Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - PLANETARY RADIO LIVE: LADEE Launches for Luna

Episode Date: September 9, 2013

Planetary Radio returned to the Crawford Family Forum for live coverage of the LADEE launch on September 6th.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We humans began another journey to the moon on the evening of Friday, September 6th. Planetary Radio celebrated that event with one of our special shows produced in front of a live audience. The complete webcast of that great night is now available on the show page at planetary.org slash radio. What you're about to hear are excerpts of that 90-minute program. Planetary Radio Live. We are coming to you tonight live from Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum, where there is a standing room only crowd of space junkies. Who wants to go to the moon tonight? to the moon tonight. All right, we are now less than an hour away from the liftoff of LADEE. That's the Lunar Atmosphere Dust Environment Explorer. Yeah, you heard right. Atmosphere on the moon? Yes, and that's just one of the great things that we've learned about our closest

companion in the solar system, the only one that we've actually visited in person, though it's been over 40 years since that happened. We'll learn why this is an important and historic mission, beginning with the launch site that we're going to be blasting off from this evening. We will also talk with Lunar Explorer David Page of UCLA and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. Then we'll go directly to that launch site for a live report from the LADEE missions' Brian Day. Joining me on stage for the whole shebang tonight is my buddy, the Planetary Society's Director of Projects, Planetary Scientist, Bruce Betts. Welcome, Bruce. Thank you very much.

Good to be here. Thanks for inviting me up. My pleasure. Glad to have you here. Now, we do have one other person to introduce this evening. He has just become involved with this other gig that has kept him from joining us live this evening, but it does mean that you will soon see him tripping the light fantastic on Dancing with the Stars. Ladies and gentlemen, from his cell phone in New York City, here's the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Greetings, greetings, Matt. Greetings, everyone. We can hear you. I can hear you, Matt. It's fabulous.

How's it going there? We're less than an hour away before the lunar atmospheric dust, the environment explorer, goes to the moon. Aboard an old military rocket, I might add. That is true, yes. How are your feet? Are they holding up? Your feet get really tired. And so, for example, last night I put my feet in a bag of ice, and I'm not even kidding.

A bag of ice, Matt. Ice, a very substance. Water ice. We're going to be talking about that a great deal tonight, I suspect. I did see you wearing your Planetary Society pin on Good Morning America. Well, who wouldn't? Who wouldn't? Yeah, we're the world's largest

non-governmental space interest organization started by my old professor, Carl Sagan, Lou Friedman, my predecessor as CEO, and Bruce Murray, who died very recently. Just passed away last week. In fact, this week's Planetary Radio show is a tribute to Bruce Murray, a truly great explorer.

So I hope you continue. Yeah, absolutely. To the audience there, I'll just say again, Bruce Murray is the guy generally credited with insisting that spacecraft have cameras. Can you imagine a space program with no pictures? Wouldn't be half the fun, would it? Half isn't the expression. It wouldn't be a half of a thousandth

as fun. Are you excited about this mission as you dance your feet off out there? Oh, yeah, because the idea that the moon has an atmosphere is extraordinary. Dr. Betts can probably speak to this more accurately. The big thing that

came from the human missions to the moon was we found out how old the Earth was. In other words, we learned more about our own planet by exploring another world. And that's sort of the essence of the business. When you go looking, when you go exploring, you are going to make discoveries. And the other thing is you're going to have an adventure. And so LADEE is right there. I mean, LADEE is the next one of these things. It's exciting. Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray used to say that we explore space to find ourselves. Yes.

Part of NASA's mission is to engage as many people as possible, and this is part of that. Thank you, Bill. Good night, and give them hell. Ladies and gentlemen, Bill Nye, the science guy. For the first time in 11 years, we're going to do What's Up right up front instead of at the end of the show. What's up?

