Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Nobel Prize Winner Michel Mayor…and More

Episode Date: October 9, 2019

Astronomer and astrophysicist Michel Mayor has just been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for physics. Listen to Mat’s 2016 conversation with this revered scientist, the first to discover an exoplanet. The Beresheet mission’s Yoav Landsman recently visited Planetary Society HQ and spent a few minutes catching up with Mat. And Society Editorial Director Jason Davis introduces The Downlink, our weekly digest of planetary news. Bruce Betts takes us to a moon of Uranus to find the melancholy Dane. Learn more about this week’s guests and topics at:  http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/1009-2019-michel-mayor-yoav-landsman.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

2019 Nobel Prize winner Michelle Mayor, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. It was in April of 2016 that I sat across from Dr. Mayor for a conversation about the very first discovery of an exoplanet, a world revolving around a distant star. Now he has been named a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics. We'll bring back that great conversation and we'll add a brand new one with Yoav Landsman, Senior Systems Engineer at SpaceIL and the deputy mission manager for the Beresheet Lunar Lander mission.

Yoav was in Southern California this week to pick up a million dollar check from the XPRIZE Foundation. Then we'll visit a moon that pays tribute to the Bard as we visit with Bruce Betts. First though, a very welcome announcement from my colleague, Planetary Society editorial director, Jason Davis. Jason from my colleague, Planetary Society Editorial Director Jason Davis.

Jason, if listeners to Planetary Radio find this new service as useful as I think I'm going to, then we have a lot to be grateful to you for. Tell us about the Downlink. Yeah, the Downlink is a new planetary exploration news roundup from the Planetary Society. roundup from the Planetary Society. The motivation behind it, you know, there's a lot that happens each week in planetary news, you know, either new discoveries on worlds or just regular old mission news. You know, we have like 20 different spacecraft, more than 20 actually out exploring the solar system. So there's a lot to keep up with. And we have such a small team here, as you know, and we can't keep up with all the news. And, you know, there are a lot of good websites out there that already cover the news. So what we wanted to do is just offer a quick

roundup of all the things that you might've missed during the week and just kind of run them down every Friday and say, here's some links. If you want to go learn more, here's some resources, maybe the planetary society has, and just kind of offer this little service to get everybody caught up. Another great thing about this is that you are linking out to follow up on other sites, you know, either going to the source of a story or to some of those other places that may have covered this story that we can't. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, a lot of it sometimes is just on Twitter. You know, I follow a lot of space reporters, as you do, that might have a little tidbit here and there that they've discovered. So it's just kind of crowdsourcing from everywhere we get it, these little general updates on anything involving what the Planetary Society is interested in, which is, you know, planetary exploration. While it is going to focus on

planetary science, apparently we're not afraid to include things that are relevant. I'm looking at the very first, the premier edition of this. And you've got something about the Discover Climate satellite and something about the space launch system, an update on the development of that big rocket. Yeah, yeah. We're still trying to figure out where we draw the line for what is exactly planetary exploration news. That's a whole deep discussion to have in our communications department, I suppose. True enough, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But you know, the Space Launch System, NASA wants to use that to take us to the moon. They have a date set for 2024. Whether or not that ends up panning out the way they plan it to

is another discussion again. But yeah, so we cover a little bit of things like that. The International Space Station, they're doing research up there for human exploration of the solar system. So we kind of cover that as well. Discover, you know, it takes those beautiful pictures, these full globe pictures of Earth every day. And it's just hard to pass up something like that when it's so relevant to our own planet. That's your introduction. I think it's going to be extremely valuable, Jason, and already has become a popular offering from Planetary.org, the Planetary Society website. I look forward to reading it every Friday.

Thanks. Thank you, Matt. Jason Davis is the Planetary Society's editorial director, and yes, that's his new title. That first edition of The Down leak features eight stories, including an update on the Juno mission still orbiting Jupiter. The spacecraft completed a 10.5-hour thruster burn to avoid what would have been a 12-hour trip through the gas giant's shadow. That eclipse would have drained the solar-powered spacecraft's batteries. Without heaters to keep it warm, it likely would have drained the solar-powered spacecraft's batteries.

