Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Radio Live! Featuring Mike 'Pluto-Killer' Brown

Episode Date: June 6, 2011

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When you wish upon a star, may it bloom. From Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum, this is Planetary Radio Live. Here's your host, the Planetary Society's Matt Kaplan. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. Took us a year to get around to it, but we're back with Plan Rad Live in front of a standing room only Pasadena audience. That harmonious humming you hear is the award winning barbershop quartet High Fidelity. We'll hear more from them in a few minutes.

Also coming up is our special guest, the author of How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, Caltech's Dr. Mike Brown. Joining us for that conversation will be the Planetary Society's executive director, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Society's Executive Director, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bruce Betts will also be here for a live version of our What's Up segment, including the chance for several people in our studio audience to win a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

In fact, the whole gang is here with one glaring exception. We always get started by talking with Planetary Society blogger Emily Lakdawalla, but she is on the road this week, so instead of a live appearance, we've got something very special for you. A few weeks ago, Emily, Bill Nye, and I visited the Jet Propulsion Lab near Pasadena, where we put on bunny suits and entered what's known as the High Bay Room. Waiting inside was Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover, that will be leaving for the Red planet in just a few months.

First, though, we had to pass through a man-made hurricane designed to blow away any last bits of earth dust before entering the massive clean room. It's very comfortable, really. Mislok to Walla. After you. So here we go. Look, there it is, there it is, there it is. Come on, Ms. Laktawalla, after you. So here we go. Look, there it is, there it is, there it is. Come on, Emily.

Oh, Emily, check it out. Here it is, everybody. This hardware is going to another planet, and it's not coming back. My favorite part is standing right here, right next to a rover that's going to be driving across Mars in just a year or so. It's really exciting. I can't believe that I'm standing right next to Curiosity right now. So all this hardware, all this metal, all these wires, all the software that's loaded in there, it's not coming back. It goes to another planet and that's where it stays pretty much forever.

And neither is the blood, sweat and tears of thousands and thousands of people who have been just putting so much time into building this thing, writing the software, testing it, making sure that the folks at headquarters are still going to pay the bills to get this thing moving and on to Mars. And it's just, it's been a long process and I'm so excited that we're almost at launch. It is striking to me how small it is and then how far it can go. And then the radio thermoelectric generator

puts out so much heat. You gotta cool it off till you get to Mars. That is just, it's a lot of heat. I've heard that there are three redundant cooling systems in the launch tower just to make sure that if nothing can happen once they bolt that thing onto the rover. If it doesn't get cooled, bad things will happen. Well, it's exciting. Everything is very clean now, but I look forward to it getting dusty.

That's right. It's going to be covered with red dust of Mars, although the landing sites that are being chosen are less dusty than most of the other places we've ever been. Why is that? Well, because we can tell from space that they have mineral signatures. With the CRISM instrument on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Omega on Mars Express, we have been able to spot clay minerals on the surface at all four of the possible landing sites, which is why we're going there.

And the fact that we can actually spot mineral signatures means that we're not looking at dust, we are looking at rocks. And so this machine is being sent to study rocks and we're going to find them. What is it so intriguing about clay? Clay is a mineral that is formed from the alteration of other minerals in the presence of water. Water is generally required to make clay minerals and this machine is being sent to Mars to look for habitable environments, which were environments that once may have supported life. And so as far as we know, you need water in order to facilitate the chemical reactions that make life work. And so we are looking, the fact that there are clay minerals means that there was water there long enough to alter the rocks to make them into these different minerals. Yeah, and so hopefully

that also means it was long enough for life to form and evolve there. It's not a life detection mission. It's a habitable environment studying mission. Habitable environment studying. If we found evidence of life on Mars, it would change the world. And it all started in this room. Not bad. Bill Nye and Emily Lakdawalla visiting the Curiosity Rover at JPL.

Listeners, you can check out the video of that clip at planetary.org slash radio. Emily will be back for our regular weekly conversation next week. I told you we'd be hearing from our musical guests, Barbershop Quartet, High Fidelity. Now what you radio and podcast listeners can't see is how magnificent they look in their Star Trek uniforms. Ladies and gentlemen, High Fidelity! Fly the friendly skies on the Enterprise. Da-da-da-da-da.

We'll fly through the galaxy, me and my pals on the Enterprise. Our five-year mission is a new tradition, the Enterprise. mission is a new tradition the Enterprise we boldly go where no man has gone before and more factor four new planet come on let's scan it no sign of intelligence beam us aboard you can't affect us behind our deflectors. The Enterprise. The ship that's truly Vulcanized. Those Vulcanized. Captain, I fail to see the human. It's nifty.

It's neat. Oh, blasting the Romulans with photon torpedoes. Oh, what a joy of a toy for a boy is the Enterprise. What a joy of a toy for a boy is the Enterprise. Where you can bring Spock, though his logic's a crock. But don't bring Sulu. Scotty can go where she's gonna blow. But don't bring Sulu.

Sulu drives the Enterprise like it has some fuzzy dice. When he brings the ship around, all the bridges falling down. You can bring Kirk, though he's kind of a jerk, but don't bring Sulu. You can bring Bones, though he whines and moans, and he'll often lose his head.

Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a baritone. Like we said, put Sulu in the wheel and danger I'll renew

will. Oh my. Cause Desilulu says don't bring Sulu check off instead So beam me up Scotty I must use the potty on the Enterprise

The ship that's truly Vulcanized We fly on We sing on And in between we're gonna bag us a Klingon Oh what a joy of a toy For our boys the We love the

Enterprise In the Federation skies On the Enterprise. High Fidelity. Live long and prosper, guys. We'll see them again in a couple of minutes. They'll be back later. And I'll be back with Mike Plutokiller-Brown and Bill Nye in just a minute. This is Planetary Radio Live.

I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show.

Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org

slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. I hope you can tell what a great time we had on Saturday, May 28th, when we recorded Planetary Radio Live. You're about to hear our conversation with Mike Pluto Killer Brown. But there was just no way for us to cram that whole

afternoon into this one show. So we'll have much more of Mike, Bill Nye, and Barbershop Quartet High Fidelity on next week's episode. And now, back to the show. Welcome back to Planetary Radio Live. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're in front of a capacity crowd at Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum. And when I say we, I mean, please welcome Bill Nye, the science guy. Thank you. Thank you, Matt. It's great to be here with other humans. Thank you, Bill. You like to say that discoveries in space will change the world.

Now our guest today is the discoverer of several worlds including Eris, Sedna, and Haumea. He's often credited as the demoter of yet another, though that really wasn't his decision. He has been professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech here in Pasadena since 2003. Please welcome local and cosmic hero, Mike Brown. So Mike, I don't even remember how many times you've been on the show now. It's good to have you back. Thanks. It's great to be here. You kind of grew up with your head in the solar system in Huntsville, right? I did. When I was growing up in Huntsville, Alabama, they were building the Saturn V rockets to go to the moon, and you could hear the tests going on every afternoon.

The whole ground would shake and rumble. It's kind of like living in Southern California. And what high school did you go to? I went to Grissom High School. Virgil Gus Grissom High School. Virgil Gus Grissom. So your future was kind of preordained. It's true. Was it your intent right from the start to murder a planet? When I started this big search of the skies,

it eventually led to the discoveries of things like Eris and Maki Maki. What I told people that I was doing was looking for a 10th planet. I really thought that no one was ever going to actually have the guts to get rid of Pluto. So if I could just find something bigger, then I got to be the discoverer of the 10th planet too. But you had a sense there was something bigger. I did think so. It was what as soon as Pluto, what we realized that it was part of this larger population out there. And we realized that nobody had ever done a very consistent search of the skies for the other things out there in that region. It just seemed clear to me that there must be larger things that have gone undetected so far.

So what happened in 1930 that Pluto was the first of these objects to be discovered? Is it especially shiny? It's got two things that we're going for. One is it's pretty close. It's one of the closer of these objects. When you say close, how many light hours does it take to get there? It only takes something like 10 hours to get there. At the speed of light.

Maybe five hours. So let's see. I always do everything from Eris. So let me see. So Eris, to get to Eris. Tell everybody what Eris is. Eris is the one that led to Pluto being demoted by being. We thought at the time it was significantly bigger.

Now we're still not quite sure which one's bigger but there are two that are about the same size and Eris was much harder to find because it's three times further away. So Eris it takes 12 hours for sunlight to get there and another 12 hours to get back before

we can see it. So it's day old sunlight when we see Eris. Now when you say big, bigger than Pluto these things are smaller than the Earth's moon, right? Yeah, these things are all generally fairly tiny. I mean, I think it's fair to think of them as kind of cosmic debris out there. And this is Pluto and Eris are the two biggest of the debris field, of which there are things that go from that size down to tiny, tiny little specks of dust. So how many objects of significant size, if Pluto is considered significant size, how many such objects are there? There's a size that I think of in my mind of what makes them significant.

They're ones that when they get a little bit bigger, they get a little more interesting in that they start to have geological features on them. And we can't really see them well enough to know that. But what we can see is that we see signatures of different types of ices and different types of minerals. That size, which is something like a thousand kilometers across, there's probably a dozen of them about that size. A dozen of those in population, what, 10,000 of other objects? Oh, as you get down to smaller and smaller sizes, there are thousands and millions of objects out there. And how did they get there? They're all the remnants of the formation of the planets.

When all the planets were forming, the disk of material that eventually went into the planets extended further, but there just wasn't quite enough stuff to make it into a planet. So water, ice, is primordial. Yeah, and they're mostly made out of ice. This is from the beginning of beginning. It's been water. That's crazy. How do you do it? What's the secret of finding other worlds? It's actually, in some ways, it's quite simple. You take a picture of the sky, and you come back maybe an hour later and take another picture of the same spot in the sky and you look for things that move and all the stars are in the same place hour after hour

and all the galaxies are in the same place but anything that's in our solar system that's moving around the sun you actually see move ever so slightly in the course of that hour and then all you have to do is do that uh over the whole sky for a decade and you're bound to find something and that's what you did i read your book by the way everybody the book how i killed pluto and why do is do that over the whole sky for a decade and you're bound to find something. And that's what you did. I read your book. By the way, everybody, the book, How I Killed Pluto and Why I Had It Coming is just a terrific read. It's really fun. I really encourage everybody to have a look. What is it that we know, that we know is a planet? What makes us call it a planet and why is that important to us? The reason for studying these things out there in the region of Pluto, the Kuiper Belt is what we call this region out there.

The reason for studying this region, this area, is because these things are the frozen remnants of the very earliest part of the solar system. They're basically leftovers that we can study and see what things were like back 4.5 billion years ago. So the real reason for doing it and the real reason I started trying to find more of these, was to find more of that fossil record. But the excitement in it and the thing that kept pushing me forward is because it really was kind of an exciting idea to be able to find something bigger than Pluto, find something that obviously, if it's bigger than Pluto, it's a planet, right? Obviously.

Along with that obviousness, you've gotten hate mail? Oh, yeah. I still do. These days, actually, I get less hate mail. I get obscene phone calls predominantly. From whom? I have a theory on this because they come at around 2 a.m. on Saturdays. You know you can unplug phones. they don't know my home number.

They only go to my office. And so I actually, I've collected them all. I saved them because they're actually really quite funny. But I think what it is, I think that these are the kids who were in about eighth grade when Pluto got demoted, and those are the ones who I think were the maddest. And now they've gone to college.

And on Saturday night at about 2 a.m. they think, hey, let's call that Mike Brown guy and give him a hard time. And they think it's pretty funny. I think it's pretty funny too, I have to admit. You killed Pluto, man. Actually, that's pretty much what they sound like, only with some of the other words that you're missing that are in there. I can imagine. So what's next for you? Well, so there are a lot of exciting things going on,

but the thing about which I am most excited is that as part of the search and these discoveries in the outer part of the solar system, the one object that we found that I'm still most interested in is one called Sedna. Sedna is still the only object that we know that's beyond the Kuiper Belt. Sedna is... Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought the Kuiper Belt went out, out, out, orclavically beyond, beyond tivity. No, so the Kuiper Belt actually is fairly limited in range. It starts just at about the orbit of Neptune, and it goes out only about 50% further than that. Oh, that's all? Yeah, it's tiny. 15 light hours. Tiny, tiny area. And then for reasons that we still really don't

understand, it abruptly ends. Then there's essentially empty space for a long period of time. And we thought there was empty space from the edge of the Kuiper Belt out until the Oort Cloud. The Oort Cloud is actually far away compared to all these other things, which are just the inner part of the solar system. The Oort Cloud is way out there, but we thought it was empty space between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. And we have found one object in that empty space now that shouldn't be there. Sedna is this one we found in 2003. If you find one, you know there are going to be more.

And if you can find more, you can learn how they got there. I think that the answer to how they got there is they were thrown out there to this otherwise empty region right when the sun was born. And so I think if you can find more of these, they're preserving this fossil record of the very earliest moments of the sun's birth. So I'm really excited to go find more of these. But they're really far away. They're hard to find.

And so far we haven't found any more. Okay, folks, we're going to have to call it quits there with this segment. Mike Brown's book is called How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming from Spiegel and Grau. It's available from all the usual places, including Amazon, where you can now get the Kindle edition, Mike. Did you know that? You've been digitized. Somebody made me sign their Kindle once.

It was sort of odd. That's pretty cool. Mike Brown is professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech. Bill, we will hear from you again next week with your regular planetary radio commentary. And Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, I like to get that in too. Yes, yes. He is executive director now of the Planetary Society. Let's change the world. Every single week for eight and a half years

we've closed out the show with my friend Bruce Betts, astronomer and Planetary Society Director of Projects. We call this segment, What's Up?, because we're so very clever. Welcome, Bruce. Clever. Clever. You know, I think I stepped in some irradiated methane goo on the way out of the stage. Oh, I saw that on your shoe. Don't touch it. Okay. Here it's hard to get off. You're going to tell us about the night sky. I off. You're going to tell us about the night sky.

I am. I'm going to tell you about the night sky. We've got still in the pre-dawn sky, though it's getting tough to see, low, low in the east. We've got four planets. Jupiter is pretty easy to see in the pre-dawn, looking like a super bright star-like object. Down to its lower left, you can check out Venus, also really bright. Mars coming up higher, looking dim and reddish. And maybe you can still catch Mercury.