If you haven't noticed, Venus is still looking stunningly bright, low in the west shortly after sunset. In the pre-dawn east, we've got Jupiter getting higher and higher, looking like a bright star. And about halfway down towards the horizon below it in the pre-dawn will be Mars looking much dimmer and reddish. And go check it out. We move on to this week in space history. First, another one for you, Matt. Last week we had the anniversary of the debut of Star Trek.

This week? Lost in Space. Lost in Space. I got it. 1965, Lost in Space debuted. 1959, we'll have some lunar ones. We had some nice lunar anniversaries. Luna 2 was launched by the Soviets.

Luna 2 was the first object to, quote, unquote, land on another world. It at least hit the other world. And so that went to the moon. And then a few years later, we have the anniversary in 1967 of the U.S. NASA Surveyor 5, which was the third successful soft landing of the NASA program of a robotic adventurer. All right. One, two, three. Not bad. That was very nice. So an exosphere, as we're talking about this evening a lot, because that's what Ldie will be studying, is a thin atmosphere-like bunch of molecules. But the distinction is those molecules are so spread out

that they basically are not running into each other as you get in a regular atmosphere. So even though we refer to the lunar atmosphere, it's also an exosphere all the way down to the surface. Whereas on Earth, the exosphere, you have to go up 1,000 kilometers or so. It varies considerably, but 500 to 1,000 kilometers. So exploring the lunar atmosphere is kind of like exploring what we usually call space, where the International Space Station is flying around, or even higher than that. That's how little atmosphere there is there. Excellent RSF. Thank you. Thank you very much. We move on to the trivia contest. We asked you who was the

first person to tweet on Twitter from space. How'd we do Matt? This got a tremendous response. I guess people were tweeting it because we got a much higher number of entries than usual. I am happy to say that a first-time winner, Matt Kendall of Ephraim, Utah, town I've never heard of, he won. He said, and now this was going to be in question for some people who entered and we'll have to explain. It was everybody's favorite shuttle astronaut, Mike Massimino, in 2009, I believe. Yes. Yeah. Okay.

But he did it indirectly. And the first direct tweet from space was T.J. Creamer in 2010. was T.J. Creamer in 2010. Because I guess Mike had to relay it and then somebody punched it in on their cell phone when they got it at Mission Control. Nice distinction. Yeah, yeah. We probably would have accepted either one.

But Matt did say Mike Massimino, so Matt Kendall, congratulations. We're going to send you a brand new Planetary Radio t-shirt. I also want to mention what the tweet was. And we got this from a lot of people, including Gina Smith. He tweeted, Launch was awesome. I also want to mention what the tweet was. And we got this from a lot of people, including Gina Smith. He tweeted, launch was awesome. I'm feeling great, working hard and enjoying the magnificent views. The adventure of a lifetime has begun. He's a very enthusiastic guy. One more from Stephen Georges, who I thought had a very clever answer. He said that even before anybody tweeted, there were birds in space

because NASA took doves and pigeons there. But not intentionally. That is not true. Do you know why? Here's your trivia question. Why did they take doves and pigeons? Because they needed to test the space toilet. No, because they can drink without tilting their heads back to swallow. This is the last thing you want. So they used them to train

the astronauts? You don't want your birds drowning in space. So he also said that probably Angry Birds space didn't count. Alright, that's enough of that. Alright, so for the official radio show trivia, I'm going to challenge the group this time to give us some analogies for the surface area of the moon. So the surface area of the moon is like or is equivalent to, so I'm not looking for square kilometers,

I'm looking for either creative units or analogies to land areas or whatever. X number of football fields. Yeah, that kind of thing. Got it. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest.

Get your entry to us by when, Matt? By the 16th, Monday, the 16th of September at 2pm Pacific time. I'm glad all of you here in the live audience didn't yell out any answers, but you do have an opportunity to enter. Get it in, and you might just win yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Professor David Page is with us tonight.

