Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Northrop Grumman Space Technology President Alexis Livanos

Episode Date: September 8, 2008

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President of Northrop Grumman Space Technology, Alexis Levanos, 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 of the Planetary Society. It was the first company to build a space science probe for a new agency called NASA, and it has built scores since then. We'll talk with the leader of this Northrop Grumman division about a few of its notable successes in space science,

progress on the James Webb Space Telescope, and why he is so passionate about climate change. Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, is the life of the party in this week's commentary. That's the life experiment that will send living bacteria to Mars's moon Phobos and back. And Bruce Betts will help me explore other uses for space food sticks on this week's edition of What's Up. That, a night sky roundup, and a new space trivia contest. Emily Lakdawalla is away on assignment, but you can always check out her latest blog entry at planetary.org. And she's got a present waiting for you there.

It's a montage of all the asteroids and comets we've gotten a close look at, and they're all displayed at the same scale. Cool? Suitable for framing cool. Here's Bill. Hey, hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, vice president of the Planetary Society. Let me ask you this. Do you know any Martians? Do you know anyone descendant from living things on Mars? Well, maybe you do. You see, it's possible that everything on Earth that's alive came from something that was once living on Mars. I mean, this sounds crazy, I admit, but it's not beyond scientific understanding that life actually started on that distant world, but through a

cometary or meteoric impact, a bunch of Mars, big chunks of Mars, got thrown into space. Their orbits decayed. Earth's gravitational pull yanked them in, and every living thing here really started out from something that was living there. I mean, it is at first incredible, but when you think about it, maybe not. So to that end, you as a member of the Planetary Society can participate in the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment. It's an acronym we call LIFE. And here's the idea. We're going to send microbes in a special life capsule that we have designed, and we're going to piggyback aboard the Russian Grunt mission, which is going to the moon of Mars called Phobos. Now, here's the idea. If these microbes

can make the trip from Earth to Phobos and back and still be alive or not substantially mutated, well, that might show that it's possible to make this trip. I mean, you know, microbes are pretty durable sometimes. It's just 100 grams, and we've gotten it approved every which way from the powers that be, so we won't be contaminating Mars. Phobos is not really big enough to be a ball. It's its own little rock that must have been captured by Mars at one time. And so we're sending a mission out there to study where we all came from.

And you're a part of it. Well, stay tuned to the website and stay tuned to Planetary Radio. Meanwhile, I've got to fly. I'm Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. Just south of Los Angeles International Airport is the corporate campus of Northrop Grumman's Space Technology Division. The man who leads it actually started there in 1981 when it was still TRW. Alexis Livanos left to try his hand at other businesses, but now is back as president of NGST and a corporate vice president of Northrop Grumman itself.

In addition to military contracts, the division builds spacecraft that explore our solar system and the universe beyond. And it has just dedicated a new complex of buildings called ECOS, where it will fabricate a new generation of Earth observation satellites. ECOS, as in ecology, is the Greek word for home. And it was at his corporate home that I got to spend a few minutes with engineer, scientist, and corporate executive Dr. Lovanos. This division that you run, that you're the president of,

you have a lot of things going on. But, of course, what we pay the most attention to on this show is space science. When I went on the website, I was surprised at just how many missions Northrop Grumman has been involved with, beginning almost exactly 50 years ago with Pioneer One, the very first space science platform built by an industrial contractor. That's quite a history. We celebrated last year the 50th anniversary of space. We've partnered with NASA and with other agencies for the last 40, 50 years. Some of the instruments

that we've built for Earth observation, the last one was Aqua. That was a wonderful satellite that had an instrument that essentially measured and looked at clouds, looked at land formations, and looked at the ocean. And there's some beautiful pictures where you can actually see sand coming off Sahara and actually flowing into the ocean. You can see pictures of fires, the direction that they're headed, and they're very useful platforms because they give us a lot more information than anything we've had before. Prior to that, we built another platform. It was Aura, and the purpose of Aura was to look at the concentration of trace gases up in the atmosphere. trace gases up in the atmosphere. We're talking about looking at ozone, looking at carbon dioxide, looking at methane in order to look at different interactions of those gases. And that is a part of the climatology that we can talk about maybe a little bit later on. The one instrument that

probably is the most exciting for me, which is not climate related, but science related is Chandra. Oh, yes, the X-ray telescope. When I go to my kids classroom, and I actually can see, you know, a picture of a galaxy, and having the black holes depicted right there, and the knowledge that actually gives my generation, it makes me really proud of the of the work that's being done. And it's kind of interesting because the galaxy NGC, like Northrop Grumman Corporation, 6240, was discovered to have those two massive black holes. Really interesting. This is part of our DNA, part of what we do is science and climate methodology. Before we talk a little bit more about Earth observation,

I want to ask you about another instrument that Northrop Grumman is building for NASA right now, which absolutely leaves me awestruck. It has to be one of the most ambitious missions ever, space science missions. James Webb Space Telescope. How in the world are you going to get that thing put together in space? I'm really excited about this.

And part of my excitement comes from not just the sheer feat of putting such a thing together and making it work, but also from the fact as to what it's really going to do. The fact that we'll be able to look in time at the near infrared that will give us an idea what happened between the Big Bang and between the time that we can actually observe with the Hubble, I think it's going to open great avenues in terms of our knowledge for that particular time. Astrophysics, where is dark matter? What

is it? Dark energy. I'm not saying that this is going to give us an answer per se, but I think it's going to really greatly help in terms of our understanding of the origins of the universe. going to really greatly help in terms of our understanding of the origins of the universe. The Hubble is about 2.4 meter aperture, and we are six and a half. So the collecting area that goes is diameter squared. As all of us amateur astronomers know, that's quite an increase in gathering. You know, if you really think about it, the height of this room is only eight feet. You need to double that. Yeah. So it's really phenomenal. We are going to send it up unfocused because we don't want to run into the same trouble that we ran on the previous telescope.

So we're going to configure the spacecraft, deploy all the mirrors, because they're all folded. We'll deploy the mirrors, and we'll do the adjustments of the mirrors by using special actuators in the back in order to get the wavefront that we need. So we don't have an issue of having it pre-done in here. We're going to send it up, and we'll do the entire wavefront calibration and correction in orbit. So it's a little bit like the adaptive optics on Earth-based telescopes, except that once those mirrors are configured, you don't have to play with them anymore. That is correct. It's exactly the same thing. It is adaptive optics. And it's kind of interesting because the whole aperture, which is about, as I said, 6.5 meters,

weighs approximately half of what Hubble weighs, because the surface is just so thin, and it can be adapted with actuators to give you exactly the surface that you're looking for. That's one big problem, is how do you build that telescope? The second problem is, where do you locate it? And then, because it's going to be looking at infrared part of the spectrums, how do you keep the sun away from it? So we have to take it and put it, it's called the second Lagrangian point. L2. L2. And that's about a million miles away. And it's quite a ways away. And it's going to stay in that position. miles away. And it's quite a ways away. It's going to stay in that position. And it's going to always have a sunshield between itself and the sun because it needs to keep everything cold. The sunshield is the size roughly of a tennis court, doubles, not singles. And it's five or six layers

that are specially built. And the equivalent sun shielding capability is an SPF, you know, the SPF. Sunscreen, right. Sunscreen. You're familiar with SPF 10, 15, 35. This is 1.2 million. That's good. Well, you're never going to have to worry about a sunburn on those mirrors. years. So it's ready to go up on 2013. We are currently in the stage of polishing the mirrors. So we have completed the development of all of the high-risk, high-technology items, and we went through an independent review last year to make sure that we are at the right technology level. A passionate conversation with Northrop Grumman Space Technology President Alexis Lovanos about climate change when Planetary Radio continues. 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,

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Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. My guest is Alexis Lovanos, president of Northrop Grumman's Space Technology Division in Southern California, where Alexis earned his Ph.D. in engineering science and physics at the California Institute of Technology. We wanted to get back to Earth observation, but Alexis is much more broadly concerned with climate change and the huge challenges we face. Before we can do much about it, we need a much better understanding of our planet's climate, and that is a challenge that strains the limits of what

science is capable of. A seven trillion dollar economy depends on climate. National security depends on changes in the climate, where people go migrate, where they grow food, what is happening with the ice pack, and is happening with our water. All of these things are occurring right now. And the part that most people don't understand is that some of those effects, even though we could bring the emissions down to, let's say, what we had 30 years ago, some of those effects are very long-term effects that would last for a long time. You remember we used to use lead in paint, and we fixed that real quickly. And now the lead levels in the atmosphere are way down.

This is not lead in paint. This is not a very simple point solution. This is a much more complicated thing. And let me explain to you why. Climate is governed in general by some simple-looking equations. We scientists always like to think about equations. There are four equations, and the equations are very nonlinear. By nonlinear, I mean that their effects multiply exponentially. It's the standard question that I would ask. Would you rather have $10 million right now, or would you rather have one penny that I double every day for a month? Most people will take $10 million. Now, the one penny, though, is way in excess of $10 million in 31 days. That's what I mean by nonlinear. It goes

exponentially. And we are seeing the exponential behavior. We are seeing basically things that don't follow the normal season and pattern, but they're going exponentially. They're moving at a much higher rate. You cannot approximate the climate around the earth by taking giant blocks that are 100 kilometers by 100 kilometers. That doesn't work. You have to make it a lot smaller. So the number of points that you need to measure all the way from the bottom of the ocean up to the stratosphere is huge, and it's three-dimensional. So you need underwater platforms, which we're using right now for current measurements as well as for tsunami prediction. You need surface measurements from ships and for buoys.