Without heaters to keep it warm, it likely would have succumbed to the cold. On the moon, our moon, China's Yutu 2 rover is wrapping up its 10th lunar day exploring the far side. The rover survives those chilly nights, but it must hibernate as lunar temperatures plunge below minus 170 degrees Celsius. You can read more about U-22 and the Chang'e lander on their mission page at planetary.org. Remarkably, Chang'e 4's predecessor, the Chang'e 3 lander, was still active on the moon as of a few days ago. Michel Mayor was a professor at the University of Geneva in 1995 when his team announced its discovery of 51 Pegasi b, a giant world found very close to its star. They had used the radial velocity or Doppler technique, detecting subtle changes in the

velocity of the star caused by the tug of the planet. Now, nearly 25 years later and after the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, Professor Emeritus Mayor will be awarded the Nobel Prize. That's why I've decided to reprise my April 2016 conversation with him. He had come to San Diego to participate in the Kyoto Prize Symposium. I met him on the beautiful campus of Point Loma Nazarene University, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. You'll hear him mention the TPF, or Terrestrial Planet Finder, a now-canceled space-based system that might have allowed us to find life on one of these worlds. Dr. Mayor, thank you very much for joining us on Planetary Radio

and congratulations on this latest recognition of a truly tremendous world or worlds changing discovery. Thank you very much. I'm very proud to be here. It's the first time I'm in San Diego. Well, it's a nice place to visit, isn't it? This is my home away from home. My grandparents lived about two miles from here. I fully agree. This is unique, this symposium that has brought you here along with your colleagues, the fellow awardees who've

received the Kyoto Prize this year. The recognition that you have received over the last now almost 21 years for this discovery of the first extrasolar planet. I think it has been absolutely justified. I don't know if you feel the same. It's difficult to me. What I can say is that I'm very happy to receive all this recognition. And in some sense, it's so unfair because you see that you have so many people working in science in their lab, in their office and so on

doing incredibly nice research but without any impact for the general public. Maybe having a huge impact on science but not on general public and these people will never be recognized for such and so I'm very happy to but I feel as though okay a little bit

troubled by this question and I understand but I think it is in recognizing these most visible accomplishments that we also generate greater support for those scientists who may never be celebrated as you have. What I can evidently understand is that the question of extraterrestrial planets is such an old question.

For more than 2,000 are dreaming, discussing of the possibility of the old terminology of the plurality of world in the universe and more in the possibility of plurality of inhabited worlds. So it's evident I'm completely sensitive on this subject. But I'm also extremely concerned by the fact that I just arrived at the good time where the technology allows to answer this question. Because it's evident discovery of extrasolar planet is really the result of the technology development, development of instrumentation. The idea was already existing for decades, but now we have the tools to do it.

But even having said that, when you were doing your work and developing these revolutionary optics, you and your team, we should say, in the mid-1990s, it was still very much cutting edge. And I sometimes wonder, I mean, I'm sure someone, some other team would have reached this point, but your team was the first. Yes, you have. In the 90s, the number of people working in the field was very low. And I can recognize maybe three, four teams of two people, always very small teams, working in different place in California, but as well as a place. And it was not considered probably as the highest topics in astronomy due to bad experiences in the past.

We have several claims in the last 50 years of the errorless detection and so on. So the domain was not really promoted as a very big issue. And suddenly we just have this new tools, new spectrographs, having the capability to detect extremely small wobble of the velocity of stars due to the gravitational influence of planets. So this was a dramatic change in this domain because at the time, in the 90s, the paradigm was that giant planets could only exist with a period larger than 10 years, because they have been to be formed with the agglomeration of ice particles, and ice particles do not exist close to the star.

So when we discovered 51 pegs with 4.2 days, so it's a factor of 1,000, too small. So it was not a small error. It's not a small problem. It was a big problem. So we have been extremely perturbed by the possibility that we were sure of quality of measurements. But what was really the physical interpretation? It looks it was a planet, but with completely crazy parameters. So this was really the first impact for us, all this discovery. And it was the reason why we have decided not to publish immediately this discovery,

publish immediately this discovery, but to postpone the analysis and publication to the next season. We have the first hints of something interesting in fall of 94, winter of 94, but we did some new measurements in July 1995 to be sure that we have a stable period, stable amplitude, stable phase of the phenomena. All signatures requested if it is a planet. And it's only when we got this confirmation, OK, we decided, okay, we just publish. And, okay, we were quite sure that it was interesting because if we decided to publish in Nature, it was not because it was not considered to be interesting. So we rushed to publish the paper. But we did the announcement a little bit before the official publication,

what's called the Cambridge workshop. It was in Florence, in Florence, in the north of Italy. The first week of the… That we know as Florence, yes, yes, yes. Yes, yes, yes. So, this was the time of the announcement, and we have a big audience. It was more than 300 astronomers working on LOMA stars in the room. So it was a big question for me to see what could be the answer of our colleagues.

And it was evidently, as many cases, a mixed answer, because some were very convinced, some said, oh no, it's only a pulsation of the stars with this first discovery right from the start you overturned a lot of the existing theory about planetary

system development right I love this kind of question because you see that already in I believe it was at Caltech, in 1980, Peter Goldreich and Scott Tremaine, two big names of astronomy, studied what happened to a small body

embedded in the disk of a large system. It could be a small galaxy embedded in the disk of the Milky Way, or it could be a new planet embedded in the disk, crescent disk around a star. The answer of this paper was that you have a strong orbital migration. And the last sentence of the abstract of this paper was, you have have the phenomena is so efficient that Jupiter was not born where it is today so a lot of people read this paper but mostly with interest for galactic frame which you were also working yes exactly and it's strange because I read this paper at the time because I was working with spiral galaxies, but I do not have any remembrance of the extrasolar planet

impact of these things. And it's only after the discovery of 51 Peg that you have people here, Doug Lynn from Santa Cruz, Richardson, Bodenheimer, immediately jump and say, oh, this is the good explanation, is the presence of orbital migration. And today, this is one of the largest impact on this first discovery on the theory of extraterrestrial planet. Today, all scenario of planetary formation have to take into account orbital migration. You said something so interesting during your lecture in Kyoto when you received the prize. Something in all of the other planetary scientists I've talked to I never thought to ask that we're really not in the business anymore of discovering more of these exoplanets,

extrasolar planets. We, of course, know about thousands now. But you said we've really moved beyond that. Yes. At the beginning, all the team working in the domain was extremely happy when they have a new planet, discovered a new planet. Okay. extremely happy when they have a new planet, discovered a new planet. Okay, today we still have this, but I believe this is not what is more important. I believe what is really important today is to have a good statistical view.

What is the frequency occurrence of low-mass planets, of big planets? If they are rocky, gaseous planet, what is the distance, the limits of rocky planet? What, and all these things. If we want to, okay, we have discovered that the theory of the formation of planets, planetary system, is much, much more complicated than believed at first.

And now we need to have constraints coming from observations. And this kind of statistical discussion are absolutely necessary to give this constraint to the development of the theory, to understand the formation of planetary system. So this is the meaning of my, it's not one object in addition, but is to have a global view. And the second point, evidently, is to try to push the instrumentation to detect Earth twin, because always, evidently, everybody have in mind the possibility to set, I would say, a small catalog of bright stars being good candidates to have planets with a mass of about one Earth's mass, with

a good temperature and so on. Because any kind of experiment we will have in the future, we'll need to know in advance where to look for. Because if you have, let's say, a space interferometer like TPF or Darwin-type instrument, you cannot search for this object. You need to know... You have to know where to look. Exactly.

And so, at least for me today, this is my first interest, is to try to contribute a little bit to set a list of the subject. You have different possibilities. You have a lot of people interested in low-mass stars. Evidently, the habitable zone of low-mass stars is extremely close to the star. Like the so-called red dwarf stars that there are so many of. Exactly.

So it's much easier to detect good candidates, good rocky planets orbiting this kind of star. But are you sure that life could be on this kind of low mass planet? Because it's extremely close to the star. So you have different kind of low mass planet because it's extremely close to the star. So you have different kind of phenomena. You can have difficulty with big atmosphere and recently you have papers showing that oh maybe you have trouble with inhabitability on this subject. Personally, I'm more interested to try to detect rocky planets orbiting solar-type stars just to offer the possibility if low-mass stars are not a good object. Maybe we have also a list of few candidates. I'm just looking with my colleague in Geneva

to explore this possibility. When you worked with your spectrograph in the mid-90s, it was cutting edge. When you look at the technology that is being used in these searches and characterizations of planets today, like HARPS, and the things that are happening with space-based astronomy. Do you see this technology continuing to progress to the point where finding Earth analogs will become commonplace? Finding Earth analogs, I believe, is already possible today.

