Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Orion Launches Into History

Episode Date: December 9, 2014

NASA’s Orion spacecraft has taken its first step toward Mars and an asteroid mission. The Planetary Society’s Jason Davis was at the Kennedy Space Center for the December 5 mission.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, and that roar was the launch of Orion in the early hours of Friday, December 5th. Most of our show this week is dedicated to that very successful test mission. We'll talk with producer-reporter Jason Davis and hear from others who were there. First, though, it's Off to Pluto with Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, you have a great new piece posted to planetary.org on the 4th of December, leading into the big milestone that took place over the weekend for New Horizons. Tell us about that. Sure. Well, New Horizons has been cruising for an awful long time in order to get to Pluto.

And we're finally, as the mission says, on Pluto's doorstep. And New Horizons has spent much of its cruise hibernating in a sort of sleepy mode where it just rouses itself enough to beep once at Earth every week. But now it's woken up and is ready to get ready to begin science observations. It'll actually begin those science observations in January and will continue doing science right through the Pluto encounter in July and even a few weeks after. few weeks after. So anybody who wants a good overview of this mission and the great things to come in the next few months, you really should take a look at this June 4th entry by Emily. It goes through the instruments. It has a great little sort of block diagram of what will be happening during each phase of this close encounter. And then you have this wonderful table that you've, I think you created, of the quality of images that we can

expect to see as we close in on the planet or the dwarf planet. Yeah, it's real important to be patient with New Horizons as it approaches Pluto because it's going really fast. And what that means is that it spends most of its time very far away from Pluto. So the images that we're going to get are not going to be all that spectacular until New Horizons is right on top of Pluto in July. Beginning in April, they'll still be the best images of Pluto that we've ever had, every single new one that we get, but they'll still be fairly smudgy and difficult to interpret until right around July. I don't know if you heard the term that Alan Stern introduced us to on the webcast we did as New Horizons woke up on Saturday of the weekend, the 6th of December. It was BTH, Better Than Hubble.

Better Than Hubble. And, you know, that's actually a difficult comparison to make because, after all, New Horizons, one of the things that made this mission possible is the miniaturization of its instruments. And its fancy science camera instrument weighs only four kilograms. All of its instruments weigh less than the main camera on Cassini. So these are small instruments. They have relatively small capabilities, but it's huge inside the package of New Horizons, and it's going to be doing absolutely fabulous science. But we'll still have to be pretty patient in order to get the best results. One other quick thing I hope you can mention. You say in this piece that you've written

that the New Horizons science team, the whole team, has proven itself very open to sharing data with the public. Oh, absolutely. You know, when they flew past Jupiter, they were sharing images in near real time at very high quality. And we got to see with them that there were volcanoes in the act of erupting on Io. It was absolutely incredible. And we'll get that same experience. Well, maybe not volcanoes erupting on Io, it was absolutely incredible. And we'll get that same experience. Well, maybe not volcanoes erupting on Pluto. I think that's too much to hope for. But we will, the public will be seeing the images for the first time at just about the

same time the mission is. We'll all get to enjoy it together. It's going to be a thrill. Who knows? Maybe we'll be surprised by one of those cryovolcanoes that we've talked about in the past. Emily, thanks so much. This has been great talking to you. And we all look forward to following this terrific mission.

Me too, Matt. You might also want to take a look at another entry by Emily, a recent one, Dawn, the Dawn spacecraft looking at Ceres. And Emily explains what's so important about being round. Anyway, she is the senior editor, our planetary evangelist at the Planetary Society, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine, Emily Lakdawalla. Up next, Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill, in just a couple of minutes, we're going to be talking with our colleague Jason Davis, who was at the launch of Orion. I thought it would be great to get your thoughts about this very successful

mission. Hey, we're on our way to Mars. It's very easy to say, but this capsule, capable of carrying humans farther and deeper into space than anybody's gone ever, actually, capable of taking beyond the moon, this is a big deal because people have been working on it for so many years. It's been such a, to use the modern term, political football. People funded the program as part of Constellation, the vision for the space exploration, the VSE. Then it was not, and then it was again, and now it is again. So it finally flew, and it flew perfectly. Splashdown, just like the good old days. It's a reapplication of all the expertise people accumulated during the Apollo era. Now, with the fundamental intent of going into deep space,

