Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Radio Live at the Aquarium of the Pacific

Episode Date: July 23, 2012

What better place to talk about Earth's oceans and the seas of other worlds?Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So hoist up the solar sail and trim the inertial vectors. We're off to ride a cosmic tide in two uncharted sectors. And charge up the ion drive and chart the navigation. We'll be mates in altered states in cryohibernation. From the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California, this is Planetary Radio Live. Here is your host, the Planetary Society's Matt Kaplan. Ahoy, me hearties. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

We're at one of my favorite places in the world, the wonderful Aquarium of the Pacific. I've been a volunteer here since the groundbreaking for its beautiful seaside building. It was back in 1995. Could there be a better place to talk about oceans? I don't think so. Not just our home world's salty seas, but the vast oceans that appear to be hiding under thick ice on worlds like Jupiter's moon Europa. We'll hear from the Aquarium's Director of Education, David Bader, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Deputy Chief Scientist for Solar System Exploration, Kevin Hand. Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye, the science guy, will join the conversation.

That's Michael Nanto over there providing our musical accompaniment. He'll have more nautical numbers for us in a few minutes. We'll close this week's show as we always do by welcoming astronomer and Planetary Society Director of Projects, Bruce Betts, to the stage for What's Up and the chance for our live audience to win a prize or two for themselves. Now, we knew that Emily Lakdawalla would be away on business this week. That's why she and I recently made the short drive from Planetary Society headquarters to the birthplace of a powerful new robot that will soon be exploring Mars. Here is the first of our two video reports. We're in Building 180 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

That's headquarters, so somewhere right over our head is Charles Elachi. He's the boss, the director of the laboratory. But much more significant for us, we are here with Emily and someone else that we're going to get to know a little bit better. Emily. Hi, Matt. What a great place to be. It's spectacular to be here and so exciting to be waiting for this rover to land.

So you're going to take us through this in a couple of tours, and I think this time we're going to focus mostly on the cameras, and there are a lot of them, I guess, on Curiosity, and then we're going to do another segment, probably will air next week on the radio show, about the other instruments. So where do we start? We'll start with the cameras, and there are 16 of them on this rover. We're going to start at the top and work our way down. So right at the very top, we have ChemCam, which is the laser on this robot's head. It can shoot a laser at a rock target, vaporize a little bit of it, and while it's doing that, it has a telescope that takes a very high-resolution photo

of that spot that it's vaporized, and then it does that in order to get a chemical and mineral analysis. And this is the ray gun that we Earthlings are sending to Mars. That's right. We're sending it to Mars, not Mars sending it to us. It's a nice change. Okay, so moving down from ChemCam, we have the MastCams. These are these two different sized eyes on the rover. They're color cameras. One of them is zoomed in. One of them is a more wide angle. And those are designed to take color photos and actually HD video of the Martian landscape. Although it's at a slightly lower frame rate than we do on Earth, it's four to seven frames per second, depending on the exposure time. Moving outside from the mast cams, we have the nav cams. And those two pairs of nav cams are actually identical on this rover to the ones that were

on Spirit and Opportunity. The only difference here is that there's two of them. There's two pairs on this rover. There was only one pair on Spirit and Opportunity, because this rover is designed to last an awful lot longer than Spirit and Opportunity were, so we need to make sure that these cameras do not fail. There's a backup pair for redundancy. All right, so moving down from the mast,

we go all the way down here. Let's crouch right down here. And we have the HAZ cams. Now, these cams are much like the NAV cams up at the top of the mast. They are designed, they're very much the same as the ones that were on Spirit and Opportunity, and they look out in front of the rover to see the landscape, to get a good idea of the 3D landscape right in front of the rover and give some context for this gigantic robotic arm

to be able to place its instruments very accurately on rock and soil targets. And speaking of that robotic arm, we go all the way down to the front, and this right here is the hand lens imager. It's like a geologist's hand lens. They use it to get very up close, very high resolution pictures of the rocks and soils right in front of the rover. This one, like the mast cams, is full color, and it's also got its own light sources, so it can illuminate the target very brightly. It's a really awesome camera. So this is analog to the hand lens that a geologist would carry. Absolutely. These guys are built to be robotic geologists as much as possible,

because it's, after all, it's for the geology that we're sending these rovers to Mars. Now, there's one other very cool thing about this hand lens, because it's on the end of an extremely long arm. It's actually taller than the rover, so it can hold this hand lens camera right over its head and actually use it almost like a periscope. It can take self-portraits, and it can see over rock walls. So it's a pretty amazing instrument.

It is entirely an amazing instrument. Sixteen cameras, you said? Sixteen cameras. And we will be back next time to talk about the other instruments on Curiosity. And Emily, thank you so much. We'll see you then. All right. Thank you, Matt. Emily Lackawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope Magazine. She joins us every week on Planetary Radio, but this

time and next time from JPL. I want to thank Lauren Roberts of Harkin Creative in Pasadena for shooting and editing that video for us. Listeners, you can see it in the multimedia section of our website, planetary.org, or find it on the Planetary Society YouTube page. Emily asked me to tell you well-informed fans of Curiosity that she knows about the rover's 17th camera. It's the so-called descent imager that will be active as the big robot plunges to the Martian surface on August 5th,

or 6th, depending on your time zone. We'll be celebrating that landing all of that weekend, August 4 and 5, in Pasadena with PlanetFest, but also with our live webcast so people can participate anywhere around the world. And there's more about that at planetfest.org. I told you we hadn't heard the last of Michael Nanto. Here's his take on a traditional sea shanty updated for the seas that await us in space. Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Nanto. This is a Neptune. It's one of the few space shanties out there.

I'm a biologist first and a space shanty writer second. So hoist up the solar sail and trim the inertial vectors We're off to ride the cosmic tide into uncharted sectors And charge up the ion drive and chart the navigation We'll be mates in altered states in cryohibernation Be sure to grab a lime when space-time gets all curvy. Throwing up in zero-g is worse when you have scurvy.

While on the beach of Titan, the snorkeling's insane. But if you dip your toes, better hold your nose, cause the sea is liquid methane. So hoist up the solar sail and trim the inertial vectors. We're off to ride the cosmic tide in two uncharted sectors. And charge up the ion drive and chart the navigation.

We'll be mates in altered states in cryohiberbernation. If a comet hits the hull and our oxygen's escaping, don't despair about the air. We'll fix it with duct taping. There's a Martian lass I long to see with a dusty red complexion. Men all stare, but I don't care, she's a holodeck projection. So hoist up the solar sail and trim the inertial vectors. We're off to ride the cosmic tide in two uncharted sectors. And charge up the ion drive and chart the navigation.

We'll be mates in altered states in cryohibernation. So hoist up the solar sail and trim the inertial vectors. We're off to ride the cosmic tide in two uncharted sectors and charge up the ion drive and part the navigation. We'll be mates in altered states in cryohibernation. Mike Lieto, he'll have one more tune for us, Michael Nieto. He'll have one more tune for us, a little bit more instrumental music later in the show. Mike is a busy actor and musician whose day job is working as a restoration ecologist.

He's a biologist, as you heard. He was raised here in Long Beach, which is also where he fell in love with our announcer, Laura Kaplan Nieto. Yes, full disclosure, they are my son-in-law and daughter. They work cheap. I'll be back with Dave Bader, Kevin Hand, and Bill Nye the Science Guy in a minute. This is Planetary Radio Live.

Bill Nye the Science Guy here. The next Mars rover, Curiosity, is about to land on Mars. You can join the celebration. PlanetFest 2012 is Saturday and Sunday, August 4th and 5th at the Pasadena Center in California. I'll be there with dozens of special guests, spacecraft displays, a space art show, great activities for kids, Planetary Radio Live, and the landing on Sunday night. Kids 8 and under are free. You can learn more at planetfest.org. It's a planet fest. I'll see you there.

Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio Live. I hope you'll check it out.

