Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - New Mexico Cave Adventure With Penny Boston and the First International Planetary Caves Workshop

Episode Date: November 21, 2011

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The last of my great New Mexico adventures begins this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier, and this week far below the surface of our own planet. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. There was just too much of my visit to Carlsbad Caverns National Park and the International Planetary Caves Workshop to fit into one show, but we'll get an exciting start this week. First, though, we'll make our usual online visit to Emily Lakdawalla for an update on the Planetary Society blog.

Emily, big week last week in the blog for the Galilean satellites, particularly Europa. Tell us about, well, you didn't see it, but you read about this big press conference last week. There was a press conference last week that was talking about some rather exciting news on Europa about some water that was much closer to the surface than most scientists had thought. And, of course, water on Europa always makes people excited about the possibility of maybe there being life there underneath the ice. So it's always big news when we talk about water on Europa. Apparently, this may help to put to rest an old argument about thin ice versus thick ice. That's right. There's this seemingly intractable argument between two camps of Europa scientists.

I know that's not how science is supposed to work, but that's how it was in this case. There are people who looked at these things called chaos terrains on Europa that really look like icebergs floating in a frozen ocean. And they say, hey, look, the water must have melted all the way through to the surface on Europa in the past. The problem is that the physics with that just does not work. Europa is so very cold that ice there, it's like rock is on Earth. Just like you don't expect rock to suddenly melt all the way through to the Earth's surface, similarly, you can't really have ice melt all the way through to Europa's surface. So the water actually has to be much lower below the surface, 10 or 20 kilometers deep.

Well, this particular study figured out a mechanism by which you can have lakes near the surface, these little perched lenses of liquid water inside the much thicker ice shell. So in a way, you have both water close to the surface and most of the water is much deeper below the surface. So it's a very neat paper. I actually watched the press conference, and I'm hoping we can get some of these scientists behind this work on the air on the radio show soon. To me, more than anything, this means more than ever, we really have to go to Europa. And one thing that they didn't talk about in the press conference, I understand, was a particular spot of chaos on Europa where they cite evidence that there may actually be liquid water close to the surface today, approaching the surface today at a place called Theramacula on Europa. So if we're going to go to Europa to look for water from deep inside it, then that's the place we've got to go.

Wow. Okay, very briefly, this book review by a guy who, I guess, has been studying Europa and its sisters out there for a long time. Right, it's Paul Schenck, and if you haven't gotten him on the show before, you should. He's been studying all of the icy moons of the outer solar system since we've been sending spacecraft to study icy moons of the outer solar system. And he is the man for topography all over these places. And you can learn an awful lot about geology just by studying the shape of its landscape. And he understands what every single image that we have ever taken of any of these icy moons have to tell us about its geology. And that's what he's written his book about.

And the book is Atlas of the Galilean Satellites. It's not cheap, but what I love about this is that in the comments on the blog entry, Paul Schenck himself wrote to assure some reader that, don't worry, it'll be cheaper than the $160 or so, $165 it's starting at. Emily, as always, thanks very much. Thank you, Matt. Emily Lackawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. I knew I was in the right place when I saw the giant green screen and the inflated planet models hanging from the studio ceiling. There was Bill Nye the Planetary Guy making a new series of planetary science videos

that you'll soon be able to see online. During a break, I asked Bill about these segments that are based on the special kids section he has created for the Planetary Society's Planetary Report magazine. So, Bill, let me tell you, it's a pretty big thrill to get to see the science guy do his thing on a movie set. Yes, we put the band back together. So these are the videos that we're creating for Toshiba and Exploravision, sponsored by the National Science Teachers Association, in partnership now with the Planetary Society. So these will be on Toshiba USA's Facebook page. I'll have a link

on my page. The Planetary Society will have them on our page, and they will appear in Times Square. So what we're doing is taking the kids' sections, the demonstrations in the kids' sections, and producing them on video for the first few. Now we want people to send in your question. Hey, everybody, send us your question, if you're a kid especially, and we will reproduce it in hilarious science comedy fashion. Now, how can people send in that question? If you go to the planetary.org website, you will find a link, a landing page, a way to go.

Excellent. This is so much work. You've got a full crew. You just did probably 50, 60 takes of something there, trying to get a movement with a thermometer just right. Yeah, when you get into this thing, you get into these motions. I've done it for many years, but you get into things where you're trying to hit marks within less than two millimeters. And so it's very difficult. Then you got the camera, the focus pulling or moving at the same time and we're on a so-called jib arm where it looks like you're flying. And it just gives the thing motion. And it's exciting. And I got to to say it's fun. And the thing that I really like about it, it's still handmade. Everybody's here.

Everybody's got one task to do this one thing, and we move the lights, and we're trying to tell a story. We're trying to get people, especially young people, excited about planetary science so that we will, dare I say it, change the world. So how soon might this be visible to everybody out there in Internet land? My understanding is Wednesday, 7 December, which is a date that will live in infamy. Yeah, but that's fading a little bit, and my dad was involved in that, but it's going to be the middle of that week of the first week of December,

the first week when you're really settled in after Thanksgiving. I better let you get over to lunch with the crew. Thanks, Bill. Thank you, Matt. Bill Nye is the science and planetary guy, and he's the executive director of the Planetary Society, and right now he is on the set somewhere in the depths of downtown L.A. preparing these great new video segments. I'll be right back with our special visit to Carlsbad Caverns with some of the world's greatest cave experts.

Sometimes you just get lucky. I was already planning a trip to Carlsbad Caverns, my first in 30 years, when I learned about the first International Planetary Caves Workshop. It was convened by a couple of past guests of this program, Timothy Titus of the U.S. Geological Survey and Penny Boston of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. We're gathering geologists, astronomers, biologists, and an engineer or two, all of them fascinated by caves on our own home world and by what we may find when we explore them on other worlds.

Because they are out there, you know. We've already found them on the moon and, most intriguingly, on Mars. Our starting point was the National Cave and Karst Research Institute in Carlsbad, New Mexico. The Institute's beautiful new building hosted the many talks presented by attendees, but it's also where we got on the bus early on the morning of October 26, heading for the National Park Service Visitor Center and the tremendous natural entrance to Carlsbad Cavern. I always wear my helmet because you never know when a giant house-sized block is going to come off the ceiling. It's magic. I'll be safe.

That's Penny Boston. She was our guide in the main cavern, the one that has been visited by more than 43 million people. Trust me on this. You need to go at least once in your life, and you will not be sorry. Penny has been there countless times, and she has been in far more exotic, far less hospitable caves, yet she never tires of visiting this one. I talked with her as we descended the steep paved path down to the big room, 750 feet below the surface. As we walked,

she pointed out just a few of the signs of life in this alien landscape. Sometimes you see moon milk in big thick deposits, like in Alaska, we're working on a cave there that's a meter thick of this fluffy white stuff. Moon milk? Yeah, moon milk. It was named, I believe, in Germany on the theory that somehow the moon was shining into caves and somehow creating this stuff. That's the folk tale. But what it really is is a breakdown product of the carbonate bedrock, largely assisted by microorganisms. So the microorganisms are busy growing on the rock surface, and they are producing organic acids as a byproduct of their metabolism,

and this is then helping to dissolve that material. So there's life right in front of us. There's life right in front of us. Wave hi. Hello. Hello, guys. It's amazing that you can support so much mass above you with cavities this large in one gravitational field, right, 1G. And it makes me think about what would happen with these similar sorts of circumstances when you were on a planetary body that had a much lower G.

You know, we were talking on and off in various talks and in discussions yesterday about this whole issue of scale and the scaling factors of different structures. And it's not what you might think, that you have a bigger planet, you have bigger structures, or something like that. It's much more complicated. So these looking, acrostic-looking features on Titan, I was thinking, well, I almost don't think it matters what size they are.

That really, to me, the crux of the matter is, what is the morphology? And that the morphology is a good indicator that similar processes are at work in spite of the different gravitational conditions and the different temperature regime and even the different chemistries I think in my mind they seem to be more secondary so as I look at caves on earth I'm always thinking about the scaling factor

and how things would be different on different bodies. And places like this truly amaze me because this is one heck of a lot of rock above us. And yet we can maintain cavities that are this stupendous, you know. This is a gigantic cathedral size and it's just as beautiful as any cathedral, perhaps more than most cathedrals I've ever seen. After a lazy elevator ride to the surface we got back on the bus and set out across the New Mexico desert. As we bumped along I talked with one of the scientists

attending the workshop. Hi, I'm Nancy Chaunovere and I'm an associate professor of astronomy at New Mexico State University. So astronomy you're generally looking up, not going down. What brought you here? Well, my interests are in planetary science, and I'm working on a project where we are developing some instrumentation for astrobiology purposes. So we're interested in looking at samples on the ground on another body.

So that's my interest in coming to this CAVES workshop to learn more about that. Have you done anything like this before? I've been working in this instrument development area for some time, but this is the first application where it's been sort of looking at stuff on the ground. So this is my first time. And a workshop like this with people from so many disciplines, I don't know how many astronomers are here. Have you run into some others? There's a few, yeah, not a huge number. But geologists, biologists, I mean, this is part of the wonder, I think, of astrobiology

because everybody gets to jump in. Yeah, and for me, that's been the most rewarding part of this workshop has been the opportunity to learn more about those other disciplines and to hear what sort of cutting-edge science is being done in those areas and sort of how they all relate to the field of astrobiology, what we can each bring to the table. After nearly an hour, we reached a small, secluded parking lot at the foot of a steep trail.

At the top of that trail, on what was once an ocean reef millions of years ago, we found an iron gate protecting Slaughter Canyon Cave. Once mined for its incredibly ancient bat guano, this formation is now a protected part of the national park and can only be visited with an experienced park service guide. Try to block your fall. If there is a beautiful formation on one side and something that's not so pretty on the other,

which are you going to grab for? Guano. Guano. Guano happens. So yeah, try to brace your fall. It's generally not if you're going to fall in this cave, it's generally when you're going to fall. And you'll probably come out a couple of times that it's easier just to get down on your butt and slide down some of these areas that have steep slopes

or big steps. Down the precarious steps we went, within a minute or two we were in the dark zone, where the only light came from our headlamps and flashlights. Penny Boston stopped here and there, often to point out some feature that represented one or another form of tenacious microbial cave life, including a fluffy black mass. And that black fluff is manganese oxide stars that are being created

in association with manganese oxide oxidizing bacteria. So they're a better marker than the iron organisms are. We isolate organisms that can do all of those metals. They can also do chromium. The ones that can do manganese often can manipulate chromium, uranium, a lot of the rare earth elements. They have this ability to oxidize metals broadly across the periodic table. More underground wonders when we return, along with speculation about cave life elsewhere in our solar system and beyond. This is Planetary Radio. 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, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members

can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, continuing our coverage of the first international Planetary Caves workshop. Next week we'll present great conversations with some of the scientists who attended,

but this week it's all about caving. We're still following cave and planetary scientist Penny Boston as we descend ever deeper into Slaughter Canyon Cave near Carlsbad, New Mexico. It was the most adventurous part of the workshop. Our coverage will continue next week, but you can watch a slideshow right now at planetary.org slash radio. Penny reminded us several times of the great diversity of caves and cave life. So this cave, even though it's not all that far from Carlsbad, it's a world away in terms of its history, I think. Would you expect to find different biology in here?

Oh, yes. In fact, we've actually done some of the biology, and it's quite different. We're finding the manganese organisms, which you also find particularly in Lechuguilla Cave. We find them in Carlsbad, but not with the same enthusiasm. You know, there's not as many strains, and they're not as abundant. If I want to try to grow them on manganese media, live culture in the lab, it's a lot harder so they really are a much lower proportion of the bio flora in in Carlsbad than they are in Lechuguilla but in here they dominate they dominate the scene and they're very very cute they're actually pretty fuzzy you know most bacteria pretty boring, right? There are a limited number of

shapes, but one of the things that has struck us in the cave work is that there's a lot more complex morphology just of the cells themselves. So we have little things that look like chrysanthemums, and we have some that we call giant death stars. They're all of two microns across, which is pretty big for a bacterium. That's a giant? Yeah, that's a giant. You know, the diameter of the average hair is about 100 microns, to give people a scale for that.

So they're big, and then they're always accompanied by these weird hairy guys that have sort of globular hair-like structures coming off them. And then there's an entire group that we're not sure what they're doing, and I have not succeeded in growing them in culture yet, but they're nanobacterial size, so that means ultra-small. And they're about 100 nanometers in diameter, which is like a tenth of a micron across. But they're truly cells. They're actually alive.

And, you know, so what their ecological role is, I don't know. But, you know, there's a big controversy over whether there actually are nanobacteria. And it sort of amuses us because a great number of the species that we find are just nanobacteria in nature. How big were those little structures found in the famous Mars meteorite? I guess they were like 60 nanometers or something like that. I've forgotten the exact size, but they were pretty small.

So our bugs are very small, but they're getting down into the range where maybe there's some overlap. I also think that there is an issue of shrinkage upon preservation. So cells don't always retain their original size and shape when they're preserved. So, I mean, the jury is certainly out on the Mars meteorite stuff because it's been altered so many times. It's had a hard life, so to speak.

But I, you know, I don't know whether those are microbial remnants but I wouldn't rule it out just on the basis of size I think there's a lot we don't know about what actually is in our own biosphere and we're discovering them all the time so this is cryptic microbiology this is not gooey slime that grows on your jello in the refrigerator when your food spoils you know it, you see it.

And the organisms themselves are so highly involved with the mineralogy of the system that they look like mineral deposits. And in fact, a lot of the mass is mineral deposit, but with the bugs mixed in. And of course, we're studying Earth because that's where we live. But if we find these structures on other planetary bodies that will also help us to interpret them once we learn how to get into those or send robotic devices into them. For my own particular research interest of course, anything that appears as a biosignature, That is the signature that life leaves when it has lived in a place.

In this case, you're seeing both ends of that spectrum. So a lot of this manganese that's deposited in here is probably no longer biologically active. So we have a fossil representation of a biosignature that's a biomineral composite. And we have active ones. So all these beautiful purple guys that I didn't remember were in here that Dale pointed out are living microorganisms producing patterns and growth patterns on the walls. And so here we can see both ends of the time spectrum. So what we're trying to do, along with other people working on geomicrobiology that are concerned about biosignatures, is try to map out what are the formations that we see, what are the textures that you see,

even if something is long dead that might indicate that it was the former product of biology. Obviously, any cave on another body that we suspect might have some kind of life form in it is a very high priority, but the landscape of other planets themselves have intrinsic value. And so even as we're trying to use some of those for certain purposes, certainly we are not, I would think, going to be able to just willy-nilly go and use caves for all sorts of purposes without the same kind of considered decisions that we make here, or hopefully make here, or at least sometimes manage to pull off here. And I just love being underground. I mean, it's a nonstop eye candy experience. It's,

you know, an aesthetic experience as well as a scientific experience, and I never get tired of it, and the privilege of being able to come in to places like this. Penny Boston in Slaughter Canyon Cave, New Mexico. We thank the National Park Service for its hospitality and for maintaining the balance between protecting these magnificent resources and opening them for all to see. More coverage of the first International Planetary Caves workshop next week, but Bruce Betts is just moments away.

It's a cool day in Pasadena. Pasadena is always cool, of course, but it's very nice to be here in the warm confines of Bruce Bett's office. He's the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and thank you for keeping it cozy. You're welcome. Did you want me to stoke the fire? Yeah, would you please? Put another piece of coal on there, Cratchit. Really? May I? Thank you, sir. What's up? Well well we've got Venus low low low swinging low on the horizon in the West early in the evening shortly after twilight you'll have to be looking for it because it is low down and you can actually check out the crescent moon near it on November 26th. Just don't look inside the crescent, right there, Bing?

Oh, that's right. Ba-ba-ba-boom. Because it's the moon inside the crescent. Ba-ba-ba-boom. Anyway, we also have Jupiter, also super bright, not quite as super bright as Venus, over on the other side of the sky in the east in the early evening. And in the middle of the night, we've got Mars coming up looking reddish over in the east. And in the pre-dawn, low on the eastern horizon, you can see

Saturn. And Saturn is just a few degrees from Virgo's brightest star, Spica. Saturn's the more yellowish ones. And if you squint, you can pretend it's the one with rings. Because it is. Also, I like to point out occasionally for those willing to whip out some binoculars or a telescope, both Uranus and Neptune are well placed in the early evening sky. Yeah, you just have to know where to look, right? Exactly. Turn left at Greenland. Straight on

toward morning. Yes, exactly. On to this week in space history. Perhaps appropriately, it was 40 years ago that the Soviets first successfully slammed an object into Mars. It was the first ever artificial object to hit Mars. That was Mars 2, and that happened 40 years ago. What a shame that, at least as we speak, we're still not looking for Phobos-Gronk. Not to smack into any planets at all, but at least to come close there toward Phobos. There is still hope that it will nuzzle Phobos. Although hope is dwindling, we

keep it in our hearts. That's really touching. It's a little painful, too. Okay, we move on to Random Space Fact. What's that? I didn't catch that. That was actually good. Random Space Fact. I don't think I've ever heard it in a whisper before.

Exhilarating, isn't it? It makes you want to pay attention. Ooh, what's he whispering? But I will avoid whispering the rest of it. Alpha Centauri has a good publicist. People have often heard of it. Closest star system. Actually made up of a binary star system

and then kind of the rebel third smaller object Proxima Centauri, which is technically the closest to Earth. But let's talk about the binary system because it's kind of cool. Alpha Centauri A and B are similar to the Sun, one a little bit bigger and brighter and one a little dimmer and not as bright. But I find it kind of interesting. They orbit each other in an elliptical kind of dance around a central point. And they do that over a roughly 80-year period.

And the distance between them varies between about the distance between the sun and Pluto and the sun and Saturn. That's very interesting, actually. Our nearest neighbors, we should get to know them. We will. We will get to know them, Matt. I've sent them an invitation for the holidays. I'm putting together a basket i'm putting together sunglasses star glasses all right we move on to the trivia contest

i asked you what was the last russian or soviet interplanetary mission and to qualify it had to make it beyond the earth moon system something that Phobos Grunt is having trouble doing right now, but we still have hope in our hearts. How'd we do, Matt? Very important distinction, since we had a number of people go back to the last fully successful Soviet or Russian mission. That was not the correct answer. You had to catch this right. Most people figured it out.

Most people are on to you, your little conniving tricks. In fact, Christopher Farrow of Melbourne, Florida, came up with this, Phobos 2 in 1989, but he points out only a partial success. Yes, I would actually go with Phobos 1 and 2, but we will accept that answer. Phobos 1 failed after it left the Earth-Moon system. On the way to Mars, Phobos 2 made it to Mars and went into orbit for two months, collecting some data about Mars and Phobos before it failed prior to its hope for landing on the moon, Phobos. And we are all four, the Russiansians now getting back on track out there at the red planet so now we're pulling for them again christopher we're going to send you a planetary

radio t-shirt all right we move on to the next trivia question uh we've been talking a lot about things like our experiment and uh also uh u.s astronauts launching on Russian rockets. So my question to turn it around, who was the first Soviet or Russian to launch to space on a U.S. launch vehicle? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. That's fascinating. I didn't know that there were any. Well, tune in a couple of weeks from now.

We'll have the answer for you. But you'll need to get us your answer by the 28th. That's November 28th at 2 p.m. Pacific time. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about umlauts. Thank you, and good night. Mmm, latte. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up.

Is that the coffee drink with the two dots over it? Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, and by the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.