beyond the orbit of the moon to the Lagrange point, to the place where gravity is in balance, beyond the moon, it's exciting. So this, we all hope, will lead to a mission. I'm not kidding, all hope will lead to a mission. I'm not kidding, Matt, a mission that orbits Mars and comes back very much analogous to Apollo 8. I mean, not this weekend, but in the coming years. And just to have it go flawlessly on a very big rocket, a Delta 4, shows that the thing will work. And then when we get these new big, big rockets, the Falcon 9 Heavy and then the SLS, the Space Launch System, everything is designed to be compatible. You just gently set this thing on top there and you go zooming out beyond farther than anyone has ever been from the Earth. So here's to the future. This really could reignite everybody's interest in space because humans will be involved.

And it will, I strongly feel, help this thing you hear about constantly, science, technology, engineering, and math, the STEM effort that is throughout the U.S. education system and Canada. STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM. If we have a space program with people going successfully farther and deeper into space. It will, as I so often remark, Matt, change the world. And if that crowd, that enthusiastic crowd down there in Florida is any indication, I'd say you're absolutely right. Thank you very much, Bill. Thank you, Matt. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society. That's Bill Nye, the science guy. In just a moment, as promised, we're going to talk with Jason Davis. He was there for the launch.

Jason Davis was writing for the Planetary Society long before he became a staff media producer and reporter. He's our embedded light sail correspondent, but still manages to cover other stories. That's why he was at the Kennedy Space Center on December 5th to have his bones rattled by the launch of NASA's Orion spacecraft. He wasn't alone. Hundreds of media reps and tens of thousands of other witnesses had filled all the local hotel rooms. They had to endure a Thursday scrub caused by bulky hydrogen valves and a wayward boat,

but on Friday morning, they got what they came for. Jason, thanks so much for joining us on Planetary Radio, and let me begin by saying how incredibly envious I am of you for getting to go to see this very successful, glorious launch. Well, Matt, thanks for having me. And yeah, I'm sorry you didn't get to go. You were there in spirit along with the rest of everybody at the Planetary Society. Well, I'll settle for spirit, but I'd rather have been there in body. But anyway, why did the Planetary Society feel it was important to have not just you, but a couple of people at this launch? Well, the Planetary Society is very interested in NASA's current human spaceflight plans.

NASA's stated goal is to put humans on Mars, and having humans there to do science directly on the surface would be huge for planetary science. So as part of that, they've decided to increase their coverage. And I was the first salvo in that going to cover this live. For the one, maybe one and a half people in our audience who don't know what Orion is, give us a little 30-second backgrounder. Sure. Orion is NASA's next human spacecraft that will carry astronauts into space. It's supposed to go to deep space, so beyond low Earth orbit. It was

originally announced back in 2004 as part of the Constellation Program. That program was canceled in 2011, but Orion carried through when the new goal became to visit an asteroid and then go on to Mars. Orion has a new rocket system called the Space Launch System. That's a giant rocket that will ultimately be bigger than the Saturn V. It'll carry Orion eventually, but this was the first test flight of the spacecraft. So it was 10 years in the making. And it was just a little two-orbit shakedown cruise that ended in the Pacific Ocean. And it took the biggest rocket that's currently available to put it in orbit. And that's the Delta IV Heavy. That's United Launch Alliance's rocket. Two orbits, but one of those got pretty far out there, right?

Yeah, yeah. That went up to a 5,800 kilometer apogee. You could really see the disk of the Earth at one point with one of the cameras looking out the window. Very cool. When the SLS is finished and ready for that first launch, hopefully in 2017, it's apparently going to use an almost entirely new sort of launch platform or pad. Did you get to see that new system? Yeah, I sure did. I talked to a gentleman named Scott Thurston about this. He's Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Integration and Launch Operations Manager. We were at the construction site where they're putting together the mobile launch platform that the SLS is going to take out to the launch pad. And so here's Scott talking with me at this very noisy construction site where they're doing that. Can you describe what we're looking at here?

So in a nutshell, what we're actually standing next to is what the big new NASA rocket is going to launch off of. It is what we call a mobile launcher. It's a 405-foot tower that all of the umbilicals that will connect the ground systems to be able to fuel the rocket and test it, put the crew in it, make sure everything's good to go and launch it. And the concept, the reason I say mobile is because this will actually move with the rocket. We'll assemble the rocket on this structure inside of the vehicle assembly building and then move it to the pad and launch from it, which is different than what NASA has done in the shuttle.

