Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Radio Live on the Eve of the Eclipse

Episode Date: August 30, 2017

With hours to go before the Great American Eclipse, nine outstanding guests joined host Mat Kaplan for Planetary Radio Live in front of 1,100 rowdy eclipse and space science fans.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is Planetary Radio Live! Good evening Salukis! We're coming to you from Shryock Auditorium, I've learned to say it, on the beautiful campus of Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, smack dab in the middle of the path of totality for the Great American Eclipse! And that was how we began our live show in front of more than 1,100 men, women, and children on the eve of the eclipse. Over the next more than an hour, you'll hear excerpts of that amazing evening that featured nine very special guests on two different panels. You'll also hear a live performance by the Jenny Johnson Band of their terrific song written for this cosmic event,

and later we'll have a brief visit with Bruce Betts for this week's What's Up. The space trivia contest will offer a rubber asteroid. Let's get right back to SIU Carbondale and the first of those panels. It focused on the science surrounding the eclipse, and the conversation took us to several places I bet you didn't hear much about in the overwhelming media lead-up to August 21st. First up was Steve Clark. Steve directs the Heliophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. That puts him in charge of the Space Agency's National Research Program regarding our sun. His program ranges from research grants to exciting missions, like one we'll hear about that heads for our star next year. You brought along this beautiful eclipse animation, NASA animation. Tell us about it as we watch it.

It's getting started right now, and I'm afraid you'll have to see it back there. Okay. So this is simulating what everyone will see on Monday. You can see the moon is between the sun and the earth, and you'll see two shaded areas. One light-shaded area is called the penumbra, which is where the partial eclipse will be seen across the United States. And then you see the darker region, which is the umbra. That is the direct line between the sun, the moon, and the earth, and that's the path of totality as it moves off the coast of the United States. It'll take approximately about four hours to traverse the contiguous United States, and that's the total part of the eclipse. The totality will

take about an hour and a half, and it moves roughly at about 1,800 miles per hour across the country. So that's why it goes so quickly across the continental U.S. Amazing. Lucianne Walkowicz was just named the Baruch S. Bloomberg Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. You might wonder why someone who studies the magnetic fields of our sun and other stars is working in astrobiology. That's until you remember that the sun is responsible for all life on Earth, as well as for the existence of Earth itself, Lucianne is also an astronomer at the famed Adler Planetarium on the shore of Lake Michigan. Lucianne, it's only recently that we've been able to use spacecraft,

the spacecraft that Steve's division helps to manage, to reveal the sun. It really is never before. You've brought two videos that are guaranteed to drop jaws. Let's take a look at the first one and tell us about this. Sure. Yeah, get right in there close. So this is a wonderful video that was created by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or STO. And I'm not ashamed to say that they have a wonderful YouTube channel, and you should all watch it all the time, and I definitely do that.

What you're seeing here is the sun in all of its changeable glory. So all of those loops and bright spots and dark regions that you see over the surface of our star are caused by its magnetic field. And these changeable regions help us understand how it affects us here on Earth and can even impact things like our technology and our power grid. Our next guest has been building instruments for planetary science spacecraft for more than 50 years. The NASA's or Tom Economou has had a hand in far more missions than we have time to

mention, but they include the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and Opportunity, the Cassini mission that is about to end after 13 years at Saturn, and the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission to Comet 67P. I invited this senior scientist at the University of Chicago's Enrico Fermi Institute to join us in part so that we could talk about Earth's only natural satellite. And it plays a pretty important role, since it is, after all, only because the moon is going to pass in exactly the right spot tomorrow that we are going to get the treat for some of us of a lifetime, a total solar eclipse.

Tom, I want to go to you to talk about this. You worked on one of the first programs to explore the moon. In fact, only the second spacecraft to soft land on the moon was Surveyor. The image that we've got here shows us one of those spacecraft. Were you in on that right from the start? Yes, I was part of the Surveyor missions. I came to this country in 1964 and was lucky enough to get involved with the exploration of the lunar surface in preparation for the Apollo missions. We don't realize, but at that time, we knew very little about the moon. Sure enough, the moon was not made of green cheese that we know at the time. So NASA asked us to design, construct an instrument to get the chemical analysis of the moon in order

to provide some meaningful information for the next mission to bring the first Americans to the surface of the Moon. Wasn't there concern before the Surveyor spacecraft and the Soviet spacecraft, the Lunas started to go there, that we knew so little about the Moon, we didn't know whether you could land on the Moon without just sinking into the dust? Oh, yes. This was a big question, actually. Oh, yes. This was a big question, actually. At the last moment, they made us put something like a snowshoe on our instrument to prevent from sinking on the lunar soil. Time to be the last of my guests on the Planetary Radio Live science panel.

It has only been a year and a half since the entire world went wild over the announcement that gravity waves had finally been detected. One of the leaders of that effort, Kip Thorne, has joined us on Planetary Radio several times. On that night at SIU Carbondale, we welcomed another member of the LIGO team. LIGO, that's the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, and it is one of the greatest scientific and technological achievements in history. Nergis Mavavala is Marble Professor of Astrophysics at MIT and part of that school's LIGO group.

It's not an exaggeration to say that her pioneering work on the LIGO detectors gave them the exquisite, jaw-dropping precision needed to detect the infinitesimal changes in space itself caused by gravitational waves generated nearly one and a half billion years ago. But I began with Nergis by looking back not quite a century. These are actual clippings and records of something that was pretty historic, almost exactly 100 years ago. Tell us about what we're looking at. What we see here is a couple of images from the eclipse of 1919. Now, what had happened in preceding years, starting in 1915, was Einstein had erupted on the scene and had kind of turned

our ideas about gravity on their head. And one of the predictions of his theory of general relativity, which was a theory of gravity that's different than Newton's, was that light should bend around gravitational objects. Now, something that's

not well known to most people is that Newton had predicted something similar, but with a factor of two less than what Einstein's prediction would be. So the idea is that if you have a star behind the sun, then the light from that star will bend as it goes around the sun, and it'll bend towards us on the earth, and we would be able to see a star in a different position, in an apparent position. Even though it's behind the sun, and it'll bend towards us on the earth, and we would be able to see a star in a different position, in an apparent position. Even though it's behind the sun, it would skirt the edge of the sun. And this is why, prior to general theory of relativity and Eddington, there were a lot of

