Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Radio Live at Science Museum Oklahoma

Episode Date: August 7, 2019

Join Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye and host Mat Kaplan as they visit Oklahoma City’s outstanding public science museum. You’ll meet University of Oklahoma researchers who are exploring Mars and learning how solar systems form across the universe. And we’ll hear about the Sooner state’s huge role in our exploration of the final frontier. Learn more about this week’s guests and topics at: http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/0807-2019-planetary-radio-live-science-museum-oklahoma.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Oklahoma OK! This week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, it's Matt here to present a special episode. We'll take you back to May of this year, when we took Planetary Radio Live to Science Museum Oklahoma in Oklahoma City. Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye and I were first joined by the president of this magnificent museum, along with the author of a terrific book that pays tribute to the scores of astronauts and scientists, engineers and explorers who have made the Sooner State an unsurpassed contributor on the final frontier. Then we'll meet two Oklahoma University scientists who are revealing the secrets of Mars and the formation of solar systems across the universe.

Stick around for What's Up with Bruce Betts when we'll give away that great book, Oklahomans and Space, along with our regular space trivia contest prizes. From Science Museum Oklahoma, this is Planetary Radio Live. Welcome, welcome, welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. We are in the Sooner State with hundreds of space exploration fans, some terrific guests, and the guy a lot of folks here can't wait to hear from. Please welcome to the Planetary Radio Live stage the Chief Executive Officer of the Planetary Society, my boss, Bill Nye the Science Guy. And greetings. Greetings, everyone. Oklahoma. Yes. That was some great Sooner noise. Yes.

I don't know if there was music playing there or if that was just people stamping their feet. It's just excitement. Well, welcome. It's so good to be back. I come to Oklahoma from time to time. Now and then it's good to be back. I come to Oklahoma from time to time, now and then. It's great to be back. You know, I used to work in the oil field not far from here, and look, I'm fine. But you weren't a roustabout.

No, I was an engineer, not a roustabout. I worked with roustabouts. We were required to have different colored hats. It's kind of like Star Trek. You can hardly tell us apart. Guy on Star Trek, roustabout, engineer in the oil. It's six of one, really. You don't want to wear a red hat.

No. Those are the guys who all... That was, yeah, the red, yeah, he digresses. But the guys with the red shirts on Star Trek, they often, they came to a bad end. But they're just characters, everybody. Relax. Is this your first time visiting Science Museum? Yes, in Oklahoma City. Yes, it is. It's quite a place. Oh, it's gorgeous, you guys. It is with respect to the other science centers which I visited. This is a pretty great one.

This place has a lot of just fantastic innovations. I'm amazed because the other science museums that I've been in, usually about half the exhibits are non-functioning. They all seem to be working here and everybody's having a good time. Maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. Your admission dollars at work. We got a little bit of a chance to look around. I think you got more of a chance than me.

In fact, right backstage here is something that you love to make use of. Oh, the vortex cannon. So if those of you for some reason have not taken fluid mechanics, the vortex cannon is fantastic. It's, you know, the motion of fluids, of anything that flows is a fluid. So air is a fluid in the mechanical engineering world. And there's this mythic thing where you imagine an element of fluid, a cube of fluid flowing through cube stream space. And then it devolves into this wonderful thing called the Navier-Stokes equation, named after Steve Smith.

No, named after a guy named Navier and a guy named Stokes. And when you do the vortex cannon, all these complex mathematical terms all cancel out and you get these perfect circles, these perfect rings. It's just so cool. But I've grown out of that. I've seen you do that on stage. I was kidding. You never grew out of it. This is a radio show, but imagine So one here, the second sound is the candle. The first sound is the vortex. And if it's really far away,

it's like far away, poof! It's like being there. Yeah, yeah, it's almost like that. We're going to bring out the first two guests for the show, but not just yet. No, wait! There are a lot of people here who, incredible as it may seem, have not heard of the Planetary Society. Would you introduce them? That is just weird, Matt Kaplan.

Planetary Society is the world's largest independent space interest organization, advancing space science and exploration, so that citizens of the world will know the cosmos and our place within it. Go ahead, close the elevator door. That's my speech. And then the other thing that I really want in my lifetime while I'm alive is finding evidence of life on another world. So it would be. You and me both.

And apparently a lot of people here. It would be profound, proflippin found, if I may. If we found evidence of life on Mars, like a microbial mat fossilized on Mars. Not this mat. No, different mat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good question. Matt spells his name with one T, just like at the front door.

Coincidence? Yes, yes, actually, it's a coincidence. People walk all over me all the time. I get it. Yeah, thank you. Yes, actually, it's a coincidence. People walk all over me all the time. I get it.

Yeah, thank you. So Mars is much smaller, somewhat smaller than the Earth. So it cooled off faster. You know, a small pan cools off faster than a big pan on your stove. It cooled off maybe a billion years before the Earth did. It formed an ocean and an atmosphere a billion years before the earth did it formed an ocean in an atmosphere a billion years before the earth did so if you have an ocean for a billion years maybe you've got something alive and then uh the oceans evaporated actually they got scraped off and blown into space by the particles streaming off the sun but if you are a microbe on Mars, hypothetically,

and that's a joke, hypothetically, it's a really funny joke. If you live under the sand on the ice that's on Mars, water ice, maybe you're still there. Maybe there's a colony of microbes still making a living on Mars someplace.

And if we could find that, it would change history. It would be, everybody would just have to think differently about what it means to be alive. Are those microbes just like us? Do they have DNA? Or are they a whole different Martian, Marscrobial deal out there?

Second Genesis. Second Genesis, right. Did it start in a different way? But what if they're, wait, what about this? What if the microbes on Mars have DNA? Does that suggest for sure that life started on Mars a billion years before it started here? Mars was hit with its own asteroid and then through what's called a Hohmann orbit. These rocks came from Mars to the Earth. Of course, it's in space, Matt, so there's no noise.

It wouldn't be, it would just be, and they would land here. Because there's a lot of Mars, if you know where to look, you can find Martian meteorites here on Earth that we can show that they're from Mars. So are we all descendants of Martians? Whoa, dude. So the Planetary Society connects you with issues like that. And we have learned opinions. We have the best, I think the best long form journalists about space in the world right now. Our board of directors is made of extraordinary space exploring people. The patent holder on Sirius XM radio,

the world's foremost historian, people that have been involved with all sorts of space missions, guys who take pictures on Mars, pictures of Europa, the moon of Jupiter with twice as much ocean water as the Earth. So the Planetary Society connects you with space. Check us out at planetary.org, your home page.

I mean, after you, of course, are at BillNye.com. Yes. And that URL is going to show up again up here on the screens at the end of our afternoon. So if you're listening at home, look for it on the screen. Yep. They already know. Or in your car. Yes.

Lead on, Matt. All right. We are, as I said, at Science Museum Oklahoma. Prior to the beginning of the show, we had an introduction from the woman who runs this place, the president of Science Museum Oklahoma. She's going to be the first of the guests that Bill and I host here on her own stage, so I don't know who's hosting who. Sherry Marshall is the president.