Finding Earth analogs, I believe, is already possible today, but sometimes these kind of Earth twins are extremely at very remote distance. So the follow-up of this object to determine the mass, because maybe by transiting planet it's only the radius, so to get the mass could be already difficult. But after to separate the planet from the star, it would be almost impossible. Personally, I'm more interested in today's Texas scan of rocky planet orbiting extremely close stars.

And so we'll see if we succeed. But it's true that we have ARPS-type instrument already has the possibility to get sub-meter per second, precision better than one meter per second. Today we have a new kind of spectrograph built on the same kind of principle presently developed in Geneva with the frame of a big consortia, which is to be connected to four eight-meter

telescopes. But the real difficulty will be the jitter of the velocity of stars due to the magnetic activity of the velocity of stars due to the magnetic activity of the star. So despite the precision you have with your instrument, you still have the problems of the difficulty due to the star itself. And this is also at the level of one meter per second. And what you are looking for is 0.1 meter per second.

So I believe it's what is very important is the effort presently done to try to correct the velocity of the star using some kind of physical information due to the magnetic

activity. Okay. This is a little bit for the future, but you have some teams working on that line. And okay, I'm quite confident. When you mention even one meter per second, to say nothing of one tenth of a meter per second, our ability to measure that kind of exquisitely small,

nearly infinitesimal change in the velocity of a star, I'm still left in awe. Yes. A priori, it looks impossible to measure. It's so small. And you have to maintain this precision during several years sometimes. Because if you are looking at a period of one year, let's say, you need not to have only one period,

but maybe two or three to be sure. So you need to maintain the stability of the instrument on several years. And it's extremely, it corresponds to few atoms of silicium in the plane of the spectrograph. That's incredible. This is the beauty of science. You can do this kind of thing. You asked a question also during your lecture in Kyoto that I want to ask you,

knowing that you're an astrophysicist, not a biologist. One of your slides said, is life a cosmic imperative? And of course, this is also leading us toward, is there intelligent life out there? I'm sure you're familiar with the Drake equation, which is more of a statement than an equation. But we are filling in those variables. If I ask you that question, is life a cosmic imperative, do you have any sort of an answer? Yes, I have an answer typical of a politician. So you have two ways to answer the question. You have the scientific answer that you don't know.

answer that you don't know because you know that you have a lot a lot of planets convenient for the development of life no question about this and so the drake equation is certainly completely not necessary if we observe today that we have a lot of low mass planet at the good distance no problem real question, what is the probability of emergence of life when you have all the good conditions? I'm not a biologist, and in any case, biologists have never given any probability. You don't have any prediction coming from a biologist. No data to base it on. So one of my friends gave some lectures on this, and the title was,

Infinity Product with Zero, What is the Answer? So, okay, the scientific answer to a question is you have to do measurements. Look if your life exists. So after you have the second possibility to answer, what is my own feeling? Personally, I'm absolutely not offended to be a byproduct of the evolution of the universe. So some can, okay.

Life is a normal development. It's a marvelous aspect of this because sometimes you are disturbed but you see the complexity of what is life. So I understand that people have some difficulty with this kind of

statistic, not evolutionary predictions. But okay, I don't know. We have to do measurements. I share in that statement of faith. You have such a busy day lined up today. I just have one other question for you, more of a comment, because in your lecture, you trace some of your early life, and you had an image from 1968, at least at that time. maybe you still do, like to participate in somewhat dangerous activities. We almost lost you, apparently, in 1968,

and therefore might have lost the discovery of 51 Pegasi. I'm glad that they managed to pull you up that precipice. I don't think so, because, okay, maybe I will not have discovered extrasolar planet, but the general tendency of the technology in the 90s was moving in the good direction. of Canadian people, Gordon Walker and Bruce Campbell. And they have not been happy because they received quite a small amount of telescope time, six to eight nights per year. So I discovered relatively recently this fact.

So these people have been working during 10 years with so small amount of telescope time. So it's exactly confirmed that it was not considered to be a so highest topic of science. But in any case, I believe that maybe a few months or a few years after, I'm sure that another team would have discovered. And now, as you said before we started recording, this

community of colleagues that you have has grown and the public interest is quite obvious. You must be gratified. Yes, and I'm always amazed because I was in a big conference on Extraterrestrial Planet

in Hawaii in November. 360 people. And due to the location, many people from Europe or Asia were not able to come. So it's only a small fraction of the people working in this domain. And some of them are young people, extremely good. At the beginning, 20 years ago, I knew almost everybody. And today, I don't know. It's more than 1,000 people, and some of them, young people, are incredibly good. So I'm looking for big progress in the domain. Dr. Moyor, thank you so much for joining us on Planetary Radio. It has

been a pleasure and an honor to speak with you, and congratulations once again on reception of the Kyoto Prize. Thank you very much. University of Geneva Professor Emeritus Michel Mayor, speaking with me in April of 2016. He was just announced as a co-recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics. I'll be right back with Joav Landsman of the Beresheet Mission. Hi, I'm Jason Davis, Editorial Director for the Planetary Society. Did you know there are more than 20 planetary science missions exploring our solar system? That means a lot of news happens in any given week.

Here's how to keep up with it all. The downlink is our new roundup of planetary exploration headlines. It connects you to the details when you want to dive deeper. From Mercury to interstellar space, we'll catch you up on what you might have missed. That's the Downlink, every Friday at planetary.org. Planetary Radio continues. I'm Matt Kaplan. It was just a couple of days ago that we received a distinguished visitor at the Planetary Radio continues. I'm Matt Kaplan. It was just a couple of days ago that we received a distinguished visitor at the Planetary Society. Many of you will remember my earlier conversations with Yoav Landsman. We talked before his team attempted to land Beresheet on Earth's moon.

Yoav returned after that spacecraft was lost, and after it had worked almost perfectly, till it was just a handful of kilometers above the lunar surface. Yoav was at home in Israel when we recorded those interviews. Thank you for dropping by the Planetary Society. It's wonderful to see you in person. Thank you. It is my pleasure. I plan to be here the next time I'll be in LA, and I had this opportunity, so I'm happy to be here the next time I'll be in L.A. And I had this opportunity, so I'm happy to be here. And you're going from here out to see Space Shuttle Endeavor at the California Science Center? Yes. I'm trying to see all the space shuttles.

This will be my third, I think. That's a great goal. That's a great thing for a bucket list. Since you're here, I mean, we've done the tour. You got to see the Planetary Society, you and your guests. I can't miss the opportunity to do a little follow-up. The last time we talked, as you know, was after the end of the Beresheet mission. I'm just wondering what has happened since then because you guys did such amazing work and came so close.

But the technology that you developed, the way you were able to put together this mission at remarkably low cost, what's the legacy? Is there more that has happened since then that you can say about how this effort is going to help us help somebody else get back to the moon? Well, first of all, I hope that we can manifest what I said before. Currently, I have to remind you and the audience that we are, SpaceIL is an educational organization. So the educational part will continue. So this is the first thing, and this is what we've done since our last interview, and we'll continue doing a couple of years at least. We are still trying to raise the funds for the next mission. We still have to decide exactly what will be the next mission. It will be something about the moon,

but it's not decided yet. Whatever it may be, I'm determined to make this happen again in any way I can pull this through. I didn't realize that you were that far along, that there is a commitment to another mission, even if it doesn't look like Bereshit. Well, there is such a commitment, but obviously it depends on funding. And since we're a non-profit, it's not an investment, it's donations. It's very hard to... We know how that works, yeah. Yes, it's quite obvious. But still we try good people that are willing to donate the money for that. Still, our goal is education and inspiration for the younger generation,

the people that in, let's say, 10 years will be the next scientists and engineers. So they will have a legacy of a mission to the moon. I hope a successful mission to the moon. And that was where I was hoping to go next, because in both of our previous conversations, we talked about how that goal was met, in fact, met many times over. The enthusiasm, the excitement that was generated, not just among Israelis and young Israelis, but really around the world.

And you see that continuing? Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm actually here at LA because of the XPRIZE Visioneering Summit. We were invited to receive the Moonshot Award of $1 million from the X-Files Foundation, which is very generous. And it's a statement from them to show how they appreciate our effort, even though the competition ended about a year before it even launched. We were very honored to get this prize. Even though it's not the prize of the competition, it will still be of good use in our educational programs, even if we don't get the money for the next mission in the short term.

That is a great bit of recognition. You can tell Peter Diamandis we say hello. I want to get to the other folks who also made a valiant effort to land on the moon, our colleagues in India, who, like Beresheet, came so close. How did it feel to see that happening again, but to some other people? It's like a deja vu. Yeah, I really, really wish they succeed in that. And I've been during the summer at the space studies of the ISU, the International Space University. We had a lot of people from India, and some of them were part of that mission, of the team that designed that mission. Some of them were, we even saw the videos, the live videos from the launch, from the landing attempt. I think all of us were really rooting for them because in my personal view, this is what needed to be done to succeed in landing on the moon.

It doesn't matter who does it first. I don't want to compete. I want to succeed in doing that. And it doesn't matter which group does it first. When things started to look like it's not exactly as planned, then it felt exactly as I felt in the control room of the parachute mission. They were so close. As were you.

Yeah. Yeah. So it shows how hard it is. Their mission was a governmental mission, much more people were in that mission crew and they made also a lot of investment, a lot of effort to get this right. And still that's something is, it's not enough. It's not enough. I can't, it seems that only the Chinese know how to land probes on the moon currently.

But we're going to get there. We're not far away from many more attempts, not just by the Chinese, but there's more coming from the United States. We've talked to some of those people on this program. Maybe as soon as a year or two from now. It's obviously feasible technologically. I believe it 100%, but it's still hard. So we tried that twice in the last year. Well, three times, including the Chinese, right? Because they got it right, and the second and third attempts failed to land.

This is very poor statistics. We need much more trials in order to nail that, to figure out exactly how to do that reliably. Do you think that someday this will be no big deal, that this will just be something that happens on a regular basis, that we will see craft, both robotic and maybe humans, going to and from the moon, if not on a daily basis, on a regular basis, that it will become an outpost of humankind.

Yeah, I actually want to be part of the team or group that make that happen. And as I call it, we want to try to make it look easy. It's like landing a Boeing 747. It's not an easy thing to do. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people put a lot of effort in order to make that look easy. And it looks easy. We're going on the airplane without a lot of fear that something will go wrong. And I think that we can make that happen in that way, that it will look easy.

But it takes a lot of trial and error in order to do that. That's the point. As it did with airplanes. Best of luck as you pull together those funds for whatever form that next mission takes. And I look forward to continuing or to covering that one just as we did Beresheet. Looking forward to a great success. Thank you very much. Yoav Landsman of Israel's Space IL. He served as Deputy Mission Manager for the Beresheet mission to the moon. It is once again time for What's Up on Planetary Radio, and we are joined online in a virtual kind of way by the Chief Scientist of the Planetary Society. That's Bruce Betts. How are you? I'm a little under the weather, but not bad.

And you? I'm fine. I'm concerned. I'm sorry you're not feeling well, but glad that the miracle of technology allows you to join me for What's Up, as you have for nigh on to 17 years. Nah, it hasn't been that long. No, it's only been two and a half, actually, but we used a time machine. It's less than one Saturnian year. That's true. Saturn's up there, right? Saturn's up there. You can see it, and it's moving slowly in its slow orbit. Yeah, you can see it in the southwest in the early evening looking yellowish,

and to its lower right is super bright Jupiter. Coming up, just to get you excited, Uranus will be in opposition towards the end of the month, closest it gets to Earth, still really far away and barely visible from a really dark site. But if you have binoculars or telescope, the next few weeks would be a good time to check it out. So somewhere on the infinite web is a website that will be saying that Uranus won't be this close again for 48,000 years and you can reach out and touch it. And it'll be bigger than the Earth's moon in the sky. No doubt. Maybe we should put that out first before someone else does it. It doesn't really matter whether it's true as long as you're the first.

Wow, the new motto of Planetary Radio. This is going to open up so many possibilities that we would never have had before. Next week, SETI success. We'll be interviewing actual aliens. Alright, we move on to this week in space history. In 1964, Voskhod 1 became the first time that three people were launched into space at one time. In 1968, Apollo 7 was launched, launching three people with the first successful human launch of the Apollo program. I read that they really had to cram those poor cosmonauts into the Voskhod-1 capsule. It was not made for it. They just wanted to beat Apollo.

Poor guys. All right, we move on, and I hear you've got someone else to save my sick throat. Here's how it is. Remember, we had a visitor for lunch yesterday and you were going to join Emily and me, but then you had some stuff come up. You had to be in a telecom. You didn't get to go with us, which was a shame. But we do have this from the chief engineer of the Jet Propulsion Lab. Hey, Bruce, this is Rob Manning. I'm sorry I missed you today, but I've heard that you have a random space fact for me. Thanks, Rob. He's such a great guy. He is such a great guy.

Everybody, everybody who knows Rob Manning says he's such a great guy. Well, thanks. Indeed, I do. And appropriately for the guy who is one of the keys to masterminding landing on Mars, it's a curiosity fact. I didn't even plan it that way. But Curiosity rover, its mass is a little less than a smart car and much less than most every other car on the road at around 900 kilograms. And I'd rather drive Curiosity than a smart car. Apologies to all you smart car owners. On Mars, of course, I'd rather drive on Mars. It's the location that

makes it all worthwhile. You only have to refuel it every 25 years or so, I think. Well, that's true. It's a great view. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. And we were playing Where in the Solar System? And I asked you, where in the solar system is the crater Hamlet? How'd we do, Matt? We got such great responses to this. And it's just a pleasure to read some of these. Let me start with our winner. Manuel, or Manuel, I bet it's Manuel McClure in Sacramento, California,

chosen by random.org to tell us that Hamlet is a crater on, guess where? Uranus's moon, Oberon. You should be able to see it very soon with the naked eye. You're really embracing that. As long as you're first, you don't have to be right. With a big enough telescope, you might see it as a dot don't have to be right with a big enough telescope you might see it as a dot i mean if you have a big enough telescope you will yeah maybe a space telescope yeah so it turns out hamlet is related to all sorts of things out there because uh even the moons themselves like oberon are named from characters mostly from the plays of that guy, William Shakespeare. Shakespeare, I think it is.

Shakespeare. And also from Alexander Pope, a wee bit of his stuff. So indeed, Oberon from one play, Hamlet from another. We have so much great stuff inspired by this. Beginning with Laura Dodd up in Northern California. She says, yeah, Hamlet crater. It is thought to be, though perhaps is not to be. Get it?

The largest crater on that moon because only one side of Oberon was imaged during Voyager 2's flyby in 1986. Tony Knutson in Minnesota looked no further than Uranus. Well, he says Uranus IV, Oberon, to find a moon crater named Hamlet. If you look way down in the bottom, you might see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern digging away at the black base of the 204 kilometer wide divot. I think he's confusing the gravediggers with Rosenkrantz and Gildestern, but that's okay. They probably would have been happy to be digging them rather than be in one by the end of Hamlet. Insider Shakespearean humor there. Here's one for cinema lovers from Martin Hajoski in Texas. Hamlet, definitely on Oberon.

But in a way, Oberon was definitely into Hamlet as the great actor Merle Oberon once played opposite legendary screen Hamlet, Lawrence Olivier as his doomed lover in Wuthering Heights. Wow. Classic film. Not one, but two poems inspired by this question. Not one, but two poems inspired by this question. Greg Lewin, Fairchild Air Force Base up in the state of Washington. A crated surface that's icy hard, each named for characters penned by the Bard. Macbeth, King Lear, and Anthony.

Alas, no Yorick, t'was not to be. The largest carries Hamlet's name on Oberon, this Prince of Danes. Nice. And finally, this. It could be verse. Dave Fairchild, our poet laureate, to moon or not to moon, that is the crater. Whether tis nobler in Oberon to suffer ejecta ices of outrageous impacts or to take arms

against a sea of meteors and by opposing, crush them. With no apologies to the barn. That seems so familiar. Back to Curiosity for our question for next time. What is the diameter of Curiosity's wheels?

Each of its six wheels. What is the diameter of one of those wheels? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You've got until the 16th, October 16th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer this time. And let's go back because there was so much interest in it. I got a couple of notes about this. Let's give away a rubber asteroid, a rubber kick asteroid. a couple of notes about this. Let's give away a rubber asteroid, a rubber kick

asteroid asteroid. Not just any rubber asteroid, but a Planetary Society kick asteroid for planetary defense. And of course, a 200-point itelescope.net account. Now we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up

the night sky, and think about what you could make from aluminum foil. Thank you, and good night. What else would you make a wonderful hat out of? That's Bruce Betts. He's the chief scientist of the Planetary Society who joins us every week here for What's Up. I almost forgot to mention this week's winner will receive that gorgeous, almost magical Earth globe from MOVA. You can see their entire line of solar-powered wonders at movaglobes.com. But you won't see the one we're sending to Manuel McClure.

Those special edition light sail globes are sold out. That's okay. I want Mars. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its noble members. You can join them. Everything you need to know is at planetary.org slash membership. Mark Hilverda is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan at Astra.