Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Radio Extra: Planetary Society Experts 2015 Review

Episode Date: January 5, 2016

Bruce Betts, Jason Davis, Casey Dreier and Emily Lakdawalla gather with Mat Kaplan for a fascinating and informative Planetary Radio Extra year-in-review roundtable discussion.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 another edition of Planetary Radio Extra. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, and I'm very glad that you've joined us for this unprecedented conversation with four of my colleagues at the Society. You've heard from all of them individually, but not till now have all of them gathered for the sort of discussion that I hope we'll be enjoying over the next hour or so. Our topic is 2015, just as it was for the last regular episode of Planetary Radio in that year. So fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a fast and fun ride as we talk with Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla, Director of Advocacy Casey Dreyer, Digital Editor Jason Davis, and Director of Science and Technology Bruce Batts. Hi, everybody.

Hey. Hello, everybody. Hey. Hello. Emily, what is the first of your top stories from the year just passed? We'll let you introduce it, and then everybody else will have a chance to jump in. Well, you know me, Matt. I hate to pick favorites, but I don't think there's any question what the most exciting mission event was of 2015, and that was the New Horizons flyby of Pluto. We've been waiting for this one for so very long.

Pluto and all of its moons actually surprised us with how exciting they were. And so we're going to be spending 2016 getting most of the rest of the data down. But what we have on the ground shows us that Pluto is a bizarre place with all these different kinds of landscapes. And Charon is a really cool-looking moon

with volcanic plains and a red cap. And it was just very exciting to be there. And I'll be very excited to continue reporting about this mission. And I will bet that our other panelists have no shortage of enthusiasm for this mission either. Who wants to jump in? Well, Matt, I will. This is Casey. Again, I think it's easy at this point even to look back and start to just forget how important this mission is, historically speaking, right? Like, when's the last time we have completely explored a new place? We had two last year, right? Pluto and Ceres.

But Pluto really had that flyby feel of the 80s, right? It was a very retro mission in that sense. It was just like those Voyager missions, every time kind of whipping through a new system, completely rewriting or writing even the textbooks on these things. And it was just so gratifying from my perspective to see just how the public embraced this mission. It was huge. Everyone was talking about it. It was on every kind of news outlet, public facing, not just the space and science news outlets. It was all the way up to, you know, the White House was talking about it, people in every part of Congress was talking about it, and Jason wrote a great story on this earlier this year. This was a mission that was

canceled multiple times back in the early 2000s. We should not just take for granted that this type of exploration happens. This stuff has to be very, very, very diligently pursued in order to have these types of successes. Jason, do you want to add anything to that? You did write that terrific article that traced the long and tortured history of this mission. Yeah, it's pretty amazing when you think that as far back as Voyager, we were trying to get a mission to fly by Pluto. There were several spacecraft concepts that came and went of varying costs and varying complexities and the Society was there pretty much from the beginning lobbying for this mission.

When it finally got announced, it was almost cancelled, brought back from the brink of cancellation. We had postcard campaigns, letter writing campaigns, calling Congress. Just an incredible involvement from the public that we get this final classical member of the solar system, the classical planet, whether you think it's a planet or not, explored. It was really cool to see the culmination of all those efforts. And as Casey said, just a big advocacy success that was many years in the making. Bruce Betts, we'll give you the last word on this one. Decades in the making, nine years to get there.

It was, I don't know about worth the wait because it was so long, but it couldn't have been any better. I think lots of us have wondered for decades since we were little kids, hey, what's Pluto look like? Pluto has a big popularity in the public and people like it, but it's always been this fuzzy blob. public and people like it but it's always been this fuzzy blob. Now Pluto and Charon and its other moons are resolved into not only isn't that neat that we can see them but oh my gosh aren't they complex and amazing. There's one aspect to the rhetoric around the Pluto flyby that I haven't enjoyed and that's the tendency of some people to say that by exploring Pluto we have completed the initial reconnaissance of the solar system and two head honchos at at NASA, both John Grunsfeld and Charlie Bolden, said something to that effect at the flyby.

And it just drives me nuts because there's so much of the rest of the solar system left to explore for the first time. Maki maki 2048, right? Haume or bust. Casey, you're going to be up next. And it's a good segue from this discussion of Pluto because, of course, the Pluto mission was such a great success for advocacy. Yeah, and again, I cannot express enough, convey enough how successful everyone or how proud every planetary society member should feel about this. society members should feel about this. This is the problem with advocating for space exploration, in a sense, is that the rewards are so delayed from the actual work that you do, right? This mission, we were sending postcards and letters and going to Congress in 2002 and 2003 to save

this Pluto mission, not to mention even all the other ones that were canceled through the 90s. And it was just now that we get the success from that. And that's this kind of long game attitude. You have to kind of keep in mind as a member of the Planetary Society when we say, why do we do advocacy? Why are we asking you to write Congress every year? Maybe it feels like it's the same message. Maybe it feels like you've done it once.

Why do it again? Well, it's because we need to sustain this over literally decades. I think this is the Pluto pictures. Every time I kind of feel frustrated or every time I feel like, oh, not again, we have to talk about upping the planetary science budget or focusing on a mission to Europa, say, I pull up a picture of the ice volcano from Pluto and just say, this is an essence of what we'll get eventually. It's just savor that kind of joy of this new science and new discovery that you had a little part in enabling and channel that energy and push it forward into all the other places that Emily just kind of hinted at. All these other places we have yet to truly explore in our own solar system that we could do in our lifetime. That's, to me, the essence of Pluto. It reminds us, I think, that there's so much out

there to understand, and it's basically up to us to make it happen. Now, the rest of you are not as directly involved with advocacy, but I think everybody recognizes this is a pretty important part of the mission. Jason? Yeah, I mean, I think in researching this long article you mentioned about the history of a mission to Pluto, it really becomes apparent how important advocacy is. It's not the only piece, but it is an important piece. And as Alan Stern himself described it, without all of this push from the public, it just wouldn't have happened. Without all of this push from the public, it just wouldn't have happened. And ultimately, the National Science Foundation, with the decadal survey, was what authorized the Pluto mission eventually for NASA. But just this continuous push, bugging Congress, these letters, is really what eventually did it.