She is a native Oklahoman. She also recommended to us, as somebody that we might want to have as a guest, the person who's going to follow her on stage, but he'll be up in a moment, please welcome Sherry Marshall. Sherry, Sherry, Sherry. Have a seat. No, you get next to the host. Oh, Bill will move down. Okay. Hey, thank you for Sherry. Have a seat. No, you get next to the host. No, Bill will move down. Okay.

Hey, thank you for doing this, first of all. Oh, my gosh. Thank you guys for being here. It's what an honor to have you guys at our own homes. It's beautiful. Really, you guys, I've visited a lot of science centers. This one is extraordinary. It's great.

Thank you. That means a lot. I'm kind of partial, but I have to 100% agree with you. No, it's innovative. It's cool. And as Matt pointed out, it's very well maintained. And that's management, Sherry. Blow it up. That's innovative. It's cool. And as Matt pointed out, it's very well maintained. And that's management, Sherry. Blow it up. That's right.

If you're listening on the radio, we just did a fist bump. We did a fist bump. I say the radio. You're streaming service. How many of you out there in the audience, this is not your first visit to Science Museum Oklahoma? Pretty much everybody. Almost everybody. Okay. Great place. During the little press briefing that Bill was doing backstage, you got a question, Bill, about how did you become excited about science? And it was kind of in a place like this. Oh, very much in a place like this. Yeah. It was the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., which is cool. It's big. And it has all kinds of cool things. But back then, there was hardly any, hardly anything you were allowed to touch.

Yeah. Yeah. Very little hands-on informal science education. Now the Smithsonian has, in many regards, stepped up to catching up with Oklahoma City as best they can. But this is what makes this place seriously, this is what makes this place, seriously, this is what makes

this place great. So welcome everyone. And for me it was the Griffith Observatory on the hilltop in Los Angeles and the Museum of Science and Industry, which got me into all of this. You're a native. Yes, and for me it was Omniplex. I came here as a child. Which is the original name of this place, right? The original name of this place. It opened in this building in 1978. It actually started on the fairgrounds here in Oklahoma City. And then we built this big, beautiful, huge building.

And it opened in summer of 1978. And I was one of their first students through their summer camps. Wow, you're an OG as the kids say. I am old, I think is what you're trying to say. No, for the grown-ups, that's the original gangster. When it comes to science, gangster, I'm all in. And you went to BSU. She's got the moves.

I went to BSU, blow stuff up. Not Boston State, blow stuff up. You've got so much going on here. There are many different exhibit areas. What is related? What do you have that's related to what we're talking about today? Space? Astronomy? Don't you have? I mean, science

is everywhere and you can relate to a lot of the things that we have in our everyday life honestly came from space exploration. But specifically to that content area, we do have a planetarium. We have a large space area where you can explore aviation in space. We have one of the original Apollo mission simulators

on loan from the Smithsonian because it's obviously better here. No, that's not true. Love you, Smithsonian. Can I, may I briefly, what I think is a brief story about Rust Schweigert, who is a very, is an Apollo astronaut, still very active, in fact, in the search for asteroids and keeping one from hitting us.

But there's an Apollo simulator, and the guy I went to college with is the president of the pinball, American Pinball Association, and he prides himself on this sort of thing. So he walks up to the simulator, Dan Miller, Miller and he plays it and he can sort of get it to land on the moon most of the time Rusty Schweigert 40 years after flying walks up to it boop bang the muscle memory the number of times those guys must have rehearsed landing on the moon it's really extraordinary so come down to Oklahoma Science Center and see if you can land on the moon for reals for simulated reals you you said you have a planetarium we do but big changes are ahead changes actually we started on the

fairgrounds as a planetarium and when we relocated here at our current location we thought it was very important our founder had the Kirkpatrick Planetarium and we've had this equipment for ages and we realized that, wow, people care about this stuff. It's important, it's relevant, we need to invest in it. And so we have a plan now to move our current planetarium, which is a 40-foot dome. You've probably walked by it in our museum.

It's right in the middle of our exhibit floor. A lot of places have planetariums tucked away off to the side. Ours is smack dab right in the middle. You mean 15 meters? Yes. Yes, I'm sorry. You're correct. I forgot about those old units.

That's right. I kid. No, you're right, though. I'm fooling around. Go ahead. That's good. We're going to get it. We're going to move it to a giant new dome. Now I'm going to have to start doing conversions in my head. Thanks for that. That's why you're right though. I'm fooling around go ahead. That's gonna get it. We're gonna move I'm gonna have to start doing conversions in my head. Thanks

From a pretty small thing to a big thing, right? We're gonna increase the size of our dome and we're gonna put it off to the side Because it is such an anchor to our building and we're putting it where we had one of the large Domed theaters and Omni dome theater. So a lot of museums around the nation have those. But they're becoming a little less technology relevant. And so we've decided, you know what, that space is way better served

with, we're going to increase the size, put better projectors in there. We're going to be one of the only digital optical hybrid systems around. So you'll have the old-fashioned type projector, the kind that I fell in love with at the Griffith Observatory.

It was a Zeiss, but you might have... We might have a Minolta. We might have a Zeiss. Yeah, but you'll combine it with the new digital technology. Right, right. We call it a digital hybrid or an optical digital system, hybrid system,

because those optical stars are so bright. They're actual pinpoints of light, and it's not a digital representation of light. You can say it's 4K or 16K or something, but it's still digital. There's still pixels there. It's still pixels on a screen. So when you have a true light bulb projecting on a screen,

you're going to have a much higher resolution star. They're just sharp. They're sharp. They're beautiful. Now, is this a true fact or a false fact? That's a joke. That you can take binoculars in the sun? Absolutely. So the resolution you can get from these optical stars, so you go out,

the lights go down, you have that, ooh, moment. You can actually, right, pull out the binoculars and see even deeper. So for listeners around the world, we're in Oklahoma, right in the middle of the United States, which is virtually the middle of North America. You may think that in this area with all this agriculture and so on and oil fields that you would just be able to go out at night and see tremendous number of stars. But for our listeners who might have pictures or images of the earth at night, look for Oklahoma City it is one bright enormous metropolitan complex with a great deal of what would we call light

pollution extra light at night and so to students who might live around here I really encourage you to families everybody come down and look at the new planetarium because I'll bet I'm, you are missing a great deal of the night sky, which might surprise you living here in Oklahoma City. I think one of the moments that's really transformational is when you go into a planetarium and you see the night sky and then they take it to a truly dark sky because you can do that in a planetarium.

Take all that light pollution away and that's when you get that gasp moment. People think it's a hoax. It is one of the most traumatic experiences. I have many reasons to be we have many reasons to be grateful to you Sherry. One of them is as I said the guy that we're going to bring out now who is Bill Moore who is

I guess a great resource for the museum as well. Yeah he is a great resource a great friend of the museum and one of the best historians for space information that I've ever met. And I have proof of that sitting next to me here, which I'll show off in a moment. Bill Moore, he is a historian, maker of documentaries, author who founded the Motion Picture Archive at the Oklahoma Historical Society. He is, among other things, the author of that book I mentioned, this magnificent book, which is called Oklahomans in Space, Chronicles of the Amazing Contributions

of Oklahomans in the Aerospace Industry. It is really spectacular. This is my copy. You can buy one right here at Science Museum Oklahoma, and I know that Bill told me the proceeds all go back to the museum. But don't buy a copy just yet, because we're going to be giving one away at the end of today's program. And it is signed by Bill and I believe also by someone else. General Tom Stafford, a native Oklahoman astronaut.