In shuttle, we did everything on top of a platform and took it to a launch pad, had to reconnect to the launch pad, and that's how we launched. Here, it all stays together. So the concept is we have access to the rocket 365 days of the year, 24 hours, that kind of thing, seven days a week. So we don't have to move it to get to areas. We always have that. And how long before the launch will you take it out to the pad on this, as opposed to the shuttle program? Yeah, the shuttle program, because we had to go to the launch pad and connect everything up,

typically we spent a month at the launch pad with SLS, Space Launch System, and this concept, we'll spend less than two weeks at the launch pad because everything's already connected. All right, Jason, sounds like that'll be an amazing sight. I know you also spent a few minutes with NASA's chief scientist. Tell us about that conversation. Yeah, Ellen Stofan was one of many representatives from NASA headquarters that came down to watch this launch. And so I asked her what this means for the future in terms of the science side of NASA.

Orion is the first critical step to move us as humans beyond low Earth orbit. Incredibly exciting. Seeing Orion launch tomorrow, seeing it splash down in the Pacific four and a half hours later, four hours later, to me is just such a tangible example of saying we're on this path to Mars. As chief scientist, I look across all of what we do at NASA, and to me, this is all about the science fundamentally because this is the first step to get us on the journey to Mars. And as a planetary scientist, I want to know,

did life evolve on Mars? And I have a bias as a field geologist that it's going to take astrobiologists, geologists, chemists on the surface of Mars, being able to go out and read a landscape, pick up rocks, take them into a lab, say, okay, these aren't the right rocks, going out, iterating, iterating, being creative. That's what humans can do. And it's not that our robotic exploration isn't important.

It's not that we're not learning great things. But to me, to really resolve this question of did life evolve on Mars, which many of us believe that it did. How can we use that information to better understand life itself? When you look at how far opportunity has gone over its 10 years, when you look at how far curiosity has gone in two years, a human could cover that in a couple days. And again, to me, science is an iterative, creative process. And teleoperations only gets you so far. You have to be very careful with your robot.

Humans, again, can go out, pick up a rock, put it down, go out, come back in. You know, there's just so much more flexibility that we just don't have with our robotic explorers. And when you're trying to answer really tough scientific questions, scientific questions that the scientific community will be hugely debating. You need scientists in place. So I also asked Ellen why NASA doesn't say more about the details of how we will reach Mars in the next 20 years. And here's what she had to say on that. Part of the reason we don't is because we haven't figured it out yet. And, you know, I also think that that doesn't focus on what we've accomplished to date.

You know, we're launching Orion tomorrow. We're building the SLS. You know, we are doing research right now with Curiosity. All of that is putting us on this path to Mars. We're on the path. I would argue we're far down the path. Now, how exactly we lay out the next 15 to 20 years in terms of how do we do the research we need to do on the International Space Station and then potentially in cislunar space to make sure humans can be healthy when they get to Mars, be healthy for that journey back.

That's something we have a very specific list of what are the risks to sending humans to Mars and how do we use the next 10 years on the International Space Station to buy down those risks. So we're confident. We're working on that. We're making progress every day. The Planetary Society's Jason Davis talking with NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan. He'll be back with more sound and fury from the launch of Orion when Planetary Radio continues. Hi, Emily Lakdawalla here. Thank you for listening to Planetary Radio. The Planetary Society has lots more ways for you to hear the latest news and see the greatest pictures from around our solar system.

I lead a growing family of expert bloggers at Planetary.org. We cover nearly every angle on space exploration. And you can find us all over online, tweeting and posting to our popular Facebook and Google Plus pages. We're also producing great new videos for our YouTube channel. There's no doubt about it, we really are your place in space. Random Space Fact! Nothing new about that for you, Planetary Radio fans, right? Wrong!

