Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - News From the 37th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference

Episode Date: March 20, 2006

Emily Lakdawalla reports on the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, while Stardust co-investigator Scott Sandford describes exciting results.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The solar system's biggest breaking news, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. What's the sound made by a bunch of excited planetary scientists when they get together? I'm Matt Kaplan. We'll get a report from our own Emily Laktawalla. Then we'll hear from Stardust mission co-investigator Scott Sanford about the promising results his team has already begun to get from that visitor to Comet VILD-2. Then it's our weekly visit with Bruce Betts, who will somehow manage to talk about Mars, Aldebaran, the new space trivia contest, and fingernails. Just enough time for a few interplanetary headlines. What happened

to Stardust at home? Stardust scientist Andrew Westfall says, don't worry, it's coming. He wants to explain the delayed start of your chance to discover bits of interstellar dust. The project is a victim of its own success, as Andrew describes at planetary.org. You've probably heard that Space Shuttle Discovery's return to orbit has been delayed, thanks to those pesky fuel sensors on the external tank. The new launch window is early to mid-July. Finally, if you're any kind of Mars explorer, you can't miss this trip. The Mars Odyssey team and the image magicians at the Jet Propulsion Lab have created an online flying tour of Mariner Valley. You can learn more about it and get your ticket at planetary.org. Let's join Emily on the fast track to Pluto, then we'll hear her recap of the LPSC.

Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, A later launch of New Horizons would have given it a slower trip to Pluto. Would that have allowed for a slower pass by Pluto and therefore more science? The New Horizons mission team was relieved when their spacecraft launched early in its launch window because the early launch means it'll take only nine years to get to Pluto. A launch later in the window would not have permitted New Horizons to get a gravitational boost from Jupiter, resulting in a longer and slower trip. But when New Horizons does get to Pluto in 2015,

it'll be traveling at the screamingly fast speed of 14 kilometers per second. A later launch and a later arrival could have reduced this speed by more than 20 percent. New Horizons gets only the one fast flyby to gather all its data, and a slower speed would give it more time at Pluto within the distance at which its instruments are effective. Would it have been better to be patient, skip Jupiter, and take the slower flyby? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. Well, there was Emily Lakdawalla, and here is Emily Lakdawalla back from the LPSC. Emily, welcome back. Tell us a little bit about what you saw and maybe starting with what this conference is all about. Sure.

Well, this was the 37th Annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, which is hosted by the Lunar and Planetary Institute near Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. And this conference is one that's really primarily for planetary geologists. So it's for people who really care about the solid surfaces of bodies in our solar system, everything from Mars, Venus, Earth, to the moon and the icy satellites in the outer solar system. So they're not big on gas giants. They're not real big on gas giants except for looking at all of the little bodies that are orbiting them. So tell us about some of the highlights.

Well, I think one of the big highlights of the meeting was the Stardust first results that happened on Monday morning. I'm sure that Scott Sanford told you a lot about that. Yeah, we're going to have Scott on in just a couple of minutes, right after we finish talking with you about the organics. What else did you learn? Well, we learned that they got a lot of very interesting tiny particles that are quite crystalline, and this is a surprise. They expected particles that were more amorphous, that didn't have a crystal structure.

The crystalline particles tells them that they formed at a very high temperature, which is really strange when you're talking about an icy thing like a comet. So the theory has always been that these formed way, way in the outer reaches of the solar system. Maybe not true, because some of this stuff must have come from the sun, I suppose? Well, the comet certainly formed in the outer solar system, maybe not true, because some of this stuff must have come from the sun, I suppose? Well, the comet certainly formed in the outer solar system, but the particles that the comet are made of couldn't have formed in the outermost part of the solar system, and that leaves you with two places they could have formed. One is the innermost part of our solar system, near the orbits of Mercury and Venus and Earth,

or in the innermost parts of some other solar system, which is also kind of exciting. Planetary science, got to love it. Surprises all the time. So what else did you learn? Well, there's always new results coming in from the rovers and from Cassini. I went to several talks on Titan and Enceladus. I saw a lot of new information about these geysers that have been discovered on Enceladus. One of the most mysterious things about those geysers is that they contain some pretty odd chemistry. One of the

molecules they found there is acetylene. Acetylene is two carbons bounded to two hydrogens with a very strong triple bond in the middle. And there's only a couple of ways that you can make that. One of them involves very high temperatures, which you couldn't really have inside an icy moon like Enceladus. Another one that's much more interesting is catalytic chemistry. And if you've got catalytic chemistry going on wherever Enceladus's geysers are starting, then you could have all kinds of interesting molecules down there. What occurs to me is that life is based on a lot of catalysts. That's absolutely true. And it generally makes much more interesting molecules than you can get