Apollo 10 astronaut. So, all right. Please welcome another Oklahoma native who calls Oklahoma City home, Bill Moore. Good to see you. Thank you. Come on down. Good to see you. Hey, Bill.

Thank you. Welcome. Have a seat. All right. It's a heck of a book. I'd have used stronger language. We have kids in the crowd. It's a heck of a book. I'd have used stronger language for it, but we have kids in the crowd. It is gorgeous.

I mean, I'll just give you a little peek inside. You were telling me this wasn't the original plan. No. Because it complements a project you already had underway. What began this project is I started interviewing Gordon Cooper when he was in this facility back in 2000. It was Gordon Cooper. He's an astronaut, from Shawnee, Oklahoma. There you go. And it began with that interview and I realized that we needed to get all the other astronauts and from there it took off to engineers, media folks

like Jim Hartz. His interview was brilliant. I loved his interview. It just tells the story of the space race and the history of the space program up to today through the eyes of these Oklahomans. I was under the impression, and you correct this right up front in the book, that Oklahoma was the birthplace or home of more astronauts than any other state.

Not quite true, but there is a great distinction for astronauts in Oklahoma. There is. I researched that because I've heard political types promote that about Oklahoma and tourism-type folks, and it's not true. I imagine Ohio probably has more. I haven't really connected with all the shuttle astronauts since then. Well, Purdue University just keeps cranking. Purdue, yeah, a lot of them. But right now, the administrator of NASA is a good Oklahoman. Yeah, former congressman from these parts. That's

right. The book you said came a little bit later because somebody said, hey, Bill, you really need to do a book about all this. I was putting together this series, this documentary series, which aired on our PBS affiliate here in the state. We were going to have an event to celebrate this and bring all the Oklahomans in that I interviewed. And the executive director told me that we needed to have a book. I made this as complementary to the interview process because they tell their own story in the video, and the book needs to tell the statistics of where, when, why, and how. And it does very well with great illustrations. I got away from where I wanted to go, which is also right up front in the book,

having to do with the pioneer spirit, which certainly the first Oklahomans had. I would probably say the Native Americans as well, because they had to have the pioneer spirit to make it here from where we all came from in Africa, but also the settlers who came here. Do you see that same pioneer spirit exhibited in not just the astronauts, but the others who you document in the book? I did. Bill, if you said no. exhibited in not just the astronauts, but the others who you document in the book? I did.

Bill, if you said no, I mean, come on. Did you guys, did the astronauts have pioneering spirit? No. I had a pretty good idea where he was going with that. I was afraid the show would go too long if I did that. But, yes, the astronauts, like a great example, Tom Stafford, his mother came to Oklahoma in a covered wagon to her dugout in western Oklahoma, and she lived to watch her son orbit the moon on color television. Now, I don't know, maybe. That's astonishing, really. It isn't.

Can that ever happen again? That kind of technology change is just amazing. Well, we had a picture of General Stafford up here, but I'm going to back up a little bit to a guy who certainly exemplified that pioneer spirit in Oklahoma. Wasn't born in Oklahoma, born in Texas, right? That's not far. Spent most of his life here. Absolutely amazing character.

This particular picture is particularly significant. Why, Bill? It is. It is. He created his airplane, the Winnie Mae, could not be pressurized to go to higher altitudes. So he had to pressurize himself. And this was the first high-altitude pressure suit. And Wiley Post developed that

here in Oklahoma in conjunction with the BF Goodrich Company. And the tire, rubber tires. Yeah, rubber tires. It has a rubber liner inside. And he would pressurize himself to go to high altitudes. He discovered the jet stream. He was pretty impressive. And Tom Stafford told me that when he'd put on his space suit, he'd always think of fellow Oklahoma and Wiley Post. You guys, if you can't see the picture because you're listening to the podcast, that's kind of a joke. The guy put on a big can on his head with a very small round window in the front.

And this is the third generation model. And he tightened down a bunch of wing nuts. I mean, once you're in this thing, you're not getting out of it. There's no peripheral vision, nothing. But he trusted the numbers, as the saying goes, and was able to fly at these very high altitudes. It's like when you dive to the bottom of the pool and you feel the pressure on your ears. Well, we all live at the bottom of the

atmosphere pool. If you go up high enough, there's nothing to breathe. And so you've got to put on a pressurized suit. What an idea. What a risk taker. Basically invented the space suit. Bill Moore, you gave me several other great slides that we're going to try and get to, but I threw one other in. I threw Wiley Post in because I just thought we only lost him about a month ago. Another Oklahoman is Owen Garriott, the great space shuttle astronaut. He did other stuff too. He was with NASA a long time.

Brilliant man. Very nice. Very kind. He was very proud of his son, son Richard when I was interviewing him for this program because Richard was just getting ready to go up into space himself. So he paid his way. He paid his way. He told me that when Richard was growing up, he really was disappointed when he found out that not everybody got to go into space because their neighbors all around him were astronauts. Of course, dad was an astronaut, and so he eventually was able to pay his way and go into space.

And I know that's something you'd like to do, Bill. I would. I would. I'm counting on SpaceX. I was thinking of the other Bill this time. Oh, yeah. I applied four times. Both of you.

Both of you. Yeah. I applied four times to be an astronaut. Has anybody applied to be an astronaut? Yeah. So they take out this clipboard, you know, how many PhDs do you have? You know, what? The first one, A, 100 to 300. The kind of people that become astronauts are just these maniac overachievers. How many marathons

have you run this month? What? And there are people that are able to do these extraordinary things, and then we count on them to make decisions that are important. Here are some of those overachievers. That's the Mercury 7. Original 7 astronauts. Why did you want to show this off? Because Gordon Cooper was a member of that group. This is something that we can brag about as Oklahomans. Starting with that group of seven astronauts.

Oklahoma astronauts have been in every phase of the space program since Mercury. And where the last state kind of dropped off was in the Skylab program. And, of course, we had two Oklahomans in Skylab. So we've had Mercury, Gemini, Apollo to the Moon, Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz. Then Fred Hayes, who's not an Oklahoman, but he obtained his engineering degree from the University of Oklahoma, and he flew in the Oklahoma Air National Guard. You just own the space program, people.

Fred flew the Enterprise, the test. Yeah. I might have watched him do one of those drop tests out at Edwards Air Force Base. And Fred told me that he was more afraid of failing at that than he was in Apollo 13. And that was because he said it was the only test vehicle. And if he had crashed it, cracked it up, there wouldn't be another one and he didn't know what it would do to the shuttle program.