people who thought, gee, Mercury is not exactly where it should be. There must be another planet there called Vulcan. It wasn't, right? It was relativity. That's right. General relativity had many successes. But I want to go ahead and say that when, so Einstein made this prediction. Eddington, who was a well-known astronomer in England at the time, understood that this eclipse was coming up. And this was a total solar eclipse, like the one we're about to witness. And it happened to line up with a group of stars that would be ordinarily behind the sun, but because of the bending of light, they would skirt the edge of the sun, and if you could remove that bright disk of sunlight, which the moon gladly does for us during an eclipse,

then maybe you could catch those stars in a slightly different position. And so, Eddington launched an expedition to two sites. So, this was a total eclipse, much like the one that's going from Oregon to South Carolina here. He caught it at two different places, one on the west coast of Africa and the other in northern Brazil. So, he had two teams and they made a measurement. They actually were able to show that their measurements were closer to Einstein's prediction than to Newton's.

And there was a factor of two difference, and his measurements were closer to Einstein's. And remarkably, for a variety of historical and geopolitical reasons, this was the measurement that catapulted Einstein into becoming a household name. It was sort of Einstein had introduced general relativity in wartime Germany, and then this measurement that was done post-war, and he became a household name then. Anything really big, well, everything with any mass bends space. Stars are really big. They bend it more. But they don't just bend space. There are other effects, which is what you were looking for. Yeah. So, you know, I do have to

say, so Tom's work reminds us that space is not empty. I want to say space is not only not empty, it actually has, is a very, very active and violent place. And in fact, it has a life of its own. Space can bend, as Einstein told us. This was the way in which Einstein's ideas of gravity were different than Newton's. Einstein said, we experience gravity because massive objects curve the space around us. So space can curve. And then also out of Einstein's theory of general relativity came this added piece, which may indeed have been the most outrageous piece

of Einstein's general relativity, was that space can also ripple. And in fact, we think of this idea of space around the sun bends, as in that little graphic there, but indeed, space can ripple. If the objects in space that bend space are actually whipping around each other, are moving or accelerating, these ripples of space-time can propagate outwards,

just as if we would drop a rock on the surface of a still pond, and ripples would emanate outwards. And then remarkably, also in Einstein's theory, it turns out that we as distant observers could actually measure these ripples if we were sensitive enough. And so we get finally to our current day and the development of LIGO. LIGO, the Laser Inafrometer Gravitational Wave Observatory. So LIGO are these four kilometer long L-shaped instruments that are interferometers. As the lengths of the two parts of the L of the interferometer get longer and

shorter, more or less light leaks out onto the detector at the bottom of that L. And what happens is as a gravitational wave comes by, it moves the mirrors of LIGO by a ridiculously tiny amount. And let me tell you how ridiculously tiny. If you get gravitational waves from neutron stars, which are kind of cousins of black holes, from a nearby galaxy not too far from our own, those mirrors would move by less than

one thousandth the size of a single proton. And indeed, so it sounds ridiculously small, and it is, but these large instruments could measure those. And you actually, if anyone wants to build one of these in their own garage or basement, here's how you do it. So you have two things you need to do. So the first thing you need is you need mirrors that are very, very still. And so you have to make mirrors on a whole lot of vibration isolation systems,

like the ones that we show here, very much like the shock absorbers in your car. You know, you just put some springs and masses and you isolate them, but a little bit more sophisticated. You also take mirrors and you can hang them from pendulums or bungee cords. That also helps isolate them. And then finally, you've succeeded. You've made these mirrors very still. They're so still that the only thing that will move them is the passing gravitational wave. The vibrations of the earth have been filtered out by these systems, but that would do you no good if you don't know how to measure a distance that's one thousandth the size of a proton. And you couldn't do that with a ruler, but there comes our laser light. So the laser is actually our meter stick, and that, you know,

the interferometer uses the laser as a meter stick to make these tiny measurements. And this whole effort has been funded for the last 40 years since its inception with Kip Thorne, who Matt mentioned, and Ray Weiss by the National Science Foundation in the U.S. And these were the instruments that made the discoveries that some of you heard about last year. And so, rotating neutron stars, rotating black holes, formerly stars not so different from our own. Yes, indeed. Essentially, when one thinks about a black hole or a neutron star,

which I already said are cousins of each other, they're stars like our own sun that have essentially come to the end of their lifetime because they've run out of nuclear fuel, and they collapse. And when they collapse, they form extremely compact stars. So a neutron star is a very nice example. It's a star that has the mass of our sun, but it has a radius of 10 kilometers. I believe that's the size of Carbondale.

That's right. And so you take a pair of neutron stars or black holes who are just slightly heavier cousins, and those can be 10 or 20 or 30 solar masses, up to many much more, but in this class of stars that we look at. And you can have them whipping around each other in a binary. We all know many stars occur in binaries, and so neutron stars and black holes can too. And when they do that, they essentially disturb the whole space-time around them,

and then those ripples of space-time travel towards us, and these instruments are capable of measuring those. This is it, right? This was the first actual detection? This was it. This is the iconic data from the two detectors of LIGO. LIGO has two detectors, one in Hanford, Washington, and one in Livingston, Louisiana. Essentially, if you take away nothing else from these bumps and wiggles, the thing to look at is at the maximum of the peaks, which was when the two black holes collided, the mirrors were moving by 10 to the minus 18 meters. So the thousands of a proton that I promised, there it is. And what

did we learn from these bumps and wiggles? This is another amazing thing. Einstein had a lot of ambivalence about gravitational waves, about black holes, but his equations contained all the information. What we learned from these bumps and wiggles, which you can then model with his equations, was that you had two black holes, 30 times the mass of our sun. And at the moment that they collided, they were whipping around each other at half the speed of light. So everybody has to sort of hold on to their seats here, right?

Because if we were writing fiction, we wouldn't dare come up with this, right? And this particular system was 1.3 billion light years away. And there's another very amazing thing you can learn from this data, which is that when these two black holes collided, they formed a bigger black hole. But the bigger black hole was not as heavy as the two that it was made of. And three times the mass of our sun was radiated away as gravitational waves in these quarters of a second. It's conservation of energy and matter.