And I've really become convinced of the value of that as I've researched this. Bruce, you're the only one of us who has sort of seen this from within the agency, from within NASA, one of your past lives. Did you see the importance of this kind of advocacy when you were back in D.C.? Yeah, definitely. I was at NASA headquarters when some of these cancellations and rebirths and advocacy pushes were happening, and I can tell you they were noticed in the push by the Planetary Society, the grassroots efforts. It was always the question how to deal with it, but they made an effect, and people talked about the Planetary Society back there when I was hanging out there. Emily, how about from you spend so much time talking to the scientists who are behind these missions. How delighted to talk about their work and get the public excited about it, just to thank them and pay them back for

supporting planetary exploration. All right, we're going to move on to yet another topic. Jason, it's your turn. What would you like to start with? SLS and Orion, the big program that doesn't have a lot of news coming out of it all the time. We kind of joke that anytime an engineer tightens a screw on one of these vehicles, NASA has a press release for us. But I look at it a different way. I look at it and see that really we're watching this launch vehicle and spacecraft take shape here. That's going to be the bedrock of human spaceflight for decades to come. It's on par with when NASA was designing the Saturn V and the Apollo capsule in the space shuttle, and now this is our generation's spacecraft and launch vehicle.

So over the past year, we had SLS complete some test firings of their main engines, a booster firing up in Utah, went through a critical design review where we found out that it's going to have an orange exterior that is very similar to the space shuttle's external tank. Same with Orion. Some reviews. It moved in from the fabrication phase to the production phase. Just a lot of small successes like that for NASA. But, you know, I really think it shows that the agency is kind of continuing this momentum

forward. And there's a lot happening and that this program is moving in the right direction. All right, Bruce, Emily, Casey, comments about big rockets and new capsules for the top of them? Well, one of the most exciting things for me is that before they launch any people on this rocket, they're going to need to launch something robotic first. And that leads to lots of exciting possibilities for great big missions or fast missions you could do with such a big rocket. But it also makes me a little bit afraid that some robotic planetary mission will be designed that will depend on a rocket that maybe won't be available in time or won't be reliable enough. So I'm both excited and afraid for the future of robotic planetary exploration on top of an SLS.

That reminds me of the situation we were in when there were missions being designed for the space shuttle. Then suddenly the space shuttle was no longer available for that kind of mission. Is that the sort of thing that has increased your worry? Oh, yeah. And that was absolutely disastrous for the Galileo mission. So hopefully SLS will get us to the outer planet sometime really fast, but I wait to see what's going to happen. Bruce, Casey, your thoughts? Well, this is the interesting thing. The SLS space launch system, I think a lot of how people talk about it is essentially a reflection of their own opinion about these larger issues in space.

Because as Jason kind of pointed out, a lot of the work is really happening behind the scenes, and it's really hard to know exactly where we are. It's also kind of an unprecedented project. We've only done this, we, NASA, has only done this three times in its history. You had Apollo, and then you had the space shuttle, which was mired in overruns and problems, as Emily just mentioned. And now we're in this SLS world. mentioned. And now we're in this SLS world. What's interesting to me is that we have the situation where you have an immense amount of support in Congress for this program. You know, you look at it year after year, Congress kind of falls over itself to add money to this program. They added $640 million to the SLS program in 2016. Just as a comparison, that's the equivalent size,

essentially, of NASA's entire heliophysics science division. You know, every sun science and solar physics mission out there is what they added to SLS this year. That is an immense amount of support. And then you also have this immense potential opening up of this mission, not just that it can happen, it's actually law. Now, this is, it is, you know, it is illegal, essentially, for NASA not to use the SLS to send a mission out to Europa. You know, that was part of this year's budget that they added to the national law. And so it's, as Emily said, there's great potential. And there's risk that you tie yourself very intimately with a very big program that has

essentially unprecedented levels of complexity and effort, we kind of cross our fingers and hope they know what they're doing. But maybe Jason or Bruce would have something to add to this. Because from my perspective, compared to particularly the Aries and Constellation, we're actually making, or NASA's actually making pretty solid progress. We're making it through the key decision points roughly on time. We've slipped a little bit, but honestly, I mean, the shuttle slipped, what, three to four years from its first launch. And I think we're in a situation where so far it seems like this project is doing pretty well considering how big it is. Yeah, certainly you're getting progress, real hardware builds, tests, things that you didn't see in some of the previous incarnations or that were delayed. I concur with Emily's concern, as usual, that when you start tying missions to specific rockets that aren't yet built, you raise the potential for issue. But

they are making progress. And let's face it, who doesn't love a big rocket? progress, and let's face it, who doesn't love a big rocket? Bruce, we're going to stick with you as a cleanup batter in this first round of our topics. Where would you like to start us? I would like to start us in the wild and lackey world of asteroid impact. Planetary Society's Science and Technology program has had an emphasis on planetary defense, protecting the world from asteroid impact, something that doesn't happen very often, but does happen and is preventable, which separates it from any other

large natural disaster. This last year has seen a lot of things happening, including the Planetary Defense Conference, which happens every couple of years. And this year, the Planetary Society was a primary sponsor of it. I know some of us, including Matt, traveled to Italy for the Planetary Defense Conference. It's really a neat conference because it brings together experts in all aspects of the issue, all the way from finding to tracking to characterizing to trying to figure out what to do when you find a dangerous one, how do you deflect, to getting into political and other aspects of it. So actually there, Matt hosted a wonderful public event that you also turned into some

nice radio. And we did presentations on the programs we're doing. And then also I had the happy experience of announcing our latest round of Shoemaker Neo grant winners. This is a program we've had going for many years where we award mostly amateurs, but really, really impressive amateur astronomers to do asteroid observations, particularly follow-up observations. So once you find an asteroid, you need to keep observing it so you know its orbit, whether it's going to hit Earth, and doing characterization work. So there's also been a lot of successful effort from the new Shoemaker-Neo grant winners,

of which there were new six right across the globe, and they've been upgrading their systems, and good stuff's been happening. I just want to add that the Society was also able to initiate a number of unscheduled meteor showers at the Planetary Defense Conference with our rubber asteroids. Yes, the rubber asteroids were a huge hit with the very serious asteroid community. Literally a hit. How about the rest of you? Let's get you in on this near-Earth object priority for the society, but really increasingly

for humanity. It's really interesting. Just from a policy perspective, you've had an incredible growth in what NASA spends on not exactly planetary defense, but more accurately represented as near-Earth object detection. Four years ago, or five years ago, we were spending $4 million a year, right? And that's not very much money. That's a rounding error in pretty much any federal agency's budget. And that was going mainly to ground-based telescopes to do some sky surveys.