So getting tougher, but Jupiter and Mars being farther out from the Earth will just keep getting higher and higher and easier to see. We've also got Saturn high in the east in the evening sky. And we have some special things coming up June 15th, total lunar eclipse. It is visible from five continents, not Antarctica. Darn! And not North America. That's my trip to the South Pole. Not North America.

But if you go anywhere else, and for all our listeners elsewhere, you can check it out if you're on one of those other five continents. I got this week in space history, we're at the 40th anniversary of the Mariner 9 launch, the first Mars orbiter. 1965, this week, we had Ed White become the first American space walker. All right. Now we're going to move on. And do we have something special? Well, this is normally, right, where you would do, he would intone random space fact for us. And he does that in this incredible voice. But, after all, we have high fidelity here.

Not quite as incredible as what we've got here. Take it, boys. Random space fact. Space fact. Space fact. Yeah, that deserves a hand. Okay, lay it on us. That's really cool.

Well, thematically, let's talk about Eris. Eris is about 20, and it's always dangerous here with the, you know, discover, maybe I'll get corrected, but Eris is about 27% more massive than Pluto. All right, got the thumbs up. Which also means, because it's still kind of tiny compared to your favorite planet, it's about 0.27% the mass of Earth. Yeah, we rule. Let's not talk to the Jovians about that. We're going to go on to the contest.

Now, normally at this point, we would award a Planetary Radio t-shirt to a listener who has gotten in the right answer to our weekly trivia contest question. But this time around, it all goes to the folks who are here with us in the Crawford Family Forum. So we're going to do this real quick because we only have a couple of minutes left. Are you ready to start tossing out those shirts to our winners? I am, but first I have to take a few seconds to harass you. I thought I had the most brilliant trivia question. What was Mike Brown's high school? Oh, I'm so sorry. Then you discuss it.

See, that's poor planning. Virgil Grissom High School. Alright, don't worry, I brought a backup. Alright, let's crank through these. We'll stay thematic through all of them. We'll start with what are the three known moons of Pluto? Three known moons of Pluto. We got somebody right back there. Three.

That's one. I need two more. Who said that? Split the T-shirt. We'll tear one or two for you like Solomon. Okay. All right. Okay.

Did we get it? We got it. We had a winner. Tell it to us one more time over there. Hydra, Nix, and Sharon. And Sharon, we got a winner. Throw that man a T-shirt. You know what?

All right. We're actually out of time, but we'll do one more bonus question. Go ahead. Bonus question. All right. What is the orbital period of Eris? Within 100 years. We're in a hurry.

Time to make it around the sun. Okay? Orbital period around the sun. Here's one right over here. Around the sun, Eris. 540 years. Ooh, even much closer than 100 years. Very precise. Okay. Orbital period. Here's one right over here. Around the sun. Eris. 540 years. Ooh, even much closer than 100 years. Very precise.

Okay, give that man a hand. Terrible throw. 557 years. We're out of time. 557. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about irradiated methane goo. Thank you, and good night.

I can't stop thinking about it. He's Bruce Betts, the Planetary Society's Director of Projects. He joins me each week for What's Up. He's going to stand up and juggle now for you folks while we finish off the show. Not bad, huh? Not bad. Oh, whoa, whoa. We will end this edition of Planetary Radio Live with one more tune from Barbershop Quartet High Fidelity.

You can check out the guys and buy their CDs at highfidelityquartet.com. That's high, H-I, fidelityquartet.com, all one word. They are Greg Bernhard, Craig Ewing, Martin Fredstrom, and Tom Moore. Clear skies, everyone. Please welcome back High Fidelity. Throughout the course of space and time, man has always dared to reach beyond the limits of his own imagination and dream an impossible dream. May man never stop dreaming, never stop hoping, never stop reaching, and never stop wishing.

When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are. Anything your heart desires will come to you. Anything your heart desires will come to you. If your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme when you wish upon a star as dreamers do. As dreamers do. Fate is kind. She brings to those who love the sweet fulfillment of their secret longing. Just like a bolt out of the blue.

Fate steps in and sees you through. When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true This is my quest to follow that star No matter how hopeless, no matter how far To fight for the right without question or pause To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause and I

know if I'll only be true to this glorious quest that my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I'm laid to my rest. That one man, scorned and covered with scars,

still strong with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable star. Reach the unreachable, reach the unreachable star. is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible in part by a grant from the William T. and Kathleen L. Norris Foundation. We thank the staff and management of Southern California Public Radio for their support. Our engineer is Mike Stokesbury, Ron Petkey was our stage manager,

and I'm your announcer, Laura Caplanietto. Thank you. Laura Caplin Nieto.