Still works even at this scale. I think it was Eddington himself who, I'm not sure of this, had that quote that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine until we start to look and find these amazing things going on. Very, very briefly now, this is sort of LIGO to come, right? This is a global network. So the two U.S. detectors are LIGO, shown on the top left, and then there's a whole network of detectors,

especially the European detector Virgo that just came on the air earlier this month and a number of others that are planned in construction phase. And so I expect this to be sort of an explosion of detectors in the future. And in a sense, we're at the dawn of a new age of astronomy, right? That's what we think it's going to happen. Lucienne, this has to be exciting for someone like you, even though you deal with magnetic fields, the ability to do astronomy, to look out at our universe in a way that doesn't involve looking at light? Absolutely. I actually stayed home and watched the press conference, like excitedly eating my coffee, or eating my coffee, having my breakfast and coffee.

See, it's still so exciting. I think this was incredibly exciting for essentially anyone who follows science. It really is, you know, a lot of people use this phrase, like, it opens a new window onto the universe. Like, many, many press releases must contain that phrase. This actually opens a new window onto the universe. It's a fundamentally different way of studying, particularly the dark universe. And Nergis, correct me if I'm wrong here, but one of the significant things about this is that this was fundamentally

the first direct detection of black holes. Yes, so part of the excitement was that we had never ever seen black holes in this dance around each other and colliding. And those bumps and wiggles of the signal, that is what they're telling us. They are telling us, we are two black holes that are about to collide with each other.

And Einstein didn't even believe they were real, did he? You know, initially, no. He resisted it for a long time. A lot of what we're learning, in fact, some gravity wave research starting to be done, space-based. There was the LISA Pathfinder mission with involvement from NASA, I believe, but primarily European Space Agency, Steve. Correct. Here is an entire constellation of spacecraft studying our star. Tell us about some of what's happening out there, what NASA's doing with all these. Well, so this graphic actually shows which spacecraft,

and we have aircraft looking at the eclipse Monday. We have quite a fleet that will be doing that job, taking data during the entire time of the eclipse. We're using every asset that we have available to us to gain as much data as we can to better understand. We're looking mainly at the corona, which is the upper atmosphere of the sun. When the moon blocks out the bright spot, the sun, in totality, what we can finally see clearly is the corona. And we're still unlocking mysteries of the corona. The corona is the upper atmosphere of the sun, yet it's millions of degrees hotter than the surface of the sun. And we're still trying to understand why is that? What are the processes within the sun that is creating that much of a difference in the

temperature? We talked a little bit about solar flares and coronal mass ejections. We're trying to better understand how these form and better predict when they're going to come off the sun. We talked about space is not empty. We've talked about folds and curves, but it's filled with high energetic particles at all times. The sun is constantly throwing off high energy material, and this is what we call the solar wind. And the solar wind was actually theorized by Dr. Eugene Parker in 1958. At first, when he had the peer review of that,

nobody really supported that theory. And then as time has gone on, as the technology improved, we found, yes, actually with instruments, we have been able to determine there is constant solar wind in the solar system. And at times, there are some violent storms that are cast off the sun, sometimes towards Earth. We talked about what it could do to affect life here on Earth. But it also goes out in all directions. We've been studying how those type of coronal mass ejections have been affecting Mars, for instance. We look at our neighbor and we're trying to understand why is it the way it is? Why is it so barren?

Because we feel fairly certain that at one time Mars had water. It had an atmosphere. The difference between Mars and Earth is Mars does not have a magnetic field. We have a magnetic field, a magnetopause, that actually protects us from the most severe effects of those solar storms. It's basically a force field. It's basically a shield. And it does, though, it does,

those storms do interact with our own magnetic field. And that's why we see the northern lights. That's why we have some interruptions. With Mars, since it does not have that shield, there is some theories out there that these coronal mass ejections have been stripping away the Mars atmosphere for centuries. And that's why Mars has become a barren planet. And haven't we now confirmed that with the data from the MAVEN spacecraft? Correct. That's where we've gotten just an enormous amount of data to support that theory, actually. You mentioned this fellow Parker. He gets a nice tribute beginning, what, next year? Yes. Yes. Actually, this is the Parker Solar Probe that is being built right as

we speak by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Maryland. And we're scheduled to launch this spacecraft July 31st of next year. And this spacecraft will fly the closest to the sun than we ever have before. In fact, six months after launch, it will be the closest we've approached it, but we won't stop there. We're going to do seven gravity assists, and what I mean by that is it's going to fly around Venus seven different times, and each time it's going to use the gravity field of Venus to adjust its orbit and put it closer to the sun each time. We have a host of instruments on this. We're actually going to fly into the very upper regions of the corona that I mentioned earlier. This will be the first time we've actually taken data there instead of remotely from back,

you know, millions of miles back or here on Earth. We're actually going to be sampling that corona for the first time. It's an incredible spacecraft, and we just recently renamed it in May for Dr. Parker. We had a big event University of Chicago earlier this year. Were you there Tom? I'm proud that Eugene Parker is a very known solar physicist that came out with this idea of solar wind. And I'm proud of his colleague from the University of Chicago. Why not? And it is for the first time that NASA has decided to name a spacecraft after a living scientist.

Lucien, as someone who has spent a good part of your life studying our star and others, it's got to be an exciting time to be around to be able to do research like this with tools like that. Absolutely. You know, I really would love to emphasize how important these studies of the sun are not only for understanding our own sun-Earth system, but also for our search for life in the universe. I've worked for many years on NASA's Kepler mission, and with Kepler, we look for planets, and in fact, it's found thousands of planets now, and has told us that Earth, at least as far as being a small, rocky world, is not alone. The thing that we get with Kepler is the ability to study some of these solar flares just as changes in brightness of the star. But the sun is the only star for which we can get these kinds of

high resolution images that really tell us in detail what's going on. And so being able to study solar physics really tells us a lot about the stars that we find out in the universe that host planets. And that's leading us down to possibly eventually discovering life on one of those worlds. Please help me thank this absolutely outstanding panel. Thank you, folks. All right. As we play musical chairs, we're going to look over to stage right. Jenny, welcome.