And then we had this very important, you know, this is the beautiful part of the planetary side. We fill in those gaps, right? We support those amateur astronomers to do that extra kind of follow-up that NASA couldn't do. In the last five years, we've seen an order of magnitude increase up to $40 million a year, actually $50 million a year this year for near-Earth detection. That is a significant boost. And strangely enough, it's not actually tied to NASA being more afraid of asteroids. It's actually due because NASA wants to find an asteroid to redirect to the moon for astronauts to explore. And that's kind of

a good reminder about what really drives investments in NASA is that if we can find a way to attune really practical goals, like near-Earth object detection to more immediate political goals of giving astronauts something to do in the orbit of the moon, you can actually get wind for everybody. And I think we've had a great increase in terms of funding for planetary near-Earth detection and also this potential that someone else can probably talk about more of this new mission called NeoCam that would go into orbit and actually be a dedicated asteroid search mission. It's one of the five selected for further study for the

next small mission class from NASA. Well, of course, what I'm interested in is actually going out and seeing what these near-Earth asteroids are like. And we didn't have any new launches this year, but Hayabusa 2 flew past Earth, and we got a new name for its target asteroid, Ryugu, which it will fly past in 2018. And we got a long way toward the preparation of the OSIRIS-REx NASA sample return mission to asteroid Bennu. So the planetary community is really working on the problems of working in close proximity to these little asteroids. And who knows, maybe we'll have a human mission to one of those things pretty soon. No one wants to talk about the human mission. Seems like there's a lot more cooperation between various groups at NASA.

You talk about the cooperation between the planetary group and the human groups when it comes to things like asteroids and then use of the SLS. I'm curious for those of you that have been doing this a little longer, if this seems new and a function of NASA's shrinking budget, or if it's something else and this has always been happening and it just seems like it's increased. There have been various periods where NASA has had integration between the different elements and they're constantly restructuring so those get named different things but the they've had pushes before with the human program and planetary program it happened in early 2000s with uh trying to plan mars missions but then kind of went went away when there were the failures in 99 but trying to figure out what to do with that. They have done, as mentioned, for better and largely for worse for the planetary program, they forcibly tied various planetary launches to space shuttle that got significant delays and changes with the issues after a

Challenger incident. And so it's not new for NASA and the different parts of it to work together, but it kind of seems to come in waves based upon my rather informal assessment. We're going to begin the second round in this first ever roundtable discussion by our experts, my colleagues at the Planetary Society. And for that, we're going to go back to Emily for your second choice as a highlight of 2015. Well, since I'm writing a book on it, of course I have to pick Curiosity as my second highlight. But actually, this has been a really fantastic year for Curiosity. Curiosity began the year on Pahrump Hills, which was a unit of mudstones.

It drilled several times at that location and ever since has been driving upward at the very beginning of Martian history as recorded in the Mount Sharp at the center of Gale Crater. This was the year that Curiosity really finally started doing the science that it was sent to Mars to do. It had been able to do some pretty good science right after landing, but most of the two years since landing have just been driving and driving and driving to get to Mount Sharp. Most of the two years since landing have just been driving and driving and driving to get to Mount Sharp. This was the first year of Mount Sharp. They have found all kinds of intriguing different sorts of sedimentary rocks with complicated stories about lakes filling Gale Crater and windblown sands and different kinds of climates and different kinds of chemistry with multiple generations of different kinds of groundwater soaking through the rocks after they got formed.

We still have to wait and see the scientific papers that come out of all of this work. But Curiosity is now really doing the science that the rover was sent to Gale Crater to do. Can we just talk just in a larger sense, too, about how hot Mars was this year? I mean, you look at this, Curiosity was everything what Emily was saying, and you still had Opportun opportunity rolling around on Mars. You had MAVEN putting out its first big science right after it got there last year in Mars orbit. But then you also had the broader cultural implications of the public's reaction to Mars exploration and this increased focus of NASA at least talking publicly about sending humans there.

The first workshop ever looking at potential landing sites to put humans on Mars. I know everyone listening here is the rediscovery of water, but yet another discovery of briny water flowing on the surface of these craters, these recurring slope lineae. That was a huge story. As I mentioned, it peaks larger than Pluto in terms of news stories published about space in that time that that came out. It was a massive story. And I think it just says to me that the public is still completely into this idea of exploring

Mars. I think at a level that most people who do this in the business, or particularly in government, don't even quite appreciate how excited people are to do this in the business, or particularly in government, don't even quite appreciate how excited people are to do this. And we got hints of it this year, and I'm hoping this will continue into the next year and really get people excited about the potential we have for NASA's human and robotic program to continue exploring this place. It's a rich, rich place for science and exploration. Yeah, thanks, Casey. Jason Davis? From my standpoint, I'm just always amazed

at the pretty pictures that Curiosity continues to send back. Every mission we send to Mars has a higher resolution camera than the last mission. For me, just always seeing that constant influx of new sand dunes and new interesting rock formations as it makes its way towards the mountains, it just really keeps me interested. You know, a reminder, there are seven spacecraft that are working at Mars right now. And every one of them are doing good stuff. And there's been some big revelations. And also with the discussions of humans for the future, Mars is exciting and keeps the public imagination.