Random Space Fact is now a video series, too. And it's brilliant, isn't it, Matt? I hate to say it, folks, but it really is, and hilarious. See, Matt would never lie to you, would he? I really wouldn't. A new random space fact video is released each Friday at youtube.com slash planetary society. You can subscribe to join our growing community and you'll never miss a fact. Can I go back to my radio now? Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, visiting this week with my colleague Jason Davis, just back from the triumphantly successful first test flight of NASA's Orion spacecraft, the capsule that someday may take humans to Mars. Jason, tell us about your experience of the launch. itself and see the rollback at around midnight. I didn't get any sleep that night.

We had to get up at 3 a.m. to get to the press site after that. So that was a long day. But I went up to the roof of the Vehicle Assembly Building for, again, the 1% of people that might not know listening to this. That's the giant iconic building that you see in all the pictures at Kennedy Space Center where they stack rockets. I went with a small team of photographers, and we had to kind of wade through multiple elevators, all of the construction that's going on. You duck under steel girders and small platforms, and eventually you get clear up on the roof. Boy, when it finally launched during the second attempt the following day, you could just feel the vehicle assembly building shaking beneath your feet. It's a big building. It's over 500 feet tall, one of the biggest buildings in the world by volume.

But you could just hear the crackle of those three engines on that rocket. It was a pretty incredible experience. Now, I think you have just quadrupled my level of envy for your experience. Now, I think you have just quadrupled my level of envy for your experience. And not just of you, the Planetary Society's ace video producer, Merck Boyan, was also at the launch. Where was he at liftoff? So we sent Merck down to the NASA Causeway, and that's a small kind of a land bridge that goes across one of the many waterways around Kennedy Space Center. And there were thousands of onlookers there watching as well. So I want to play a montage from Merck that captures the power and the emotion of the launch from a new era of the world's space. Wow! I know! I'm like, why am I crying? Oh man, a run just went up. Delta 4 heavy. Fire came out from all up under it. It was incredible. You could feel it as it was going up. It was just magnificent. It was magnificent. Oh, man.

There are just no words, you know? You can feel it and you can taste it and still it was beyond anything I ever even imagined. My daughter and I were talking yesterday and talking about how they keep telling us that the people who will walk on Mars are alive today? I'll let her go. Oh, my God, I'll let her go. How could they not get emotional at that? This is the world's future. This is our future.

How do you not? I mean, oh, my God, this is a success that we needed so bad. Wow, just a bit of the emotional response from so many of the people who showed up for the launch that day. Jason, review the success of this mission for us. How did it go? So it was nearly perfect. It was eerily quiet in mission control. We got word that Mike Serif and the flight director went to take a quick break during the mission. And he asked his team before he walked out of the room if anyone was working any issues. And it was just dead silence on the audio loop. By all accounts, this was very successful. They have a little bit of post-flight

analysis to do on the heat shield to see exactly how well it performed. We had beautiful live video of the Earth's slim, including during reentry. And I've never seen anything like that where you actually were able to see the spacecraft live coming back to Earth. Splashdown was right on schedule. The spacecraft was hauled into the well deck of the USS Anchorage and it'll be shipped back to KSC. So this was a big moment for NASA and pretty much an unqualified success. Just a couple of minor glitches at the very end with an airbag that didn't inflate properly. But overall, a big moment for them and a big success. What other coverage can listeners find at Planetary.org?

If you go under my blog there at Planetary.org, you can see all of my articles about Orion. And I believe on our YouTube page as well, we have several launch videos, one kind of beautiful piece that Merck put together. And we hope to have some more coming as well. So everything can be found there. When I tweeted about that launch video that Merck did, I said, here's the prettiest video of Orion you will see anywhere. I stand by that statement. Great work, Jason. You and Merck both, thank you so much for all of this and for joining us on the show today. Well, it was my pleasure, Matt. Thanks for having me.

Jason Davis is a media producer and reporter for the Planetary Society. He and Merck Boyan have just returned from the successful first mission of Orion, the spaceship that will return humans to deep space. Up next, we'll return to deep space. We'll do that with Bruce Batts for this week's edition of What's Up. Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, comes to us this week on his cell phone because he is, well, why is that? Where are you? I am in Arizona at Arizona State University for the first meeting of the Mars 2020 Mastcam-Z imager team, the pretty picture stereo color imager from the mast of the Mars 2020 rover,

similar to the Curiosity imager, but now will have spiffy zoom capability, as well as a couple additional filters. It's led by Jim Bell, who's a professor here, but also a Planetary Society president. And the Planetary Society is the official education outreach partner with the instruments. So we're getting fired up and getting the gang back together and planning ahead six years for landing on Mars. Excellent. Something to very much look forward to. For right now, tell us about the current night sky. something to very much look forward to.