Welcome back to Planetary Radio Live. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're in front of a capacity crowd at Southern California's Aquarium of the Pacific. And if you would, please welcome the Chief Executive Officer of the Planetary Society, my boss, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Greetings, earthlings. Bill, I'm especially glad you could join in today's conversation because I know how passionate you are, not just about exploration, but really the search for life and discovering our own origin. Well, that's it. We're living at a time where

ocean science is merging with planetary science. I mean, we all live on a planet. We are discovering oceans on other worlds. And the big thing, I guess we're going to talk about this, the big thing in astrobiology is a solvent. If you're going to be a living thing, there must be some liquid that moves chemicals around. And the best one we can find so far is water. around, and the best one we can find so far is water. And so we're at the aquarium. Coincidence? So it's really an exciting time. And I just remind everybody that if this mission to Mars, if we find evidence of ancient life on Mars, it will change the world. It will change the world. Thanks, Bill. Dave Bader is Director of Education here at the Aquarium, where he has worked for 14 years. He and his staff serve one and a half million guests each year. That includes

200,000 school children who walk through these beautiful exhibits. The marine biologist is president of the Southwest Marine and Aquatic Educators Association. Please welcome Dave Bader. Thank you. Educators Association. Please welcome Dave Bader. Thank you. And our other guests filling out our panel today. Just last year, the National Geographic Society gave this astronomer and planetary scientist and astrobiologist its Emerging Explorer Award. He is the Jet Propulsion Lab's Deputy Chief Scientist for Solar System Exploration. And back in 1999, he founded Cosmos Education, an NGO that is devoted to science and technology education in the developing world. Please help me welcome Kevin Hand. Thanks, Scott.

Kevin, I'm going to start with you. When I asked who I should talk to about Seas on Other Worlds, a lot of people told me I wanted Kevin Hand. How did this become such an important subject of study for you? That's an interesting question. Actually, I grew up in the landlocked state of Vermont, so the connection to oceans is a little bit odd. But growing up in that small town under beautiful, clear skies, there is, it's not hard for a young child to make the connection to the stars and to start

thinking about whether or not there could be life beyond Earth. As much as I love the possibility of life on Mars and the past habitability of Mars, it's really these worlds like Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, that we think has an ocean today, an ocean that's got two to three times the volume of all the liquid water on Earth. It's there today.

It's been there for the history of the solar system. And if we've learned anything about life on Earth, it's that where you find the liquid water, you find life. So Europa is this place that I have just become fixated on, and hopefully within the next couple of decades we will send a spacecraft out there to explore Europa to see whether or not it is in fact habitable and potentially inhabited. Would we have to land on Europa to be able to find this evidence of life? In other words, if that life is, what, tens of kilometers underneath that thick layer of ice, how do we detect it from the surface? Yeah, that's a great question.

And it's a question that I think benefits from thinking about the case of how we detect life on Earth from space. Obviously, we all see these satellite images, and we do a lot of monitoring of the Earth's biosphere from space. But when you really look at the details, it turns out that much of what we do for remote sensing of the earth from space involves monitoring the pigments like chlorophyll that are associated with photosynthesis. I like to say that photosynthesis is sort of the spectroscopist or remote sensing scientist's evolutionary gift in that there are very specific absorption features in spectroscopy that allow us to monitor the photosynthetic activity on Earth. So you detect certain frequencies of light

indicate that there are plants growing. Yeah, and they give off gases, and we can detect those. So the problem then is on a world like Europa, where it's covered in ice, an ice shell that's maybe a few to as many as 15 kilometers in thickness. Just a lot of ice. Yeah, there's a lot of ice. You're not going to, photosynthesis is not a very viable pathway, a very viable niche. And so we need to figure out other ways to potentially detect signs of life from an orbiting spacecraft. I would love to send a lander there. Just this past year, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

and NASA looked into a very complex lander design, which could be launched in the 2030 time frame. I should mention these missions, these projects are not for the faint of heart. Right now, the best option for getting to Europa would be a launch by the European Space Agency in 2022. Be here before you know it. It gets out to the Jovian system in about 2030. My parents

love it. It's job security. But it's not the type of thing where you get rapid return. Dave Bader, clearly space scientists, astrobiologists are able to learn a great deal more and theorize, I'm sure, in better ways about these oceans elsewhere based on our knowledge of our oceans here.