And also we're getting some great science. So having come out of a Mars research background, I'm excited! This is what Emily brings up a lot that I think is really important for us to appreciate, that we are really in this golden age of planetary exploration. We have an embarrassment of riches, particularly from Mars, of what Bruce just said, seven active missions of not just us, but India is there and Europe is there. Europe is going to be sending another mission there this year, ExoMars. It's going to send another one in 2018 to land.

We have a whole Mars program. This is something that's only really been a focus of NASA for the last 20 years, 15, 20 years. It's just been night and day compared to, I mean, or I would even say, Bruce, is this not too much to say a revolution in our understanding of Mars in the last 20 years because of all these spacecraft that have been sent there? Oh, definitely. There was such a lack of data for the 20 years before that. Now we continue to find more mysteries and more solutions. Mars turns out to be this amazingly complex world, and trying to understand both its present and its very different past,

there have been revolutions in our understanding. Casey, let's stick with you and go on to another topic. It's a mission that has already come up in this discussion, and you and I have talked about in that Planetary Radio Extra conversation we had just a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, the Europa. We'll bring it out beyond Mars a little bit to everyone's favorite moon in the outer solar system, if I dare say that. I know, I have very opinionated people. One of my favorite moons in the outer solar system, Europa, right, with more liquid water than the Earth by several multiples. A new mission to Europa is on the books.

NASA has officially begun this mission. We have a science team. We have a set of scientific instruments that have been selected and are being designed as we speak. We have a spacecraft that is being designed as we speak. We have hardware being tested, things being validated. This mission is a go. NASA requested $30 million to work on this mission in 2016. Congress gave them $175 million, plus an extra $25 million to do what they called icy satellite landing technology development, right, to land on the surface. And

actually, that's not just good enough. Congress decreed by law, again, that NASA must land on Europa when it goes. Now, you know, this is one of those good news, bad news things, because I get a little worried about how we're going to squeeze that into a budget for planetary science while maintaining our commitment to Mars and, of course, the rest of the solar system. But I think overall, it's a good problem to have. But Europa, I mean, we've been fighting for this mission for a long time. It's been the prime focus of our advocacy program since 2013. It has been a goal for many, many people for many years beyond that, decades before that. This is the Pluto mission of our generation, essentially, right? We're pushing for this for so long, the public is gonna love it when we get there truly exciting science very very deep questions that could potentially address

that is a huge step and we've never been this far along in designing a europa mission before this is unprecedented this is new territory we're in and we have a long way to go and pitfalls ahead like any mission but we have gone through some incredibly difficult hurdles that have been surpassed in 2015. And it's very exciting to see where we're going to go from here. So, Casey, if we were successful advocating for Pluto, apparently we've been successful advocating for Europa. We're on the way. So what are we advocating for next in the outer solar system? Good question.

My job is never done. Well, something that really intrigues me is this idea of an ocean worlds program. Why do we have so many missions at Mars? Think about this at NASA. Why does NASA focus so much on Mars? Well, internally, there is a bureaucracy. It's called the Mars Exploration Program.

It's a part of the Planetary Science Division, which is part of the Science Mission Directorate and so forth. But it's a group of people employed by NASA that manage the overall exploration of Mars from a robotic standpoint. Even more importantly, it's an internal advocate for the Mars program. You know, if you look at it just from a very pragmatic sense, bureaucracies are really good at sustaining themselves. So what if we get a bureaucracy devoted to exploring the outer worlds of our solar system, even the ocean worlds of our outer solar system?

That would probably end up with a lot more missions in general going to these moons like Titan, Enceladus, Triton, all these other places that have very likely liquid oceans of some sort, whether they're water or not. Getting a devoted part of NASA to say, let's maybe even utilize the SLS and say we can open up this whole world of common, maybe medium-sized missions that take three to five years to get there using our heavy lift vehicle. And we have a serious sustained effort to understand these potential habitable environments beyond the asteroid belt, I think is something that we're really going to be taking a close look at.

Then, of course, you know, Europa's on the books, but we got to see this mission through to launch, right? As you say, you don't even write about missions until they're, what, cutting metal on them. And so, you know, we're in a couple years formulation design stage for Europa. We got to get through what they call KDPC, where they actually lock in the design and start building the thing. And then we got to see it through in the design and start building the thing. And then we got to see it through to the launch and make sure that planetary science as a whole, as a science, is still balanced and we're still sending missions to other parts

of the solar system besides Mars and Europa. And NASA in general continues to grow. That's a thing I'll talk about later is NASA's budget now has been growing the last couple of years. I want to sustain that, and let's keep this incredible commitment to space exploration, really pursue the potential that we have there. We've got lots to do still. No one can rest. Europa is an incredibly exciting place,

and there's a lot of congratulations to be passed around to Casey, to the Planetary Society, and particularly to the members and supporters of the Planetary Society who have been pushing for this for years because it really is kind of mimicking the Pluto drive that happened now long ago. about the whole process is, or worrisome, let me say, is that there were far more Pluto missions canceled than the one that actually was approved and flew. So the job is not over. As Casey points out, there are some really great positive steps moving forward. The program's growing, but we need to stay vigilant and keep pushing for this, because Europa is this fascinating world with liquid water, subsurface ocean, and it's not easy to explore either, because it's inside the Jupiter radiation areas, and so it's a tricky mission to pull off, but one that should be well worthwhile. Jason Davis, you want to close this one out for us? Yeah, sure. I'll just close out by noting the tie-in with SLS and how it is both

risky and an incredible opportunity the way that these two programs are coming together. We had in this last budget, along with the mission Europa being mandated, it is also written into law that NASA must develop the exploration upper stage for the space launch system, which will enable these kind of outer planets missions. NASA conceivably would want to fly the SLS with this new upper stage before putting people on it. Publicly, they've said that they're comfortable flying people on it on the first run. They've cited the space shuttle as precedent for that. But it seems that they would, if they have the chance, they would like to fly another mission, a robotic mission first.

If this all comes together and they fly the Europa mission around 2022, it would be amazing to see all of these programs kind of come together and coalesce around a common goal. And also, as Casey was saying, this Ocean Worlds program, you know, SLS needs to keep up a high flight cadence. There's your perfect opportunity if you can keep tying it to these outer planets exploration missions. You have to see how it all comes together from a budgetary standpoint, whether it's feasible. And, of course, it was only a couple of weeks ago on Planetary Radio that we talked to Congressman John Culberson of Texas, and he mentioned that commitment in law to an Ocean Worlds program. Jason Davis, you bring up people on the tip of the SLS rocket. Part of your beat, of course,

is human spaceflight and commercial spaceflight. Is that where you want to take us next? Yeah, well, we can go up to the International Space Station, where it's been a pretty interesting year for logistics, something that everyone just loves to get excited and talk about. I know, space station logistics. NASA lost a couple cargo resupply vehicles. They closed out 2014 by losing a Cygnus vehicle on top of an Antares rocket. Little did they know this was going to be an even more interesting year for them because SpaceX lost a rocket and the Russians lost a progress vehicle in orbit as well. So that was pretty much the three main supply lines to the station all having a failure within the course of about a year.

It was so bad, and Matt, I joked about this during the last time we talked, that the subject of toiletries was actually coming up during a press conference on how much supplies the crew had left. But the end of the year, saw that all kind of bounce back. Cygnus is back flying again. An Atlas V rocket pushed Cygnus to the station, and they expect to get their Antares rocket flying again this year. Then we closed out the year with one of the most exciting moments for me in spaceflight all year was SpaceX returning their rocket to flight, and they did it in this grand fashion by returning their spent rocket booster back to Cape Canaveral

and landing it upright. And that was a big moment for them and really the entire spaceflight industry. Still a ways off from seeing people going up to the ISS, either in a Dragon or the Boeing capsule? Yeah, we're at least a year away, if not more. 2017 is NASA's stated goal for one of those two commercial vehicles. We may see a Dragon test flight of their new crew vehicle at the end of this year. Whether or not that actually happens is hard to say. SpaceX is pretty quiet when it comes to their internal timelines. But both are committed, SpaceX and Boeing are committed to doing this in 2017. So they'll have to first fly a demo mission to the space station, an unpiloted demo mission with their new capsule. And then they'll have a crewed

test flight that'll be just a demo flight with people in it, but not an actual operational mission. And then after that comes the actual paid missions where they're ferrying crew back and forth. And something I just want to add in terms of this timeline, something really important happened this year too, also in the budget that was passed just a month ago. For the first time in the program's history, the Commercial Crew program actually got the money that NASA said it needed to execute the program. Commercial Crew, originally their goal was to have human launches in 2015. Obviously, that didn't happen.

Why was that? Well, they've been getting fractions of the money that they've been asking every year to develop the program, to pay Boeing, to pay SpaceX to develop this new hardware. And for the first time in 2016, they got the money they said they needed. And this is something that NASA pushed for very, very hard. They had the NASA administrator down to astronauts in orbit on the International Space Station, saying that the top priority for NASA was to get the full funding for commercial crew to keep it on track for 2017. So we don't know if they'll

make it, but they got the money they say they needed. That's going to certainly help and to keep them on the schedule for 2017. You know, it's impressive is outside all of the details and all of the debates. We've had humans in orbit constantly since November of 2000, more than 15 years, making it look routine, which is always dangerous politically, but really good for astronauts in space. Sounds suspiciously like a random space fact. Sorry, can't help myself.

Bruce, you are next up with the story of a project that got you and me and a couple of other of our colleagues out to the desert not long ago. Indeed. Part of what we support in Planetary Society are innovative technology programs that are doing something different, something innovative. And we'll talk, of course, about our big light sail project shortly but what we also supported this year was a planetary deep drill field test run by honeybee robotics basically we've hardly drilled into planetary surfaces other than the earth we've drilled a couple meters into the moon a few centimeters into mars but having a capability to go deeper than that including on the ice ocean worlds that we talked about basically allows you a capability to go deeper than that, including on the ice ocean worlds that we talked about, basically allows you a capability to look back in time and also explore other aspects of worlds, potentially even oceans. But in any case, you see, like in the Martian polar caps, you would see a climate history by going deep down.

But it's not easy. So Honeybee was doing the first field test that we supported out at a gypsum mine that several of us went out to, and they spent several weeks out there using this four meter long drill that works completely autonomously below the surface, drilling down. They use gypsum because it's similar in strength properties to very cold ice. Nutshell, very successful first step towards developing a technology to allow us to actually probe deeper into planetary surfaces. Rather exciting.

Emily, I want to hear your thoughts about getting us a lot farther down below the surface of, let's say, Mars than we've gone so far. Well, of course, getting down below the surface on Mars gives us a prospect of getting to that Holy Grail organics on Mars and learning a lot more about what's going on in its interior. Unfortunately, this year saw the delay of the launch of a spacecraft that would have gotten not a deep drill, but a little self-propelled mole down several meters into the surface of Mars. And that's InSight, which was supposed to launch early 2016 and now won't be going until 2018. But hopefully we'll get there eventually. Casey, Jason? Well, having visited Honeybee Robotics and doing a story on this early on, and then doing a follow up with Chris Zachney, who's the lead on this project from Honeybee, I just found it really

impressive and ambitious, this program that they're testing out. The leap forward in technology from just drilling a few inches below the surface to really going meters or even tens or hundreds of meters below the surface eventually is very ambitious, and it's a really neat project, and it'll be interesting to see where it goes from here. I know they have future field tests planned. I'll actually be writing up some of this in a future article. Casey Dreyer, projects like this, I mean, this is such a tiny project compared to the ones that get all the attention that NASA puts on. Does it get onto the radar at the national level?

The core here is kind of what I mentioned earlier, and Bruce knows this more intimately than anyone on this call, which is that the Planetary Society is trying to do work that fills in these gaps. You can do this type of technology demonstration to get it up to the level of NASA funding, potentially opening far more funding, millions of dollars, to develop these technologies, but you have to demonstrate a proof of concept. You have to demonstrate that your idea fundamentally works, and that's exactly why we have the Planetary Society, right? That you have to be able to show that concepts aren't just completely nuts in order to get this funding. And this is a crucial area that we kind of help in to develop this up to the point of showing it's not completely nuts or that it's totally reasonable or a variety of outcomes.

And this sort of technology demonstration is definitely helpful in moving that along. And it's one of those things where the planetary side of members can definitely feel a little bit, you know, every day when you wake up, you feel a little bit of reward. Oh, I helped space exploration today. Well, here's a good example of that. Very good point. And exactly what we're trying to do is fill in those niches, boost things forward. We do some things that are more near-term technology and some like planetary deep drill that are a little farther off. But what's great about this is now they actually have succeeded

and there will be some NASA funding at a higher level and we'll still be participating to take this out and integrate it with actual high-level science instruments and eventually in a couple of years take it to Greenland Ice Sheet and do real ice sheet exploration using cutting-edge technology. Bruce, I insist that I participate in that one. You're not taking my seat. All right, we'll all talk offline about this.

Emily, it is your honor to lead off the third and final round in this discussion of highlights of 2015. And I think you've got at least a two for one for us. At least two. Maybe I'll squeeze in a third. So there were lots of smaller worlds that got explored this year in addition to Pluto. The first of those was the only dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, and that's Ceres. And Dawn snuck up on Ceres and got into orbit and completed the initial reconnaissance, built our first global map and named things on the surface officially, and has now spiraled all the way down to its low-altitude mapping orbit where it's going to start doing some compositional mapping,

learn what the surface is actually made of. And then the whole year, Rosetta was following comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko around the sun, including passing through perihelion in August. And comets are such dynamic things. And we've never orbited a comet before. We've only seen snapshots of comets. So Rosetta has given us this unprecedented look at the way a comet changes as it goes through perihelion. And we're just beginning to get all the results of that. Then finally, I have to squeeze in Cassini, which spent most of this year in an equatorial orbit that allowed multiple flybys of Saturn's icy moons, including several of Enceladus toward the end of the year, at a time when the south polar geysers are erupting into south polar night. And so Cassini was actually able to use its heat sensing instruments to stare down the throat of

those geysers and see what temperature they're at and learn about the salty ocean that's likely underneath the surface. So it's just been an absolutely great year for things smaller than planets in the solar system. Excellent job of data compression there, Emily. Gentlemen? Cassini is one of those missions that we're all going to miss so much when it's gone. You know, I think we kind of take it for granted because it's been there for, what, 12 years now? It's just continuing. It's spectacular. And I think we just had our final Enceladus flyby. Is that right, Emily?

Pretty much. It depends on how you count more distant ones. But it was the final close flyby. And we've really finished up the close icy satellite flybys, except for Titan, which Cassini does have to keep returning to in order to adjust its orbit. Cassini's just been an amazing mission and is kind of one end of the spectrum where you flew a really big spacecraft, really expensive and really successful for more than a decade already there, giving us a combination of first reconnaissance with really detailed studies of all aspects of the Saturn system. And it's been amazing. Going back to Ceres and Rosetta, I'm always struck in these really first reconnaissance type missions, how you go from points of light or fuzzy blobs to places that have personality

and complexity and detailed science questions. And both Don at Ceres and Rosetta at Comet 67P have really taken us into whole new levels of understanding of those objects. Just over the past couple years, it feels like there's been so many where you get the first glimpse where you make out the actual shape of the object. We did that with the comet, with Rosetta. We did it with Ceres. And then with Pluto, it's just been really fun seeing all this happen. And I feel like we've kind of gotten spoiled in many ways with all these first reconnaissance of these objects.

And also with Cassini, as Casey said, boy, are we going to miss that, seeing all those awesome rings, shots, and the icy moons all lined up. And looking into the future, it's really looking kind of grim. You know, in the next decade or so, almost every mission is going to be at Mars or an asteroid. And I like asteroids. Oh, and the moon also. I like all of these worlds, but it's not the whole diversity of the solar system. We've had such a bounty of other kinds of worlds that we've explored in the last decade. And there's going to be a major pause in the decade ahead of us.

And that's really true. This is the importance of the pipeline, right? And this is, you know, even just for Rosetta. I think they were first proposing Rosetta in the 80s. ESA selected it in 1993. They spent 10 years building it. It launched in 1993. They spent 10 years building it. It launched in 2004. It took 11 years to get where it's going to match the orbit of the comet. You've got to be continually investing in your

next mission, in your next program, and what's next. You have to be operating your current mission. You have to be building the next mission, and you have to be designing the one after that in order to keep this pace up. And because of the budget cuts, at least in NASA's case that came down three years ago, we have disrupted that. And we're going to have this gap coming up in 20, starting in 2017, we have a lot of missions ending. But the last planetary mission, well, I guess now that InSight's delayed, we'll actually have kind of a bonus mission in 2018. But we're going to have a serious gap coming up in the 2020s. This is something that comes up as well in my regular conversation with you, Emily, in our January 4th Planetary Radio Edition.

Because of these timelines you've developed, you could see that fall off in missions that is not far away. Casey, you've already indicated that we have a good start with the 2016 budget on fixing this situation. There are other successes in there that I think you want to tell us about. Yeah, the budget's always hard to talk about in a condensed way. That's why we had a whole episode about it, right? There's so much in there, particularly when they cram everything, literally the entire federal budget into one 2,000-page piece of legislation. But for NASA, NASA just made out great, honestly.

We had NASA's biggest budget in five years was passed in 2016. The Planetary Science Division's biggest budget in 10 years was part of that, $1.63 billion, blowing past our goal of $1.5 billion that we've had for the last few years. Lots of extra money for Europa, extra money for the Mars 2020 rover, money to continue operations of Opportunity, to continue operations of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Both had been zeroed out in 2016 by the White House. Hard to do much better.

My goal here is that NASA itself sees the support from Congress and continues this goal of growing NASA, right? We as a nation, as a world, honestly, ask NASA to do so much. Congress or the White House has kind of underfunded that, you know, made it very hard to actually execute what we ask NASA to do. And this is a step this year. They added $1.3 billion to NASA overall. That's a 7.5% boost over last year, which itself was a boost over the year before. We're building back NASA's capability to do this stuff. We've got lots of big programs coming up. One way to make sure those programs don't blow their budget is to give them the money they need in these early stages of

design. And I think we're doing that. I'm crossing my fingers, but we got to keep this pattern going forward. I want to hear from the rest of you about this. I mean, what are you most happy about in this pretty good budget, the 2016 budget? And what maybe do you wish had been in it or been better represented? You know, I think Casey first mentioned this everybody wins scenario to me when the two of us were in Houston for the Mars conference. And I remember thinking at the time when he wrote a blog post on this possible budget outcome, I remember thinking, yeah, right, come on, this can't happen. And then it did. And I was just blown away that seemingly most groups got what they needed, or in many cases more from a human spaceflight standpoint.

It was amazing to see the exploration upper stage debate come to an end, that now that's going to be built, and even a habitat for NASA's future lunar proving grounds. So it was just pretty incredible. future lunar proving grounds. So it was just pretty incredible. This has to be the most optimistic budget that has been passed since I've been covering space news. The thing that I'm happiest to see is that both Opportunity and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter got the funding they need to carry on their highly successful missions. They keep getting zeroed out. I know it's a hard problem that NASA has to continue paying for all of these missions that live ridiculously longer than they're supposed to. But they're there, they're doing great science, and it would be a crime not to continue paying for them. So I'm so glad to see those two continuing. good about themselves that their efforts along with Casey have led to in part to this success in the budget. I of course always am looking for more, particularly in planetary areas, seeing more funding in the science research aspect that often gets a little shortchanged

compared to what we could do with more funding to use all this amazing data that we're collecting. And then also all the discovery, the discovery mission line got a little bit of a boost. Discovery and new frontiers, the competitive, competed missions that it's, it's hard to keep much of a cadence of new missions without more funding going into those lines. So that's my, my wishful, wishful fantasy thinking would be to get more money in those areas. But overall, it's a big success. Jason Davis, I think the science guy would fire me or you or both of us if we didn't talk about that other project, which is a big part of what you report on.

Yeah, this was quite a year for the Planetary Society's science and technology projects, in particular LightSail, of course. We flew the test mission. That was an incredibly eventful few weeks where we launched the spacecraft, heard back from it, lost contact with it a couple times, and finally managed to deploy its solar sails. And that was our criteria of success. And we managed to make that happen. So that was pretty eventful time. Now we're making steady progress on the second mission. In fact, we closed out the year with

a technology or a test readiness review for full-fledged system testing that's going to start early next year. So this was quite a big moment for Planetary Society members that supported this project and saw it take shape over really almost the past decade, and our involvement before that was solar sailing with Cosmos. Bruce, I want to get your thoughts. After all, you are the person who is basically our liaison with the folks who are putting LightSail-B together for us. One, just a reflection back, it was very gratifying to actually see a solar sail planetary sighting mission in space

after all the efforts over 15 to 20 years to reach that point, although the test mission was not yet trying to do actual solar sailing. But the next LightSail mission, not yet trying to do actual solar sailing. But the next light sail mission, we will be working on controlled solar sailing and demonstrating it in something that's only about the size of a loaf of bread and five kilograms in size. And if we can prove it out using the push of light on the spacecraft, we can actually use that for propulsion. That opens up potentially a new world with these very the spacecraft, we can actually use that for propulsion. That opens up potentially a new world with these very small spacecraft, giving them a propulsion technique

that doesn't require fuel being on board. So yeah, we're pushing ahead. Learned a lot from the first mission, which was a little spacecraft that could, where the team kept getting past different issues that came up and successfully getting the sails deployed. And from that, we learned a lot. So there are a lot of modifications going on with the spacecraft. Jason's written about a lot of them on our website. Do a lot of testing over the next few months and get ready for launch. Great anticipation.

Anybody else see that piece in the L.A. Times recently, just a couple of days ago as we speak, that called out about 12 science stories to look forward to in 2016, and there was LightSail. Yeah, and it's also, it's like the perfect mix because it's going to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, which I think everyone is going to be super excited about just independently of the exciting story of LightSail. So this is just like internet catnip, you know, that we've put together here. It's going to be really exciting.

Emily, you don't get to talk about LightSail very much since it's not going to any other planets. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Well, I was just thinking back to when we first launched Cosmos 1 and that one didn't turn out so well, but I was working on that particular mission on the camera instrument. I was going to be the one sharing the pictures with the world. And we had a little fun time with LightSail, rearranging and reassembling the pictures that

we got onto the ground from that one. So I'm looking forward to future LightSail missions where we can see that sail deployed against the blackness of space and just enjoy the view up there. Yeah, Emily, we'll be calling on your image processing wizardry, I'm sure, for this mission as well. The imagery for the next mission should be even better in terms of the second spacecraft that's involved, Prox-1. We should get a sequence of images of the CubeSat actually being deployed out of the spacecraft. And if all goes well and Prox-1 is able to track it down and rendezvous with LightSail, we should get two different views of the solar sail coming out, one from Prox-1 and one from LightSail.

So that'll be pretty cool, and I'm sure the team, as they were for this one, will be saying, hey, can Emily take a look at this? Bruce Betts, you have the honor of picking the last of our topics today, and I think we may cover several missions with this. It's, again, sort of a cleanup position. Yeah, just a general statement. There are a lot of missions that are working, that people are working hard every day and extracting data from previous missions that do great work.

And obviously, we don't have time to go into all of them. that do great work, and obviously we don't have time to go into all of them. I do want to mention one mission that pulled off quite a success, which is the Japanese Akatsuki mission, which was launched to Venus in 2010. Every mission that goes into orbit around another planet has a terrifying time where they try to get into orbit. Akatsuki, it turned out, their main propulsion stopped firing. It basically ceased to work during part of the communications blackout. So next thing they knew, it was continuing to fly past Venus. It missed getting into orbit, missed that crucial time

period. So one would think all is lost. but in a very clever move, the Japanese space agency came up with a way five years later, in December of 2015, when it was coming back near Venus to actually get into orbit. And even then they had to come up with creative solutions and ended up using just the orbiter maneuvering thrusters that are usually designed to just make small changes because the main propulsion didn't work. They used those and actually achieved Venus orbit in December. And it's quite an achievement, another example of a little spacecraft that could. Emily, you and I have talked a little bit about Akatsuki. I know you're pretty excited about this as well. Yeah, Japan just has this record of recovering missions that seems like they ought to be lost.

And I am looking forward to the pictures that they're going to get of the clouds on Venus circulating around the planet. It's very cool to have this mission be able to fill in the gap, actually, that we have in the inner solar system, which we haven't even talked about. With Messenger dying early this year, Akatsuki is the only thing going for a while until BepiColombo finally launches and gets past Venus and to Mercury. Yeah, we also lost Venus Express this year, didn't we? Yeah. So it's part of the shrinking of the portfolio of solar system exploration that's just started to happen. But we do have BepiColombo going, and that one's a really exciting mission. It's both ESA and Japan are going to be working together on a double spacecraft mission to Venus and then Mercury. They launch in 2017. And I believe NASA has a reasonably substantial instrument contribution to BepiColombo as well.

All space exploration is international these days, and that's one of the things that I love so much about it. Well, let's keep it international. Anybody else want to throw anything else into this discussion as we go into bonus time, including accomplishments around the world? MOM, the Mars Orbital Mission from India, already came up. We can't give enough credit to ESA for the Philae lander. I think how they presented that to the public is maybe an underreported story this year in terms of anthropomorphizing both the lander and the orbiter.

The cartoons they made, everyone was watching that. That was something that was just truly exciting this year, and I really liked how ESA communicated that. Also, I would add to my list, they just had a press release, right, you know, I don't know why they released this during the very end of the year

in this dead zone, but we had the first official generation of plutonium-238 was validated, the whole new technique for creating plutonium-238, the power source for our deep spacecraft and spacecraft in dusty destinations or in shadowed craters or so forth. You know, we haven't made any in the United States since 1988. We have now made some again. And that's a really, really important story if you want to keep particularly going to these ocean worlds, but anywhere really. A surface of Mars that gets dusty for a long period of time,

shadowed craters of the moon, or Mercury or any of these places, you need plutonium. Bruce, Jason, your last comments? What Emily said about all space exploration being international these days, you know, that's so true, and it's even creeping

into human spaceflight, where the United States has definitely been the clear leader with Russia there for the longest time. And we've seen that with this year, ESA made contributions to the Orion service module. That's coming together. They sent a test module over to the United States, to Ohio, where that's going through vibration testing. And also, I believe it was earlier this year when the Europeans launched their reusable space plane demonstrator, IXV. They plan to launch subsequent versions of that as well to test re-entry technology. So it's really neat to see international partners coming together, especially when it comes to something like getting ready to send humans to Mars. We've only scratched the surface.

2015 was a big year and exciting. 2016 is going to be another great year with a lot of great information. There's lots more Pluto data still coming back, lots more exploration at Mars. And of course, the other missions we've talked about still cranking out and new missions launching. So although we need to keep an eye on the pipeline and keep pushing for more planetary exploration, there's a lot of happy stuff coming. And I don't think we've even mentioned yet the thing I'm most looking forward to in 2016, which is the arrival of Juno at Jupiter. It's going to be a short-lived mission, but those pictures are going to be spectacular. This has the webcam, right?

It's a short live mission, but those pictures are going to be spectacular. This has the webcam, right? It has a camera on the spacecraft whose sole purpose is to entertain the public with amazing photos of Jupiter. They've already set up their website where they're inviting people to select places to target the camera images. So I'm really looking forward to that. Yeah. I mean, I think just this whole thing, what Bruce said about how big of a year 2015 was, we can't in an hour, we can't even address this, much less what's even coming forward next year, which is going to be a very busy year.

I just want to give a quick call out to also other NASA sciences, right? We mainly focus on planetary science. Heliophysics had a successful launch and deployment of the MMS, the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, which is a very ambitious mission to measure magnetic recombination in the Earth's magnetic field. James Webb Space Telescope is continuing forward without blowing the budget again. So we could just appreciate that. That looks on track. We have continued research into the WFIRST mission, which will be the big follow up to James Webb in the early 2020s.

We also have Earth Science launched like four or five missions last year. Very, very successful, despite the one failure of the instrument on the soil mapper mission. All of these science missions are getting roughly the budget that they need, thanks to the overall growing budget of NASA. And that's a very important thing, too, that we don't have to, we're not pitting our sciences against each other. There's so much science to do, all of them deserve more money. I'll throw out one other thing, which is there's been a huge amount of success in exoplanet hunting in the last year, and it continues,

and we're supporting some research at the Planetary Society, but we're still getting results from Kepler, ground-based, and it really is an area that's growing and expanding, finding planets around other stars. So something to look forward to even more great results. So an exciting year past and an exciting year to look forward to, and you can continue to follow these developments that we've talked about and many, many others from all the folks that we've been talking to over the last hour or so. Best place to do that? Probably, my opinion, planetary.org.

Probably. Thank you. For sure, Matt. Planetary Radio and all of our social media, Facebook, Twitter, we will be on top of these throughout the year for you. Thank you very much, folks. I hope we can do this again, and I look forward to talking to each of you individually as the

year unfolds. Thanks, Matt. Thanks. Thank you. We've been speaking with Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla. She is our Planetary Evangelist. The Planetary Society's Director of Advocacy, Casey Dreyer. Our Digital Editor, Emb, embedded reporter in the LightSail project and reporting on human and commercial spaceflight, Jason Davis, and, of course, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, Bruce Betts. Thanks very much for listening to this edition of Planetary Radio Extra. Clear skies.