Whereas, you know, you can wreck an Apollo spacecraft. That's fine. That's no problem there. Well, he brought it back. I guess that's why they thought he was the right guy for the job. Fred Hayes, I know we have work to do, but he just told a story that just utterly fascinates me. So these guys on Apollo 13 were coming back, and they were cold

because the systems are shut down. They're trying to save electricity. They don't want to run the batteries down. This is before spacecraft just had all kinds of solar panels flying on them. So he found if he balled himself up and arms around his knees kind of thing, he could keep warm if he held really still. And this is a fantastic insight in physics, and it has everything to do with tornadoes in Oklahoma, obviously. Warm air rises is an expression we hear all the time. You'll even hear people say heat rises. But warm air doesn't rise unless cold air squeezes it up.

Without gravity, warm air does not rise. So Fred Hayes did this real-life test of holding very still, and then a layer of warm air would form around his still body on the spacecraft, and he could keep warm. What? This just seems like such an extraordinary thing. And if you get in a zero-g airplane and fly these parabolic flights where the airplane goes

downhill, as they say, at the same speed as it would fall, you can't run the test. You've only got 30 seconds. because if you don't pull up, you'll have direct trauma with ground. So whenever I hear Fred Hayes' name, I think about that report. Just what a cool insight, a warm insight that was.

And so you don't get thunderstorms and hailstorms and tornadoes without gravity. Thank you, Bill. Wow. We could spend the whole time just talking about the astronauts with connections to Oklahoma, but the book is largely about all the other people who've contributed to the space program in the United States.

Some of them are women, like this woman, who we know very well at the Planetary Society. She used to be one of our board members, I believe. A good friend, has been on Planetary Radio several times. That's Donna Shirley, who was, yeah. She is a hero. So, Donna Shirley. Donna Shirley, if you read her book.

So, yeah, you know, my girlfriend and I, we wanted to go flying. So, the plane, it was too heavy. But it was fine. We took off, just went under the power lines. She flew under the power lines, like this, you know, teenage people. It'll be fine. She shook things up a lot. I mean, when she went into NASA, there weren't a whole lot of women trying to be engineers. She was the only female engineer at JPL when she joined them. And so she became a big

muckety-muck and she wrote a book, Managing Martians. Yeah. And went on from there. I mean, she was doing stuff at NASA HQ, right? Yeah. And she started early when she enrolled at OU. She went to engineering school and she went to talk to them about enrolling and they said, girls can't be engineers. Of course, this was the early 1960s, late 50s. And I think she kind of proved them wrong. What do you think? Oh, yeah. Not that it's important.

But if you, you know, she also won a beauty contest. I mean, she was. I didn't know that. Well, that's what she says. I wasn't there. I believe her. She still is an extraordinary person. She's really cool.

All right, so here's one of the more traditionally thought of engineers from that period. There are a lot of reasons to love this picture. One of them is look at that ashtray full of cigarettes right next to delicate electronic equipment that was probably monitoring somebody on orbit. Who is this? This is John Aaron. He's probably the most famous person in mission control. Maybe it's next to Gene Kranz. Chris Kraft is up there. Chris Kraft was mission control. But John Aaron was was ecom electrical environmental systems and he saved the apollo 12 mission because he remembered a switch that needed to be flipped after the spacecraft was struck by lightning and they had no readout at all and it was time to abort and it was right after launch he told them the switch they flipped it and went on to the moon.

And then on Apollo 13, he led the group that figured out how to get enough electricity to get them home. Yeah, but the simulator was so well made that they could throw switches or engage systems in the right order so they wouldn't overload it. And the simulator was so accurate that he worked out,

I guess, a very complicated sequence that required, you know, as the saying goes, one test is worth a thousand expert opinions. Oh, take my word for it. No, I won't take your word for it. I'm gonna try it. So way to go, thank you. These are the engineers, of course,

who made sure that all the equipment was working and saved them from lightning strikes. But, you know, we're the Planetary Society, Bill and me, so we care a lot about planetary science, and here's one of those planetary scientists. Ben Clark worked for Lockheed Martin, Martin Marietta before that, and he was the planetary scientist for them, and he worked on a lot of missions, a lot of the space probes. Folks in this audience and some people around the country might know his family's business was a jewelry store, and it's B.C. Clark, if you're familiar with that.

Everybody knows the jingle. Got a few customers up there. The Christmas jingle is known around the country that they play every year on their commercial. When they gave him a pocket watch, he proceeded to take it apart, and they knew then he wasn't going to be in the jewelry business. Was he able to get it back? I'm sure he did. I'm sure he did. He was that good. I forgot that we've got one more astronaut here,

somebody who has been active a little more recently than some of the others that we've looked at, Shannon Lucid. Shannon Lucid, amazing woman. She spent more time in space than anyone up until that time on the Mir space station. A series of events kept them from coming and getting her, and no problem, she just stayed. A series of events. So for the young people, Mir was a Russian space station before the International Space Station. It was up for years and years.

Flying in all sorts of people, did all kinds of space research aboard it. There are scores and scores of more people like this. We'll flash one by very quickly. This guy John Harrington obviously doing an EVA there what at the International Space Station? Yes he attached the P1 truss to the space station which was built in Tulsa Oklahoma. Ah that's great yeah and he's an Oklahoman and a Native American. He was the first Native American in space. Now obviously Oklahomans have a lot to first Native American in space. Yeah.

Obviously Oklahomans have a lot to be proud of in the space program. What is it about this state? Why have we seen so many people in every facet of the space program come from this state? It is that pioneering spirit because you look at the early astronauts, they were only one or two generations removed from the settlers of this state that pioneering spirit that brought them here they took on to the next frontier as President Kennedy called it then there's always like some of the engineers told me they grew up on farms out in western Oklahoma and when they were sitting there picking cotton and

the Sun was burning down on and, they said, I'm going to do something else. Shocking. Smart move. Sherry, it sounds like you're in the right place with Science Museum. Do you get to meet a lot of these people and benefit from these resources? Sometimes, you know, you just really love your job, and sometimes you really love your job. And a lot of times we are so fortunate, you know Tom Stafford is a great friend of our museum

and a lot of our artifacts here are Stafford artifacts and we do get to meet a lot of the people and use them as resources. The knowledge that Bill Moore brings to the table as well is just so incredibly valuable for what we do. We are a collecting institution as well. So on top of all the millions of hands-on things we do, we have artifacts that we put on display and that come from our friends that are these astronauts

that have been part of the space program. Can I tell you one more thing about Oklahoma? Sure. Right now, Jim Bridenstine's administrator of NASA, he's from Oklahoma. Dr. Kelvin Droegemeier is the presidential chief scientist at the White House Science Advisory Group. He's from Oklahoma, came from the Meteorology School at OU. Congresswoman Kendra Horn is the current chair of the House Space Subcommittee. And she used to work with Space Foundation, another group in Washington. That's right. another group in Washington.

That's right. Congressman Frank Lucas from Western Oklahoma District has been on the science committee in the House for years, served on the space subcommittee. Senator Jim Inhofe, who just left the Senate Space Committee, is chair of the Armed Services Committee, and so he's overseeing efforts to work on the Space Force. So even your politicians are all space geeks. Yeah, yeah, and we don't have a NASA facility in Oklahoma anywhere.