I wonder, you think that might reverse itself at some point and knowledge of the water out there might help us down here? Yeah, I mean, it couldn't hurt. I think also just that idea, that sense of needing to explore. I think, you know, when we think about it, we have only really discovered or explored about 5% of our oceans. And 95% of our oceans are left to be discovered. We think about ocean discovery as really the ocean bottom.

But we kind of forget about the fact that we're passing through this zone, this habitable zone of liquid space where it's also teeming with life. And we haven't really even explored that middle space. We sort of focused on a two-dimensional layer. We like to think of things in terms of ourselves. We live on ground, so let's go to the ground first and look around. But there's that space in the middle that we can explore. When I was drawn into marine biology, it wasn't because I loved dolphins or sharks or something like that. It was because I loved exploration. I saw a documentary, I think it was Jacques Cousteau, and he was at the Marianas

Trench with an ROV. I didn't know at the time that people had actually gone down once to the Marianas, now since been back. But I wanted to be the first person to get down there. And it's that sense of exploration that I think is similar in space exploration and ocean exploration. But it's not just the deep sea that needs to be explored. I mean, we have just recently heard a researcher who did a transect of 60 feet of water off of the Aleutian Archipelago and discovered new species of algae, of invertebrate. You know, anytime we go out into the ocean

to a space we haven't been before, we find new things. Every time we go to the bottom of the ocean, we're discovering new species. So there's a tremendous amount to be learned. Kevin Hand mentioned how methods of observing Earth from space have been extremely useful in exploring other worlds. That's something the Aquarium pays some attention to as well, Earth observation.

Yeah, absolutely. We have actually an opportunity. We have won a brand-new grant from NASA called Our Instrumented Earth. So next summer we're going to have a brand-new exhibit that you can come and explore. When people think of NASA, they think of Earth out, looking out into space, but NASA does a fair amount of Earth in, looking at our world and how we observe our planet and how we know the things that we know about our planet. And that exhibit's going to revolve all around those types of instrumentation

and how we know about El Nino and weather and plant life on the planet, all of those things. And this will be an exhibit that explains all that in a really fabulous way. We have a science on a sphere in our Ocean Science Center that is amazing at showing these visualizations. So it should be a pretty fun exhibit. Bill, Dave, Kevin, we're out of time for this week's portion of our conversation, but we'll continue it on air and online in next week's episode. Thank you very much for joining us.

Dave Bader is Director of Education here at the Aquarium of the Pacific. Kevin Hand is Deputy Chief Scientist for Solar System Exploration at JPL. And Bill, I look forward to your regular Planetary Radio segment next time. Thanks for coming down to Long Beach today. Thank you, Matt. Thank you. It's changed the world, everyone. And Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy.

He's the Planetary Society CEO. Dr. Bruce Betts is an astronomer and the Planetary Society's Director of Projects. Each week he joins us for a segment we cleverly call What's Up? Welcome, Bruce. Thank you. This is pretty cool digs you got us here. Isn't this nice? This is the Ocean's Theater at the Aquarium.

Oh, you know what? Yeah, well, Matt's just going to walk over there and grab a piece of clothing. I've got to put on my aquarium vest. Ah. Hey-oh. Hey. Hey.

Hey, give us a spin. No. All right, please, what's up? All right, in the evening sky, in the early evening, you can look over in the west and check out Mars and Venus. Mars looking reddish and Venus over to its left. Venus is near the star Spica, which is bluish, and Saturn is yellowish.

All of these issues are technical terms. It's funny, you don't look bluish. It's an old yellow submarine joke. Go ahead. And if you pick up this podcast right away or for the live listeners, on July 24th, the moon will be right in between Spica and Saturn on one side and Mars on the other. And we'll be hanging out nearby over on the 25th as well.

In the pre-dawn sky, two super bright objects. You've got Jupiter and the even brighter Venus below it, low on the horizon in the east in the pre-dawn. We move on to this week in space history. It was 40 years ago, Matt, that Landsat 1 was launched. space history. It was 40 years ago, Matt, that Landsat 1 was launched, and NASA's pretty justifiably proud of 40 continuous years of Earth observations from space from the impressive Landsat program. As we were talking about just moments ago on the show.