His first professional interplanetary experience came while he was an undergrad at UCLA. That was when he joined the Viking mission that put the first soft landers on Mars. Thirty-five years later, he is a professor of planetary science at his Westwood alma mater in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences. David just received NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Award, largely for his work as principal investigator on the diviner lunar radiometer experiment that is now circling close to the moon on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Now, of course, in his entire distinguished career, nothing is as significant as his service as the technical advisor to Star Trek, the next generation.

Please welcome David Page. Hey, David, thanks. Welcome to Planetary Radio. Thanks, it's a pleasure to be here. Let's talk about the moon. What is it about this companion that we have that has once again made it so interesting to so many scientists? It really never stopped being interesting, did it? No, and this idea that when we look at planets, we're looking at ourselves, I think really does apply in the case of the moon. The moon, of course, is our neighbor in space.

And for many years, it was thought of as a rather dull, boring world by comparison to most planets. Now, as we've had a chance to explore much of the solar system and see a lot of what planets are like, a lot of questions emerge. And it turns out that the moon, both because of its proximity and accessibility to the Earth, as well as its history, is a very important piece of the puzzle for how planets form in general and how the early Earth environment was back before we have records on the Earth, since so much of the Earth's early history has been destroyed by the things the Earth has that we like, like atmospheres and geologic activity. Those aren't so important on the moon, but it preserves a record of those early times.

We heard Bill Nye say that we, I guess, had to go to the moon to really figure out how old the Earth is? Right, absolutely. The moon also provides a very convenient planetary body in orbit around the Earth. It only takes three days to get there. And it provides a very nice place for us to test out whatever sorts of instruments, techniques, methods of conveyance, humans, et cetera. It's the only body that we've had humans visit, the only body that we have samples from or we know they came from.

So in that respect, the moon really holds a very, very special place in the field of planetary science. The mission that I'm involved with is the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO mission. We've been in orbit around the moon now for four whole years. And in that time, we've acquired more data about the moon than all the other planetary missions combined. It's a tremendous avalanche of data that's coming in. And what we're doing is something that probably could have been done many years ago. But the overall goal is to create extremely detailed maps of the Moon using various types of maps and provide a real good basis for deciding what is really interesting

about the Moon and where we might go in the future in terms of landed exploration. The Moon itself, of course, is a very beautiful body. We're sort of used to seeing it and shining through our windows. And you can get a very good look in a telescope. But as with many things, the closer you look at it, the more you see. There are a lot of interesting mysteries about the moon, for instance, how it formed, what sort of activity is there, how it's interacted with the space and solar environment and the like. The data sets that we're returning from LRO right now are really amazing

in terms of their depth and their clarity and their coverage that we're able to achieve. It's completely unlike what we're used to in terms of flying by the planets or even orbiting them because of the very high data rates that we can get back here. And I know LRO has a stunningly high-resolution camera, kind of like the HiRISE camera on the... Yes, absolutely. If you go to the LROC website, that's the name of the camera that ASU is running there, you can see many unbelievably beautiful images.

The experiment that I'm involved with is the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment. This is an experiment that actually is derived from a Mars instrument that's currently orbiting Mars right now, the Mars Climate Sounder. We took it and modified it to turn it into a lunar mapping experiment. And it's been tremendously successful. It's the first instrument to really make a full map of the temperatures on the surface of the moon. The moon has a very interesting thermal environment. It's a very extreme thermal environment. And as you go higher and higher in latitude, the environment becomes more and more affected by the topography.

There's craters there where light has not shown into for billions of years, and these places are intensely cold. One of the main results of our instrument so far is that there are some places that get down to, if you can believe this, 20 Kelvin. That's 20 degrees Celsius above absolute zero, which is the coldest you can believe this, 20 Kelvin, that's 20 degrees Celsius above absolute zero, which is the coldest you can possibly get. These are the kind of temperatures you'd expect to get beyond Pluto in the solar system typically. The interesting part about this is they're not only cold enough to trap water,

they're cold enough to trap a whole bunch of other sort of supervolatiles you find in comets, Kuiper belt objects, et cetera. So we have this little cryogenic niche right here in our own backyard. Very exciting. UCLA's David Page, planetary scientist and principal investigator for the Diviner experiment on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. You can hear much more of David as part of our complete webcast recorded on the evening of Friday, September 6.