just by kind of assembling a couple of atoms here and a couple of atoms there. Wow, that's wonderful. How about the Mars Exploration Rovers? What do those scientists have to say? They had to say that the rovers are still roving. And when I listened to talks by Steve Squires and Matt Golombek about that, I could hardly type fast enough to keep up with what they had to say. Steve Squires was talking about a bunch of interesting things that they'd seen on the way down from Haskin Ridge

into the interior of Gusev Crater, and particularly looking at Holm Plate, which I heard was such an interesting outcrop that they had a hard time tearing themselves away from it. But they've got to get the rover to a protected north-facing slope for the winter or else its energy, its power is going to get too low for it to continue functioning over the winter. Yeah, I did read a little bit about that, particularly, I guess, complicated because of that one wheel motor on Spirit, which is no longer functioning? It's got one gimpy wheel, and it's giving them serious problems. But unlike the problems with Opportunity's arm that they had earlier this year,

they can't take the time to diagnose and fix the problem right now. There just isn't enough time, so they're just roving as fast as they can, dragging that bulky wheel until they can get to that north-facing slope. Any other eye-opening announcements? Well, one of the interesting ones was that all of the craters that they're finding in Gusev Crater seem to be secondaries. They're not primary craters, and that could mean some pretty important things for the ages of surfaces on Mars. Emily, this, I don't think, was your first visit to LPSC. No, it's not. I've been going since 2001 when I was a graduate student.

Wow. What's it like to get together with all these guys working on so many missions, all basically astounding each other with their findings? Well, it's really great. And actually one of the main purposes of this kind of meeting is just to get all the people together again. It's a pretty small community. There's not very many universities that generate these kinds of scientists, so everybody knows each other and everybody's always catching up with each other and exchanging ideas and getting new ideas started for new areas of research.

They listen to each other's talks, and that inspires them to think about different ways that they could go forward with their own research. For instance, there was one talk that one guy gave on volcanic eruptions on Io, and that made one of my friends thinking about how could dikes propagate under the surface of Io, and he wants to start a new research project on that. Listen, our time here could hardly be more limited, so we will suggest that people visit your blog at planetary.org, where you had all of your daily entries quite detailed about the stuff that you found most exciting each day at the LPSC.

There is one other mission that I sure want to mention because there is an amazing fact that came out of one of your blog entries, and that's SMART-1, which is angling for arrival on the moon, a somewhat violent arrival later this year. That's right. The European Space Agency's SMART-1 is just really a technology demonstration spacecraft. It's in an orbit around the moon that eventually is going to intersect the moon with rather dire consequences for the spacecraft. It's in an orbit around the Moon that eventually is going to intersect the Moon with rather dire consequences for the spacecraft. Originally, they were planning

on impacting the far side of the Moon, which wouldn't have been very interesting from Earth, so they're going to do a maneuver that will allow them to impact on the near side of the Moon in September, and they're inviting a lot of people to look at it. The orbit spirals very slowly downward over time. It gets closer and closer to the surface, which gives them higher and higher resolution with their cameras. And I think one of the craziest facts that came out of that mission is that the last orbit is likely to take them no more than a couple of hundred meters above the surface of the moon. A couple of hundred? Oh, I thought it was about double that, but that's like,

oh, I don't know, a couple of tenths of a mile. That would be quite a sight. It would be quite a sight. And one of the things that they don't even know on which orbit they're going to impact because, you know, the topography on the moon is a couple of hundred meters. So they could hit on one orbit, but if there's a mountain in the way, they could hit on the orbit before that. Well, somebody's going to start a pool. You can bet on it. I'm sure. We will watch for that. Put that on the orbit before that. Well, somebody's going to start a pool. You can bet on it. I'm sure. We will watch for that, put that on the Planetary Radio calendar for September. Welcome home, Emily, and we'll be hearing from you again shortly with the second part of today's Q&A.

Thank you, Matt. Emily Lachter-Wallace, Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society. Of course, we hear her every week with her Q&A segments. And you will be hearing in just a moment from Scott Sanford, who was at LPSC, spoke to Emily. He's going to talk to us about his findings regarding organics recovered by the Stardust spacecraft. Stay with us. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group.

The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds. And we're building the first ever solar sail. We didn't just build it. We attempted to put that first solar sail in orbit. And we're going to try again. You can read about all our exciting projects and get the latest space exploration news in depth at the Society's exciting and informative website, planetary.org.