I wonder if that might change. Let me just say, oh, hey, if you're proud of being a Sooner, Bill Moore's book is Oklahomans and Space. I'll turn it around so I can read the subtitle. Chronicles of the Amazing Contributions of Oklahomans in the Aerospace Industry. Sherry Marshall is the president of Science Museum Oklahoma. Thanks again for hosting us here today, Sherry. We are not done.

We're going to be back with a couple of terrific scientists from OU, the University of Oklahoma, to talk about Mars and more with Bill Nye. If you'll stay on stage with me, Bill, thank you very much. Please, though, let's hear it for Bill Moore and Sherry Marshall. Thank you. We'll be right back after this break. Hey, it's Matt.

Taking time to welcome back a sponsor, a past sponsor of Planetary Radio. It's LinkedIn, specifically LinkedIn Talent Solutions. Years ago, before I started doing space and radio, I was a manager at a fairly large university. And I can tell you something I never looked forward to was hiring people, trying to find the right candidate for a job that we might have open. It was very difficult. I don't miss it. But if I had to do it again, I would be all over LinkedIn Talent Solutions.

I just took a look. I went in, you know, from the job seeker viewpoint and almost immediately found a couple of positions that if I wasn't thrilled to be doing planetary radio, I would be all over. It was so easy. And it is just as easy to post your positions that you need to fill with just the right person. You really should take a look at it. And here is more incentive to do that. You can get $50 off your first job post. Go to linkedin.com slash planetary.

That's linkedin.com slash planetary to get $50 off your first job post. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back to Planetary Radio Live. I'm Matt Kaplan at Science Museum Oklahoma with the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye. Greetings, greetings. All right.

Do we have any OU, any Sooner grads or fans in the house? Got a few. Nothing against OSU. We love them too. But both of our next guests come to us from the University of Oklahoma, just south of here in Norman. We wanted to roll them in on the Sooner schooner, but Boomer and Sooner have the day off, so they're just going to have to walk up on stage. Let's get started. The first of them is astrophysicist Nathan Cabe. He's an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Oklahoma. He's part of the worldwide effort to understand how solar systems like our own and others across

the galaxy form and evolve. For example, why does a rocky little world like Earth form where it does, where conditions seem to have been just right for life? And why do next door neighbors like Mars and Venus get such raw deals? But maybe it wasn't always that way. Please help me welcome Nathan or Nate Kabe. Hi. Hi.

Have a seat. Megan Elwood Madden is the Stubman Drace Presidential Professor of Geology and Geophysics at OU. She and her students use lab experiments, field studies, and geochemical models to understand the amazing diversity of planetary surfaces and the atmospheres above those surfaces. As you'll hear, a lot of her work has focused on the red planet Mars. Please welcome Megan Elwood Madden. Thank you. Very glad that both of you could join us today. You're in different fields, but your work

overlaps. I learned that just from looking at the websites. Even though one of you is an astrophysicist, Megan, you are, would you say a geologist or a geophysicist? I'm a geologist. A geologist. Okay. And that means you've got one of those little hammers and you like to go out and break rocks. I do that sometimes, but most of the time I spend in the laboratory doing experiments with the rocks I bring back and looking at how they react with different types of fluids. And as Bill noted earlier, fluids can be liquids or gases and what sorts of new minerals form when rocks react with fluids. So you do chemistry experiments with rocks. Exactly.

And we've had, I told you, Megan, that we've had lately, last few months on Planetary Radio, wasn't really intentional. We've had so many people who do this kind of stuff. That's good, Matt. It is a good thing. You don't have to express it. I'm not complaining. I'm not complaining. But you do simulations. You try to duplicate the way things might be on some of these other worlds. Well, part of that is because we have these great data sets, right? That the Mars rovers or the orbiting spacecraft tell us what the different minerals are that they're seeing on Mars and also on Europa or even on Pluto. And some of these are kind of funky.

And we've got to figure out how these funky mixtures of minerals form. to see if we can determine what perfect set of fluid chemistry and temperature and pressure we need to form those interesting mixtures of minerals that we're seeing on Mars. Are they all equal in your eyes, all these other worlds, or does Mars have an edge? I've spent a lot of time working on Mars. I think it's because it's actually fairly similar to Earth, so it's easier to do experiments in the laboratory to simulate Mars than, say, Pluto. It's really hard to get down to 10 degrees Kelvin, but getting down to 220 Kelvin, that's kind of doable. Then you're talking temperature here, real

cold. Yeah. Even on Mars. Where do the minerals come from? Nate, that's your business, right? From exploded stars. Yeah, well, so what I do is I run computer simulations of large ensembles of objects acting under their own gravity. Ensembles of objects with gravity? Yeah. Well, where do you see some of the little models and animations? Lots of asteroid-like bodies and evolve them under gravity for hundreds of millions of years.

It's a video game for 100 million years. Pretty much, yeah. So you can take 100 million years and speed it up. So parents, don't worry parents, your kid could end up playing video games for 100 million years. And make a career out of it. It is kind of a video game. Like I said, wait until you see the animations that he's got. Come up to dinner.

No, no, no, no. Megan, it's got to help that we know so much about Mars because we have so many spacecraft there. Yeah, we have a huge amount of data about Mars. In fact, we have so much data that there aren't enough human hours to analyze all that data that we have from Mars. But the data that we do have is really fascinating. And we see these unexpected results like perchlorates for example. I hate perchlorates. I hate especially Martian perchlorates. Why do you hate perchlorates? Because they messed up the Viking spacecraft. Well, we'll

let her tell us. So perchlorates are these really highly oxidized chlorine-bearing salts. And we weren't expecting to find perchlorates on Mars. May I ask you, so to be a perchlorate, per I think means heavy duty, through and through. Right. Chlorine. And then it's a salt. Right.

So I'm expecting in the land of salts, if there were such a place, I'm expecting something from the right-hand side of the periodic table and something from the left-hand side. Do I have that in my perchlorate? In your perchlorate, yes. So the perchlorate is the anion side of the periodic. Oh, the anions, there, yes. This is the guy, by the way, with the periodic table on the back of his business card.

Okay, so hang on a second. Anne, I remember that cations are positive. That is correct. Because they have paws. Yes, cations. So anions are negative. So just help me out now. What's going on?

I got chlorine. You got one chlorine and four oxygens. And four oxygens, and that's a salt? So that's the anion part of the salt, and then you need a cation to match with it. We're less clear about what the cation is that goes with the perchlorate. But it could be sodium? Sodium, magnesium, could be iron. Could be iron, could be iron.

But why haven't we- Yeah, what's the big deal? I mean, we've had the Mars exploration rovers. We've got Curiosity there now, especially Curiosity, this amazing rolling laboratory. Why are we still learning about these things? There's like just a lot to learn? There's a lot to learn.