When we return, we'll meet the LADEE mission's Brian Day, This is Planetary Radio. of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science

and, dare I say it, change the worlds. 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. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're listening to excerpts of our Planetary Radio Live special coverage on Friday, September 6th. Live special coverage on Friday, September 6th. A Capacity crowd joined Bruce Betts, David Page, and me at the Crawford Family Forum in Pasadena, California to celebrate the launch of LADEE, the Lunar Atmosphere Dust Environment Explorer. Our next guest is deeply involved in that mission. He is Brian Day. Brian is the education and public outreach lead for LADEE, and that means that he's pretty much the voice of the mission, communicating with media and the public. He's also director of communication and citizen science for the NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute. Now, we would normally find Brian up at NASA Ames in Northern California, but tonight he can only be in one place.

Brian, welcome. Where are you? Thank you very much. I am actually at a trailer at Wallops Flight Facility. And outside, there is a great deal of excitement going on. Fantastic. And we got a great Skype connection. We were a little worried about the bandwidth because you've got a big crowd there, and they're probably sucking up a lot of this network. We do have a lot of people here and at sites all around Wallops Flight Facility.

It is a very exciting night. What makes LADEE special? What makes LADEE special is that it is part of a new class of robotic lunar explorers that is revolutionizing our understanding of the moon. After the LCROSS mission that I worked on, it was commonly said that this isn't your father's moon anymore. But with the case of LADEE, we're using the moon to explore this concept of a surface boundary exosphere. And yes, this

will give us great insights into the moon, but this is also one of the most common types of atmospheres in our solar system. Mercury has one. The moon has one. Larger asteroids. Many of the moons of the giant planets. Even some of the distant Kuiper belt objects, icy worlds beyond Neptune. This is the most common type of atmosphere in our solar system. And so in exploring this, we are gaining insights into environments that we are going to encounter as we spread throughout the solar system. Now, we know that Curiosity brought a laser to Mars to zap rocks, but what's the one on LADEE going to do?

So we have a technology demonstration on LADEE called the Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration. Typically, in deep space spacecraft, we are plagued by the fact that our data is being sent via radio broadcast. And those radio waves spread out as they travel across the vast distances of space. And as they spread out, the signal strength goes down. And so by the time the signal reaches here on Earth, that signal strength is very low. Because the signal strength is so low,

that means that the data transfer rate is also very low. We're going to try something different here, though. Instead of broadcasting the data via radio waves, we're going to try sending some data via a laser beam, a laser beam that doesn't spread out, that allows that signal strength to remain high even over very great distances. By doing so, we're going to potentially bring broadband speeds to the moon. We're looking at the potential of 622 megabits per second. That is a luxury. Can I get that from my cable company? I don't think so. All right, so tell us what's ahead for LADEE after the successful launch

tonight. I'm knocking on wood, but it sure is looking good. How long before you go into orbit around the moon and how long before the science starts to come? So our schedule is we're going to spend roughly 30 days getting to the moon. That sounds like a long time, but we're taking kind of an indirect path. We're doing phasing loops, swinging out further and further, getting higher and higher up until we get to an altitude where we're at the same distance from the Earth as the Moon. And we time that so that that happens just as the Moon comes along. We're able to fire our engine and enter into orbit around the Moon. So about 30 days to get there. We will spend about 30 days then in a high orbit above the lunar surface, a checkout orbit. This is the commissioning phase