You can also preview our full-color magazine, The Planetary Report. It's just one of our many member benefits. Want to learn more? Call us at 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. You just heard Emily mention Scott Stanford in her report on last week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Scott was getting ready to check out of his Houston hotel room when I reached him last week. He is a co-investigator on the Stardust mission

that just returned a capsule full of cometary and interstellar particles to Earth. He's also co-leader of the Astrochemistry Lab at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. Scott Sanford, how has Stardust shaped up for you so far after its recovery out there in the desert? Well, things have been going great. We know we have sample, which we've been working for over a decade to get, and now we're in the fun part. We're actually removing sample from the aerogel slices we got back, and we're starting to study them using all kinds of different analytical techniques. You are looking in particular for organic compounds. That's right.

I'm running the sub-team that is looking for organics in the return cometary sample. And so far, we seem to be finding some organics. We're very early going, so we don't know all the details, but we're highly encouraged. Of course, one of the problems we have is when we see organics, that's only step one. Step two is to prove those organics come from the comet and aren't some form of contamination that may have gotten into the aerogel from the spacecraft or during launch or whatever. Is there concern that the contaminants might have entered since reentry?

Well, any time you study organics, you have to worry about contamination getting into your sample during the course of the collection and or the analysis of that material. And so we took fairly extensive precautions to try to minimize any possible contamination. And, in fact, the collection, the recovery, the sample return capsule went extremely well. So many of the things that could have caused this problem seem to have either been completely avoided or certainly are much less of a concern. But we live on a planet that's just a chock-a-block full of living things, and life has a way of getting to where it can be and survive. So we have to worry about that. In addition, no matter how many precautions you take, you know, this was a real mission that went to a real place,

and the spacecraft is made of real materials, and some of those materials contain carbon. So you can get a certain amount of contamination simply by being nearer in the presence of other things. And so we could have gotten some contamination that was on the spacecraft on the Earth and went for the ride with us and came back, some stuff that we may have accumulated by transferring it from one part of the spacecraft to the collector,

and then there's always the possibility certain things can get on the collector afterwards. So to be really careful, we have to make sure when we detect organics in our samples that we have a clear way of demonstrating that that material is really cometary and not just something else. Is part of the problem that you may be looking for only very small amounts or hoping to find very small amounts of organic material? Oh, yeah. You know, the entire sample we brought back is probably, you know, measured in terms of a milligram or so. Individual particles are microscopic and may only contain a nanogram of material,

so a billionth of a gram. And then of those samples, only a fraction of the material is likely to be carbon-rich organic. So we're talking about very, very small samples. It's rather preliminary, a little bit too early to really be asking you about this, but I take it that you're hopeful with the results you've gotten so far. Yes, we're definitely seeing organic compounds associated with our samples, and we're seeing various things that lead us to believe that it can't all be contamination because we see different components in the same particles.

And at least in one case, we see a particle that has organics that seems to show a modest enrichment in deuterium, the heavy form of hydrogen, and that's characteristic of many of the organics we seems to show a modest enrichment in deuterium, the heavy form of hydrogen, and that's characteristic of many of the organics we find in meteorites, but not characteristic of organics you find on the Earth. So we're highly encouraged, but we're just in the very early going. Most of the people on my team have only seen their first samples and have only had one or two weeks to study them, so we're all excited, but it's so early that it's hard to take the facts we've learned so far

and integrate them into a comprehensible whole at the moment. So stay tuned. Yes, stay tuned. What will these organics tell us about comets, or at least about this one comet? Well, one of the things for any material we find in the samples is that once you understand the nature of the material, it allows you to put some constraints on the history of the body this material came from. So, for example, if we find organics in the comet, you sort of know immediately that the comet as a whole, you know, was not heated above certain temperatures or in the presence of too much oxygen,

or those organics would have been destroyed. So they place constraints on the history of the parent body right off the bat. In addition, in the case of organics, they give us insights into the chemical processes and physical processes that the components of the comet must have gone through so that you could make this material in the first place. We've only got a minute or two left, and I wanted to save a bit of time for what was, I imagine, one of the more adventurous portions of this mission for you. You were out there in the helicopter searching the desert in the dark for this recovery capsule or sample return capsule. Yeah, I was one of the members of the recovery team.

There were a number of us. We spent many months before the recovery going through lots of rehearsals so that we were ready to not only handle recovery of the capsule if everything went right, but also had done a lot of practicing so we were prepared to handle the capsule if any of these things went wrong. Unfortunately, many of those rehearsals ended up being, in a sense, a waste of time. But we had a team and we worked together for many, many months and when the time came, everybody knew their job and we went out there and found the capsule, and it had done a terrific job of surviving seven years in space and reentering through the

atmosphere at the highest velocity anyone's tried yet, and landed in the mud, but managed to stay intact and not get any mud or water or any other things we don't want inside it. So it did a terrific job, and it was a lot of fun to watch it do its thing. Were you in one of the helicopters that was the first to spot it on the ground? I was in the second helicopter. The first helicopter was to find it and to establish safe places for the helicopters to land for the recovery. And there was a fellow in the first helicopter who made sure we didn't have any unexploded ordnance on the ground to worry about. This is an active military range where the thing came down.

And another person was there to measure the gases given off by the capsule to make sure there was nothing toxic or dangerous to everyone else. And then the second helicopter came in, and I was on that one. And then we started unloading all our gear to do the proper recovery. We had to bag the sample return capsule so that we could keep it from getting any more contamination on it in the course of transportation, and we took samples of the soil in the environment to the landing site because that's a potential contaminant that we could later find in our collectors if any of the mud stuck to the SRC. You know, I didn't realize until now that among the things those of you who are part of the Stardust team

have to be thankful for is that your sample return capsule didn't come down on an unexploded shell. Yeah, that would have been kind of a very Murphy's Law kind of thing if we had landed on a 500-pound bomb so that we survived a 2.88 billion mile trip and then blew up in the last six inches. But fortunately, that did not happen. Well, I certainly hope the success and good luck of Stardust and all of you who are part of its team continues. And we look forward to getting results beyond the preliminary ones that you've told us about today. Yeah, I think I can pretty much guarantee that you'll have another story in the future from the stuff we're learning from this.

We'll look forward to getting that from you. Thanks so much, Scott Sanford. You're welcome. Scott Sanford is a co-investigator on the Stardust mission. He is also co-leader of the Ames Research Center Astrochemistry Lab, and, I learned, a co-investigator on the Hayabusa mission, another one we've been following and that you'll be hearing more about in an upcoming week here on Planetary Radio. Coming up next is our usual return visit from Emily,

followed, of course, by a visit with Dr. Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. Would New Horizons have been better off skipping its Jupiter gravity assist and taking a longer but slower trip to Pluto so it could spend more time there during its flyby? The answer is no. First of all, New Horizons, like all outer solar system spacecraft, is powered by a radioisotope thermal generator.

The decay of a radioactive source is what powers the spacecraft, but it also limits the spacecraft's life and functionality because as time goes on there is less source material remaining and therefore less power for New Horizons instruments. Second of all, New Horizons is a mission not just to Pluto but also to other Kuiper Belt objects. In order to have the, but also to other Kuiper Belt objects. In order to have the maximum range of choices of Kuiper Belt objects to visit, New Horizons needs to have time and power to spare once it has passed Pluto. A slower trip would have substantially narrowed the cone of possibilities of other objects for New Horizons to visit.

Thirdly, with every passing year, Pluto tips more and more towards summer in one hemisphere, leaving more of its other hemisphere in permanent winter darkness out of reach of the cameras. And finally, the more time that passes, the greater the chance for something to go wrong with the spacecraft. In this case, faster is much better. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Back in Studio D, ready for What's Up with the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, Dr. Bruce Betts. Hi there.

Not quite. Live from Studio D. That'll be the name of my tell-all book. Will I be in it? You'll be the main focus of it. No one will buy it. It won't be interesting enough. Oh, I'm sorry.

What's up? What's up? Other than just random abuse and sleepiness, we have planets, planets, planets. Check out in the evening sky, we've got Mars. Mars getting, you know, pretty dim, but still looking like a bright star. Actually looking kind of similar, very similar to Aldebaran, which is not that far from it. So you're looking for Mars looking yellowish, orangish, reddish, high in the west after sunset. And you'll see it to the upper right of Aldebaran.

They're not the same, so don't be confused, Matt. Also see Saturn in the evening sky, high in the southeast to south. During the evening, looking spiffy as always. Take a look with a telescope if you can. Jupiter is starting to join the evening crowd crowd rising at 1030 in the east. You can also see it in the pre-dawn sky headed over towards the west looking like a really bright star. But Venus now, the way bright star and star-like object in the pre-dawn sky, you'll see it rising high in the east before dawn. So that's our planet roundup.