Is it true that this is going to be the first performance premiere of this new tune? It is not true. Darn. Well, just the same, it is delightful to have you. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Southern Illinois' own Jenny Johnson Band. Thank you so much. It's such a treat to be here. Thank you so much. I wrote this actually as part of my thesis exhibition last year, and I wrote it about how different cultures have perceived the solar eclipse over time. So before essentially science was involved, so people thought you would bang

pots and pans and it would keep the demons away. And they told pregnant women not to go outside, those kinds of superstitions. And it's a little bit about how people perceive and celebrate the solar eclipse. And it is a call and response, so I'm going to ask you if you could repeat after me. Just on the chorus, it's really easy. So if I were to go... In the shadow. In the shadow. In the shadow.

In the shadow. In the shadow In the shadow In the shadow In the shadow In the shadow In the shadow In the shadow Oh, that's wonderful. Do you want to be in my band? You sounded great.

All right, so we're going to play this song, and real quick, I have Toby Merriman on fiddle, Nate Graham on bass, Kevin Olau on clarinet, and Al Pape on the accordion, and my name is Jenny Johnson. Oh. Keep your honey bone locked inside. Bang your pots, bang your pens. Chase away the boogeymen. Get your tickets here while you can. In the shadows.

In the shadows. In the shadows. In the shadows. In the shadows, in the shadows, in the shadows, in the shadows, in the shadows, day becomes darkest night, and all you thought you knew was right, the shadows Steers a fading light A crafty dog Could steal the sun But here they just lay On your lawn Solar rings and coffee cups

To match your astrologic love Bang your pots Bang your pens And chase away the boogeyman Get your tickets here While you can In the shadow In the shadow In the shadow

In the shadow In the shadow Day becomes Dark as night And all you thought you knew was right Until the shadow scares your fading light guitar solo guitar solo In the shadow In the shadow, in the shadow, in the shadow, in the shadow, in the shadow, comes a dark ass night and all you thought you knew was right

till the shadow steers your fading light In the shadow In the shadow In the shadow In the shadow In the shadow Where day becomes darkest night And all you thought you knew was right

Till the shadow steals your fading light. Thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Appreciate it. The Jenny Johnson Band. Much more ahead as we continue with highlights from Planetary Radio Live on the eve of the great American eclipse.

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With your help, we'll soon be sailing on the light of the sun. I am Matt Kaplan from the Planetary Society here at Southern Illinois University. Carbondale, hours before the beginning of the great American eclipse. Planetary Radio Live continues now with five people who really want nothing more than to share their sense of what our boss, the science guy calls the passion, beauty and joy. What's going to be happening tomorrow? They see it as a rare opportunity for millions of Americans to be united under the shadow of the moon, and one hopes to keep that excitement about the cosmos alive for the rest of our lives.

Kevin Moorfield grew up looking through telescopes in southern Illinois and dreamt of seeing a total eclipse. Now he is just one of the eclipse chasers on this second panel. His appearance on Planetary Radio Live was a homecoming since Kevin is an alum of SIU Carbondale. The astrophotographer had returned to his alma mater to watch his fourth total solar eclipse. Kevin has a remotely operated telescope in California for deep sky imaging,

but he has done astrophotography from around the world. Okay, see this image on the cover of Sky and Telescope magazine? Yeah, that's one of his. Yeah, you must have been pretty proud. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is a childhood dream. Are you kidding me? I had this magazine since I was 12.

Yeah, this is kind of, I mean, there's Astronomy magazine as well, also a great publication. But really, for kind of professional and serious amateur astronomers, Sky and Telescope is pretty huge. Yeah. All right. We're going to take a look again at those other images of yours, but I want to get the rest of the folks out here. There are a lot of great people here at SIU that we need to thank for this really monumental eclipse celebration. But up at the top of that list, certainly nobody higher, is Bob Baer of the university's physics department. Some of you know him. Bob has been serving with Scott Ishman as co-chair of the solar eclipse steering committee,

people responsible for all this. They've been working toward this day for something like three years. But this eclipse means even more to Bob because he is another eclipse chaser, and he's the Illinois coordinator of a project called Citizen Kate that we'll talk to him about in a few minutes. Please welcome Bob Baer. All right. So I admit it.

Everybody on this panel is an eclipse chaser at one level or another, including Michelle Nichols. Michelle has been with Chicago's Adler Planetarium for more than 20 years. She just got named that Great science resources director of public observing. And she leads the Adler's many programs that open up the sky for all the rest of us. They include the Scopes in the City program. If you are in Saluki Stadium tomorrow, we mentioned that you'll see her everywhere as one of our primary correspondents throughout our five-hour eclipse celebration. Please welcome Michelle Nichols. Nice job on the rehearsal today, Michelle. Our next panelist is another NASA veteran. Lou Mayo

of the Goddard Space Flight Center is a heliophysicist and planetary scientist who has been part of missions including one you've heard about already, Cassini, that got that great backlit shot of Saturn, and Voyager, to many people, the greatest planetary science mission of all time. His more than 20 years of program management experience include work on the space agency's National Space Science Data Center. For over 15 years, he has been creating and running a variety of space science education programs, working with Girl Scout leaders and Girl Scouts, and he supports about 150 after-school astronomy clubs worldwide. Lou serves as professor of astronomy at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, not far from Goddard,

and he has been central to planning of SIU's eclipse celebration. Please welcome Lou Mayo. So our last panelist. I was listening to National Public Radio a few mornings ago, and they aired this story about our collective excitement, not to say frenzy, about the great American eclipse. So I wasn't surprised when they shared our next guest's famous reaction to a total solar eclipse. You are in for a treat if you haven't heard it yet, but we're going to save it for the end of the show. Mike Kentrinakis is so much more than just an eclipse chaser. This former CBS News producer is no less than the eclipse project manager for the AAS, the American Astronomical Society. No group has had a bigger role in helping the U.S. prepare for what's coming tomorrow all across the nation. He says he has waited his entire life for this eclipse, and he promises that it will change the lives of all who see it in totality. Please welcome Mike Kentrianakis.

I want to ask each of you right up front, at least all of you, and I think all of you have seen one of these before. Every eclipse chaser that I have talked to over the past, not just months, but years, has always used the same phrase to describe this. Life changing. Do you agree? Anybody can jump in. Let's start, Kevin. I mean, it's an emotional experience. It's just something that looks up, you look up in the sky, you're seeing something that's not

supposed to happen, but it's not dangerous. It's beautiful. You promise that, because there are a few people making these terrible predictions about signs and portents and what this is going to mean for us as if we haven't had eclipses every few years for the history of our solar system. That's nothing new. Historically, we can go back thousands of years and see evidence that civilizations all over the world viewed solar eclipses as evil omens and bad signs and things to be afraid of. Perhaps it's in our genes. Anybody else want to get in on this? Was it life-changing? I know you told me it was life-changing, Michelle. Yeah, so you instantly understand why people were terrified of these phenomena

because when you see totality, it looks like a hole in the sky. And I've used that phrase a lot. Words fail me often when I try to describe this, which is why I tell people that's why you need to go see this in person, because there's just nothing like it. There's no other astronomical phenomenon that really compares to this. Tell us about this place, which doesn't look at all like Carbondale. No, no, no. This was... Not right now, anyway. This was Svalbard, about 800 miles from the North Pole in 2015. That's our family shot because that was our family vacation.

And, you know, this is one of the things about once you see this, you know where your vacations are going to be for the next 20 years. You can just look at the list and there you go. You're going to keep this up? I mean, tomorrow's not the last one for you? Oh, absolutely.

Okay, we're going to get, what is it, Michelle? I think two minutes and 38 seconds of nighttime. Exactly right. It's daytime turns to night and it's an amazing sight. We're going to see it all around us, because what happens down here on the surface will change. The way living things live will change, because they're going to start to think it's nighttime, right? Right. And one thing I have to clarify is people ask, how dark is it going to get? And I tell people about as dark as a full moon evening because the corona is about as bright as the full moon. And then the really weird thing is if you have a horizon view, you're going to see what looks like sunset all the way around the horizon.

But the sun is up over your head. And so it's just an odd looking sky. We're going back to SIU Carbondale's Bob Baer to hear about the Citizen CATE project from the National Solar Observatory. CATE stands for Continental America Telescopic Eclipse. What is Citizen CATE hoping to add to our knowledge of the sun? Well, we're hoping to image the corona from coast to coast. And with 68 sites, you can actually get, hopefully, you know, weather pending, continuous data. And that data will be shared with the scientific community eventually. I think it takes about a year for for Kate to do the analysis themselves. But we look to get a little better understanding about that inner corona

and then use that to understand things like how the solar atmosphere, how the sun's atmosphere affects communications here on earth is one practical application. More of that solar weather concern and the inner corona that is so difficult to see even when you have a telescope that has a so-called corona graph. It really is not as effective as having the moon cross, right? It's not. When the moon blocks that sun, it blocks it out in space. You get it blocked for you and you don't have the sky glow going on and you don't have this large disc blocking the sun. So you can see you don't have this large disk blocking the sun. So you can see that corona right down to the surface of the sun. Citizen Kate is largely citizens, right?

Volunteers, people who are doing this for the love of it. It is. All of the sites are operated by volunteers. There's a lead person for it. I think we have about three people on average for the site. So we're talking over 200 people just with the observing side of it. And we also have volunteers working the scientific side of it and developing the application that we use to collect data. One other citizen project that I know I've heard of is this one called the Mega Movie, the Eclipse Mega Movie. Do you know something about that?

Well, I'm familiar with it. The Mega movie is similar in concept to Kate. I think the concept was original to the mega movie. It is to image the Corona in a similar way, but they're using non-standard equipment. Whereas Kate has standardized equipment that we go through a pretty long period of training on. Mega movie is, as I understand it, use what you have. Yeah, even smartphones, I've heard. Right? Michelle, do you know something about this? A little bit. So basically, if people were interested in taking some time and using their time during totality, before totality, after totality, to image the image of the sun and use your DSLR, your camera phone, whatever you've got. And so they're going to then put all those images and movies together to get, as you said, about an hour and a half, hopefully,

of imagery all across the country. And I'm going to stick with you for a moment, Michelle, because I want to talk about your previous eclipse experience. You also went to one of the far corners of our planet, but I don't think you faced the hardships that these guys did in Svalbard or Indonesia. Where were you? So we were in 1999, August 11th, 1999, so a little over 18 years ago. We had a group of about 200 Adler Planetarium members, general public, folks. We were across two cruise ships in the Black Sea. members, general public, folks, we were across two cruise ships in the Black Sea. This was a picture taken from the Stella Solaris cruise ship looking out toward the other three that were there. I was

given two pieces of advice prior to this eclipse. It was, number one, right before totality, take pictures off into the distance and get a sense of how dark it's actually getting because your eyes are adjusting and so you really don't truly get a sense of what it looks like. A few minutes later, we had drifted a little bit away from those other ships because our captain had turned the engines off and so we were drifting. He didn't want the engine vibrations to shake people's telescopes and cameras. And then right before totality, so it really was that dark. And then the final picture is that one. And it says, it says image credit me.

I didn't take that picture. So I wish I would have. But no, I actually don't know who took it. I have to say unknown photographer because this was a person I think who was on our ship. You know how you get off cruise ships and there's pictures there you can buy? That was one of them you could buy.

So I have a picture of totality because the other piece of advice I was given was put the cameras down. We didn't have camera phones at that time, but put all the equipment down. Stare at totality. Take those glasses off, the solar glasses off. Stare at totality and burn it into your brain

because your first time seeing this is like nothing else. And so I want people to consider doing that. Put the smartphones down. Put the Facebook Live down. Put all the Twitter, all of it. Put it away and look up at the sky. And we will encourage those of you in Saluki Stadium tomorrow to do exactly that. Now note that Michelle said take the glasses off when totality has begun,

because even a sliver of the sun is too much for your naked eye. You want to burn it into your brain totality, not into your retinas. Right. Listen, the Adler Planetarium is a huge partner here at Carbondale, at SIU Carbondale, and not just here, but all over the Illinois region. What are some of the things that you and your colleagues are doing? So this past week, we got down here on Monday. The other team, we call it Galaxy Ride, and Galaxy Ride has been driving all across southern Illinois to do programs for elementary schools, restaurants, bars, breweries, libraries. Where people are, that's where we went. And we've been doing

activities related to the sun, moon, light, color, eclipses, and totally free. We just show up and people have been showing up in the hundreds. And we could not be happier or more thankful to the folks down here in Southern Illinois for supporting us. And we could, and please, yes. here in Southern Illinois for supporting us. And we could, and please, yes. And we also couldn't be more thankful to Southern Illinois University because they helped get the word out about all of this. So it's been just a win-win all around. Lou, isn't NASA working on some telescopes that are going to do a better job of sort of faking an eclipse? telescopes that are going to do a better job of sort of faking an eclipse? NASA puts a lot of effort into what we call heliophysics. The study of the sun, the solar atmosphere,

its extent into the solar system, and then of course its effect on the planets. We have a very special mission that's going to launch next year. Well, it was called Solar Probe, now it's called Parker Solar Probe. Which we heard about some from Steve. You know what I was thinking of? It's a little farther down the line. Even after the James Webb Space Telescope is W first. That has a chronograph, doesn't it?

That's right. It still won't get down to the photosphere of the sun, which is the interesting region we want to look at. That's the place where the temperature starts to reverse itself. And rather than getting lower as you move out from the sun, it starts to go up from about 6,000 degrees Kelvin on the surface of the sun, 4,500 degrees in the chromosphere, and then it rockets up to about 3 million degrees Kelvin. We don't know why, but these kinds of observations that we can make all the way down to the photosphere are going to help us figure it out.

You've been at this for a long time. You're an astronomer. You're a scientist. I don't know that I've ever seen NASA encouraging and leading more public involvement in anything, including the seven minutes of terror, curiosity going down to Mars. And I'm not sure I've seen a public response like this since, well, at least the first shuttle launch and landing, or maybe even the Apollo 11 moon landing. I mean, what is the agency hoping to accomplish with all this? Well, what we're hoping to accomplish is to bring the eclipse to people as only NASA can, kind of through the eyes of NASA. So there are a lot of wonderful and very effective education programs out there. AAS has some of them, SIU, Adler.

NASA has spacecraft, and NASA has its most important asset, NASA scientists. So we're going to try to bring the eclipse to you, showing the eclipse from 14 NASA spacecraft. I want're going to try to bring the eclipse to you, showing the eclipse from 14 NASA spacecraft. I want to go back to citizen science projects because you've got some samples of some of the stuff that will be underway. All right. Citizen science. The traditional definition here would be ways you can assist with science in a way that's publishable, you know, new findings. And so we certainly have that for the public. We also have something we call citizen explorers, where you can do real science

that's already been done. You can figure out the distance to the moon. You can calculate the speed of the umbral shadow across the earth. Things like this that we already know, but you can actually do real science. And then we have a whole series of programs that are just kind of fun to do. We have art projects where you can draw the eclipse as you think it'll be, predict the way the corona is going to look. Eclipse in six, where you just describe your experience of the eclipse in six words. It just rhymed. That's all we thought would be cool. We have dance along the path.

This will be interesting. I can't wait to see what they send in for this. Record a dance in your community that describes your community or the eclipse experience you're having and send it in to us and we'll post it. That's going to be exciting. A whole variety of things that people can do, eclipse selfies, and lots of ways to plug in, as we say, and really kind of own this experience as your own. And we are proud that the main NASA webcast from NASA EDGE is going to originate from right here, right next to Saluki Stadium. Tell us about NASA EDGE and what they'll be doing. Yeah, you bet, Matt. NASA EDGE is an amazing group.

They've been doing webcasts for well over two decades. They're led by Chris Gersh and Blair Allen, who are just hilarious. They work together so well as co-hosts. And we've been all over the world with them. We've been to Turkey and China to broadcast eclipses. We've been to the summit at Mauna Kea at 14,000 feet where we could barely breathe, much less think. And a view of the transit of Venus to launches of space missions like Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and MAVEN. space missions like Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and MAVEN. So NASA EDGE is going to put on a four and a half hour show right here at SIU, right

outside the stadium. We're going to have scientist interviews. We're going to bring in images from space and from high altitude balloons that we already talked about. And we have probably the best images of the sun, I think, that anyone's going to be able to take because we've partnered with a group called Lunt Solar Systems. If you're amateur astronomers, you know Lunt Solar Systems. And they have built what they call the Sun Lab. This is an amazing piece of technology. It's a 20-inch heliostat, 20-inch mirror.

Male Speaker 2 Big. Male Speaker 1 Big, that follows the sun, sends the light from the sun down an optical path where we have four telescopes, hydrogen alpha and calcium K, which are tuned to look in the chromosphere, a white light telescope, which is perfect for seeing the corona, and then a color telescope that is going to see some of the chromosphere and the corona. We are recording all of this in 6K. So if you have a 4K TV, you think you're pretty hot. This is 6K. This has never been done before. And so these images are massive. And they have built a 24 CPU system to process these images, bringing out as much detail as possible. I've seen the preliminary images from them.

It will just knock your socks off. So this will all be available. We are going to stream all of this live during our four and a half hour webcast. Kevin and Bob, time to play catch up. 6k. You got to go to eight. You can't have enough k. And I'm not talking about Kelvin. I don't know, 20 megapixels. That's what I'm shooting. Okay, that sounds good enough to me. Mike, I teased people at the beginning of this segment about that video of yours, which has had, what, how many views now? Well, it has 2.3 million on YouTube and 1.6 million on Facebook and maybe a couple of million on other private sources that have downloaded it. So what we're going to see is just a tiny piece of that video. They're going to see

a somewhat longer segment in Saluki Stadium tomorrow, and the folks here at SIU Carbondale had some fun with this. It is absolutely laughing with you because your enthusiasm is so infectious. But first, set this up. Tell us about this flight. I was called by a colleague, Joe Rao, about the 2016 eclipse. And I was hesitant about going to Indonesia because of the heat and the difficulty to go out there at the time. and the difficulty to go out there at the time. And he said to me, Mike, if we're able to change the schedule of this single flight, Flight 870, on the day of the next total solar eclipse by 25 minutes,

would you be interested in going on that flight? And I thought about it, and it didn't actually take me long. I said, yes, absolutely. I said, that is great. We can actually have a news story where Americans can fly without a passport from Alaska from the 49th to the 50th state, whereas America is having this great American eclipse, so we can call it the almost great American eclipse. So that was my plan and thought. So yes, count me on and let's do it. So it took a year of planning with Alaskan Airlines to change the schedule, post it as such, because it wasn't delayed as some people say it was. It was not delayed. It was one year ahead scheduled. So they knew. Everyone arrived on time. And there was a little hesitancy right toward the end where safety issues came up, as they always do. They just seem to come up. It's a nervous frenzy,

safety. And we've had a legitimate one with this one, of course, as we all know about. But I called and interceded and spoke to the CEO, and I said, as the AAS, that this is what we do. We clear this with the safety. We wrote the flyer on this. We wrote the information, which we shared with NASA. So they felt more at ease that it was coming from the AAS, and then all of a sudden it was green-lighted.

There were only really 12 of us who had booked the flights at regular airfare. And the rest of the passengers were unknowing that this was going to be an eclipse flight. So we then tipped, Alaskan Airlines tipped off the media only days before, and as we were going to the gate, it was filled with media. There were so many cameras there. And I'm there with a coffee and a bagel saying, oh, my God. You know this is going to the gate. What's going on here? And they're all, hi, can we interview you? This and that. See this eclipse site. It became a story just on itself. And we had met the pilots the night before for dinner. And they went over the plan.

And it was so precisely drawn. And the times it had to leave at 2.15 precisely wheels up and their speed and their direction. We were worried about snow in Alaska delaying us and that they would have to plow the runway and we'd be late on it. And it left. I had my watch synchronized and 2.15 wheels up. We just had clearance like Air Force One or something. And I was like, we're going. We're going up there. So there we were flying. It was a few hours getting into it. And I didn't know what to expect because I've never had flown to see an eclipse.

I heard stories. But I thought, being in a fuselage, it's enclosed, and I'm just looking out a window. A little tiny window, yeah. Yeah. So it's all contained. I'm like a little gerbil in here watching this eclipse. And so then it started getting darker, like the eclipse was happening. We're using our solar filters and holding them up. And there's happening partial phases, which are very familiar with having seen 20 solar eclipses, which is

mostly partial phases. But then it started getting darker and darker, and all of a sudden, I could see the shadow of the moon directly in view of the eclipse, which is different normally on the ground, where the shadow sweeps us from west to east. It will cross over us, and in the stadium, we'll have a little difficulty seeing that, but we will see it above us, instead of from the ground. Whereas in this case, because we're at the end of the eclipse, we're looking directly into the shadow and have the eclipse there. So this shadow rose up above the horizon like a storm, like a tornado. I didn't know what to think.

And it came and it grew and it grew and it grew and it just went into Bailey's Beads, Diamond Ring, and totality. You could see the outline of the shadow perfectly on the cloud tops. It elongated there just because we were at the end. It becomes a real oval before it lifted up and went into outer space and left us until tomorrow. Thank you, Ben. Okay.

But as Al Jolson said, you ain't seen nothing yet. We're going to watch one tiny piece of that video with Mike, and hopefully the audio is up because you're going to want to hear this. Look at that curved shadow. Look at that. Look at it come in the light. Oh, my God. Passing right in the shadow of the moon.

Look at that. Look at those prominences. You can see them with your naked eye this chromosphere look at that here comes the shadow it's lifting up it's going out it's going out going up to the atmosphere though look it down there right oh what is beating it's cool that's a flare look at that diamond ring. Look at that. Oh, my God. Diamond ring. Oh, look at that.

Oh, my God. Wow. Oh, my God. Look at that. Wow. Wow. Oh. Woo. Woo. Yeah. Bravo. Oh. Woo!

Woo! Yeah! Bravo. Yeah! Yeah! Kevin, go ahead. What usually follows 21 Oh My Gods, by the way, is, it was so short.

Which is why you got to do it again, right, Michelle? Yeah, the rule of thumb is the phrase that you hear often from people who've seen these is every total solar eclipse lasts eight seconds, because that's what it feels like. It may last two minutes and 38 seconds here, but it's going to feel like eight seconds. The question I've been wanting to ask you, Mike, ever since I first saw that, didn't the plane start to tilt because everybody went over to that side? People were laughing in the plane, you know, for me. It was quite contagious. It is funny. I mean, when I watched it myself, I've actually laughed at it, thinking, who is this nut? He's an absolute nut. It happens.

And tomorrow I'll be vindicated. We had a long time. So one thing that, when I first watched that video, I watched the whole thing, and I started crying again. Because the first time I saw totality I sobbed I absolutely sobbed and I still don't exactly know why but I'm wondering tomorrow I don't know what I'm gonna feel but I had the same chills and and I just started crying sitting there at my desk at work so I had to had to like clean myself up make sure nobody was watching me.

But, no, that was incredible. I don't know about you folks, but this only makes me even more excited looking forward to tomorrow. We're going to go to your opportunity, those of you here in Shryock Auditorium at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, to throw a few very limited number of questions at our excellent panelists. There you are now. We can see you. You stayed. Thank you. We've got those microphones. They're going to be floating around in the aisle, and there's somebody right down here, fairly close to that side. Hi, ma'am. It's so exciting to have you and the former panel come to my alma mater. As a scientist and someone who was fortunate to see Bucky Fuller talk here,

and we celebrate him here, I'm very concerned with the current climate. Personal is political. I'm concerned about people's perceptions of scientists, science, and future funding of space expeditions and research. And just wanted kind of your comments on that. Lou, can you tackle that? Yeah, I can say a few things about that. Congresses come and go and administrations come and go. that. Congresses come and go and administrations come and go. And NASA's budget is generally pretty steady, rising a little bit. I forget the exact number, but about $20 billion. I

was talking to Steve Clark yesterday, who's the head of heliophysics at NASA headquarters, and he's out at the White House now for a year on the Office of Science and Technology. Steve was saying that they're very interested in space weather. Fantastic. Space weather, this is kind of the foundation of heliophysics. We have a strong planetary program. We have a number of launches. I know some of you know that it's kind of sad.

