beyond biology and physiology, and maybe also looking to some of our international partners, what other kinds of research are underway on the station? Well, not surprisingly, they're interested in the same areas that we are. We all track relatively closely. Most of the work is either in fundamental biology or in various aspects of applied biomedical applications. The other area of the program, of course, is material sciences.

We've had some notable achievements in material sciences over the years in measuring thermophysical properties of exotic materials like vanadium and zirconium and titanium that we can't measure on the ground, but we can measure those under microgravity environments, and they've yielded some really advanced materials as a result. A lot of this, in fact virtually all of it, has meant turning astronauts into scientists and to a degree engineers. Now, of course, some of them already were scientists. Is this work something that the astronauts generally really take to? Oh, the astronauts, as you say, many of them are already either medical doctors or scientists in their own specialties. And they really enjoy doing the research on the

space station. They look forward to being able to try to advance knowledge. They're naturally inquisitive people, and because of their science and technology backgrounds, they're very effective in probing into the root causes of different phenomena that we see on orbit that you can't find on the ground. How much of this research, and we can talk specifically about the Biomed ISS project if you like, how much of it actually takes place on the ground? There must be a good deal of preparation before something is ready to take up into low-Earth orbit. Oh, that's absolutely true. I mean, it's very expensive to conduct research in low-Earth orbit,

so you have to be certain that you've done all the ground preparation adequately, set up your controls for your experiments, and maximize the opportunity that you get on orbit. You've been at this for a long time. You've been working in one way or another affiliated with the International Space Station effort for some years, as I look back over your history on the NASA website. It's quite a bit up there, by the way. It seems like something that you and many other people are quite dedicated to. Well, I first became involved in the program back in 1984 during what was called Phase A. That was when we received the presidential direction to go off and build the space station. And my interest

from the very beginning was not so much in the design and operation of the vehicle as it was in how the vehicle was going to be used once it was completed. And my role tended to be during those early years, making sure that the space station was designed in such a way that it could accommodate a wide range of research and technology. So I'm very proud to be able to look back over the history and see that the performance requirements that we set literally 17 years ago at the Critical Design Review have all been met today. What's the outlook for the future? I mean, that was, I guess, the major topic at this meeting of the Multilateral Coordination Board.

I mean, that was, I guess, the major topic at this meeting of the Multilateral Coordination Board. A couple of your international partners seem to be quite committed to continuing work on the International Space Station for many more years. Oh, there's no question about it. We have already seen formal approvals at the government level in Russia and in Japan. And of course, in the United States, President Obama's proposal for fiscal year 11 extends the space station to 2020. And we see virtually unanimous support in the Congress to go ahead and do that as well. We're working with our European partners, and we're confident that both Europe and Canada, as they move through their various government approval processes, by the end of the year we'll end up all prepared to proceed on to 2020. Well, I am very much looking forward to covering the last flight of Discovery,

its destination, of course, the International Space Station. And I wonder if, not with that mission, but the one following, perhaps the last shuttle mission ever, if there's going to be something of a celebration on completion of the ISS. Oh, we celebrate after every single flight. These are tremendously challenging operations. If you've ever had the opportunity to watch some of the real-time operations, If you've ever had the opportunity to watch some of the real-time operations, you'll see that these people are highly trained and highly effective at accomplishing their jobs on orbit,

whether it's outside conducting repair work or inside conducting research and development. And we celebrate it all. And it is amazing to see what humans are able to accomplish in space that we still can't expect from our robots. It is incredible. This is an absolutely new field of endeavor. Although we've been going to space for many decades, we're finally turning the corner now on having a continuously operating laboratory in one of the most unique environments conceivable. Mark, again, thank you so much for joining us on Planetary Radio, and best of luck with all of this work, stretching out hopefully for many years on the ISS.

Well, thank you, Matt. Stay in touch. The best is yet to come. We look forward to it. Mark Uran is the Assistant Associate Administrator for International Space Station at NASA HQ in Washington, and he has been with NASA and contributing to the International Space Station effort for many years. We'll be back with Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he's going to tell us about the night sky. We're going to get to a cool trivia question and a very cool way to hear this random space fact not the fact the intro to it

welcome welcome to you as well please do tell us about the night sky okay we've got venus still bright in the east i'm sorry in the west just after sunset but really setting pretty darn early it's just still so darn bright you can see it in the theilight. We've also got Jupiter over in the east in the early evening and high overhead by the middle of the night. Uranus is still about a degree away from Jupiter, so if you pull out some binoculars, look for that little blue dot. It quite likely is Uranus. Neptune also up in the early evening.