Curiosity is amazing in that it can actually measure the minerals with its XRD, right? So not only do we know the chemistry. What's an XRD? XRD? X-ray diffractometer? Oh, yes. So we can actually tell what minerals are there, not just the bulk chemistry. So we can get down to like individual flavors of different

chemistry. So a mineral is where you take these atoms and arrange them in a pattern. Correct. Like a crystal or a lattice. And you can arrange the same chemicals in different arrangements and make different minerals. So you can have the same composition but have multiple different minerals. Same chemicals

arranged in a different way. Well that's the difference between sugar and oil, in a sense, right? Oxygen, hydrogens, arranged. The carbon arranged in some charming way. So I mentioned the Viking spacecraft, Viking 1 and 2, 1976. Way ahead of their time. Actually intended to discover life on Mars. But those darn perchlorates

got in the way, right? Right. So the perchlorates, we know now, produced a signal that at the time was interpreted as a possible signal of life. What was the signal? Basically gases that were involved. Yeah. We were expecting that those gases would be produced by metabolism of organisms.

But instead, what we think now, our new interpretation, is that it was perchlorate reacting with either things in the soil or the actual reactants in the Viking mission. So you can make carbon dioxide with vinegar and baking soda, nothing's alive. Or you can make it with sugar and yeast, something's alive. And you get the same gas given off and the presence of those perchlorates that are all over mars in the first at least few meters right um not real friendly to life as we know it not as we know it although

there are organisms in the atacama desert that can live in environments that have a lot of chlorine. Like when you go to have a clean swimming pool, you put chlorine in it because it kills everything. Soles are not very bio-happy usually. Unhappy bio-wise. Yeah. But let me ask us this. When you are forming solar systems, there you are out there, you're gravity. Sure.

Playing video game for 100 million years. How likely are you to get chlorine? And then how likely is it to end up on the surface of a planet? In general, in those types of simulations, a lot of the materials, the relatively volatile materials that we see on Earth. What's a volatile material? Oh, something that gets vaporized at a pretty low temperature. Like, for example?

Water. Water, cool. Not iron. Not iron, no. A lot of those materials actually get thrown in from a little bit further away from the sun, and Earth got a lot of its volatiles probably from the outer asteroid belt,

and they were tossed in via Jupiter's gravity. Oh, yeah, tossed in Jupiter's gravity. And so Mars will catch a good fraction of that material that gets tossed Earth's way, too. With its gravity. Yes. Pulls in chlorine, in this case. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then there we have chlorine all over the surface.

Why don't we have chlorine all over the surface of the Earth? Do-do-do-do-do-do. So most of our chlorine is in the ocean. So if we evaporated off the ocean then we would have a lot of chlorine. And so I just now caught up with you. I apologize. Everybody knows what sodium chloride is. It's table salt. Not everybody. I hope a lot of us. Sodium chloride is what makes the ocean salty for crying out loud. Or at least most of it, yeah. And so there's a lot of chlorine there. And you study these brines all over the place, but on Mars, I mean, as Bill said, that's a salt,

even though we may not fully understand its composition. Just like we add salt to an icy roadway in order to get that ice to melt, and those of us that live in Oklahoma, we experience ice storms at least once a year, and hopefully they remember to put the salt out. So we put the salt out before the ice storms so that we keep that water liquid, right? How does that work?

The water has a polar molecule, right? It has one end that's more negative and one end that's more positive. Like a magnet, only... Except a molecule. Except a molecule, only... Except a molecule. Except a molecule. And when we add salt to the situation, the salt breaks up.

So if we have sodium and chloride, this halite, which would be the mineral form of this table salt, dissolves into that water, and we have a positive sodium ion and a negative chloride ion. And those actually go in and arrange themselves around the water molecule and basically prevent the water from crystallizing into ice. From catching on to another water ion. That's cool. Yeah and in fact if we

add enough salt to that water we can keep that water liquid down to 220 K which is about this average temperature that we see on the surface of Mars. So if we have liquid water on the surface of Mars today, which there is mounting evidence that there is liquid water at some point somewhere on the surface of Mars today, that water is probably really salty. So on the surface and also not too far below the surface. So if I'm driving around on Mars with the right rover near the equator, I presume. Probably, yeah.

During the summertime, the Martian summertime, I would find a little puddle of briny water. You might have a trickle. A trickle of salty water. You might have a trickle, yeah. Listen to me, peoples. If you have a trickle of salty water on Earth, you have something living in it. Some crazy Mike, some fire, somewhere. Anywhere there's what? Liquid water and a source of energy, right? There's going to be living things. So are you telling me

there's some place on Mars we should send a rover with the right thing to go sniffing around? Exactly. Yes. And that's exactly what the 2020 rover, not yet named by a young person, although they're headed in that direction, as Curiosity was, that's what it's supposed to do, right? You must be looking forward to that. Yeah, in fact, I'm really excited. Just like Curiosity was the first rover to take an x-ray diffractometer to Mars, the 2020 rover is going to be the first one to take a Raman spectrometer to Mars. And a Raman spectrometer is a really powerful tool in that it can measure the composition of a liquid, a solid, or a gas, and it can look for these anions

that might be dissolved in a brine. So if this rover happens to find one of these trickles, we can shoot it with the laser because that's what we do in our lab, is we shoot things with lasers. Come on, we take ray guns to another planet. Come on, that's cool. So then you shoot it with a laser, and you... And we make it glow a little bit, and we collect that light, and that light tells us the composition of that brine. Yeah, the different atoms and molecules, rather, produce different patterns of light. Exactly, yeah. I think it's probably fair to say that a lot of why Mars looks the way

it does now, and why it may have been a lot friendlier to life as far as we can tell billions of years ago, is because of where Mars is, right? And that's what you study, Nate, a good part of what you study. Yeah, and we're trying to figure out how rocky planets like the Earth and Mars form. And our general idea is that, our general picture of things, are that you start off with enormous numbers of bodies around the early sun that look something like the asteroids, maybe a billion, a couple, tons of billions. So hang on, the sun forms first? Yes, yes.

And then within a few million years probably even less than that you have formed the dust that's in the disk around the Sun after it forms so the Sun surrounded by a disk of gas and dust and we get a disk this is something I think I understand if you if you bring in stuff from every direction with gravity, the likelihood that it would just form a perfect sphere is very, very low. Yeah, absolutely. Instead, there'll be some unevenness, some asymmetry in this pulling in together, and then it resolves itself into a spinning disk. Yeah, because any random cloud of gas out in the Milky Way is going to have some small net rotation in some direction.

If you take any random cloud of gas and collapse it under its own gravity, you conserve angular momentum, which means that the thing spins up. So you can't see this if you're listening to podcasts, but everybody here has his arms out going like this, then making it spin like this. See? See how it's spinning here? Now I get it. Yeah, yeah. But just like the ice skater pulling his or her arms in, the disc spins faster and faster.

Exactly, and you could imagine if you're the ice skater and if somebody spun you up even faster, your arms would want to fly out from your side, and that's basically what happens at the sun's equator. Material has trouble sticking to the center of the system, and you wind up with a compact star along the north, basically the north and south poles, the spin axis, but it's much more elongated and disc-like along the equator. Until 20 or so years ago we only had one model to look at, our own neighborhood, our own

solar system. Now of course we are seeing thousands of solar systems and they appear to be I mean planets around stars appear to be the rule not the exception and lots of them don't look like our neighborhood right yeah they look very different and so that's another challenge is we thought we had a lot of the kinks and how you form a planet worked out 20 years ago based on our sample size of one but now when we look at planets around other stars these are extrasolar planets we see that you have objects that look something like Jupiter that are right next to their star and they orbit the star in a day whereas our closest planet I mean really fast

yes yeah fast and hot yeah and then we have planets the most common type of planet is a planet we don't even have in our solar system, something with the mass between Earth and Neptune. We don't have anything like that. There's a big gap in mass in our solar system. Why is that? The current issue of the Planetary Report, our quarterly magazine, talks about the so-called ice giants or mini-Neptunes. Yes.

Yeah. Some are called super-Earths. Other ones are called mini-Neptunes. I don't know what. I didn't mean. Yeah. Right, right, right. So are called super-Earths, other ones are called mini-Neptunes. I don't know what... I didn't mean... Yeah, right, right. So I think there's kind of a... Ice giants would be more like Uranus and Neptune.

Yes. I got it wrong. No, no, I don't think so. I mean, I think some of these seem to have large envelopes of gas similar to our ice giants, whereas other ones seem to have a higher density and are similar to... Now, when you say seem, can we see them? No, we can see their transits as they move across their star. The star's brightness dips a little bit.

By the degree that the brightness of the star dims, we can figure out how big the planet is, so we don't see it directly. Yeah, but then can you also infer that it has an atmosphere? You can infer its density, which then allows you to constrain what it's made out of. You can infer its density, which then allows you to constrain what it's made out of. As these bodies form, and in the incredible diversity that we are starting to see across the Milky Way galaxy, they all affect each other. Absolutely, yeah.

This is the reason we need to run computer simulations, because if you have just two bodies orbiting each other, Kepler figured that problem out several centuries ago, and you can write down a couple of equations that describe the motion of those two bodies from now until the end of time. But as soon as you introduce a third object into the system, you can prove that you can't write down a simple equation. So the old three body problem. Yes, yeah. The simulations we run, they have several thousand bodies and so the way you do that is you know how gravity behaves and you can model that between any two objects and you lay down a bunch of objects, several

thousand, calculate all their interactions, evolve them in time for a very short period of time, maybe 10 days, look at their new positions and new velocities and step forward again and you do that over and over and over and the arithmetic is really boring it would be take a long time to do that by hand but computers are good at doing the same thing over and over and over again probably still pretty computationally intensive absolutely yeah so you need a supercomputer or something similar when I first learned about planet formation I thought it's something that happens very quickly and then you just have the solar system and nothing happens for billions of years after that.

But it turns out that our outer solar system has changed quite a bit. The planets have moved around. We know that from studying the Kuiper Belt, which is this icy version of the asteroid belt just beyond Neptune. So Jupiter wasn't always where it is now? Yeah, Jupiter probably moved about, it's 10% closer to the sun today than where it formed. Is that because it's winding down?

It's because it's really good at ejecting these Kuiper belt objects. So objects from the Kuiper belt start to interact with the giant planets, and all the other giant planets, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, aren't quite massive enough to efficiently toss them out of the solar system, but Jupiter is. So over the history of the solar system, Jupiter has taken lots of small icy bodies and thrown them away from the sun. Now to conserve, again, angular momentum during that process, if Jupiter's taking things and putting them further from the sun, Jupiter has to move in slightly. Nothing for free.

Yeah, exactly. And for the same reason, the other planets have moved out. And we believe that that actually caused the giant planets to briefly go unstable. And there could have even been more giant planets than we have today. So what happens when a giant planet goes unstable? It gets into a crossing orbit with another planet. And so that configuration is going to change rapidly. And there's a couple different outcomes, three different outcomes. One is that one of the planets collides with the sun.

It gets so eccentric that it hits the sun. Or the two planets hit each other. Or one planet gets... Except in space, no sound. Exactly. Or one planet gets ejected from the solar system completely. This becomes a rogue planet. Yeah, and it would be just free-floating in the galaxy.

So let me ask you this. How do you feel about Pluto? Pluto's okay with me. Speaking of Pluto, which is, we now know, just one of many big Kuiper Belt objects, you mentioned this in passing. Do you study those worlds as well? And what about some place like Titan, which some people think is more like Earth than Mars is? Yeah, so I do some experiments in my lab where we take a mineral

that is very common on Earth, but people don't usually think of as a mineral, and that's ice. Many of you have probably eaten this mineral today. And I look at how that mineral ice reacts with different gases, including methane and CO2, carbon dioxide, to form a material called clathrite, which is basically like a soccer ball cage of water molecules with a gas molecule trapped inside of it. So it's a teeny tiny little soccer ball with one gas molecule inside. It sounds kind of like some people here may have heard of a buckyball.

Yeah, kind of like that, except made out of H2O. Yeah. Yeah. So I do those experiments in my laboratory where we measure how quickly clathrates form and how long they can stay stable, even if the pressure or the temperature has dropped. So they can stay metastable. So outside of their kind of thermodynamic stability. What's the difference between stable and metastable?

So stable means if something is stable, it's like the graphite in your pencil is the thermodynamically stable form of carbon. It's not going anywhere. It's not going anywhere. It's just in the pencil indefinitely. I hate to tell you folks, but your diamond rings, they're metastable at Earth's surface. Whoa, whoa, whoa, metastable. Right. So carbon wants to be in the form of graphite at Earth's surface conditions.

It wants to be in the form of diamond when you're down in the mantle at high pressures and temperatures. Being smashed. Down toward the core of the planet. And you once in a while squirt it out through a volcano. Exactly. So diamond is metastable at Earth's surface conditions, but it can last a very long time. So diamond rings are slowly turning into pencils. Exactly. Yeah. Especially if you put it in a solvent. Don't do that. So what's a solvent for diamonds? CO2. Like in the air? Do not breathe around your diamond ring. So if you take water and carbon dioxide and you heat it up

and then you put a diamond in it, you'll dissolve your diamond. Doggone it. Careful, dareful out there, people. We are getting near the end of the time that we've got for this segment and for our time here at Science Museum Oklahoma. But I don't want to finish without letting each of you talk about where your research is headed. Nate, are you going to keep refining these models? Yeah, absolutely. So one thing we don't understand about these models,

so when you have, say, four objects in a simulation, you have to compute all the forces between every single body. And if you double that number, because you have to do all the individual interactions that goes up by not a factor of two, but by a factor of four. And so in these simulations that I just showed before, one shortcut we take often is when we have the Kuiper belt, we don't actually compute the interactions between Kuiper belt objects because it takes a long time. You can't afford the time on a big enough supercomputer.

Yeah, so now we're just getting to the point where we can actually consider the Kuiper belt's self-gravity and the evolution of the solar system. And just the preliminary work we've done, that probably makes a big difference. And so we're studying that right now. So bigger, more powerful computers available for less money, helping us learn more about our universe. Yeah. Yeah.

Megan, where are you headed with your work? Well, I've got three fabulous graduate students here with me today, and they're each working on their own projects. Here they are. You guys want to stand up? Give them a shout-out here. Future heroes of planetary science. Actually, current heroes.