For right now, tell us about the current night sky. Well, speaking of Mars, Mars is visible in the early evening still over in the southwest, looking reddish, not too bright, but kind of bright. But super bright is Jupiter coming up around 10 or 11 p.m. over in the east, looking really, really bright. If you pick this up right after it comes out, you can see the moon next to it on December 10th and 11th. And the Geminid meteor shower is coming up and peaking on December 13th, 14th. So go out and get comfortable and stare up at the sky. There'll be a little bit of moon, particularly after midnight, but otherwise. So you got the on average best meteor shower of the year with 60 to 100 meteors per hour from a dark site.

This week in space history was this week in 1972 that Apollo 17 landed and left the moon. So last humans on the moon this week, 1972. Heavy sigh. On to... That probably is the best way to do it on the cell phone. Particularly because I'm standing in a lobby, and I don't know who's going to be annoyed if I yell right at the moment. So Orion, that you've been talking about,

very similar design. You'll notice when you look at it, it's very much like the Apollo Command module. Not coincidental. They used the design that worked. But it's bigger. So it's instead They used the design that worked. But it's bigger. So instead of a maximum diameter of 3.9 meters with Apollo, it's about 5 meters in diameter with Orion.

Still not the size that I would want to ride all the way to Mars and back in, unless they attach a rumpus room or something. Well, if they go to Mars, they'll have to attach it to something else. They say they get about 21 days out of Orion as is, but you can add to it and get many months with other components, theoretically. On to the trivia contest. We asked you,

what are the two active region numbers so far for the largest active region on the Sun in the last 24 years. It first appeared in October this year and then rotated around the sun, came back into view. How'd we do? I don't know why. A particularly large number of people telling us how much they are enjoying Planetary Radio. Thank you, all of you.

I'll try to respond to at least some of you. I wish I could respond to everyone. Our winner this time, you already told me that this is the correct answer, so I will simply say that it is Frank Loso of Aberdeen, New Mexico, chosen by Random.org, a first-time winner. He said AR-2192 was the designation during the first rotation, and when it came back around, AR-2209. I still find it so strange that they renamed the same sunspot.

I do that with my children. Each time when they come home from school? Yes, exactly. They love it. I can't tell you how much they love it. Oh my, I can just imagine. Nick Priest said that he's been watching it, or was watching it with his telescope. He said sometimes you can see the tidal movement within the active region. Truly amazing. I didn't even know there was tidal movement on a sunspot.

Do you know anything about that? Surf's up. I'm sorry. No, not much I'm not much of a helioseismologist but big sunspots they change lots of plasma the sun is hot

well you may not be a solar guy but Claude Plymate is and fortunately for us he wasn't chosen as the winner this week because he's a solar astronomer at the Big Bear Solar Observatory here in Southern California. And we didn't have to go through whether he should be disqualified for answering this question. Listen, I forgot to say that our winner, Frank Loso, is going to get another of those 200-point accounts from itelescope.net. The folks with a network of telescopes that you can choose from all over the world and use the account to do observing, do astrophotography,

if anything, you choose to point one of those telescopes at northern and southern exposure, and we're going to do that again. Give away a 200-point account that's worth $200 U.S. For the person who is chosen by random.org and has the correct answer this time around, what have you got for people? For the Orion recovery from last week, what ship was, what U.S. Navy ship recovered the Orion capsule? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. And you want to get that to us by the 16th, Tuesday, December 16th, at 2 p.m. Pacific time.

Easy one, folks. If you heard the earlier portion of this show, the answer was in there. Well, sure. I just wanted to quiz them in case they were getting lazy. All right. Quiz complete. We're done. All right, everybody.

Go out there. Look up at night sky and think about what you would zoom into on Mars. Thank you, and good night. I think I'd want to get up close and personal with one of the canals myself. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week here for What's Up. You can still see our webcast recorded on the night of December 6th, when New Horizons woke from hibernation to begin its run at Pluto. It's on the Planetary Society YouTube channel. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the launch-happy members of the Society.

Clear skies. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова