Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Radio Live at the New Horizons Pluto Encounter

Episode Date: July 21, 2015

Join our live audience for highlights of an amazing evening, featuring Jim Bell, Bruce Betts, Mike Brown, Emily Lakdawalla, Linda Spilker, and Bill Nye the Science Guy.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

That time we reached Pluto, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It was quite a night. With a full house in Pasadena and thousands more watching the webcast, an amazing group of explorers gathered on the evening of July 14th. We waited for word that New Horizons had successfully completed its close encounter with a world that has fascinated humans since its discovery in 1930. You'll hear excerpts from that

celebration, and we'll get a New Horizons mission update from Emily Lakdawalla. First to join me on stage at Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum was our friend Bruce Betts. Bruce was quickly followed by Arizona State University's Mars Explorer, best-selling author, and president of the Planetary Society, Jim Bell. You'll hear from Jim, and then the project scientist for the Cassini mission that continues its exploration of Saturn, our most frequent guest, Linda Spilker. You might just hear from a killer surprise guest as well.

As we began, we were less than an hour from receiving the signal that would electrify space fans around the world. I wonder if people appreciate, Matt, the drama right now. This spacecraft went through that system. You saw the bullseye pattern, right? And we don't know if there are faint rings that we didn't see, debris, stuff coming off of some of the other moons. It could have slammed into a grain of rice and been vaporized. We just don't know, and that's what we're waiting to find out.

And I'm not on the mission team. I'm an interested observer, colleague of many of the people on the team. I've got butterflies in my stomach. I'm getting a little bit antsy. I can't even imagine what it's like for the people on the team who've invested a decade or more of their lives for this one critical moment where it all has to go right, everything has to work perfectly. And so I can't wait for it to end! Well, I'm just hoping that Principal Investigator Alan Stern is sedated. Yeah, really. He must be going nuts.

You know, I was struck because we've been waiting for these pictures and other data since the 1960s, right? I mean, when I was researching this book, I found out I was reminded that there was a plan, actually, what the missions that became Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, there had been a plan for one of them to be a Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto flyby, and another one would be a Jupiter-Uranus-Neptune flyby.

If that had come to pass, we could have seen Pluto in the 1980s with the Voyager cameras. It didn't come to pass. We ended up doing a different kind of grand tour, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, having to wait another 20 years for these spectacular images to come back. I think it's been worth the wait, and it's just really exciting to see this all happen. Absolutely. Linda, all those missions that Jim just mentioned, plus yours, plus a few others that have made it out to the outer portions of our solar system, so-called,

I imagine they've taught us all there is to know about the outer solar system, right, he said, with feigned innocence? Oh, absolutely not. I think every time we fly by a new world, we get an expanded vision of the cosmos and our place in it. And Pluto is no exception. It looks a little bit like a lot of different worlds. And when you put the pieces together, it'll be so fascinating to find out what it contributes, the origin of the solar system, how did the solar system form,

how did we get here, what's so special about where the Earth is in the solar system. Pluto holds some of those answers, I think. Aren't surprises kind of the rule when we have a mission like this, whenever we get a good close-up look at a new body? Linda? Absolutely.

Whenever we look at a close-up to a moon at Saturn, a good example would be Enceladus. We always find something unexpected, and that's part of the fun of the exploration there. Jim, there are these moments, these moments of terror, of anxious, almost horror, aren't there? Getting to Mars, too. Getting to Mars, getting to Saturn, going into orbit by a planet, going flying by somewhere new. You feel like dancing and throwing up at the same time.

It is just incredible. Can we get video? Let's get to the elephant in the room. We all know that the International Astronomical Union, the IAU, decided to downgrade Pluto from full-fledged planet to dwarf planet in 2006. Now, doesn't this cast a little bit of a shadow over this evening? I mean, if it's... Matt, Matt, come on. This is more interesting as the first object we're seeing, the Kuiper Belt. Who cares that it's not a planet anymore? It's more interesting now than it ever was when it

was just this mungy planet at the edge of the solar system. It's a great object to go see. I love Pluto. Well, okay. Then I stand corrected. And I stand corrected by Caltech's Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy. He has been awarded Caltech's Feynman Award and the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics. He is also the best-selling author of How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. Please welcome Mike Brown. That was fun, Mike. Thank you for putting up with our little bit of shtick there. I only decided to invite you to this party a couple of weeks ago. You were on vacation, not checking email, so I'm really glad that you got back to us and you were able to join us tonight.

I came back just for you. Thank you, Mike. First question, level with us. Do you really love Pluto, or are you just saying that to stop the hate mail? No, when New Horizons was first being talked about, when missions to Pluto were first being talked about, I thought it was kind of exciting to go visit the last planet and to see this oddball at the edge of the solar system.

But I'm so much more excited now to get our first chance to visit the Kuiper Belt. For the last 15 years, I've been studying these objects out there in the outer solar system, been finding these big ones that are like Pluto, and now we get to see one for the first time. And every hour that I'm seeing new images of Pluto is sort of changing my overall impression of all these objects in the Kuiper Belt. So I'm as excited as anybody about this mission. Let me just hold up the current issue of Popular Science.

He's got an article in here. It's called Why I Still Love Pluto. It's got an article in here. It's called, Why I Still Love Pluto. It's a very nice piece. So he's definitely making amends everybody. How many worlds out there have you had a part in discovering now? You know, I lose track, but on that image that Bruce was showing, there were, I think, eight objects and there was one of them I didn't discover. Pluto. But all the other ones were mine.

You know, I asked you years ago, do you feel some kinship with Clyde Tombaugh, Pluto's actual discovery? You know, I still am incredibly impressed. By having gone through and found all these myself, I know how hard it was for me. And I had all the benefits of computers and robotic telescopes and digital cameras. He did all this stuff himself. I don't feel kinship with him. I feel sort of awe of him more than anything. By my reckoning, and I'm a weirdo, there's something like 35 or 40 planets in our solar system.

All of those beautiful not planets that we saw, I think of them as planets. Now, that differs from the dynamical definition and all that, but I think that's how I think of them as more of a geologist, perhaps, than an astronomer. Mike, rebuttal time before we get to Linda and Bruce? No, I would say that what Jim has just told you is that I am the greatest planet discoverer in history. So who am I to argue with him? Excellent. Mike Brown loves Pluto, and he completely agrees with me.

This has been a great show. Can we just wrap it up? Yeah, we're done for this evening. Thanks, folks. Linda? I think it would be interesting to maybe get the public to weigh in as well. I know that when the announcement first came out that Pluto was no longer a planet, my little nephew came up and he phoned me and he said,

Aunt Linda, how could this happen? What can I do to make Pluto a planet again? So there's a lot of discussion, I think, and maybe since Pluto was a planet for so long, maybe it could get grandfathered into the mix. Linda, you're probably the most experienced outer solar system explorer. Talk some more about that. Are we making a mistake? Yeah, it's true, Matt, that after we have Juno and Cassini ended in 2017, 2018, in a sense, you can think of the outer

solar system going dark, that we don't have beyond the Europa mission anything else to go out and explore, visit the ice giants Uranus and Neptune, to continue the exploration that Voyager started. So this is indeed a problem. It takes a long time to get out there, and yet we have nothing beyond Europa in the pipeline. Well, we don't really even have Europa yet officially. We need to continue to push for that and make that happen.

Fingers crossed. Mike, we've got some really, really big telescopes coming online. You're an observational astronomer. In fact, we've had a lot of those people who are building those telescopes on planetary radio. Why is that not the answer? Can those telescopes not take the place of actually sending a little robotic emissary out there? I would say that the telescopes are critically important to our exploration of the outer solar system, too, because what the telescopes allow you to do is explore the diversity of all the worlds out there. But what you really want to do is have a few detailed looks at a few places like Pluto and then use the telescopes to look at all the other

bodies out there and learn from Pluto what the rest of these objects are like. So only having spacecraft, I think it's a bad idea. You want the telescopes too, but only having the telescopes, you're going to miss out on the richness of the stuff that we'll be seeing over the next couple of weeks here on Pluto. Special guest Mike, Pluto killer Brown of Caltech, joining Cassini project scientist Linda Spilker, author and planetary scientist Jim Bell, and Planetary Society Director of Science and Technology Bruce Betts. On the evening, we heard that New Horizons had fulfilled its destiny at Pluto.

You'll hear that thrilling moment right after the break here on Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here. I'd like to introduce you to Merk Boyan. Hello. He's been making all those fabulous videos which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right. We're going to put all the videos in one place, Merk.

Is that right? Planetary TV. So I can watch them on my television? No. So wait a minute. Planetary TV's not on TV? That's the best thing about it. They're all going to be online. You can watch them anytime you want.

Where do I watch Planetary TV then, Merc? Well, you can watch it all at planetary.org slash TV. Hi, Mary. Can I borrow a couple of eggs? Sure, Marge. I'll get them from the fridge. Oh, darn. Look at this mess. All my refrigerator magnets have clumped together again. Mary, you need magnetic monopole refrigerator magnets from the Roswell Wonder Company. They're guaranteed to never clump. Gee, thanks, Marge. I'll order my magnetic monopole refrigerator magnets today.

The Roswell Wonder Company, putting alien technology to work for you. Not an actual company. Welcome back to a very special edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. You're listening to excerpts of our Planetary Radio Live celebration on the evening of July 14th. That's when the New Horizons spacecraft finally had its close encounter with Pluto and its neighbors. We were monitoring NASA's live coverage originating from the Applied Physics Lab in Maryland, where hundreds of team members, their families, reporters and

others were waiting, like us, for a burst of data that had traveled across 3 billion miles. Here is that moment. Ladies and gentlemen, I think we made it. New Horizons is entering the room. Wow. Phenomenal, nominal. That was exciting. Woo-hoo.

Mom, this is Autonomy on Pluto 1. Go ahead, Autonomy. Autonomy is very happy to report nominal status. No rules have fired. Wow. Jim? No rules have fired. They haven't violated any flight rules. They haven't gone on an anomalous situation, safe modes, anything like that. Go ahead, CNDH.

CNDH reports nominal status. Our SSR pointers are where we expect them to be, which means we have recorded the expected amount of data. Copy that. Looks like we have a good data record. Lots of data of the Pluto system, and we're outbound for Pluto. Let's hear it.

That's what we wanted to hear. The woman you heard is New Horizons Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman. Not far from Alice were Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye the Science Guy and our senior editor Emily Lakdawalla. A few minutes later when things had calmed slightly at APL, Bill and Emily got on Skype to talk with our excited group back in Pasadena, California. Tell us about the moment there that we got word back from New Horizons. That was no big deal. No, people went nuts. They went crazy. Emily, your thoughts? The one that was music to my ears was the one about SSR pointers.

And SSR stands for Solid State Recorder. That is the device that holds all of that precious, precious science data. And it said that they had as many as they thought they should. That means they took all of their data products, every single instrument on the spacecraft. All the thruster firings also happened as planned. So both the pointing and the data products are on there. That means that there's a lot of science to be done. And as soon as I saw that, I jumped up and I hugged a whole bunch of scientists because they have jobs for the next five years now.

Really, everybody, there will be hundreds of scientific papers generated every year from this thing, I'm sure. And not that it's about generating papers, it's just trying to give you a sense of how many data were papers. It's just trying to give you a sense of how much, how many data were collected. It's a giant thumb drive way out in space, way out there. A four gigabyte thumb drive. Yeah. It is so absolutely amazing. So we look at this global disk image of Pluto, and it is an incredibly diverse surface. You look at the pole, it looks like one thing. You look at the heart. The heart is actually two different kinds of terrain. There's carbon monoxide ice in one place, and there's some

other kind of ice in another place. And the heart, we have the image up now. That's this big, whiter or lighter area, right? That's right. And they talk about the left ventricle on the right ventricle. The left ventricle is the one with the carbon monoxide ice. And then next to that is the dark region now called Cthulhu, which is this very dark material that looks a lot like Iapetus. That's actually, for me, the most familiar thing about Pluto, is that this material near the equator looks a lot like Iapetus. And then you see some linear features that could be tectonic, they could be crater-related, who knows. Could be ice cracking. Could be all kinds of stuff.

So there is so much geology just in this one image, and that's just the first close-up image we've gotten. It's going to get a thousand times higher resolution. It's going to get, yes, so much better. Tomorrow we should get a whole lot of high resolution, well not a whole lot, three high resolution images that show us what the surface looks like across that heart. So we'll be able to see that in high resolution. So it's nitrogen snow and nitro tar. Nitro tar. That sounds like something you'd put in a hot rod. Emily, how long is it going to take to get all of the data back from this flyby? 16 long months.

Bill Nye, the science guy, and Emily Lakdawalla speaking with our happy audience in Pasadena via Skype from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Maryland, where New Horizons had just phoned home from Pluto. Our party at the Crawford Family Forum wasn't quite over yet. I asked Jim Bell, Linda Spilker, and Mike Brown to share some closing thoughts about the significance of this achievement and how it fits into a continuing parade of milestones passed in space. Jim Bell spoke first.

JIM BELL, NASA Astronauts and Space Scientist, NASA's Space Science Center, USA, USA, USA It feels like there's a series of bookends going on here, right? And this year, this year we saw the end of a very successful mission at Mercury, closest into the sun, and now the beginning of a very successful downlink at Pluto, way out there, right? The entire solar system encompassed within this year also this mission is bookending this half century of space exploration we it's the 50th anniversary of the Mariner 4 flyby of Mars today today which which was the the first planetary flyby out at you know beyond

Earth's orbit what we've seen today is the end of the first phase of exploring our solar system. At least flying by everything that everybody knows about. That happened today. We just finished it. There we go. Boom. Right there. People just stopped discovering things. It's so cool. It's the end of that phase and the end, you know, an ending is always a beginning, right?

And what that means is now we're starting the next phase. And the next phase is doing more detailed missions like Cassini at Saturn, like Galileo at Jupiter. Getting orbiters out to Uranus and Neptune, understanding what ice giants are like and how they're different from gas giants, getting more landers and rovers to Mars, landers and rovers down to Venus, Mercury, asteroids. What we're going to see now, and now that we've finished this part, now we do this part, and that starts getting more complicated, more detailed, bringing samples back, spending time in those environments, getting to really know them. And what's beyond that is getting people out there. And I'm really excited about that.

Linda, your turn. Well, I've been really thrilled to be a part of being here tonight and just sort of witnessing, as Jim said, sort of the bookends of the end of this half century. And also I wonder, as we understand our solar system better, what does that mean for the other planets around other stars and those other systems? Are they like our solar system? Are they different? Are we unique? different? Are we unique? And now we have just more information that we can use as we can get better and better views over the next decade or two of those other worlds around the other stars.

Mike, you get maybe not the last word, but the second to the last word. It's funny. So this night seems like the culmination of this nine and a half years, and we're all clapping and things are going on. And yet, to me, this is, we don't know anything about Pluto yet. We've gotten just the smallest little hints of what's there. And so I feel like tonight and tomorrow are the beginning of Pluto exploration, not the ending phase. So I am thrilled to see what's going to be there on Pluto. I'm actually as excited, maybe more excited about Sharon than I am thrilled to see what's going to be there on Pluto. I'm actually as excited, maybe more excited about Charon than I am about Pluto.

I just can't wait to wake up tomorrow morning and see what has been released, and I think that will be happening every day for the next couple of months here, so it's just going to be great. Caltech's Mike Brown, preceded by Linda Spilker of JPL and Jim Bell of Arizona State University. Many thanks to them, to Bill Nye and Emily Lakdawalla, to the great folks who joined us at Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum, and the thousands of people who watched the live webcast.

The uncut recording of that webcast is waiting for you with so much more great conversation and fun. The link is on this week's show page, reached from planetary.org slash radio. Emily, we've looked back at that wonderful celebration on Tuesday, that Tuesday evening of the encounter. Of course, you spent many days after that at APL, and we're starting to see a little bit more come out of the mission, right? We're speaking, I should note, on the morning of Monday the 20th.

And there was just an image today, a little bit of a surprise. That's right. It's really cool to see these new images trickling into the Raw Images website. When I'd been told on Saturday, actually, that we weren't going to be seeing any raw images on the website for another week. So I'm so excited to see a new high-res pic of Pluto that we should be able to combine to make a 3D image of the globe. And then a whole family portrait. There's a high-res pic of Sharon and even Nixon Hydra. So they are coming. They're coming a little slower than some people, including you, expected.

And there is a piece, if you want to go behind the scenes about this, that Emily posted. It's in the blog at planetary.org from the 19th of July. But let's talk about what's ahead. And also this terrific poster, which you are gradually revising and filling in. What's going on here? Well, New Horizons has, the team has selected just a tiny amount of science data that they're going to have time to send back over the 33 astronomical units that separate Pluto and Earth right now. Only 1% of the science data came down in this first week. That's all the scientists have to work on right now. And that data is just slowly trickling in to fill out this poster that I made, which originally showed Voyager images of Ganymede to kind of simulate what we were going to see from New Horizons. And now as the raw images

pop up, I'm filling it in to show what we actually got from the Pluto-Sharon mission. It's really cool to watch this data set slowly grow before our eyes. We're talking about data, but mostly about images, which of course always hog the public mind. But what about the other kinds of data? Can you say anything about them? Oh, yeah. They had a press release on Friday Friday and one of the coolest graphics I saw there was the first bit of data from the solar occultation where they watched the sun vanish behind Pluto's limb, which is a very sensitive way to probe the atmosphere. They detected the atmosphere out to about 1500 kilometers above Pluto, which when you consider the fact that that's like half the diameter of Pluto right

there, it's really far away. It doesn't tell you anything new about the atmosphere yet, but it tells you that we have a really sensitive, rich data set on the ground and a lot more left to come that is going to just fuel Pluto science for a decade. And months and months of that data trickling back to us from out there beyond Pluto now. Of course, as I said, you did spend days at APL and then a little bit of time in Washington, D.C. Talk about the mood, what it was like to be a part of that happy crowd. Well, it was electric and exciting and everybody was elated, but then they were also exhausted. It's really hard when you have data coming down all night long to do instant science and to be

really sharp and get all the details right. And then you have to go spend all your time making photos. And what you really want to do is measure pixels and figure out what the data are telling you scientifically. So many, many competing demands on the science team this week. It's been fantastic and difficult and wonderful. And it's just quite a week. And I can't wait to see what more comes out from the team. Me neither.

And welcome home, Emily. It's great to have you back. And we'll talk to you again next week. Thank you, Matt. She is our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, a contributing editor also to Sky and Telescope magazine, just back from a week outside of Baltimore at the Applied Physics Lab, where the world was really tuned in as New Horizons had its encounter with Pluto.

There's just one thing left that we need to do, and that takes us back to Pasadena and a live version of What's Up with Bruce Betts. Well, golly, Matt, Pluto's up, but you can't see it very easily, unless you have a spacecraft or a good telescope or a medium telescope. Anyway, what's easy to see, Matt, is we've still got Jupiter and Venus looking quite stunning in the early evening west, low in the sky, looking very, very bright. And in the south, we've got Saturn, Linda's planet, looking quite spectacular in its own right over in Scorpius. We go on to this week in space history. In 1969, you may have heard of this, the first humans landed on the moon.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'll tell you about it later, Jim. I've driven the car of one of those guys. And also, same day, July 20th in 1976, Viking 1 became the first successful Mars lander. What is it about July? Everything happens in July.

Why don't you help me out and say random space fact! Random space fact! Pluto's moon, Kerberos, is named after the three-headed dog that guarded Pluto's underworld, but really, Hades' underworld. underworld, but really Hades underworld. The Greek spelling Kerberos was used because Cerberus, the Roman spelling that would match the Roman Pluto, was already in use for an asteroid. On to the trivia contest. Remember that Pluto's orbit actually takes it inside the orbit of Neptune for a few years in each cycle. When was the last year in which Pluto was closer to the Sun than Neptune? What is the answer? 1999. Not that long ago. That was when, after 20 years inside the orbit, it went back outside?

Right. And it'll hang out outside for another couple hundred years. All right. The lucky listener and entrant this evening is Brandon Frechette of Meadow Vista, California. He said, indeed, it was 1999. He says, love learning new facts and science from all at the Planetary Society. Keep up the excellent work. Love listening to you all every week, and thanks again. Brendan has gotten himself a fabulous Planetary Radio t-shirt, but along with that, a 200-point itelescope.net account.

radio t-shirt. But along with that, a 200-point itelescope.net account. iTelescope is the worldwide network of telescopes that can be accessed by anyone. You can take pictures, send them to your friends. There are some really good scopes out there. It's worth a couple of hundred dollars, American, and we thank iTelescope for making that available. David Dearden in Mapleton, Utah said, yeah, 1999. Maybe that's why Prince was partying. We're going to party like it's 1999. Set upon in Jamaica, New York. The question, of course, was when was Pluto last closer to Earth than Neptune? Pluto the dog has always been closer to Earth than Neptune.

So there you go. All right. We need to come up with a question for the listeners at home. Please don't shout out the answer. But you can enter if you like. As of today, we're going to go unofficial and unofficial. What is the unofficial feature name being given by the New Horizons team to the dark feature that some have unofficially called the whale?

Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Get us your entry. And you have until Tuesday, the 21st of July. That's Tuesday, July 21st at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And we will get you a fabulous Planetary Radio t-shirt and another 200-point itelescope.net account. All right, everybody. Go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about cartoon dogs.

Thank you, and good night. Woof, woof. Give us a good bark. Ruff, ruff. He does a great Scooby, too. Ruff, ruff. He is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, Bruce Betts. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California,

and is made possible by its members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle created our theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies, everyone.