You need measurements at the 50,000 to 100,000 foot that you do use UAVs for, like you would fly a UAV through a hurricane in order to look at humidity, in order to look at temperature, and so on and so forth. And then finally, up in space, where you look at the full three-dimensional picture. Huge number of data points. And you need to take them every few seconds, the measurements. I mean, that problem, it's not one supercomputer. It's much tougher than that. And everything is so interdependent. And apparently some of the effects are accelerating at a rate greater than the current models had predicted. That's correct. The original prediction of the rise in sea level was about 3.1 inches. Now it's gone from approximately six, a range of six to 36. That shows you the uncertainty of the measurement. And 36 inches, if you consider all the infrastructure in Manhattan,

is just two feet above ground. Right now we are in the golden era of Earth observation. We have approximately 100 platforms that are doing the measurements. That number is projected to get down to 25 in the future. That concerns me. That's point number one. Point number two is we need international cooperation for this venture. Last year, we had one, two, three, four, five platforms taking pictures of the same sandstorm. That is a waste of resources. We have to have a system in place. We have to allocate roles and responsibilities, measurements, instruments, orbits to different nations so that we can collectively gather all that information and process it. There is work that is being done

internationally. There is the GEOS program. It has 76 signatories so far, but it's still in its infancy. Somebody needs to turn the gain up. And what an opportunity for us internationally for leadership and for doing something that's good for the planet. I think it's wonderful. It's a bipartisan issue. Everybody wants to do it, but we need to just turn the gain up. And I'm hoping that part of the interview, that's what it does, is get people's sensitivity up that it's here. It's a problem that's important for our kids. What we do now has major ramifications.

I saw a commercial about, not a commercial, a statement about six months ago that really impressed me. There was a man about my age on a railroad track talking about the climate and how we had time and how we could, you know, basically address the issue. And you can actually see a train coming. And the train is getting closer and he's talking about the climate and about the issues. And then he steps off the train track, and what you see behind is a little girl. And it was a dramatic image to me because we step aside, but there is the future generation. I get the strong impression from the passion that you've expressed that you are pretty happy to be in a position where you can help contribute to this worldwide need for

more data that is basically very plausibly going to save our planet. I think saving our planet is a very good way of looking at it. I think 25 years ago, Buckminster Fuller died. And one of the things that he mentioned that I've always remembered is he talked about our planet. He called it Spaceship Earth. I mean, we are. This is our home. This is our house, our ecos. And we are hurtling through space, unfamiliar, cold, irradiated, unfriendly.

So we have to take care of it. And the best way to take care of it is to understand it. You are obviously still very much a scientist as well as an engineer and a manager of the Space Technology Division. You were once a teacher at Caltech. You taught in your post-grad days. We were talking about the research you did there just before we turned on the recorder. Do you ever miss those days? I don't. I get the chance here to transmit my knowledge to the younger people coming in. I use my understanding, my depth in subjects, and my breadth in subjects in terms of understanding our problems and our programs. it makes this job more complicated but much more rewarding because fundamentally we're not here to build washing machines.

And the spacecraft are extremely complicated and they do a wonderful job. Understanding how they work, what they do, what the effects are, and being able to communicate it to other people is more gratifying to me than teaching a course. And it's interesting because when we talked about climate and you talked about leadership, maybe we don't have that many people around now, but when I talk about climate and the importance of climate, it's the Y generation, it's the millennial generation, it's my kids.

My kids are really interested in climate. Yeah, mine too. So it's that generation that is interested. So I see a lot of future leaders sharing the same passion. Alexis Lovanos, president of Northrop Grumman Space Technology and a corporate vice president at Northrop Grumman. Alexis was recently inducted into the National Academy of Engineering here in the United States. We couldn't come close to

fitting my entire conversation with Alexis into this week's show. You can hear a much more complete version at our website, planetary.org slash radio. Emily Lakdawalla will return with a new Q&A segment next week. That means Bruce will be joining me in mere seconds for this week's edition of What's Up. It's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He has joined us once again to tell us about the night sky. Do you remember a few weeks ago when I said I was out at JPL talking to Nigel Angold about Ulysses?

Yeah. And I told you, I always go to the store. Yeah. I have it. Are you ready? I'm excited. Okay. It's edible. Well, the rumor is, anyway, that it's edible. Look the store. Yeah. I have it. Are you ready? I'm excited. Okay. It's edible.

Well, the rumor is, anyway, that it's edible. Look at that. Oh, nice. Space food stick. Here, you can hear the wrapper. Wow, that's really solid. What flavor is it? I forget.

It's a delicious protein-powered snack, and it's the original out-of-this-world this world chocolate sorry it took a while to find did you know that you can actually if a micrometeoroid makes a hole in the iss they use this they use these to plug it i believe that although i'm not sure you could actually morph it i i've met dog treats that are more pliable hey did you know there are 10 space stick bites in every pack very small space no more no less that's the real technology breakthrough or just we could try it at the end of the show or we can just save it for a few years in the emergency yeah put it on the shelf it'll be good for another 20 years all right fabulous i'll put it in the earthquake kit what's

up jupiter jupiter is still the lovely god of the evening sky. Well, okay, planet of the evening sky named after a god hanging out over in the south after sunset and high in the sky. It's high in the sky right after sunset. Yeah. Brightest star-like object out there. Unless you're looking for Venus, which is right after sunset. unless you're looking for Venus, which is right after sunset. In the twilight glow, you probably can see Venus because it's so darn bright.

There's a star-like object over in the west. And if you pull out some binoculars, you might be able to catch Mercury down below it by a little bit. And you might catch Mars, which is just snuggling up very close to it and then getting lower below it, but is really much dimmer, so it will be tricky. Oh, you know, and I wanted to mention Uranus. I just don't mention Uranus very often on this show because I'm afraid to. And September 13th, Uranus is at opposition. So the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun, so the closest it gets to Earth in the usual yearly orbit. Still, you've got to pull out some binoculars or get a small telescope and have a little guide to find where it is,

but it'll be rising roughly around sunset and setting roughly around sunrise and looking kind of like a bluish dot if you pull out your telescope. This week in space history, in 1975, Viking 2 launched. Four years on the surface of Mars. 2004, we had Genesis come crashing to Earth. Yeah. But you know, it's a good, happy, long-term story because they really are extracting science out of it. As a reminder, the spacecraft sample return brought back particles from the solar wind.

A parachute did not deploy properly, so it slammed into the Utah desert floor. It shattered a bunch of the detectors, but they've actually, with many of them, been able to pull out the science. But it's taken a lot more work than they had hoped. Amazing, though. Yeah, it is amazing. It's a wonderful recovery story. The first sample return mission outside of the Earth-Moon system.

Let us go on to Random Space Fact! That was very nice. Thank you. I'm excited because I want to talk about those big, weird vehicles, the crawlers, the crawler transporters used to move the space shuttles to the pad, used to move, they were developed for Apollo. There's more than one? There are two.

I didn't know that. Well, there's your first random space shuttle. They're about the size of a baseball infield, for those who know about such things. But here's the excitement. When they're drag racing and they have a full shuttle stack up on top, their top speed, one mile per hour. Oh, see? I was off.

1.6 kilometers per hour. I was off by 100%. I thought it was two miles an hour. Well, you may have thought that because that's their top speed unloaded when they're just, you know, ripping down the track, coming back between the vehicle assembly building and the pad, and then back again. That's about a three-mile trip. Somebody should do, like, just, you know, a fake action-adventure sequence of, you know, a mad chase of one after the other

and people diving out of the way just in time. And a lot of people thinking about gas mileage these days, and they get about 150 gallons per mile. That's great. About 568 liters per mile. Just like some SUVs. Okay. And it weighs 6 million pounds.

All right, let us go on to the trivia contest. Cosmos 1, Planetary Society's attempt to fly the first controlled solar sail flight. How many pedals did that sail have? How many different sail blades? How did we do? I am so pleased because Randall Sitton's name finally came up again. Randall, who is a charter member of the Planetary Society

and enters most weeks but has not won in almost two years. Randall said eight. Eight pedals did Cosmos 1 have. And Randall, we're going to send you a poster. Thank you. Explorer's Guide to Mars poster. All right, let's go on to the next question. Whoever wins this one will get a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

And the question is about the crawler transporters, because I can't get enough. If you had a combined odometer for the two of them, what is the approximate combined mileage of the two crawler transporters over their lifetime? How far have these two vehicles driven combined? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. It can be kind of approximate, but let's get it to, you know, within a few miles. Fascinating. See if we get some of those unique units that our listeners provide sometimes. Oh yeah. Feel free to drop into unique units if you are bored. You got till 2 p.m. on Monday, September 15 to get us that entry.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, think about playing with toy cars in the dirt, this planet or another one. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. You think they ever made a Hot Wheels version of the crawler transporter? Probably not. He joins us every week here for What's Up.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.