Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Opportunity Reaches Endeavour, and Planetary Radio Wins an Award!

Episode Date: September 5, 2011

Opportunity reaches Endeavour Crater, Emily Lakdawalla visits a New Horizons science meeting about Pluto, Bill Nye discusses a planet made of diamond, and Bruce Betts and Mat Kaplan celebrate the award of a Parsec award to Planetary Radio.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

They made it! Opportunity at Endeavour Crater on Mars, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Even the scientists and engineers pushing the little rover to its destination doubted it could reach Endeavour. Yet opportunity has arrived at the rim of that vast crater. We'll hear excerpts of a celebratory press conference that also shares a new and very exciting find. Talk about exciting. How about a planet made of diamond? Bill Nye will share that jewel of a tale in his visit with us, and Bruce Betts will help

me celebrate an accomplishment of our own. As you were about to hear in my conversation with Emily Lakdawalla, the Planetary Society's Science and Technology Coordinator, and the editor of its blog at planetary.org. Emily, we have a couple of good things to talk about this week, but first of all

I want to thank you for retweeting, letting all of your Twitter followers know about our win of the Parsec Award at DragonCon. And thank you for your contributions to the show. And thank you, Matt, for making such a great show. It's been fun to participate in this over the years. I'm sure glad you feel that way. And I know that the listeners out there feel that you are a big part of it, and I certainly agree with them. So, on with space exploration. First of all, just a heads up to people that your monthly What's Up is available. That's right, and probably the biggest thing happening this month is the launch of GRAIL, which who knows, it might have happened by the time some of you are listening to this

show. Let's wish them luck. Now let's talk about Pluto, and specifically your attendance at this New Horizons session. And you are a very, very bad girl for wearing that T-shirt. Yeah, I've got quite a collection of Pluto demotion T-shirts. This one showed a model of the solar system suspended on strings. And there was one cut string and a pair of scissors and a little ball of Pluto floating at the bottom. And Alan Stern was not happy.

You took some grief. Yeah, in fact, the very first thing he did opening the meeting was to call me out for wearing the T-shirt. But, you know, I did it just to poke fun. And anyway, the workshop was really fun. There were about 50 people there, a lot of my friends from graduate school and meetings that I've been to.

And the whole goal of this meeting was to get people together, both scientists on the New Horizons mission and people who have nothing to do with the New Horizons mission and talk about what we might expect to see on Pluto when we get there in terms of its surface composition and its surface geology. And it was just a fascinating meeting. People gave presentations on different topics, and then scientists discussed things and, you know, had some disagreements and had some agreements. And it was just really fun to be in the middle of all of that. Just like scientists always do. What's this about possibly yet another moon? Oh, there is another moon. And so Pluto now has four moons, and there may

even be more. They've got time on the Hubble Space Telescope to search for more moons, which is very cool. It gives New Horizons even more things to look at. But it's also slightly scary because all of those moons in the Pluto system means that there's a lot of dust floating around those moons from meteorite impacts. And, you know, anything the size of a marble could be the end of the New Horizons mission if it's in the wrong place at the wrong time. So more study is needed. And this time, it's not just because scientists are curious. It's because the health of the spacecraft is in question. All right, Emily, we'll leave it there. The date for your What's Up in the Solar System in September report, that's an August 31 entry on the blog.

And you've got to go to August 30 to read Emily's full write-up about the New Horizons workshop. We are done. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And you too, Matt. Horizons workshop. We are done. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And you too, Matt. Emily Lachtwal is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next is Bill Nye, the Executive Director of the Planetary Society and the science guy. Hey Bill, we have

a story this week that is really beyond belief, and I'm not talking about the Parsec Awards. Talking about the diamonds. Yes. Hey, everybody, there's a pulsar, a millisecond pulsar spending 10,000 times a minute. And wait, wait, there's more. It's made of solid diamond. That's what you're talking about, right? Yeah. Here's what I just thought of. Pulsar in the sky with diamonds. Oh, wow.