So Andrew's working to look at how basalts, which are the most common rock on Mars, react with all these different types of brines. John Sue's trying to figure at how basalts, which are the most common rock on Mars, react with all these different types of brines. John Sue's trying to figure out how rocks in Antarctica can tell us more about potential biosignatures on Mars. And James is figuring out how microbes eat metals and the new minerals that are formed during that process. So all sorts of exciting things. Great work, guys. So in other words, if you found the right metal or alloy or molecule on Mars, it might indicate that there was a Mars microbe eating the metal.

Yeah. Cool. Great work, folks. Thank you very much for being a part of this today. And keep up the great work. And I hope we get to talk to you again on Planetary Radio. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. Oklahoma is okay.

Let's hear it for Nathan Cabe and Megan Elwood Madden. Let's go to Bruce now and do what's up, and then we'll come back and say goodbye. Indeed, it is time for what's up. So we are joined by the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, also the program manager for LightSail. I didn't tell you a moment ago that I was hoping you'd give us a little bit more of an update on how the mission's going. How is it going? It's going well. Still have a healthy spacecraft.

We've got that sail out. We're in solar sailing mode most of the time. We worked through some issues with our momentum wheel, the thing that we use to turn the spacecraft twice per orbit to orient relative to the sun. But we've made a lot of progress on that. So we're solar sailing more and more efficiently. It's good. It's good. It's very good. It is good. Tell us what's good up in the night sky. Light sail too, which you may or may not be able to see, but you can go to our website and go to the mission information page, and we've got a diagram where it'll be. You might be able to see it dawn or dusk, but it depends so much on sail orientation that it may

be invisible to you, or it may show you something. So if you feel like it, check out our webpage, and you can find when your next pass is. Have you heard from people who have seen it? Our chief operating officer, Jennifer Vaughn, saw it a couple of days ago. It was very, very faint, but was visible. It was where it was supposed to be. But if you want something easier, check out Jupiter looking like a super bright star low in the West in the early evening. The moon will be hanging out near it on the 9th of August, and Saturn is to its left, and the moon will join Saturn on the 11th of August. And we've got the not that frequent side of Mercury, always low down, in this case low down in the pre-dawn. East, bright Sirius.

Mercury's looking quite bright, but to the star Sirius is even brighter farther to its right. You'll need a clear view to the eastern horizon. Perseid meteor shower peaks August 12th, 13th, with increased activity for several days after that, but the moon will be almost full at the peak, limiting the number of meteors visible. On to this week in space history. It was 1976 that the Soviet Luna 24 was launched. We will come back to that. 1990, Magellan entered Venus orbit and began its radar mapping of the Venus surface. On to space fact. Luna 24. So it was a robotic lander, the last of the Soviet Union's Luna program that went to the moon.

It was the third Soviet mission to return lunar soil samples and returned 170.1 grams of lunar samples to the Earth. The last lunar samples to be returned. I'm guessing that this is like the only times that stuff has been brought back from a sizable body, not just an asteroid or a comet. Well, I mean, I brought some from my backyard, but... Oh, yeah, other planetary bodies. Yes, although we do have meteorites that have come from Mars as well as the moon. Yeah, but I'm talking about stuff that, you know, people actually went out, picked up, and got via their robot aids. Then you are correct.

Thank you. That's the important part, of course. That's really all we are. I could have shortened that whole conversation. Sorry. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. And I asked, what is the lowermost element in the LightSail 2 logo as seen on the patch, sticker, and elsewhere? The lowest element that is not just a line. How'd we do, Matt? I'm not going to fool around. I'm going to let Dave Fairchild, our own poet laureate for Planetary Radio. He hails from Kansas. Keep that in mind. Triangular patches and stickers and pins are showing off LightSail's might and proudly displaying the logo that shows just who is in charge of her flight. Yeah, it's the Planetary Society logo. As we heard from our winner, chosen by random.org, first time winner, and she's a brand new listener as well, Kristen Scruggs, also in Kansas,

maybe they're neighbors. She says it was, yeah, the Planetary Society logo, profile of Saturn and Saturn's ring shown with the sun's reflection bouncing off of it. Yeah, it's not necessarily Saturn, right? No, it certainly in our solar system looks the most like Saturn. Could be something in an exoplanet system or a really clever view of one of the other giant planets and their lesser ring systems. But generally, I'd go with Saturn. All right, Kristen, you are absolutely right in all ways. She says, absolutely love the podcast, started listening just this month. I've already binge listened to most of this year's episodes.

One of those crazy people. Anyway, Kristen, we're going to send you a Planetary Society kick asteroid, rubber asteroid, and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. More about those in a moment. We, of course, got other stuff. David Dearden from Utah. It's the Planetary Society logo. Or, he says, because you said what element is at the bottom of the logo or, excuse me, bottom of the patch. It must be phosphorus.

You just have to be so precise. He adds, thanks for the great shows every week. Definitely my favorite science podcast, which is high praise since we're just a little piece of science. Keeping that word element in mind, this from Robert Klain in Arizona. He says, the copy of the LightSail logo I observed was on my computer screen. So strictly speaking, it's not composed of elements, but photons. To the stars by power of light, dudes. And one more little ditty from Gene Lewin at Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington, the state of Washington. A logo designed for LightSail 2 representing the mission plan shows solar rays and stars beyond with sails beneath its span.

Citizen funded, he adds. Sweet. On to our next trivia contest. he adds. Sweet. On to our next trivia contest. After Luna 24 in 1976, what was the next successful soft lander on the moon?

Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Good one. I will look this up myself. I won't enter. If you do enter. People are going to really wonder. And Random.org has chosen Matt Kaplan. Random.org, a wholly owned subsidiary of Matt Kaplan Enterprises. If you enter and have the right answer and are chosen by Random.org,

you will win yourself, of course, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account for use of that worldwide network of telescopes, remotely operated telescopes, and, and this is the cool one based on the show we've just listened to, Oklahomans and Space, Chronicles of the Amazing Contributions of Oklahomans in the Aerospace Industry. This is the great book that we were just talking with Bill Moore about. It is absolutely fantastic. It's hardcover. It is loaded with photos and hundreds of pages of great stuff. You don't have to be from Oklahoma to enjoy it, but if you're a Sooner, you might get even more out of it. And that's the package for this week, and I think that means we're done.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about being so still that the automatic lights go off. Thank you. Good night. Happens to me all the time in my office at the Society, and I have this patented waving my arms and breathing out, thinking the hot air might help. Only for me, Matt. I walked into that one. He's Bruce Betts,

the Chief Scientist of the Planetary Society who joins us every week here for What's Up. And now back to Oklahoma. Thank you to Sherry Marshall, the President of Science Museum Oklahoma, and her great staff who supported us today.

And thank you to all of you, you Sooners from Oklahoma. Let's hear it. I also want to thank the terrific guests who joined us on stage and my co-host for the afternoon, Bill Nye. Thank you.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible in part by its proud Sooner members. Mary Liz Bender is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Ad Astra. Keep looking up.