Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Our Mysterious Sister: Venus

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

Astrophysicist Javier Peralta takes us deep into the thick, fast-moving clouds of the world that is still called Earth's sister by some. Venus is slow to reveal its secrets. Jason Davis helps us celebrate the 50th anniversary of Apollo 12. The Planetary Society wants to hear your space goals, accomplishments and dreams! And Bruce Betts reveals the identity of the first gourmet in space. Space headlines from The Downlink, too. Learn more about this week’s guest and topics at: https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/1106-2019-javier-peralta.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our mysterious sister, Venus, 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. Astrophysicist Javier Peralta has written an outstanding article in the Planetary Report about cloud-shrouded Venus, we will talk with this Spaniard who has lived and worked in Japan for the last five years. We've reached another 50th anniversary. This time it's the Apollo 12 mission,

and Jason Davis will remind us of its impressive accomplishments. Who had the first meal in space? We'll find out in What's Up. Bruce Betts fooled a lot of you with this installment of the Space Trivia Contest. A special invitation from the Planetary Society is moments away after we sample the week's headlines from around the solar system. NASA plans to launch a water mapping rover to the moon's south pole in 2022. mapping rover to the moon's south pole in 2022. VIPER is the Volatile's investigating polar exploration rover.

It will analyze ice in the moon's permanently shadowed craters using a one-meter-long drill built by Honeybee Robotics. The Planetary Society has helped fund tests of several Honeybee technologies over the years, including Planetary Deep Drill and PlanetVac, both of which we've covered on Planetary Radio. The long struggle of the so-called mole instrument, on the inside Mars lander, continues. The little self-hammering probe had appeared to make progress in recent days with help from the craft's robotic arm.

Well, it suddenly backed itself out of its hole. I've been told that this behavior has also been seen in the simulations underway at JPL, and that the mission team remains hopeful. But it does make me wonder about Martian gophers. And we now know more about yet another roughly spherical asteroid. Hygieia is the fourth largest in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. With a diameter of about 430 kilometers, it was imaged by the Very Large Telescope, yes, that's its name, in Chile. You can read these stories and more in The Downlink,

presented by Planetary Society editorial director Jason Davis. It's at planetary.org slash downlink. Kate Howells is another of my colleagues with a lot on her plate. Her latest dream project is one we can all participate in. She introduced me to it as I was pulling together this week's episode. Kate, I love this new opportunity, not just for our members, but for everybody, right? But I got it because I'm a member of the Planetary Society. I got email from you just yesterday as we speak.

Tell us about this Space Goals Project. Yeah, so this project was actually inspired by birdwatching. People who are avid birdwatchers can subscribe to a life list where they keep track of all the different birds they've seen, and they can get ideas for birds in their area that they might try to find. So we wanted to do a similar thing with space experiences, different things that as a space enthusiast, you might want to experience or that you might have already experienced. So we want to build a way for you to get new ideas for things you can do to enrich your experience as a space enthusiast and a way to track those things that you have done throughout your life.

Keep track of how much of a space fan you are. And this is, as I read it, not just a way to talk about things that you hope to do, but things that other people might be able to take on as well. Yeah, exactly. So the way that we're building this big catalog of space experiences is by crowdsourcing it. So we're turning to our community, our members and our supporters, our listeners, our viewers, anybody who is tuned in to the Planetary Society, anybody who is interested in space can submit their ideas. So we're hoping to really get a lot of submissions from around the world of things that are easy to do in your backyard, like looking at the moon through binoculars, ranging all the way to things that are once-in-a-lifetime experiences that you might have to travel to experience or pay some money to do things like that. How can people get in on this?

So if you go to planetary.org slash space goals, you will be able to submit your ideas. The form lets you submit up to three, but you can do the same form over and over again and submit as many as you'd like for those who are really keen. Over the course of the next year, we're going to look through all of the submissions and finalize the sort of ultimate catalog and release that publicly to our members and to anybody who's interested sometime next year. But it's going to be this long process to really carefully put together what we think is going to be the ultimate list of space life goals. You have to have expected that I would ask you for your, at least your top three. Have you filled one out yet? I have, yes. Some of the best experiences that I've already had

include seeing Saturn's rings through a telescope. That was one of my earliest influential space experiences. Me too. And of course, going to see light sail launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket. I mean, I know that's a once in a lifetime experience, but going and seeing a rocket launch in person is definitely something I would recommend that every real diehard space fan try to do at some point in their life. I couldn't agree more. As for aspirations, I have always wanted to travel far enough north to see the Aurora Borealis. I live in Canada, so I don't have to go too, too far, but I never have seen that. So that's