Oh, man. Man, man. So anyway, everybody imagine this. These guys using the 64-meter telescope, New South Wales, Australia, observe this thing, analyze it with supercomputers in two different countries, and everybody agrees that this is just a few thousand kilometers across, right? 60,000 or something. It's 300 times heavier than the earth because it's made of diamond. How cool is that? They talk about stranger than fiction. That's really an astonishing thing. It's 4,000 light years away. It's in the Milky Way. Party on. Now, Matt, Matt, I must ask you, talking about stranger than fiction, did you not travel to Atlanta in the United States and North America this weekend?

And did you not win the Best Fact Behind Fiction podcast? Yeah, guilty as charged, Your Honor. We did. We won. The Planetary Society, the whole crew, you, Emily, Bruce, we took fact behind the fiction. That is remarkable, man. That is a great job. So thank you for listening, Planetary Society members. Through your support, we were able to do this radio broadcast. Perhaps by winning this award, we will, in the modern verb, leverage this into a big thing. Huge. Matt, congratulations.

You produced this thing and you do a great job. And I very much appreciate it. Everybody, if you get a chance, check out the story about the diamond pulsar. It's on the web in a few places. What a remarkable thing. A giant planet made of diamonds spinning 10,000 times a minute. It's like Dr. No or something. It's amazing.

Well, it's just one more thing where we make discoveries in space that really change the way we think about our place in it. If you can imagine this celestial body, you have a terrific imagination. Solid diamond, 10,000 times a minute. Hey, Matt, really good talking with you. Congratulations again to Planetary Radio. Thank you so much, Bill. I'm very, very pleased and proud for all of us. He is Bill Nye, the executive director of the Planetary Society.

He joins us each week with his thoughts about pulsars in the sky with diamonds, and now and then some kudos for this radio show. I'm going to be right back with the latest news about Opportunity, crawling around up there on Mars. What a long, strange, and wonderful trip it has been. The little rover with the three-month guarantee has now been exploring Mars 30 times that interval. And now, in what is likely to be its crowning glory, Opportunity has reached the rim of Endeavour, a crater that is 22 kilometers across, far larger than any yet explored. It now sits on a spot called Cape York. Several leaders of the Mars Exploration Rover mission gathered for a press conference on September 1.

It opened with an overview from Dave Lavery of NASA Headquarters in Washington. Dave has been the program executive since before the launch of Spirit and Opportunity in 2003. He is also the program executive for the next generation Mars rover program, the Mars Science Laboratory, or Curiosity. We're now on Sol 2703 of Opportunity's 90 Sol mission. During her initial explorations, the rover and her sister rover Spirit returned unprecedented science results and information about the current surface and ancient history of Mars. They confirmed theories about the presence of persistent water on the ancient surface of the planet, and Opportunity provided information that described an oxidizing, acidic, and sometimes wet history for the Meridiani-Planum region that may oppose stiff challenges to the potential for Martian life. Midway through her mission, Opportunity explored Victoria Crater for two years,

surveying the surface around the crater rim and exploring inside the crater itself before heading off to her next destination. Now, three years and 19 kilometers later, we've arrived at Endeavor Crater. And it turns out that this has the potential to be the most revealing destination ever explored by Opportunity. As you're about to hear, this region is substantially different than anything we've seen before. We're looking at this next phase of Opportunity's exploration as a whole new mission. Dave Lavery of NASA HQ, who then introduced John Callis, the Mars Exploration Rover project manager at the Jet Propulsion Lab. John gave us an update on Opportunity's condition after so many years on the punishing surface of Mars.

The batteries on the rover are in very good health. We have lithium-ion batteries. They're doing much better than the battery in my cell phone. They are still retaining a very good state of charge. We do have dust on the solar arrays, as we always have. Episodically, some of that dust gets cleaned off by wind events. We can't predict those. We can't count on them. But as it stands right now, we have pretty much the same amount of dust we had on the rover as we did one Martian year ago. So we are approaching Martian fall and then eventually

Martian winter. Dust factor is a very important thing to track. This is how much obscuration is on the solar array. So we want to make sure we have enough power during the winter. But given the amount of dust on the arrays, the current atmospheric opacity, the amount of dust in the air and the atmosphere on Mars, which is trending up just a little bit over past years, we should have enough energy to ride out the coming winter. If it does become a concern, there are mitigation things we can do with positioning the rover. We haven't had to do that in past years.

