Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - New Mexico Journey: Dale Frail of the Very Large Array Radio Telescope

Episode Date: November 7, 2011

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A pilgrimage to the New Mexico desert and the very large array, 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. You may have heard me mention that I was traveling in New Mexico a few weeks ago. Today, we present the first of three great stories I covered there as we visit with Dale Frail, director of the great radio telescope known as the Very Large Array. First, though, we'll check in with Emily Lakdawalla for the best of the Planetary Society blog. Emily, we've got other things to talk about, but first, you've got a couple of book reviews. And both of these books are beautiful. One of them, of course, we just

featured on the show not too many weeks ago. That's right. That one's The Beauty of Space, written by actually quite a number of members of the International Association of Astronomical Artists, also known as the IAAA. And then one member of that organization, Michael Carroll, wrote a really wonderful book about the meteorology of all the worlds with atmospheres in our solar system. And I have to say about this book, I've tried to read about planetary weather before, and it generally puts me right to sleep. But Michael Carroll's book, Drifting on Alien Winds, was really great. So I highly recommend it. And, of course, the illustrations are lovely because he's an artist.

And, oh, my God, that image that you have in the blog from inside Saturn's atmosphere. I want to see that as part of a Jim Cameron movie. It's incredibly beautiful. We'll go right on. And the reason I want to talk about this is that it's this fascinating juxtaposition, two consecutive blog entries, one about Phobos sample return, also known as Phobos grunt or grunt, and MSL, Mars Science Laboratory. It's no coincidence, of course, that these two spacecraft are getting ready to launch at the same time

because, after all, Mars launch windows only open up once every two years or so. And both of these missions missed their launch window the last time around, so they've been waiting for 26 months to get another chance. Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover, has just been stacked on top of its rocket. I read this morning that Phobos-Grundt, along with its Chinese mini-satellite payload Yinghuo-1, are also now on top of their rocket. And they're, I think, standing ready on the launch pad now, getting ready for what will be a November 9th launch in Moscow time, but it's November 8 to us. So some of you who are listening to this now, the spacecraft, who knows, it may already be in space.

Yes, let's hope so. Emily has assembled lots of other great documentation that you won't find anywhere else in the blog at planetary.org. Yep, and I'll talk with you next week, hopefully about a successful Russian launch. Yes, yes, devoutly to be wished. She is Emily Lakdawalla, the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society, also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine with some new things to read there. That's right. In fact, in both of those jobs, I have contributed articles on the Curiosity rover,

both Sky and Tel and the Planetary Report. From Emily to our other regular commentator, Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy. Bill, as usual, you've been a busy guy, a second trip to New Orleans. That's right. I spoke with the teachers of gifted children, and I got them excited about planetary science. As we say, there's nothing more engaging than space. Every kid is fascinated. I mean, everybody is fascinated by space, so I got the teachers excited about it. I think we're going to get an opportunity to use our new kids section, our new kids and educational materials with the teachers that face pretty sharp kids five days a week.

It's very exciting. Speaking of people getting excited about planetary science, you and I had personal experience of congressional staffers getting excited in that trip we made a few weeks ago, and it just happened again. That's right. We took advantage. We sent Scott Hubbard, Dr. Hubbard, Dr. Heidi Hamel, Dr. Jim Bell to the Rayburn building there in Washington, D.C., and they, once again, along with Robert Zubrin. Yes, the mad Martian. Yes. They gave the staffers and I think a few members of Congress directly an earful about the importance of planetary science and the importance, really, if you're in the United States, the importance of NASA supporting it. Because it brings out the best in us and it's a very good value for taxpayers and voters.

It's not that expensive a business compared to the technical and scientific return you get. And speaking of Mars, Matt, this is when Phobos Life leaves this week. Came up in conversation with Emily. We'll probably talk a bit more about it with Bruce because he's a big part of that project on behalf of the Planetary Society. But you as the executive director must be pretty proud of this. Oh, yeah, this thing's taken years. And so this is just a cool little idea. What happens if you send living things, albeit freeze-dried microscopic living things sealed in polyimide plastic and titanium? What if you send those near Mars

and back for three years? Do they survive? Do they change? Do they mutate somehow? Well, we'll find out. And I talked this over with the planetary protection people at NASA, and they at first were dismissive. But after a while, they realized it's a pretty good idea. They just hadn't thought of it. So it starts on Tuesday or Wednesday of this week. Very cool. Very exciting, too. So we keep chipping away at these things, Matt, and we chip away at the politics here in the United States,

and we'll see if we can't get everybody in the world engaged in planetary science. For what, Matt? Why? For the betterment of humankind. Is that so wrong? I've got to fly, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. He's Bill Nye the Planetary guy, the planetary and science guy, and he's the executive director of the Planetary Society. Back in a minute to talk about the Very Large Array.