definitely on my space life goals list. Can I share mine? Absolutely, please. These are just a few examples. Now, I would have to include that Falcon Heavy launch and then getting the first signal back from light sail. So yeah, one of a kind, I know, but everybody really owes themselves a rocket launch, a big rocket launch, at least once in their life. I always think of the trip that I made to Chile, I always think of the trip that I made to Chile to the Atacama Desert where we visited the Alma Array, but much closer to home and something that anybody, and particularly you folks who are already amateur astronomers or maybe professional astronomers, I remember when I think I was nine or so and got my first view of Saturn through a telescope, just like you. But now, I love sharing it. I love

going to where there are young people or adults, many of whom inevitably have never looked through a telescope, and showing them our solar system and the wonders of the cosmos for the first time. There is really nothing like it. I hope to keep doing that for a long time to come. That's a good one. Yeah. Thanks, Kate. And thank you for this great new project. What's that URL again? Planetary.org slash space goals. All right. Easy enough. Check it out. And we look forward to seeing your space goals, your space dreams, your space memories in this new service by the Planetary Society. Thanks a lot, Kate. Thank you. Kate Howells is the Planetary Society. Thanks a lot, Kate. Thank you.

Kate Howells is the Planetary Society's Communication Strategy and Canadian Space Policy Advisor. Onward to Jason Davis, who has just prepared a tribute to the Apollo 12 mission. It will be announced publicly on November 13th, the day before the 50th anniversary of the launch. But, shh, don't tell anyone, but you Planetary Radio listeners can get early access at planetary.org slash Apollo 12. They weren't the first to the moon, but they were the second to the moon. That's still pretty exciting. And I'm glad that

we're going to actually, that we already have this tribute to the Apollo 12 astronauts. I wonder, I wonder how they feel about being the second crew. You know, I know Buzz Aldrin doesn't like being referred to the second man to walk on the moon. Wonder how they feel about it. But yeah, I think in my book, that's pretty good. Number three and four on the moon is good in my book. Absolutely. And only 12 who made it down to the surface at all.

And we should include the command module pilot. Tell us a little bit about the basics of this second very successful flight to the moon that got off to kind of a scary start. Let's start with that scary start. So it launched 50 years ago on November 14th, 1969. They launched into kind of a rainy overcast skies, and the Saturn V got struck by lightning twice during ascent. This had the effect of knocking out their attitude control indicators. They were essentially flying blind, at least from their perspective. It knocked power from their fuel cells over to batteries. So they were having quite a few problems as they're riding to orbit. Luckily,

the Saturn V has its own independent instrumentation that kept flying the vehicle and blasting them onto orbit, even though the crew essentially didn't know what was going on. This was a pretty famous incident in which one of the flight controllers knew what was going on and recommended the crew make this obscure switch flip. And he said, try SCE to Ox. I've actually seen that printed on t-shirts. I don't know if you've, you know, pretty obscure space fact, but try SCE to Ox was the command that restored power or eventually helped get things back on track.

And they made it to orbit, checked for more damage and ended up being okay and heading onto the moon. But they were moments from getting to be the first to not just test, but actually rely on that escape system, right? It was pretty close. If they hadn't been able to restore power to those fuel cells and, you know, get their attitude control system back online, it was very possible that the folks in Houston would have triggered it on board to bring them back. Wow. Fairly uneventful from then on, on their way to the moon? Yeah, yeah. So they, uneventful, went to lunar orbit. Pete Conrad

was the commander. Richard Gordon was the command module pilot who stayed behind. And Alan Bean was the other astronaut who was Bean and Conrad who went down to the surface. Yeah, they landed without incident. They landed in the ocean of storms. That's the huge dark region you can see from Earth. Motionellus Procolarum, I think is maybe how it's pronounced in Latin. But yeah, they landed without incident. And getting to the spot, they landed without it. These are for you to say. Yeah. And getting to the spot where they wanted to land,

this is a great story in itself that you tell on this Apollo 12 page. Yeah, this was one of my favorite pieces of Apollo trivia that I don't think is well known. And it just so happened that when I was in grad school, I met the guy responsible for some of this. Essentially, during Apollo 11, as most of us know, Neil Armstrong had to kind of take semi-manual control of the lander and dodge a bunch of boulders and a crater because the computer was bringing them into a bad spot. They ended up landing quite a bit downrange, about six kilometers away from where they'd hoped. Now, NASA knew that they needed that ability. They

needed to be able to demonstrate a pinpoint landing land right where they say they were going to, because for future Apollo crews, they wanted to go to some harder to reach scientific destinations. They knew they wouldn't be able to do that unless they were able to demonstrate this pinpoint landing. But the question is, how do you know you've landed right where you intend to land? So they needed a known point on the lunar surface where they could target. Now, fortunately, a couple of years before that, there was this lunar scientist, his name was Ewan Whitaker. Unfortunately, he's passed away now, but I had a chance to work with him when I was in grad school doing this documentary called Desert Moon. Ewan was very meticulous, and he

had managed to find NASA's Surveyor 1 spacecraft after it landed. In fact, the coordinates for Surveyor 1 were published in an academic journal. I think it was Science or something like that. And Ewan looked at that work and decided that NASA was wrong, essentially. He republished his own results of where Surveyor 1 or where he thought it would be, sent them off to NASA, and NASA looked at it again and said, you know, I think this guy's right. He's got the correct location here. hey, can you help us find Surveyor 3 on the surface? So he looked at pictures from the lander. He looked at aerial photography. Well, not aerial, I guess, orbital photography. No air around the moon. He looked at orbital photography from the lunar orbiter spacecraft, and he was able to figure out exactly where Surveyor 3 landed. And this was a colossal task back then. We didn't have all the modern digital ways of looking at maps of the moon.

He's working on print, has all this stuff laid out on a table. He found exactly where Surveyor 3 was, gave NASA the coordinates. And so when it came time for Apollo 12, NASA said, hey, this is perfect. We know exactly where Surveyor 3 is. Let's have the Apollo 12 astronauts land next to Surveyor 3. And that will ultimately show that we can do these pinpoint landings. That's what they did. Bean and Conrad touched down.

They were about 160 meters away from Surveyor 3. It was perfect. They popped out on their first EVA, and there's actual audio of them saying, hey, look, it's Surveyor, and they were excited to see it. Yeah, it's just one of those neat little stories from the Apollo program and scientists who helped make that happen. It is a great accomplishment, a great bit of history,

and what a legacy for this fellow that you actually got to interact with. And there were other advantages because I know they went over and they took pieces off of Surveyor, right? And they got to bring them back home and see what spending two years on the moon did to a piece of machinery. Yeah, yeah. Engineers were really excited about the chance to actually bring home a piece of something that had spent that long in space. So they brought home the TV camera, and were able to look at the gears and mechanisms and see how well it had held up.

And interestingly, they did find bacteria deep inside the camera. They published some initial results and said, hey, it looks like bacteria survived in space for two years. Then some later studies were done and said, well, are you really sure that this wasn't contamination once we brought it back to Earth? So the results ended up being kind of ambiguous, but it was still a really useful exercise for them to be able to visit the spacecraft. I'm going with life finds a way. So they wander around a little bit. They pick up some moon rocks and these two moon walks that they made. And then they come home and they're celebrated, though not quite at the level of the Apollo 11 astronauts.

Yeah, I don't know if there were ticker tape parades all across the United States for them like the way they did for Apollo 11. But hey, still a pretty cool accomplishment in my book. And, you know, they really paved the way for the rest of the Apollo missions to go to more ambitious places and do a lot better scientific studies of the moon's surface. So that's Apollo 12. Next up, things get much more exciting once again. Jason, I look forward to talking to you about Apollo 13. Sounds good. We'll do it next year. That's Jason Davis, the editorial director for the Planetary Society, and we will talk again on that anniversary, although very likely much sooner than that as well. We're going to take a

quick break. When we return, we'll visit mysterious Venus. I know you're a fan of space because you're listening to Planetary Radio right now. But if you want to take that extra step to be not just a fan, but an advocate, I hope you'll join me, Casey Dreyer, the chief advocate here at the Planetary Society at our annual Day of Action this February 9th and 10th in Washington, D.C. That's when members from across the country come to D.C. and meet with members of Congress face-to-face and advocate for space. To learn more, go to planetary.org slash dayofaction. We recently visited with Vishnu Reddy, author of that great article about planetary defense in the Planetary Report,

the quarterly magazine from the Planetary Society that is edited by Emily Lakdawalla. The other major article in our September Equinox edition comes from astrophysicist Javier Peralta. Spanish-born Javier works for JAXA, the Japanese space agency, with most of his time devoted to the Venus-orbiting Akatsuki. with most of his time devoted to the Venus orbiting Akatsuki. He's in the forefront of our efforts to understand the complex and still mysterious Venusian atmosphere that features winds that whirl around the planet at 300 kilometers or 200 miles per hour, much, much faster than the planet rotates. I invited Javier to join us for a conversation about what some still call Earth's

sister world. Javier, thanks very much for joining me. I know that this is not the most convenient setup for you. I mean, here it's late afternoon in Southern California, but for you, it's still the morning in Japan, the wonders of living on opposite sides of a globe. But I'm very happy to have you on the show. And thank you for this terrific article in the Planetary Report. Oh, thank you so much to you. Also to Emily, because she also helped a lot for making the article. At least correcting a bit, you know, my English, because I'm Spanish. Right.

It's wonderful that she's able to bring so many great researchers to us in the Planetary Report and elsewhere through the other work that she does on our behalf. I got to tell you, when I got my first telescope, I was maybe 10 years old. I turned it on all the usual suspects, the moon, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars. But Venus, though it became a good size disc in the eyepiece of my little telescope, was really pretty boring. Featureless, sort of yellowish white ball. For centuries, that was pretty much all anybody saw of the planet. We've made a little progress in the last 50 years or so though, haven't we? Yeah. In fact, we didn't start to see details until the beginning of the 20th century,

when we started to spot Venus in ultraviolet wavelengths. That's when we started to see details. Before that, it was nearly impossible to see anything. But there were some efforts before starting to spot them in ultraviolet. If I remember well, I think there was a paper, not a paper, but a book about the observation of Venus published by an astronomer called Bianchini in the 18th century. It is amazing how much effort they tried to see details and tried to measure winds or seeing the surface at the time. Well, it's not surprising.

I remember as a kid, before we knew that, at least at the surface, Venus is not a very friendly place to life as we know it. A lot of science fiction being placed on Venus. There was a movie, a film version of Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man, and it depicted the surface of Venus as a jungle, a tropical jungle with huge creatures, which would be nice, but not much relationship to reality there. Yeah, I know. I suppose in passing, we should mark the tremendous success of those Soviet Union probes led by the Venera series, which did manage to survive on the surface for substantial amounts of time. Even though you mentioned the Pioneer Venus mission, which had some success with an orbiter and sending probes down through the atmosphere and even to the surface, It's really, oddly enough, the Galileo mission, which was on its way to Jupiter but made a brief visit at Venus that you point to in the article, is beginning to deliver somedimensional observations of the clouds of Venus thanks to Galileo, to the filters of the camera SSI and

also the imaging spectrograph called NIMS that also made observations for the night side of Venus. Combining these instruments we were able to observe several layers of the atmosphere, several layers of the clouds, many of the clouds. And it was the first time we had the chance to make tracking of these cloud features and measure the winds at different levels. It was, let's say, the first three-dimensional characterization of the winds of Venus. Then, of course, Magellan, which did such a great job of revealing the surface of Venus with its powerful radar. But really, if you jump forward to Venus Express, which the spacecraft that you're involved with, Akatsuki, the Japanese explorer, the only one that's active right now in orbit above Venus, it was hoped that you'd be there at the same time that Venus Express was still doing its work, right? Yeah, that was a pity that Akatsuki didn't make it on time

because of the problem they have in the spacecraft with the thruster. Akatsuki was not able to get inserted and make coordinated observation with Venus Express that would have been great. But still, pretty heroic work by the engineers behind the Akatsuki mission. And it is certainly doing wonderful work now. Is it providing the best data about Venus' atmosphere that we've been able to gather so far?

Yes, but not as good as the one predicted. The orbit of Akatsuki was going to be different because of this incident. It was successful. The female engineer that designed these strategies is called Hirose-san. She was here considered like a hero because she was able to recover the mission for JAXA. Right now we have an equatorial orbit,

but not with the spatial resolution in the images that the instruments were designed for. Well, nevertheless, great science coming back. Let's talk about some of the science that you review in this Planetary Report article. You begin with a mystery. Venus, very slowly rotating planet, and yet it has these category nine hurricane winds. Do we have some idea of how these are being generated? Oh, this is one of the long-time mysteries about Venus. Of course, I wish I have an idea. That's what we are trying to figure out for decades, the super rotation of Venus. We are trying now to figure out one of the key points, that is to know how this super rotation is fed.

There was a recent work published by Jo Jo Lee. She's a Korean girl who was working here in the Akatsuki Mission 2. a Korean girl who was working here in the Akatsuki Mission 2. And she made a nice work combining data from Venus Express and Akatsuki to cover as much as possible for the albedo of the clouds in ultraviolet wavelengths. What she discovered is that the albedo of Venus has been changing during the last 10 years. And just to remind our audience, the albedo, that basically how much light Venus reflects. Oh, yes, exactly. Yes. That in ultraviolet, it reflects a huge amount of light. We a long time suspected that the energy provided by the

sun through the heating of the clouds and the atmosphere was feeding energy to this super rotation. What Jung-Ju discovered is that it seems that the albedo, the amount of light that the atmosphere is reflecting, is variable along the time and also the strength of the super rotation fed by the solar tides. So we have for the first time, pretty nice clue that seems to indicate that the periodic heating of the sun on the clouds of Venus is providing some important energy to the super rotation. Very interesting. I want to bring up something else that you mentioned. And this is an especially curious, mysterious component of the highest clouds. In fact, you call it the mysterious absorber. What do you mean by this?

Oh, I didn't call that. Okay, but I took the name from, of course, previous papers. There is no easy way to call it. Yes, as I mentioned, in the beginning of the 20th century, we started to see things on the clouds when we observed Venus in ultraviolet wavelengths. There is some component of the atmosphere, especially concentrated in the cloud tops, in the region of the upper clouds of Venus, that are located about 70 kilometers above the surface.

So, the cloud layer of Venus is at higher altitude compared to the Earth, to the clouds of the surface. So the cloud layer of Venus is at higher altitude compared to the Earth, to the clouds of the Earth. We started to see things because precisely there is something absorbing in ultraviolet. For decades again, we have tried to discover the real nature of this absorber, and no success for the moment. Yeah. Well, the work continues, right?

Yes, yes. Of course, there has been a lot of candidates to explain them. More recently, one researcher from there, Sanjay Limay, I don't know if you know him, he suggested also that there could be bacteria absorbing in ultraviolet wavelengths and maybe floating at the region of the clouds of Venus. That'd be very exciting. Oh, yes, of course. Some of my colleagues who are working with numerical models to try to simulate these

absorption lines in the ultraviolet, they also told me, oh, this complicates a bit the puzzle because we don't know how we could try to model bacteria in our numerical models. I guess that the only way of solving this mystery is trying to send some emissions able to get samples of the gases of the atmosphere in some way to detect the kind of bacteria that might survive in those conditions and absorbing ultraviolet. In the case of the Earth, we have some species that are able to do so. That sounds like an excellent candidate for a future mission to Venus.

We'll come back to the future. I also want to mention that you're the co-discoverer of another peculiar feature, something in the clouds that appears to actually does remain stationary even as the winds blow. And you've got actually an image of this, one of the gorgeous images that accompany this article. Yeah, the stationary ball. It was a surprise. In many senses, Venus has been a surprise for many things. You can't expect anything from the planet. Yeah, this image was an infrared image taken at about 10 microns.

Let's say that these mid-infrared wavelengths are the ones that some drones, for example, use to track, for example, the fires in forests on the Earth. I mean, this wavelength is very special to track thermal heating, in this case, in the case of Venus, of the clouds. So we are seeing the temperature of the upper clouds of Venus in these wavelengths. This instrument is called volometer. This image was the very first one that this volometer take of Venus. Especially this was taking the exact date of the orbit insertion in December 2015. So this was one of the main discoveries of Akatsuki

that happened in the very first image of the observations. Well, I hope that people will take a look at this image. It is, as I said, in the September Equinox 2019 edition of the Planetary Report, which is available to everybody, free online, members of the Planetary Society get the paper copy that I've got in front of me. I said it is full of beautiful images and some terrific graphics. We're not going to be able to cover everything here, but there is one other series of four images that we just have to talk about. And it's not that they're just awe-inspiring. I actually find them rather creepy.

And I bet you can guess which ones I'm talking about. It's the maelstrom at the South Pole of Venus. And this is one very strange-looking feature. Polar vortex? Yes. Okay, yeah. And these are from the Venus Express's vertice instrument. It's at the South Pole.

Curiously, this phenomenon was observed for the first time on the northern hemisphere by Pioneer Venus. Do we understand the dynamics of a vortex like this? We seem to be finding such interesting things at the poles of a number of planets, Jupiter, Saturn, and now Venus. Oh, I must admit that not yet. No, I mean, this vortex is subject to very fast changes in the morphology. I mean, the images that appear here are an example of that. It can have like a circular shape, sometimes like a dipole, sometimes a triple. It can change in just two days a lot,

in 48 hours. We have many sequences of this polar vortex taken with the imaging spectrograph VIRTIS on Venus Express. Unfortunately, this instrument worked for only the first two years of the mission, but in those two years, we managed to take many, many sequences of the motions of this structure. It is funny because one of the first works we published about the dynamics of this polar vortex was published by my boss in Portugal, David Luz, in Science. What he discovered is that this polar vortex seems to reproduce the motion of a merry-go-round.

So it was moving about itself, at the same time moving around the geographical pole. It is fascinating. Yeah, yeah. But afterwards, if I remember well, a couple of years later, another colleague from Spain, she made a more extensive characterization of the dynamics, covering different dates than David Luz, and she discovered something completely different. It seems that the motion of the vortex is rather chaotic. So the case of the merry-go-round seems to be a special case or maybe some kind of stage of the dynamics,

but others is completely chaotic. We can see also this polar vortex in the lower clouds, in the cloud tops, and even a bit above the cloud tops. The position of the polar vortex in the lower clouds was not exactly the same as the cloud tops. So it seems that in the three-dimensional structure, seems to indicate that the polar vortex may be something closer to a helicoid. Say that again? It's closer to what?

I mean, yeah, exactly. The position of the polar vortex at the level of the cloud tops, I mean 70 kilometers above the surface, okay? And when you observe at the same moment the position of the vortex at a lower altitude, about 50 kilometers, the position of the vortex at these two levels is not the same. There is some differences in the location. It seems that the polar vortex might be bended in altitude. Absolutely fascinating. I mean, we see images sometimes of tornadoes here on Earth, where the neck of the

tornado or where it is closest to the ground can be quite far from the top of the tornado. And that sounds a little bit like what you're describing. We don't know how that is like a kind of coordination in the motions of the polar vortex in the north and the south. And this is something we are trying to confirm with volumetric observation from Akatsuki. So it is an ongoing work. We have already some indication from ground-based observations that the motion of the polar vortex of the North Pole

and the South Pole or Venus seems to be somewhat connected in some way because of the general dynamics. And they have some coordinated motions between the North and the South. Of course, we need to confirm this, but this is what observation seems to indicate. You have provided in this conversation, and especially in the article, ample evidence that Venus is a very dynamic place and that we still have a lot to learn.

I mean, other than sending something to look for that possible bacteria in the atmosphere, I mean, what would you like to see happen next? What missions do you think we should be sending to Venus in the coming years? First, we need a mission to be approved. That is being really hard. The Indian Space Agency is preparing a mission to be launched, I think that in four or five years, they want to do so. I hope they are successful, of course. But to my opinion, of course, I will be really delighted to see a mission able to penetrate through the clouds and try to observe all the deep atmosphere of Venus that is completely unknown to us. I mean that since the 80s we don't have barely information about what is happening below the clouds.

And that information in many senses is critical to understand the atmospheric dynamics of Venus and also the thermal structure. Many people are obsessed to try to promote missions that are able to penetrate and go to the surface. So yes, exploring the surface that is like a black box to us would be really great. But, of course, at the same time, we are also trying to think to try to perform a more detailed global characterization of Venus. And the problem we have right now has to be, for example, the technique of radio occultation that consists in emitting radio signals through the atmosphere of Venus. So the spacecraft sends a radio signal. This radio signal is vented by the atmosphere and then directed to the Earth,

where we get the signal. Because of the angle that the signal is vented and also the signal is retarded, we can get information about the temperature of Venus, the pressure of the angle that the signal is vented and also the signal is retarded, we can get information about the temperature of Venus, the pressure of the atmosphere with high precision. How about a balloon? Something that has been talked about for many years. Oh, I would say, how about several balloons? Maybe to go with those seven orbiters. Oh, that would be amazing. To have several balloons, like the Vega mission in the 80s, being tracked and measuring the speeds and other parameters.

Yeah, that would be really great. And I don't think it's so expensive for a mission. I know that there have been some proposals also about balloons, but I confess that right now people are more obsessed in trying to investigate the deeper atmosphere below the clouds and also the surface. There could be some chances in the next future, but according to the efforts of the people designing new space missions, I will say that it will take just a bit of time to see balloons again on Venus.

Okay. So, yes, we can have balloons and the merry-go-round polar vortex. It will be really, really funny. That would be quite a ride. I've got just one other question for you, if you don't mind my asking. Of course. How does a Spaniard end up living in Japan

and contributing to space missions underway there by the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA. I have to say that this is really different compared to my previous experience in the European Space Agency. As you know, the European Space Agency is a contribution from many countries. Here, JAXA, as NASA, is a national agency, especially where I work, you don't see so many foreigners. So, of course, the majority of the people working here are Japanese people. In that sense, I confess that it's kind of hard, not only, of course, for me to understand Japanese, for them also to speak English. And yet, they are trying to go ahead with an internationalization plan

for the agency, because right now at the moment, most of the work, a lot of the work that is done here, unless we are talking about combined vision from different countries is done in Japanese. I live in another prefecture called Kanagawa. Not so many people speak English here. It is quite an experience for a foreigner. I recommend at least to learn a bit, to have some base, solid base of Japanese to start with and then start to work. People here work very hard. It is very difficult to find time to study Japanese.

That is not the easiest language of the world, of course. And besides, you're busy doing science. It does seem to put you in a good position as international efforts go forward to study, to undertake planetary science missions, and especially, perhaps, Venus missions. So, you know, congratulations on taking on this challenge. Thank you for that. Oh, thank you so much.

And I will just say once again that anybody can take a look at your excellent article in the Planetary Report, Venus's Ocean of Air and Clouds, Deep Dynamic Currents Revealed by Venus Express, and Akatsuki by our guest, Javier Peralta, who's speaking to us from Japan, where he has been doing this work for five years. Javier, thank you so much for being part of Planetary Radio as well. Oh, thank you so much for giving the chance to explain it a bit further. Astrophysicist Javier Peralta studies planetary atmospheres, and as you've heard, especially

the atmosphere of Venus. He's on the mission team for the Japanese Space Agency's Akatsuki, currently orbiting that clouded mystery every 10 Earth days. He was awarded an International Top Young Fellowship as part of his participation. Born in

Spain, he's been learning Japanese now, learning it in situ for five years. I'll be right back with Bruce and this week's What's Up. 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. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is here. He's the downlink every Friday at planetary.org. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio.

Bruce Betts is here. He's the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. Back to entertain and inform us with that night sky and all kinds of other good stuff. If you're getting this before November 11th, do not miss the rare transit of Mercury across the sun as Mercury passes between us and the sun on November 11th. Do not miss the rare transit of Mercury across the Sun as Mercury passes between us and the Sun on November 11th, and that will be starting at 1235 UTC and then ending at 1804 UTC in Pacific time. That's 435 in the morning, so we won't see it rise here on the west coast of North America, but we will see the last rise here on the west coast of North America.

But we will see the last few hours of Mercury in front of the sun because it ends at 10.04 a.m. Pacific time. There won't be another one until 2032. You will, however, need a telescope with proper safety filters, or there are all sorts of sites on the web covering it, including spacecraft and space observing it and observatories on Earth. So just do a search for that. And finally, and maybe I should have started with, this will be visible from South America, Africa, most of North America, and Europe. So have fun with that.

If you miss that, or even if you don't, check out the evening sky. It's starting to become a planet party. Venus is joining Jupiter and Saturn, which have been hanging out in the southwest in the early evening for a long time. Venus now super bright, as always, down below bright Jupiter, far to its lower right. The trick is you'll need a clear view to the horizon, but don't worry if you don't see it. We will have it visiting for several months now. If you don't mind, I will tease something, even though it's not an absolutely sure thing.

You remember, you know Jay Pasikoff, right? Yes. Yeah, not just an eclipse chaser, but not surprisingly, a transit chaser, micro eclipse chaser. I got to trademark that. He is going to be at the Big Bear Solar Observatory, and we're going to try and connect as the big solar telescope there, as the sun with Mercury already transiting comes into view. And if this happens, we'll have that phone call on next week's show, which will be two days after the transit.

So wish me luck. Wish us luck. Good luck. You know, I'll be looking at it through little tiny telescopes. Don't you care about me? That's okay. Jane knows more about this stuff than I do, and that telescope's cooler, so go ahead. Yeah, it's big.

And there are good people up there anyway, so. Yep. All right, we move on to this week in space history. Carl Sagan was born this week in space history in 1934. He would have been 85. Carl Sagan, founder of the Planetary Society. And he did other stuff, I hear, too. Okay, we move on to random space fact.

That belonged on some British television. You didn't really have the accent, but it was so sophisticated. It does raise the question whether one can sound sophisticated without a British accent. I'm not sure. It's much harder. On to the fact, although Apollo 6, Apollo 6 experienced a couple engine failures and Apollo 13 had an engine shutdown during launch. Both of them had the onboard computers compensate using the other engines to get into a Earth orbit. Side note, none of the 13 Saturn V launches resulted in payload or human loss or

casualty. Pretty spiffy. I know you're a big Saturn V fan. It's a big rocket. I am. And it's so appropriate because we just heard not long ago from Jason Davis about how Apollo 12 that we're about to celebrate the anniversary of, 50th anniversary, was hit by lightning. Twice. Yes. And that one was saved as well by a smart human on the ground who said, throw this switch. Okay. We move on to the trivia contest. And I asked you, who was the first person to eat in space? And I hear we had some differing opinions. How'd we do, Matt? This is so interesting. We had a somewhat larger than

normal response, maybe because people thought this would be so easy or that it was so easy to look up. I hate to say it, folks, but more than half of you got it wrong. Yes, John Glenn was the first American to eat in space, but it was Yuri Gagarin, right? Indeed. He had two tubes of pureed meat, tube of chocolate sauce to wash it down with. And this came up recently on the show as well. When you asked what he wanted to eat,

a couple of people remembered that question. Here's our winner, Zachary Lupin. Zachary, who is from Iowa, back in Iowa now, I think, but he spent his summer as an intern at JPL working on the Europa Clipper mission. Hey, cool. Yeah. Brought people over to the Planetary Society, got a nice tour, as I understand. He said, I was very surprised to learn that it was Yuri Gagarin. He says he loves listening from the heart of Iowa. Congratulations, Zachary.

I think the confusion is because John Glenn brought a waiter, so it seemed like it. What a class act. Anyway, Zachary's going to get that new board game and the accompanying app called The Search for Planet X, which very successfully completed its Kickstart campaign. Looks pretty cool. I know you played with the prototype that was at the office. And we'll put the link back up on the show page. You can get there from planetary.org slash radio. And he'll also get a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. But wait, there's more. Oh, really? No way. dot net astronomy account.

But wait, there's more. Oh, really? No way. John Borilli, this couldn't happen today because the tubes of paste were 5.6 ounces each. And we all know the TSA doesn't allow anything more than four ounces to get through screening. Then he says, well, I'm good with the chocolate paste. I sure hope the Planetary Society doesn't serve any meat paste in a tube at its next big event. Really?

We'll alert the chef to change those plans, okay? Mel Powell. So Yuri finished his meal and then left a vicious anonymous online review later about the quality of the dining experience under the pseudonym, only guy been to space. A whole bunch of people talked about German Tiethoff, who was the next person. Exactly. That's because you talked about this recently. His claim to infamy. Yeah. Stephanie Gordon, she said John Glenn, and she knew that he had applesauce, but she said, just hearing about this brings to mind children's snacks. Can you imagine the mess a toddler would make in zero gravity? Oh yeah, I would not be good. Well, my kids were pretty neat, but on average, yeah, that'd be better. Oh, not mine. Not mine. Sorry.

Sorry, girls. Manuel, our Manuel Baquer, he is in Portland, Oregon. Yes, he thought it was John Glenn. Wrong there, but he may be right about this. First non-human, he says, I suspect, was Fred Flintstone's friend, the Great Gazoo. That was the Stone Age, right? Yeah? I guess that would have to be before the others in some universe.

Finally, in the Hanna-Barbera universe. Finally, this from Laura Weller in the UK. And I helped it out a little bit, Laura. I hope you don't mind. In space flew a man called John Glenn. He ate applesauce and flew back again. Space hinders your taste, so next time when faced with space snacks, perhaps add cayenne? Very clever. Thank you, Laura. While the Poet Laureate has the week off. That's it. We're really done now. That was fun stuff. All right.

Move on to something that I think should be straightforward. What mission was the first launch of the Saturn V rocket? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have till the 13th, two days after the transit. Wednesday, the 13th of November at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. And win yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt that comes from the Chop Shop store, of course, chopshopstore.com. You can see our whole store there, the whole Planetary Society store. And a 200.iTelescope.net account.

I'm sure they're going to have telescopes looking at the transit. So you don't have to buy a thing because you operate the telescopes remotely. A 200-point account on iTelescope, that worldwide network of remotely operated telescopes. And that's enough about that. We're done. I'll add one little tidbit, which is

Thursday before the transit, I will have a blog online if you're looking for more information. Go to planetary.org about the transit. I will have a blog online. If you're looking for more information, go to planetary.org about the transit. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about what food you'd like in a tube like a toothpaste tube.

How do you say that if you don't call it a toothpaste tube? I don't know. Thank you, and good night. Bacon. Gotta be bacon paste, right? That's Bruce Batts. Thank you, and good night. Bacon. Gotta be bacon paste, right? That's Bruce Betts. Thank you also for that update about your upcoming blog at planetary.org about the transit. There's so much more that he keeps on giving us as the chief scientist of the Planetary Society,

who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and it's made possible by its members. Who want to peek below those Venusian clouds? Learn how to become a member of the society at planetary.org membership. Mark Hilverde is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan, Ad Astra.