The estimates are we would have an active rover throughout the coming winter and beyond, so we expect to be able to continuously conduct science going forward. So all in all, we have a very senior rover that's showing her age. She has some arthritis and some other issues, but generally she's in good health, she's sleeping well at night, her cholesterol levels are excellent, and so we look forward to productive scientific exploration for the period ahead. I asked John Callis to say a bit more about how his staff's ingenuity has kept Opportunity going and going.

Opportunity doesn't have a lot of redundancy in it. It's mainly a single-string vehicle. So if we lose a piece of equipment or we lose a subsystem, we have to figure out how to get by without it. And we've done that in some ways. The loss of the shoulder azimuth joint on the IDD, the robotic arm, means that we can't position it as a muthli via the arm, but what we can do is turn the whole rover,

and that's what we do when we try to line up a target is we'll just turn the whole rover to try to position the arm to reach that given target. So that's one illustration. But we've spent seven and a half years with this vehicle, and we know it pretty well. And the team has been very innovative in coming up with techniques not only to deal with problems that we have, but also to add new capabilities. Dave Lavery at the top of the press conference mentioned that we did put new software on the vehicle. We recently added some autonomy such that the rover can pick out its own science targets, given certain parameters, and take high-resolution images with those.

So the team is still very much in love with this rover, and they're very dedicated to it, and they'll do what's necessary to try to maximize its utilization on the surface. John Callis, project manager for the Mars Exploration Rovers. Now we'll hear from the principal investigator for the science payload on Opportunity, Steve Squires. Even this always enthusiastic spokesperson seems to have found renewed passion for what's to come at Endeavor. Yeah, so I get the fun bit here. I get to tell you what we've been finding so far. And everything that I'm going to talk about is the first rock that we've looked at on the Rim of Endeavor crater. It's one called Tisdale II.

And as Ray mentioned, it's a piece of rock, local bedrock, that was blasted out of Odyssey Crater, which is this little 20-meter crater that's perched on the Rim of Endeavor. which is this little 20-meter crater that's perched on the rim of Endeavor. Now, to me, what we're finding so far, it feels like the beginning of the mission did. And several of the other speakers have mentioned this, too. It feels like things felt seven years ago when we first landed. Back then, we just touched it down at a new landing site. Everything was new. Everything was strange.

And I remember vividly some of our earliest press briefings where we got up and presented new results from Opportunity that at the time really posed more questions than they answered. You know, what I've got for you today is going to be very much like that. We got some interesting new results. We got some strange stuff going on. But we're not really ready yet to draw any firm conclusions from it. So I'm not here today to give you dramatic new scientific conclusions. Instead, what you should think of is you're coming along with us to a brand new geologic field site. We just got here, just started looking at the rocks, and today we're going to sit down on the rock together, and I'm going to crack open my field notebook, and I'm going to tell you what we found so far. But this is very much a work in progress. Steve Squires of Cornell University,

principal investigator for the science payload on the remaining Mars Exploration Rover opportunity. Mar from Steve in a minute when Planetary Radio continues. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine,

and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org

slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're reviewing the September 1st press conference that gathered several leaders of the Mars Exploration Rover Project. They celebrated Rover Opportunity's arrival at Giant Endeavor Crater after a years-long trek across the red planet's dusty surface. Steve Squires is Principal Investigator for the Science Payload on Opportunity. He's been telling us about a unique rock named Tisdale II. Squire showed it

in context with other rocks spread about what has been christened Cape York, a spot along the high rim of Endeavor. We've got four different rocks plotted here and they're all over the place. They're not at zero. They're up, they're down, they're everywhere, every which way. What that means is when you compare these other rocks to Tisdale, they look different. I could do a plot like this showing every single rock we've ever looked at was spared an opportunity, and none of them would look like Tisdale. Bottom line is we are seeing a rock type here that is different from anything we've ever seen before. Now, some of the elements, if you look at some of the major elements like silicon,

aluminum, magnesium, iron, they are very similar to what we've seen before. And what that's telling us is that this rock is basically a basalt. Basalt is a very common type of volcanic rock on Mars, and what we're seeing here is a basaltic breccia, a piece of basalt that has been broken up and jumbled up. But the details of the elemental chemistry are different. They're not like anything we've seen before. So this is a new kind of rock. The other big takeaway message here, and this is to me the most interesting thing about Tisdale and the most interesting that we've found so far, is that this rock has a huge