1971, Apollo 15 launched, headed to the moon, and of course carried the first lunar rover. Coolness. All right. We should do a little crowdsourcing for this next thing. Yes, we should. Yeah, absolutely. I want to get everyone to help me. All of you listeners know, next I do some goofy form of the words random space fact.

So if you want to just yell random space fact, and I'll count to three, and you'll go, random space fact. One, two, three. Random space fact. Wow, nailed, three. Random Space Fact. Wow. Nailed it. Nice. Very impressive. So in our special oceans

episode, I thought I'd share with you the surface area of the Earth's oceans. So all the Earth's oceans combined is about two and a half times larger than the entire surface area of Mars. Wow. That's impressive. They're big.

That's both random and impressive. That's the goal. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. Great. We asked you, where can you find Bill in the solar system? So where in the solar system, and there was no Nye, but there's a Nylee crater. Where in the solar system is Nylee crater? How'd we do, Matt? Lots and lots of people found this,

and it turns out there is a relatively small crater. Maybe you can petition for something a little larger, Bill. It's about around 11 kilometers on Venus. Did people find the right one, Nile? Yes, that's it. Apparently all these surface features on Venus are named after women? Almost all of them.

As we've had in a previous contest, there's one exception named after a man and a couple not named after women. But this is a woman's name in, what is the language? Mandingo? Mandingo. Yeah. West African language. Very cool. Our winner this week, Kurt Lewis.

Now, this is a great coincidence, Kurt Lewis of Missouri City, Texas, who's going to get that engraved planetary, radio planetary society, Fisher's space pen. Can I have it? They're good. He was just complaining to me that he's entered the contest repeatedly. He gets quoted because he says funny stuff that we quote all the time.

He'd never won the contest. And random.org chose him. It was so cool. That is impressive destiny. So the trivia contest for those listeners at home or those of you here, we talked about Enceladus, another one of those, you know,

it's another one of those places with those crazy water ice geysers. Okay, it's the place with the crazy water ice geysers around Saturn. What are all features on Enceladus named after? Where does the naming convention for Enceladus come from? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. And you have until July 30, Monday, July 30 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to enter this iteration of the Space Trivia Contest, and maybe win yourself a Fisher Space Pen. We've got to get rid of some prizes. So, are you ready to do our little live and in-person Space Trivia Contest? I am. I am ready. Is the audience ready?

Yes. All right. Question number one. Question number one, and you heard reference to this in the planetary sea shanty. What are Titan's seas or lakes thought to be made of primarily? The seas are made of methane. Yes, primarily methane. All right. Methane, methane. Throw that man a huggable Mars. Here it goes, a stuffed Mars.

Good shot. All right. a stuffed Mars. Good shot. All right. It was exciting. All right. We talked about Europa and tides. This one a little tricky. The largest three Galilean satellites, I'm sorry, the three inner Galilean satellites,

big moons of Jupiter, are in an orbital resonance. What is the ratio of the orbital periods of Ganymede to Europa to Io? Ooh, tough one. That's a hard one. Expert guests in the audience. Kevin Hand? No. Prohibited.

You're disqualified anyway. Anybody want to take a shot at this? The ratio over here. Someone's got to guess. Or maybe he knows. If you take the length of the period of each of those. I'm not sure. I think I read it somewhere. Four, two, one.

Perfect. Oh, yes. Very impressive. And good catch. All right. All right. And back to Enceladus. In what diffuse ring of Saturn does Enceladus exist in?

It also provides particles into that ring. It's a letter. All those rings are lettered, you know. You watch Emily Lakdawalla's Snapshot from Space, and she'll tell you how to identify the rings right here. Hi. E-ring. Very impressive.

E-ring is correct. Great job. This is like the smartest group ever. Alright everybody, go out there, look up the night sky and think about fish and how amazing and wonderful they are in all their shapes and sizes. Thank you and good night.

And you can see them all in all those shapes and sizes and colors and variations right here at the Aquarium of the Pacific which has been our host today. He's Bruce Betts, though, the Planetary Society's Director of Projects. He joins me each week for What's Up. Please welcome back Mike Netto to close out our show. Clear skies and seas, everyone.

Thank you, everyone. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by members of the Planetary Society. Thank you.