Probably want to get a finder chart for that. That's a little tougher. And in the pre-dawn, Mercury actually making an apparition, the bright object low in the east. I was going to take my telescope out last night to look at Jupiter. I stayed on the computer, so it's the curse of the virtual world over the real one. But tonight, for sure, because it's warm and clear in Southern California, and I'm going to catch it. Hey, try to find Uranus while you're at it. You don't happen to know which direction it's one degree away, do you?

To turn left at Jupiter. Okay, and straight on toward morning. Exactly. No, it probably is, but considering different telescopes inverting different parts of the world, it's probably best. You can find a finder chart online pretty easily. I'm just lazy. Okay, go ahead. Look to the left, see if it's there.

Convince yourself one of the stars is blue and be happy. I didn't say that. All right, we go on to this week in space history. In 1880, the first Orion nebula photo taken. Many since then. the first Orion nebula photo taken many since then also had an auspicious occasion for the world in very negative ways and later positive the first v2

rocket launched in 1942 yeah who cares where they come down that's not my and the British cared an awful lot later on that technology did work out for leading into better and more noble causes. 1958, NASA founded, October 1st, 1958. Normally, I would chant random space fact in some completely entertaining ways. But we have, of course, invited our listeners to provide us with the random space fact chant.

And we had one very interesting and clever entry tell us Matt tell us about it Ted Judah when I heard this my jaw dropped and then when I picked it up it really is a wow and Ted you have definitely earned yourself a planetary radio t-shirt at minimum folks

you got to check this out. Here it is. And I had to call Ted to say, now, was that you doing a Carl impression? No, he actually found Carl saying those words and strung them together with that music from Cosmos. With apologies to Cosmos Studios. I'm sure they'd forgive us. Annie's a good friend. That's just amazing. Thank you so much, Ted. And you folks, you have your opportunity as well.

You don't have to top Ted. Record your dog, you know, mouthing random space fact if you're lucky enough to have one of those canines. I'm home. I'm home. I'm home. Down astro. But you still have to give us a fact. Really? All right.

Equinoxes. We have just passed the autumnal equinox, which, first of all, I just enjoy saying. But see, the word equinox from Latin, I always thought it was like equine plus ox. So, of course, it meant horse oxygen, which I found odd. Turns out it doesn't. Turns out, as most people would have guessed, it's more like equal night. So it's the day of the year where we have roughly equal day, time, and night time, wherever you are, on the two equinoxes. But let me give you a little bit more of a piece.

This one, interesting, it's actually related to equinoxes and solstices. And I would not have guessed this. It's 94 days from the June solstice to the September equinox, but only 89 days from the December solstice to the March equinox. The season's not of equal length because of the variable speed of the Earth. So I guess just the fact that we're somewhat elliptical actually has that non-trivial effect. I'll be darned. Thank you, Mr. Newton and Mr. Kepler. It really seems to be the case. Way to go, guys.

All right. We got to rush on through the contest. To the trivia contest, we asked you, what's the densest moon in the solar system? How'd we do, Matt? Lots of great entries. Our winning one came from Lee Saylor. Lee Saylor. And he's in Dorchester, New Brunswick.

I'm pretty sure that's what the NB stands for. Lee said, as did many, many other people, Io, that innermost, sadly mistreated moon of Jupiter. It just barely, as we heard from many other people, beat out our own moon in density. Ian Jackson mentioned that must be because of all the cheese content in ours. Yeah, it's true, because the moon is international. They have to have part of it be Swiss cheese. That's what screws it up.

I see. Georgi Petrov said that it's actually very close to the density of a diamond, which I found quite interesting for some reason. Susan Noe said that not only is the densest moon in our solar system, Io, but he's also the smelliest and is rarely invited to parties. Kind of looks that way, doesn't he? It's true, but when it gets older, the acne will improve. Don't worry. We're sending Lee a Planetary Radio t-shirt, and here's how you can earn one. I know we got a few complaints that was too easy, but this one's kind of easy, too. But it's important.

The Epoxy mission is the reboot of the Deep Impact mission. It's going to encounter a comet in the next couple months. What comet will it encounter, and what is the date of closest approach? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. Really, those of you who've been intimidated by questions, thinking they're too hard, you have no excuse this time. You can find this easy. And you have until the 4th.

That would be October 4, 2010, to get us your answer. Hey, Guy, we're done. All right, everybody go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about orange. Thank you, and good night. Well, I'm never going to find anything to rhyme with that, so I'll just say, aren't you glad that you've joined Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up.

Join us next week for a conversation with Gregory and James Benford about their Benford beacons and a new way to listen for E.T.'s greetings. 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.