amount of zinc in it, way more zinc than we have ever seen in any Martian rock. And we are puzzling. We are thinking very hard over what that means. Now, zinc is an element that in rocks on Earth, at least, is typically one that is moved around fairly easily by water, especially hot water. And you can find rocks on Earth, when you find rocks on Earth that are rich in zinc, they typically form in a place where you have some kind of hydrothermal activity going on. In other words, you have water that gets heated up and it flows through the rocks and it can dissolve out zinc and redeposit it in various places. So this is a clue. It's not definitive proof yet, but this is a clue that we may be dealing with a hydrothermal system here.

We may be dealing with a situation where water has percolated or flowed or somehow moved through these rocks. Maybe it's vapor, maybe it's liquid, don't know yet. But it has enhanced the zinc concentration in this rock to levels far in excess of anything that we've ever seen on Mars before. So that's the beginning of what we expect is going to be a long and very interesting story about these rocks. Now, here's the question. Is the zinc in these rocks really telling us something about water? The thing is, there are things that we can look for.

There are things that we can do next. Okay, does the zinc, we've only looked at one rock so far. Does the zinc vary from place to place? Is it concentrated along fractures, along veins where water can move most easily? Does zinc correlate with other elements? In other words, if zinc is high, are there other elements that are transported easily by water that are high as well? If you look at this rock, you see that there's a lot of chlorine in it. There's a lot of sulfur. Well, chlorine and sulfur are also elements that are moved easily by water. Does that story hold up as we go and look at other rocks? So what we need to do is go now and look at other rocks,

in particular try to find bedrock here on Cape York. That's stuff that's in place, stuff that hasn't been transported, hasn't been moved. here on Cape York. That's stuff that's in place, stuff that hasn't been transported, hasn't been moved. We think that the best place to find bedrock at Cape York is somewhere to the northeast of our current location. So that's where we're going. We plan to drive to the northeast yesterday. It just executed. We're going to be driving further to the northeast, and we will see what we see. Once we find some bedrock, we're going to look at it again, just like we have here. We're going to apply other tools to it. We have our RAT, our rock abrasion tool, that we can use to grind into rock. Now, we didn't use the

RAT on Tisdale because Tisdale is too bumpy. It's too rough. It's very hard for the RAT to handle. We're going to be looking for flatter rocks that maybe we can use to grind into, see if this zinc is all the way through rather than just a coating on the outside. We'll be looking for other evidence of water activity. So stay tuned is basically the message. We've got an interesting story that we're working here. We've got a basaltic breccia that's chock full of zinc. It's telling us something probably about water. We're heading to the northeast to look for bedrock. Could be there in just a matter of days. And then we'll see what we see. It's pretty much pure exploration at this point. So a rock that just possibly indicates past geothermal activity on Mars. Steve Squires was asked what kind of geothermal activity.

Was this once the Yellowstone Park of the Red Planet? You can imagine many ways in which water and hot rock can interact with one another. I mean, the most spectacular are geysers and that sort of thing. But there are much simpler ways. You can just have warmish water percolating through the ground and depositing minerals as it goes. You can have hot vapor, no liquid at all, but hot vapor sort of coursing through the rocks and changing the chemistry as it goes. All of these are possibilities, and it's just way, way, way too early to speculate,

even meaningfully, on the exact interactions that have taken place here. You know, what I'd love to know is I'd love to know if you were standing there with your boots on the ground right after the crater formed and it's still hot from the impact, what would it look like? But it's just too early to say at this point. We need to look. We've looked at one rock. Steve Squires, principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover science payload at a September 1st press conference.

Let's hope it is far from the last report we'll get about Opportunity at Endeavor Crater. Bruce Betts will join me of projects with Planetary Society, and for going on nine years now, he has been doing the What's Up segment with me. I just almost dropped my stopwatch there. I don't know if you could tell. Which means, big guy, that you have a big part in this winning of the Parsec Award. So congratulations. Thank you, and congratulations to you.

How does it feel to be a newly award-winning producer host it feels uh pretty good it feels pretty good it feels like i'm about uh 3.3 light years wide my head right now so it only grew by a little bit yeah just a tiny bit five six percent here's the actual winning of the award. You ready for this? And the Parsec Award for Best Fact Behind the Fiction Podcast goes to

Planetary Radio. Planetary Radio. So, you had a couple of other podcast winners there, past winners, who came up and gave out all the awards. And these guys were, the whole thing was very entertaining. People had a great time. And I got up and made my little speech. And I have to say, I mentioned that I still don't know who nominated us. The nomination has to come from a listener.

So if you're out there, send us email. But thank you so much. Your effort paid off. We have a nice little trophy to prove it. Next week, I'm going to try and feature some of the material that I collected at DragonCon

in Atlanta. Speech! Speech! Well, friends, Romans, countrymen, it was fourscore, and now, you know, we'll do that some other time. I look forward to it. Yeah, I bet. So what's up? Now we've taken, like, all of the time we have to tell people about the night sky. We only get to do it when we travel to places and win awards. That's true. It's rare. So in the pre-dawn, cool stuff this week. Mercury is low in the east pre-dawn, and it's really close to the bright star Regulus in Leo. And what's also interesting is if you watch it over a few days, Mercury brightens considerably. Mercury

being quite variable compared to the others due to its speediness and the big changes in phase that we see, really changes the brightness. So it'll go from pretty bright to quite really bright. Certainly check it out near Regulus in the pre-dawn. In the mid to late evening, Jupiter's coming up, just dominating over in the east, super bright looking Jupiter. We move on to this week in space history. Voyager 1 launched this week in 1977. And one for you, Matt.

As always, I try to point it out. 1966, what happened this week? Is this the Lost in Space anniversary? Close. It is Star Trek premiered. Oh, of course. Of course. September 1966. Oh, of course, of course. September 1966. Oh,

Captain Kirk will never forgive me. But it is logical, too. He was there, by the way, at DragonCon. The Shat. I couldn't get into his thing. I came out of the awards and wanted to catch the end of his. They wouldn't let us in because it was full. You sure that was the only reason?

I think so. Two words, restraining order. That went away years ago. Oh, okay, good. We move on to random space fact. Which is how a lot of the people in costume sounded at Dragon Con, actually. Satellites, moons in the Jupiter system are named for Jupiter's lovers and descendants. But here's another

tidbit you may not have known, even if you knew that. Names of outer satellites with a pro-grade orbit generally end with the letter A. And names of satellites with a retro-grade orbit end with an E. No kidding. There's 64 known satellites so far, and they're kind of all over the place when you start going farther out in lots of different inclinations, some of them retrograde orbiting the opposite direction from the planet's rotation,

some prograde. Very clever. All right, let's go on to the trivia contest. some prograde. Very clever. All right, let's go on to the trivia contest. We asked you, who holds the title of fastest human or humans relative to Earth? How'd we do? I guess we have to disqualify David Kaplan's answer, because he said that it was probably the Roadrunner one who was being chased by Wile E. Coyote. But he's a bird, as david pointed out yeah yeah so we go to the answer that most people came up with our winner this week jason lehman jason lehman of raleigh north carolina not too far from where i just came back from and he said it was the crew of apollo 10 eugene cernan john

young and tom stafford they got up to 39,896 kilometers per hour, also 24,791 miles per hour, or perhaps most significantly 37 ten-thousandths of C of the speed of light. Really? That high? Yeah, it's actually a little better

than I would have expected. Jason, you won. We're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Thanks for playing. All right, we move on to our next question. Where does the word parsec come from? Parsec, as you alluded to, is about a unit of distance, about 3.26 light years. But where does the word come from?

Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. but where does the word come from? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. And this time you have until September 12, Monday, September 12 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get this Parsec award-winning program, That Answer. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky and think about what Matt would look like

with a head that were actually one parsec in diameter. Thank you and good night but don't think too long it's terrifying not so different uh he's bruce betts the director of projects for the planetary society and he joins us every week here for what's up next week my visit to dragon con the big science fiction and fantasy convention in atlanta georgia where i heard about how the world will end. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible by a grant from the William T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society.

Clear skies. Thank you.