of the mission, making sure that all our systems are working, that our instruments are working, and this is also when we will be testing the lunar laser communications. After everything is checked out, we will then fire the engine and drop down into our low science orbit. That will be a 100-day science mission, flying through the lunar atmosphere, understanding its structure, its composition, and how those vary over time. Also looking to see if there's dust that is lofted into the sky of the moon, and if so, how much is there, what is its distribution, what is its size, and what kind of charge is on those dust particles. I do want to ask you, Brian, about the end of the LADEE mission, because that's going to maybe deliver some science as well. Well, that's very true, because as we run out of fuel, our orbit

will decay. And that means that we will drop lower and lower and lower. And as we drop lower, we will still be gathering data so this will expand the range of altitudes that we are exploring so we will essentially be able to continue our studies all the way down to the surface pretty cool and then impact and then the mission that David is part of lunar reconnaissance orbiter I've heard is going to play a part in that David is part of, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, I've heard is going to play a part in that. David, do you know about this? Yeah, we get excited when things crash into the moon because then we get to try to snap an infrared picture of the impact. And we've done that successfully

for just about every mission that's crashed since we've been in orbit. So we're looking forward to your crash as well. Very good. We hope to put on a show for you. Going out in a blaze of glory and science. I promised you we wouldn't keep you from getting outside for that launch, which is now, if I figure it correctly, about 12 and a half minutes away.

So Brian, if you have some last words, go ahead and give them to us, but otherwise we'll let you rip off that headset and get outside. Thank you all very much. Please take a look at the LATI mission page. See how to get involved. So www.nasa.gov slash LATI. And this is a mission you can all be a part of.

You can all participate in the science of this mission. Thank you very much. And I'm going to keep you going for a second because that's that citizen science element that I mentioned up front. And this is good for people with what? Telescopes like mine that aren't that big. If you've got a telescope 8 to 14 inches in diameter, you can directly participate in looking for meteoroid impacts, the flashes of those meteoroid impacts, so we can compare impact events with changes that LADEE's instruments see in the structure and composition of the lunar atmosphere. If you do not have a telescope, go out and count meteors. And as we see changes in the rates of meteors from night to

night, then we can actually make inferences as to what's happening on the moon's surface at that time. You can do it with a wonderful app called Meteor Counter from NASA. It's free. Thank you, Brian. 11 minutes to go.. It's free. Thank you, Brian. Eleven minutes to go. Go Laddie. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye-bye.

Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Day of the Laddie Mission. Our celebration of the Laddie launch was about to reach its climax. 150 of us in the Crawford Family Forum, along with many more viewers watching our live webcast, turned our attention to NASA's cameras at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Here is a compressed version of what we saw and heard. Remember that the complete webcast with graphics and video is slash radio. D-9-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-0. Ignition. And liftoff of the Avatar 5 with left.

Pursuing a rift about the moon dust and the lunar atmosphere. Those solid fuel rockets don't waste time, do they? First stage is actually made by Estes. For you model rocketry folks. Not true. Stage three ignition. Stage three motor pressure is nominal. There we go. Stage three. All right, it's a little premature, but we've got to congratulate the lad ignition right now.

Come on, let's hear it. We're on the way to the moon. We'll stick with this for a few more moments. Bruce, David, jump in if you have anything to add. Cool. In the last minute or so, Pete Warden, the director of Ames Research Center, said, Laddie is awake. Signals are on. Bravo. So far, so good.

And that does make for a great finish for a really nice evening. Bruce Betts, David Pate, thank you so much for joining us, bringing your expertise and keeping such good company with us here on stage. As always, we also want to thank Southern California Public Radio and the amazing crew here at the Crawford Family Forum.

Most of all, we want to thank all of you who joined us here this evening and around the world. I hope you will listen to next week's episode of Planetary Radio. Next week, we'll be talking about the MAVEN mission with its principal investigator and some of the people who are looking forward to that mission,

which is, by sheer coincidence, going to explore the atmosphere of Mars. That should be very exciting. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, and by the rocket-powered members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies, everyone, and good night. applause music music

music Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова