Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Phoenix is Dead...Long Live Phoenix!

Episode Date: May 31, 2010

Phoenix is Dead...Long Live Phoenix!Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Phoenix will not rise again, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. The Phoenix Mars lander will never be heard from again, yet its brief life on the surface of the red planet has provided new hope of real life on that forbidding world. We'll talk once again with Peter Smith, head of the Phoenix mission, about what we've learned from his spacecraft. Emily Lakdawalla marvels at the thousands of asteroids

revealed by the WISE probe and gives us a preview of next week's blog. Bill Nye counts down the six new technologies NASA hopes to rely on for future space exploration, and Bruce Betts will sail the void in What's Up. Is the moon sailing away? That's Bruce's random space fact this week. Atlantis is home, probably to stay. The space shuttle returned from a very successful mission to the International Space Station.

It will be prepped for one more trip, but will only fly if it is needed as a rescue vehicle for the last scheduled shuttle mission later this year. In other news, SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, has achieved first light. The 100-inch telescope mounted in the fuselage of a Boeing 747 made a successful test flight last week. Let's go to Emily for her report on the best of the Planetary Society blog. Emily, our usually very clean Skype connection, not quite as good as usual, but there's good reason for that. You're talking to us from a lot farther away this week. Yeah, I'm attending my husband's 15th college reunion at Amherst College, the fairest college, of course.

Well, have fun and tell him congratulations. Big story this week from the blog, a real eye-opener is that new eye in space, the WISE spacecraft. Yeah, you know, WISE has been doing an all-sky survey since late last year, and it's now mapped, actually, I think something like 70% of the sky. They've processed about 50% of their all-sky map to determine where in their images they've seen various moving objects like asteroids and comets and spacecraft, they've actually spotted 60,000 asteroids. Now, this is an all-sky survey, so they'll spot every asteroid above a certain size. It's within their line of sight.

The amazing thing is that of those 60,000 asteroids, 11,000 were new. So more than one in six of the asteroids that WISE has observed are new to science. That is just a stupendous result, not just because it's wonderful in itself, but because we now have 11,000 more objects that somebody better figure out where they're headed. That's right, and amateur astronomers around the world are really, really busy around the clock trying to track down all these excessively faint objects

that WISE has been spotting. I should mention that in addition to the asteroids it's seen, it's also observed 70 comets, 12 of which were new, and 200 of the asteroids were near-Earth objects, and 50 of those had never been seen before. Pretty stunning. We will have to bring somebody back on from that mission, as we have in the past, now that they really are starting to turn up these pretty magnificent results. A couple of other things. We don't often get to look forward to what's coming up in the blog, but we can tease people with a couple of items this week. Yeah, there's two things I'll definitely be writing when I get back into my office this week.

One of them is my monthly what's up on reporting on the 20 active spacecraft that are exploring our solar system. I hope to have that posted on Tuesday. The other thing to look forward to or kind of look back on is the Phoenix mission that we're now pretty certain is done for good. The latest high-rise image that was taken of Phoenix near the solstice makes it look pretty clear that at least one of the solar panels has probably fallen off the spacecraft. So you're going to be recapping the mission? That's right. I'll recap the mission and point readers to all of the past writing that I've done on Phoenix so you can kind of wander through, enjoy the adventure again, as though you were reliving it from the original landing day.

And we'll have a good intro for this entry that will be coming up on the Planetary Society blog when we speak to Peter Smith, the principal investigator for the Phoenix mission. That's just a few moments away after we hear from Bill Nye. Emily, thanks very much. Enjoy the rest of the trip, and we'll talk to you next week. Thanks. I will, Matt. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Here's Bill.

Hey, hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, Vice President of the Planetary Society. Very exciting week. Charles Bolden, the administrator of NASA, the world's largest space exploration organization, announced six initiatives, six new things that he's going to spend between $0.4 and $1 billion U.S. on. These will be space fuel depots. You take a rocket out there full of gas and park it. Then the next rocket comes by and refuels and goes on to a new destination. Solar electric propulsion. Instead of using plutonium for electricity to make xenon ions shoot out the back of a spacecraft and reach huge speeds through

space, instead of doing that, we'll have solar panels. Get that all dialed in so they track the sun while the spacecraft is zooming off in some other direction. He wants to build lightweight modules. This is an old planetary society idea, the space habs. These things would be inflatable, so they'd be much lower mass when you go to lift them into orbit, and they'd have enormous volumes inside compared to conventional aerospace materials like aluminum and titanium. And then he wants to do arrow capture. And this is real rocket science, where a spacecraft is aimed so perfectly that it goes into a

planet's atmosphere, pick one, Mars, and it slows down just precisely enough to go into orbit instead of using retro rockets. And without retro rocket sea then you can save a lot of weight and you can do a lot more science and exploration instead of just slowing down then auto docking he wants to get auto docking figured out we use it on the international space station with some russian rocket ships but wouldn't it be cool if it were really reliable and you could use it way out in deep space. And then the thing you'd think that NASA already had dialed in, and that's self-contained life support systems.

You know, as astronauts metabolize their food, we want to be able to recover the water and recover the carbon dioxide and use it back again as oxygen. It's almost working right now, but we want to get it really dialed in. He's going to spend billions of dollars on this. This is what NASA should be doing. This is a road beyond the horizon to new, exciting places. Places that might, dare I say it, change the world. I've got to fly Bill Nye the Planetary Gun. Have you seen the pictures? The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recently cast its gaze down on the Phoenix Mars lander.

It showed Peter Smith that his spacecraft did not survive its encounter with the Martian winter. Scientists believe the little polar explorer was buried under meters of ice for many months. But it did its job before that happened, returning lots of data that is still being examined, including the discovery of a layer of perchlorates, chemical compounds that may explain why, almost 35 years ago, the Viking landers failed to find organics on the surface of Mars.

Peter is the principal investigator and leader of the Phoenix mission. He is a researcher at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Lab in Tucson, and that's where I caught him on the phone a few days ago. Peter, welcome back to Planetary Radio. Congratulations on what appears to be the completion of a very successful mission. Are you satisfied that we've heard the last from Phoenix? Yes, I am.

And we have proof now that the lander has been damaged through the severe winter. The orbiting telescope called HiRISE took a picture the second or third day after landing, and it's been almost exactly two years ago. Now they've taken one last week, and the two do not look the same. Something has definitely happened to the solar panels. I saw those images, and we will put a link to them at planetary.org slash radio, or actually the page that this show is on. It really is quite striking.

How does it feel to be able to look down on your spacecraft that way and say, yep, it looks like it's broke? It doesn't feel good at all. But, you know, there's an interesting thing in those pictures, and I invite your listeners to really take a look at them, that the blue solar panels that we saw after landing are now turned into a Martian red. And it's like Mars is taking back the spacecraft. It's becoming part of Mars.

So in some sense, you know, we've gone full cycle with this mission. I like that metaphor. The thing that kept running through my head that I thought too trite to say, but I'll say it anyway, was Phoenix is dead. Long live Phoenix. Thank you. And in fact, the science is living on. I went to an astrobiology conference just a few weeks ago, and perchlorate, which is one of the chemicals we discovered in the soil, has become a major topic of conversation among Mars astrobiologists.

This finding of the perchlorate, which is so important, and, I mean, you said it was a biology conference you were at. Does this open up new possibilities for biological activity, life on Mars? Well, the perchlorate has so many interesting properties that speak to the possibilities of habitable zones and even potentially life. The first is it's a form of antifreeze, and it actually allows liquid water at much colder temperatures than the normal freezing temperature, down almost to minus 70 degrees centigrade if you have a high enough percentage. Not only that, it is a food source for many organisms on the Earth. These are single-cell organisms. So if you could find a place where there's a considerable concentration of the

perchlorate, you might actually have liquids and food sources for Martian microbes. The quote that I saw from you in a couple of places was, this layer, that's where the action is. Yes, that is where the action is. And I really think all the science fiction books I read in the 50s about six-legged apes and wonderful creatures on Mars, they're all there. They're just a few microns in size.

All right, so Edgar Rice Burroughs is smiling somewhere. Edgar Rice Burroughs was not wrong. He just had the scale wrong. surprised to someday find that there is this active small biosphere on Mars, perhaps not as far north as where Phoenix sat down, but closer to the equator. Well, you know, this is possible. We are finding ice under the surface, but not far below the surface, all the way down to 30 degrees latitude. And it may even persist in some places closer to the equator. This is really a kind of exciting time in Mars science. It's kind of a renaissance, you know, ever since the mid-'90s when we started going back.

And we are finding a tremendous wealth of habitats and environments on Mars that I think can only lead to a potential discovery of life on Mars. What are the other accomplishments of Phoenix that you'll be looking back on happily for many years? Well, one thing we saw that is somewhat related to the perchlorate is in our oven experiment where we heated soil and drove off vapors and analyzed the vapors. We saw a release of oxygen at 300 degrees centigrade and followed by a lot of carbon dioxide. And apparently, if you add perchlorates and organics together, the perchlorate combusts the organics and releases CO2. So we're seeing circumstantial evidence for organics on

Mars. And at the conference I mentioned, there's a researcher in Mexico, Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez, who has recreated the Viking experiment where the result was that there were no organics on Mars, and by putting in perchlorate and organics, he sees the exact signatures that they saw and attributed to cleaning fluids. So the chlorine hydrocarbon products that they saw really could be the result of perchlorate and organics. Wow.

If this is true, and again, it's only circumstantial evidence, that means Mars Science Laboratory, now called Curiosity, which will be on Mars in 2012, will see organics at 1 to 10 parts per million. So I'm very excited about this next mission. That's Peter Smith, Principal Investigator for the Phoenix Mars Lander Mission. He'll have more to tell us after a break.

This is Planetary Radio. Hey, Bill Nye, the science guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work into this show and all our other

great Planetary Society projects. I've been a member since the disco era. Now I'm the Society's Vice President. And you may well ask, why do we go into all this trouble?

Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. You probably do too, or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen. You can become part of the action, helping us fly solar sails, discover new planets, and search for extraterrestrial intelligence and life elsewhere in the universe. Here's how to find out more. 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. Phoenix may be dead, but its contributions to science and future Mars exploration missions live on. We now know the lander was damaged by the ice that crushed it during the long Martian winter.

With that ice melted away, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's amazing high-rise camera was damaged by the ice that crushed it during the long Martian winter. With that ice melted away, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's amazing high-rise camera has shown us the dramatic change in the spacecraft's condition. No one really expected it to survive that challenge, and NASA has now given up trying to contact the probe. There is still plenty of data to keep Principal Investigator Peter Smith and other scientists around the world busy for a long time. And then there are the practical lessons of Phoenix. What sort of gifts have you given to future Mars missions, particularly Curiosity and the Mars Science Laboratory?

I mean, how are they reshaping their work because of what you've found? Well, the first thing is, don't heat up the perchlorate. Perchlorate on the Earth is used for a rocket fuel, and when you heat it up, it releases oxygen at a tremendous rate, and it will combust any of the organics you're looking for. So you have to be very careful, and fortunately, Mars Science Lab has the ability to search for organics without applying heat first, and I think that's the experiment that we're going search for organics without applying heat first. And I think that's the experiment that we're going to see organics, and they're well aware of this.

So this is a very exciting experiment to me. The other thing, of course, is we did a complete weather report for the five months we were in the polar region, and we learned a lot about water ice clouds and snow and the interaction of the atmosphere and the surface. And I think Mars Science Laboratory can continue that work at another latitude. You had, I think, maybe the coolest and simplest meteorological experiment ever to land on the red planet. Yes, a LIDAR. Basically, you shoot a laser pointer straight up into the sky and bounce it off the bottom of a cloud,

and you can estimate the distance to the cloud and even what it's made out of. It worked beautifully. Now, to say nothing of your little weather vane as well. Not a weather vane so much as now I can't remember what it was called. It was called a windsock. Yeah, right. Or a telltale. I think we had windsocks on Pathfinder.

This one was called a telltale. It's like the little ribbon you put on your mast as a sailor, and it told us the wind direction for the five months we were there, and speed, too, for that matter. Phoenix is basically gone, but you returned an awful lot of data, and I think you said at the outset that this is going to be keeping you and a lot of other scientists busy for a long time to come. That's right.

We put the data from our mission in the planetary database, the planetary data system, and it's now available to all scientists around the world and even the public, for that matter. and it's now available to all scientists around the world and even the public, for that matter. This data is now being actively searched for new clues about Mars in the polar region. And, of course, the scientists that weren't involved with the mission have different ideas than we did, and they are going to use this data, too. So it belongs to the world now. Talk a little bit about the sort of arc, the dramatic arc of this mission,

and, you know, once again, why the name Phoenix was so appropriate for this spacecraft. NASA gave us the opportunity as scientists to propose an entire mission, and the proposal that I led was based on using a lander that had been built for the 01 time frame and had been mothballed. And it was mothballed because the previous sister spacecraft had crashed, and they didn't have enough time to search out all the problems. And so by bringing this spacecraft back to life and refitting it for a new task on Mars, we thought of it as the mythology of the phoenix bird coming back from the ashes. It really did seem appropriate to us. Unfortunately, since I live in Tucson, it's been a bit of a confusion.

Phoenix is just up the road, and people fly into the Phoenix airport and call me and say, well, how do I get to your facility? It's a two-hour drive south. Yeah, I'd say the city fathers there owe you something. They do. This was also the first in its class of spacecraft missions funded by NASA, the Scout missions, right? Yes, that's correct.

What was the significance of that? Does that say something about what can be accomplished for, well, really relatively small amounts of money for something as ambitious as a Mars lander? Yes. When you think that the next lander, the Curiosity, is going to cost over $2 billion, ours is really a bargain basement price at $400 million, so it's 20% of what a core mission costs. 20% of what a core mission costs. They're going to alternate as a cost-saving measure between the very expensive missions and these cheaper missions.

And so you have opportunities every 26 months to go to Mars. So one opportunity would be the very expensive core missions. Next one would be a cheaper one run by a scientist. I think we just heard in the last couple of weeks that Mars Science Laboratory, now Curiosity, is going to use the launch window that will be open in November of 2011, and I bet you'll be following it pretty closely. I am really excited about that mission, and this will be a return to a nuclear-powered spacecraft, and they do not have to rely on solar panels anymore. That allows them for a long lifetime on the surface of Mars and the capability to rove many kilometers.

So definitely a very exciting mission, and I'll be watching. Peter, we're about done, but it just occurred to me again that someday there may be humans who will turn your Phoenix into a nice little Arctic Zone tourist attraction on the red planet. Well, we're prepared for the next human explorers that come to our spacecraft, and we've left them a little gift. It's a DVD, a mini-DVD, with all the Martian stories that we loved as children on board, and also some essays from various important people in the Mars business, including Carl Sagan. And I wrote an essay also. Now, we just don't know when the humans will get there, but someday that site will be visited again by human explorers,

and they may be quite fascinated with that DVD. Yeah, I bet they will be, and we're happy to have been a part of that at the Planetary Society. Yes, but getting a DVD player is going to be a problem. That's right. I should have packaged one of those as well, I think. Go to the Smithsonian. Peter, thank you so much. It has been a joy to talk to you about the Phoenix mission and we'll continue to track it as you learn more and more from the data collected by the Phoenix

Mars Polar Lander. Pleasure, Matt. Always enjoy talking to you. Peter Smith is the principal investigator and provided project leadership for the Phoenix mission. He is at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Lab and the team he led included hundreds of individuals from all over the world

who made this mission happen and happened very successfully. We'll be back in a moment for our regular visit with Bruce Betts. That'll be for this week's edition of What's Up. Bruce Betts is on the skypline. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He's here to tell us about the night sky and some other stuff that's going on. How are you? I'm doing pretty well. How are you doing, man?

I'm good, too. You were up checking out LightSail last week. I was indeed up at Stellar Exploration in San Luis Obispo and doing a review of where the project is and getting together and meeting with a bunch of the people involved in the LightSail solar sail project. Good. So we're on track, huh? We're on track. We're no longer making the sail out of cheese. That's a good decision. That was a good call, let me tell you. That's why it's important to have these reviews. There was a little debate for a while. Well, if we switch to cheddar, will it work?

And they decided to just go with no. Tell us about the night sky. Well, up in the night sky, we've got Venus over in the west, low in the west, looking like a super bright star-like object. To its upper left, you will see Mars looking much dimmer, reddish. And if you look near Mars these days, to its upper left, you'll see the bright star Regulus. They're actually about the same brightness right at the moment. Nice color contrast. So look for Mars as that reddish looking thing. Farther to the upper left, you can check out Saturn, look through a telescope. Rings are pretty darn edge on. And in the pre-dawn, we've got Jupiter dominating the eastern sky, bright

star-like object. And on June 6th, in honor of D-Day, apparently, the moon will be right near Jupiter, making for a lovely pre-dawn sight. Very good. We move on to this week in space history. In 2003, Mars Express was launched, the European Space Agency Mars Orbiter, still working great. Also, in 1989, Voyager 2 began regular observations of Neptune as it approached. And Voyager 2, as we've been hearing from Emily, seems to be back on track. It launched a really long time ago. Yeah, very long time ago.

Still returning science. Still doing a good job. Way out there beyond Pluto. We move on to... way out there beyond Pluto. We move on to random space. I don't know what to make of that. I thought at first it was going to be kind of like,

you know, in a soccer game, Goal! Goal! Goal! But then it kind of petered out. It was its own unique monument to space. I have no idea. Anyway, the moon.

There are those tidal effects people are quite familiar with that move the water around. But also, the moon and the Earth tugging on each other in their own special way have the effect of slowing down the Earth's day over time. In fact, quite a lot, many, many hours over the history of the Earth. Also, the moon keeps getting farther and farther away. So right now it's getting farther away gradually, and we'll come back to that. But also the Earth is slowing down. We're losing about two milliseconds per century. The day is slowing by about that much.

I noticed. I'm sure you did. Let us go on to the trivia contest, shall we? Yeah. We asked. The acronym of the Japanese solar sail spacecraft now successfully launched and in space, IKAROS, what does it stand for? How do we do, Matt? Terrific response. It may have been a record setter. I don't know. I don't keep very good track of these things. I'm just going to tell

you right up front that our winner, who is a past winner, I think she won a couple of years ago or two and a half years ago, Hannah Beck of Ridgefield, Connecticut, came up with the correct answer, interplanetary kite craft accelerated by radiation of the sun. But wait, there's more. Yay. You know, our listeners, some of them, they see an acronym and they cannot resist coming up with their own interpretation. That's funny. Even when we don't ask.

Yep. Which we often do. Which we often do, yes. And I guess we got them into the habit. William Stewart, he likes, I'm kept aloft on rays of sunlight. Nice, huh? Yeah.

And then from Lindsay Dawson, it's kind of axiomatic, revolutionize outer space. Okay, now here is our personal, my personal favorite, because there's some bias behind this. And it comes to us from our friend and regular listener, Ian Jackson. You ready? I think he must be a Planetary Society member because of how he put this. Icarus is king until after the release of our sail. Thank you, Ian.

That's very nice. Isn't that good? Yeah. I think that should be up on the wall up there where it's being built in San Luis Obispo. Wow, I feel badly I don't have another acronym question for us. Well, you will soon enough. What I do have for us is how much is the moon, how fast is it moving away from

the Earth? In centimeters per year, the unit used and so to be more specific in the time period we've really been measuring it since like 1970 what is the average yearly amount that the moon has moved away from us

in its orbit? go to planetary.org slash radio find out how to enter and you have until the 7th of june june 7 2010 at 2 p.m pacific to get us that answer all right everybody go out there look up the night sky and think about blinds and curtains thank you and good night how you know? That's exactly what we're thinking about, because we just put in some new windows, and we can't put up the old shades. Wow, I didn't know. You are a physic.

I am a physic. Yeah, he gets physical with us every week here. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he does join us every week for What's Up. Planetary Radio Projects for the Planetary Society, and he does join us every week for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Keep looking up. Thank you.