You can help give it a new name. So that sound you hear in the background is the security guard at the VLA turning around. He was just making sure that I actually had business out here. I got here just after dark. I mean, there's still a little bit of light up in the sky. Stretching out in front of me, like these pale white ghosts, are the individual antennas of the VLA. It's quite a sight. I wish I'd been here half hour ago when I could see them better, but in a way this is even more romantic. It is a beautiful place to do astronomy.

No, I couldn't resist that long drive into the desert where I could finally see, barely, the very large array for myself. And imagine I was Jodie Foster in the movie Contact, listening to our universe. An hour or so to the east is the Socorro, New Mexico headquarters of this great radio telescope. That's where I sat down with its director, Dale Frail. You'll hear Dale mention not only the VLA, but the VLBA, or Very Long Baseline Array, which is the continent-sized version of the Great Radio Telescope. We have links to learn more about both at planetary.org slash radio.

That's where you can also learn more about how you might be able to rename a newly upgraded VLA. How long have you been here? I arrived here in December 1989. And a fairly recent development. You're becoming the director of this facility. Right. I've been in the job for two and a half months. I'm the director of the VLA and the VLBA here in New Mexico.

I've used the VLA especially for the last 20 years or more. I used it to study the death of massive stars, gamma ray bursts, pulsars, soft gamma ray repeaters. Basically, big explosions is what I like to do the best. Did the VLA offer capabilities for the kind of research that you wanted to do, which particularly in the early years just weren't available elsewhere? Well, the VLA has always been the most sensitive radio telescope for the kind of work that I wanted to do. Being here on the staff and being at the telescope made it possible for me to do many of the things that I did that I could not have done if I had not been here. The history of this place, I mean, I already mentioned Jodie Foster, and of course that's a reference to the movie Contact.

And that somewhat fanciful scene of her sitting out on a mesa or something with the big antennas in the background with her headphones on, not exactly the way SETI was conducted, I don't think, was it? No, not at all. The romantic view of the movie, of course, is quite disappointing in real life. Most of us scientists today sit in our office and next to our laptop or our computer and the data comes streaming in. So it's not quite that romantic vision you have of listening to radio waves. When it first started in operation, what set the VLA apart from other radio telescope facilities that, of course, have been around for many years? The big thing that set it apart was its adaptability. It was a very versatile, highly sensitive telescope. By moving the 27 antennas that make up the very large array, you could turn it into an instrument that was capable of seeing very fine detail, or you could zoom it out so that you could see very broad detail.

And so it had that ability to do everything from comets down to the early universe. So you could study very fine details like black holes, or you could study the diffuse gas between galaxies. So it gave you that complete range of topics that you could study. How do you take the signal from so many dishes spread across the desert floor and turn that into one magnificent image? We use the technique of interferometry, and we combine the signals using radio processing techniques of the 27 antennas. We combine and multiply those signals together,

and we Fourier transform that signal and make a final image. And there's a lot of steps in there, but basically we're combining the signals from all 27 antennas. Did it work exactly as expected right from the beginning? I mean, this was something new was being tried here. There was a commissioning phase of the telescope and it lasted several years and the telescope now is currently ongoing an upgrade from those early days and we are experiencing all again fresh again the the joys of commissioning a brand new telescope. What were the kinds of things that the VLA was able to do for our knowledge of of the universe that that simply didn't exist before.

Right. For 20 years, it was probably the most productive. It was the most productive ground-based radio telescope in the world. And it worked on everything from the spin of Mercury to basically identifying the first explosions in the earliest phase of the universe, these gamma ray bursts that I've worked on. So that whole spread from our solar system to the lives of stars to the formation of galaxies to the death of stars, that whole range of topics, it's touched on every aspect of modern astrophysics. There's no part of modern astrophysics that the VLA has not been involved in. You talked about an upgrade. What's been going on with that and is that now complete?

We are one year away from completing the VLA upgrade. What's been going on with that and is that now complete? We are one year away from completing the VLA upgrade. We call it the Expanded Very Large Array. For a fairly modest amount of money, we have been able to increase the capabilities of the large array, the Very Large Array, by about a factor of 10 in sensitivity, in bandwidth, and in some capabilities we've actually gotten factors of 10 to 100 times more improvement. Basically, the way I describe it is that we're ripping out the plumbing and installing modern electronics. So we're keeping the old antennas. The antennas aren't perfectly sound. They're in great shape.

But when the VLA was built, we didn't have fiber optics. We didn't have modern digital electronics. And so we're putting in all these modern digital devices and the fiber optics, and that's where we get most of our improvement. What's the status of the upgrade? It's going very well. We're on time. We're on budget. We have one year left. We have kept the telescope open during the entire decade that we've been renovating the telescope.

In our community, about 700 people a year use the telescope. And on any given day, we can have a group from Australia using the telescope, a group from Princeton, we can have a group from Italy using the telescope, around the world. It's a complete world telescope. Gamma-ray bursts, a particularly frightening topic to me, as my colleague Bruce Betts knows. I saw reference to you as one of the top three people in the world with expertise in this area. I got involved in gamma-ray bursts very early on in the study of their afterglows, so that I was, my colleagues and myself were one of the among the groups that identified the so-called afterglows from gamma-ray bursts. After the explosion, there is a fading remnant in the x-rays and the optical and the radio. And we were the group that identified the fading radio afterglow from these events,

and we were the group that also measured the redshift. So we've been quite involved in the last 15 years or so on gamma ray bursts in a very close way. And when you say you measured the redshift, was there some question up to that point as to what the origin of these were and how far away they were? Yes, they'd been discovered in the early 70s, and they had been a mystery about 25 years in the making. For about 25 years, we did not know how far away they were. We literally did not know whether they were occurring in our solar system or whether they were occurring on the edge of space. By measuring their redshift,

by determining their distance, we're able to break that puzzle. We're able to show that these are related to the death of massive stars early in the age of the universe, around the time when the universe was forming most of its massive stars. So we were able to show that they were a cosmological population. More from Dale Frail, director of the Very Large Array, in a minute. 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. On the first leg of my recent New Mexico trip, I stopped in Socorro for a visit with Dale Frail. He's the longtime scientist at the Very Large Array, who now directs that historic and very active radio telescope, along with the continent-spanning Very Large Baseline Array, or VLBA. I was talking with Dale before the break about those greatest of all explosions of energy, GRBs. Quick sidelight question.

How silly am I to be worried about a direct hit from a gamma-ray burst on our whereabouts? It's fairly unlikely. I think you would be hit by 100 supernovae before you'd be hit by one gamma-ray burst. I'm not as reassured as I would like to be, but I'll settle for that. We were talking before we started recording about some of the other work that you've done,

including discovery of extrasolar planets. In fact, you were responsible for, or part of a team that was responsible for, was it really the very first one? 1992, Alex Volshon and I were the first team that found a planetary system orbiting around a pulsar. That's been confirmed, and we have a multiple planetary system. And the work that I did was done here at the VLA, and Alex Volshan did his work at the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico. Has the VLA been a part of other discoveries of extrasolar planets?

I don't usually hear about radio astronomy having a part in that. Radio astronomy has two roles. I would say the EVLA, which is this expanded very large array that we're working on right now, one of the key science things the very large array can do is now study protoplanetary disks. So the VLA is sensitive to that phase in the evolution of planets and the disks from planets are formed when the material is about the size of little rocks.

So it's that pre-planetary formation stage that is captured by the VLA. And we have as a key science project at the Very Large Array right now a project to study protoplanetary disks. The second area where I think the VLA can play a significant role is in the detection of Jovian planets. Jupiter is a known radio source at low frequencies, and we are building here a low frequency system that will be capable of detecting Jupiter-like planets around normal stars. That's amazing. I mean, what kind of sensitivity are we talking about? I know Jupiter is a very strong radio source, but we're talking about sources that are pretty far away. Right. We can, with the VLA sensitivity, the upgrade that we're

planning, we can reach out quite far in the nearby planetary environment and look for these super Jupiters, look for these radio flares from these Jupiter-like planets. And we'll be able to monitor a comparable region of space that the optical facilities can look at now for these flares. We both have jumped some time zones apparently. You just came back from Chile. What was going on there? I went out to see one of our other sister telescopes that we're building in the southern hemisphere. It's called ALMA. And I went up to the high-sided ALMA, which was at about 15,000 feet, and saw the telescopes that they're building up there on the mountaintop.

That's become quite a center for astronomy, but this move into radio astronomy, that's a new one to me. Right. The ALMA telescope is being developed by NRAO and its partners, and it is opening up a new window in the radio universe. The VLA observes the centimeter range of the spectrum. What ALMA will be able to do is open up the millimeter and submillimeter part of the universe. The VLA observes the centimeter range of the spectrum. What ALMA will be able to do is open up the millimeter and submillimeter part of the spectrum. And ALMA and EVLA are being built as very complementary facilities. The science is complementary, and together they

will make a very, very powerful pair of telescopes. So just as optical telescopes might specialize in different parts of the spectrum. That's really what you're talking about. Right. It's the difference between optical and, say, infrared. It's that sort of difference. And technically, the telescopes are very different. But scientifically, they have a lot of complementary aspects to offer. The frequency range that we observe with the VLA and ALMA overlaps slightly, and the part of the sky that they can observe also overlap.

ALMA and EVLA science needs actually overlap quite a lot, and there are science that ALMA can do that naturally fold back into the EVLA and vice versa. We're just about out of time. I want to give you a chance, though, to talk about a way for listeners to this program, other people to get involved, and that is you're looking for a new name for this new enhanced VLA. Yes, we are. We have had the name the Very Large Array for three decades. We want to convey the idea to the community and the public at large that the Very Large Array is a brand new telescope now. It is a new instrument that will

give us a new insight in the universe and allow us to use this telescope for another 10, 20, 30 years. And we've invited the public to get involved in giving us a name that matches the new science capabilities of this telescope. How can people get in on this? Should they just go to their website? this telescope. How can people get in on this? Should they just go to the website? NRAO has a website called namethearray.org, and you can go to that website and make your suggestion. And do it soon, because I think the deadline is coming up. What's that? December 1? We're looking over at Dave Finley here, who's on your staff and helped to set all this up today. Just one other question, because it is not just a place of discovery, but it seems to be to be a very special place that the location itself has a certain romance

to it. I mean, you ever do you ever feel that? I do. I need to go out there every once in a while to shake the dust off my time that I spend on a computer and the time that I spend in meetings, I find going out there reminds me of why I'm a scientist and why it's important to study the stars. And I'm particularly intrigued by the fact that whenever I go out there, I meet people who are super excited about the VLA and the science that we do. And the public at large is generally very supportive and excited about being at the VLA site. What a great way to close. Dale, thank you so much for this. I really appreciate it.

And good luck with that commissioning process and hopefully many, many more discoveries to be made by whatever the new name will be for the Very Large Array. Thank you. We've been talking with the director of operations for the NRAO in New Mexico. He is the director of the Very Large Array and the VLBA, which stands for? The Very Long Baseline Array. That's the continental-sized array that's, say, a twin of the VLA, but on continental-sized baselines.

Well, several people have asked me to talk about the transition that I've made, where I'm now full-time at the Planetary Society, left my university job. One of the best things about this, of course, is that I should be able to record with Bruce Betts in person on a regular basis. And so here I am sitting in your office. Welcome back to What's Up. Thank you and welcome to the office on a full-time basis, Matt. What's up? Oh, all of our shining faces with you here in the office, Matt. All right, but in addition, we've got Jupiter as the super bright star-like object over in the east. After sunset, you can see it near the moon on the 8th and the 9th and still same part of the sky on the 10th. Also, this week, November 8th, 2005, YU55 is an asteroid that will be coming closer to Earth than the moon. A 400-meter asteroid. If such a thing hit Earth, it would cause quite the regional disaster.

But no chance of that. Also, no chance of you seeing it with your naked eye. But it can be seen with telescopes. And all sorts of observers will be training telescopes of the optical and radio and other varieties on it. I was hoping to go out to Goldstone, the radio telescope, where they're going to be shooting radar at this thing, I guess, with our friend Emily, but I'm going to be up north with you at Stellar, as we call it around here, up in San Luis Obispo. That's because

they call it Stellar also. Stellar Expl as we call it around here up in San Luis Obispo. That's because they call it stellar also. Stellar Explorations. Yeah, going to a solar sail mission review. We've also got the Leonids meteor shower peaking on November 17th, which has great PR, except for those times every 30, 33 years. Really pretty lame, probably, but I mention it. Increased meteor activity you never know uh we've also got mars up in the middle of the night and then high overhead in the pre-dawn

and right now hanging out friends with leo's brightest star regulus very similar brightness right now but mars of course reddish and reg regalus white blue bluish whitish red white and blue yeah uh all right we move on to this week in space space space history and uh big big big week for mars 15 years ago 1996 mars global surveyor went into orbit 40 years ago this week my man man mariner I have problems today. I don't know. It's just your proximity, I guess. Mariner 9 goes into orbit, becoming the first successful Mars orbiter.

First thing to show us the whole planet. I have that effect on people. Yeah, yeah, yes, you do. We move on to random space fact. So today I've got some facts for you about Mars's moon Phobos in honor of the Phobos sample return mission launch period opening this week, launch to Mars's moon Phobos, including our Phobos life microorganism experiment. Which people can look up at planetary.org.

It's quite fascinating, very exciting. So I thought I'd give you some weird facts about Mars's moon, Phobos, some of which I've told you, some of which I haven't. Mars's moon, Phobos, orbits Mars in less than eight hours. It's zippy. Since Mars has a similar length day, this means it actually goes from west to east, not east to west, in the Mars sky. Something new because it's so close to the surface compared to, say, our moon.

It cannot be seen above the horizon at latitudes greater than 70 degrees. Oh, really? It's just blocked by the planet itself? It is indeed. It's just that low. It's more analogous to a typical low-Earth orbit spacecraft than it is to, say, the moon. And one last one. Compared to Mars' other moon, Deimos, also small,

but Phobos has about 10 times the mass. I was just thinking that some NBA players would have to duck. Well, I'm not saying it's that close. It's still, it'll be scary. I'll pull it off the top of my head, but I believe it's about 8,000 kilometers altitude, so only the tallest of the NBA players. And the best paid, yes.

Yes. All right, let's go on to trivia. And I remind everyone again, no one named Matt has ever flown in space. But there were some Bruces who flew in space. And I asked you, what people named Bruce have flown in space? How'd we do, Matt? We got lots of correct answers from folks. Just about everybody came up with the two Bruces who have flown in space. How'd we do, Matt? We got lots of correct answers from folks. Just about everybody came up with the two Bruce's

who really flew in space. Bruce McCandless II and Bruce Melnick. And we could tell you lots more about them, but we have other things to talk about. I will tell you, though, that Ralph Bruder in Billings, Montana has been two years since he's won. He is going to get the Planetary Radio T-shirt this week, so congratulations, Ralph. Would Bruce Willis count?

We had that from several people. No comment. Randy Bottom thought that he heard someplace that Yuri Gagarin's middle name is Bruce. Yes, in fact, most astronauts' middle names and cosmonauts' middle names are Bruce. They're from Australia, no doubt. Monty Python. You've got to hear this one. This is from Kurt Lewis, who says that, you know, normally he tries to make a joke about the answer,

but there's nothing funny about these two fine astronauts named Bruce. On the other hand, everything about Bruce Betts seems to make me giggle. That's great! That makes me giggle. That's really nice. Alright, pulling out something for the next trivia contest. Partially out of my dark history. Ooh, it's a clue. With this Russian mission launching, what was the last Russian or Soviet interplanetary mission? And I'm looking for ones that actually made it beyond the Earth-Moon system.

Successfully went interplanetary. How do people enter? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. Okay, everybody go out there. Look up in the night sky and think about carpet cleaning. I think I have to. Isn't this place getting its carpets cleaned?

Are you behind that? Did you complain? They just wanted things to be spic and span for my arrival. I've already moved a whole bunch of stuff into the bathroom, which has tile floors. You have a lot of work ahead of you. See you later. Later. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society,

who joins us every week, live and in person, well, in person, for What's Up. 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. Clear skies. Thank you.