I'm glad you do it for us lay people, of course. But don't you get letters from other astronomers when you say in the upper right instead of declination, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? Right ascension. Yes, I just get nasty letters that I should be listing everything in RA and DEC. Because we have a lot of amateur astronomers out there. We do. I thought they'd be entertained by that. I mean, you know, and obviously this segment's largely for the non-hardcore.

That part is for the non-hardcore amateur. Oh, me, me. Yes, you. Yes, people like you who, or even the amateur astronomer who hasn't paid attention for a while is like, where is Mars right now? That really is me. There you go.

If they want to go look at a nebula, they're going to have to look up the RA and the deck. The right ascension and declination for those playing the home game. On to this week in space history. Hey, speaking of amateur astronomy, it's the 10th anniversary of Comet Hyukutake's near-Earth flyby that occurred, let's see, 10 years ago. Cool comet. Hyukutake and then a hailBopp and then not a whole lot since. It's the 45th anniversary of Sputnik 10. Don't forget to carry the dog name Zvezdochka. Not quite as famous as Laika, but a lot healthier.

Well, not by now. Let's move on to Random Space Fact. I don't know. No? I think you can do better. Rambles fast back! That's my boy. All right.

Hey, going to talk Earth. It's sort of a planet. Mid-ocean ridges, they expand. Those plates, they grow out from the mid-ocean ridges at about the same rate that your fingernails grow. Ooh, ooh, gross. Okay. Okay. And that's tens of millimeters per year is kind of the rate we're looking at there. Let's move on to the trivia contest.

Last time we were around, we asked you what was the man-made object that the Apollo 12 astronauts visited. And I just thought this was so cool. I love those pictures. We actually landed near something we'd sent there before. How did we do, Matt, and what was it? Well, it was indeed a man-made object. It was Surveyor 3. That's what the Apollo 12 astronauts walked right over to.

I remember this. Again, you know, I was around, and I thought it was so incredible that here they planted their lunar module walking distance from this object, which had already been up there for a couple of years. And we had lots and lots and lots of entries. We get so many new entries from people we haven't heard of every week. You know, hang in there, folks, because we've got something nice to give away every week. And this was a brand-new person, hadn't heard from before, I don't think,

Morgan Larson of Ralston, Nebraska, listens to us on KIOS, we believe, in Omaha, Nebraska. And he indeed said it was the Surveyor 3 probe. Yeah, it was cool, spiffy Surveyor stuff. And even better, they went and ripped pieces off of it and then jacked it up and just left it there. Left it on blocks, right? Yeah, exactly. We did have a listener who said that one of the astronauts caught a cold from it. We haven't confirmed that, but who knows?

There are, you know, there's a virus that survived, but there's no way you could be sure. It was a virus from the Surveyor 12, the Surveyor pieces. They did bring the pieces back to study, like, the micrometeorite impacts on them and the effects of sitting on the moon for a while. I was thinking if the coal had something to do with, you know, green cheese, then you might know, but... No, it's mold, not coal. Mold, mold.

Yeah. Okay. Sounds similar. Okay, here's your trivia question for you this time around, which is answer the following question. Where in the solar system could you find a geologic feature named a palimpsest? A palimpsest. Palimpsest.

And give me one location, any one valid location in the solar system where palimpsests have been observed, geologic features. We're not going to spell it for you. Go to the website, which you're going to hear about right now. Websiteplanetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter our contest. Send us your wonderful entry. Also, you know, find the show, find links, find pictures, stuff like that.

Get it to us by March 27. Monday, March 27 at 2 p.m. Pacific time, same as always. And we'll put you in the contest, okay? You might win an Explorer's Guide to Mard poster. And again, I would be remiss if I didn't mention there is, of course, the total solar eclipse coming up. We've talked about it on previous shows. Depending on where this airs, it may or may not have happened quite yet. But if you're not already lined up to go see it or someplace where you're going to see it, you're probably bumming.

But, indeed, the solar eclipse, the total solar eclipse, will start in Brazil, head across the Atlantic, northern Africa, central Asia, ending in Mongolia. What's the date on that? But also, if you're in Europe or Africa, you will be able to, or parts of Asia, you'll be able to see at least a partial eclipse Wednesday, March 29th. And you can find more information on the web, including at NASA's very nice solar eclipse site. Okay, thanks. We've got to get out of here. All right, everybody.

Thank you. Everybody, go out there. Look up in the night sky and think about how fast you could spin a globe of Mars. Thank you. Good night. That's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He's here every week with us for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week, everyone. Thank you.