We're going to kill Cassini on September 15th. It'll take its last images and dive into the atmosphere of Saturn. But we have James Webb Space Telescope launching next year. Yeah, you can applaud for that, sure. You bet. It's been a long time. Long time coming. This is an amazing telescope that's going to let us see almost to the beginning. We like to say at the Planetary Society that we live in the golden age of exploration of our solar system and beyond. But it is a never-ending battle to maintain the ability of the world's greatest space agency

to continue to do the work it does. And not just the agency, but all the other scientists and people involved with space science, space exploration, and really all of science. It is something that all of us as citizens have to remain aware of. Michelle? That's one of the major goals of the Adler Planetarium is to make sure that we all know science is for everyone.

That's why we welcome everyone to come and join us in that endeavor called science, because we do it every day. And so we want to make sure that everybody is welcome to join us in that quest. Here, here. Nice shirt. He's got a Planetary Society shirt on. Thank you. There's been a lot of discussion about hoping to use all of the excitement about the eclipse to have more interest in space science, solar science. How can we keep capitalizing on this, especially given we have one coming in 2024? How can we keep the enthusiasm going? Yeah, because we know we're inspiring or exciting millions of people across North America,

maybe even hundreds of millions. But that is the trick, isn't it? We want to reawaken that sense of wonder, that passion, beauty, and joy of science that all of us had when we were two years old. I know all of you were involved with this effort. Bob? I think it's already happening. People are so excited about this with the talks that have been going on around southern Illinois for the last few years. I've just seen so many people excited about this and just happy to have some good news, I dare say, about an eclipse coming.

And I think we're going to see that tomorrow with the 14,000 people in the stadium witnessing this together. I'm really excited to hear what they have to say after this. Mike, I want to go to you, because obviously the AAS doesn't want this to be a flash in the pan. They want ongoing interest in space science and astronomy. And there is. If any amateur astronomer or scientist knows, there is so much happening in the sky, and there's so much, as far as NASA is concerned and other agencies, doing exploration. So I would put it with the analogy that even though tomorrow might be the best movie that comes out in this year, we still go to movies after that, don't we?

I mean, we don't just say, that's it, we're done. So there's lots to see and learn and take from each and every event. So there'll'll be more and there'll be more eclipses and who knows what else. Kevin, when you take your pictures, when you do your astrophotography, are you thinking about hoping that this is the kind of thing that's going to interest more people in this love that you have? Oh, absolutely. I mean, if you can get a picture out there that a million people see, which I got once, I mean, that was really exciting because I know that it's here in town, and there are many like them across the country, will get the most enjoyment and fascination out of the Great American Eclipse. So please thank our Outreach and Citizen Science panel very much. Highlights of Planetary Radio Live at Southern Illinois University Carbondale

on the eve of the great American eclipse. We are grateful to SIU and WSIU Public Radio and Television for their support. You can watch nearly all of the show on WSIU's YouTube channel, including the beautiful images and videos presented by my guests and special bonus material. This and other related links are on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. SIU will soon be posting highlights of its five-hour eclipse spectacular that I hosted in Saluki Stadium on Eclipse Day, August 21st, 2017. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. We are rejoined remotely by the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society,

Bruce Betts. Welcome back. Hey, good to be back. We can jump right into it, you know. I don't think there's an eclipse coming up in the next week. If there is, I didn't get the memo. Not on this planet. No, no, no.

We're back to more standard beautiful starry skies with some planets in it. We've got bright Jupiter still low in the west shortly after sunset. Saturn up higher towards the south. Pre-dawn is getting interesting. We've got Venus dominating over in the east. But as you watch over the next couple weeks, Mars and Mercury, Mars being kind of reddish, are going to join Venus. They'll be even lower down to the horizon in the pre-dawn. And Mars and Mercury appear very close to each other on September 16th.

We move on to this week in space history. A couple things related to your last couple of shows we had in 1977, Voyager 1 was launched. Oddly, as we always recall, was launched second. Voyager 2 launched first, but we have the 40th anniversary of Voyager 1's launch. Weird orbital dynamics thing. And then in 1979, Pioneer 11 became the first spacecraft to fly past Saturn. 1929, Pioneer 11 became the first spacecraft to fly past Saturn. Cassini, of course, completing its voyages of discovery around Saturn right now. Lots to celebrate out there.

All right, Bruce, now a little disappointment. I had this wonderful recording from the 11 or 1,200 people at Southern Illinois University of them shouting out random space fact. Of course. That's not great. Well, yeah, it would have been, but there were technical problems, so we don't have it. So I'm going to try and enhance your rendition of giving us the random space fact intro this week.

So anytime you're ready. Okay. Random space fact. That totally, totally was the same effect as 1,200 people. Yeah, not really, but it'll do. It'll do. I was entertained, and I'm glad you were too. We're gearing up for Cassini and its end of mission.

Let's talk about the Cassini family. Four generations of the Cassini family were the first four directors of the Paris Observatory, starting with Giovanni Domenico Cassini, for whom the Cassini spacecraft is named. Wow, who knew? Four generations. Father, son, grandson, great-grandson. Pretty amazing. But don't worry, grandson, great-grandson. Pretty amazing. But don't worry, we'll come back to them. In fact, let's come back to them right now for the trivia contest. And we're not answering any questions this week, right?

No, we don't have one to answer, but we'll have two that we'll be answering next week. So two prize packages to give away, but we're ready for a new one. Giovanni Domenico Cassini, for whom prize packages to give away, but we're ready for a new one. Giovanni Domenico Cassini, for whom Cassini spacecraft is named, began a mapping project that was carried out by four generations of Cassinis, particularly his grandson and great-grandson. What did they map? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. I am baffled. If you are not baffled and ready to answer, well, you'll have to get it to us by, we're back to the regular deadline now, Wednesday, in this case, September 6th, Wednesday the 6th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. gave away some I can't even say it anymore, rubber asteroids doing Planetary Radio Live. I saved one for you folks or for

the lucky winner of this contest. So a Planetary Radio t-shirt, the new design from chopshopstore.com There's a little Planetary Society store there if you want to check it out. A 200 point itelescope.net account from that worldwide nonprofit network of

telescopes all around our little planet, and a rubber asteroid. That sounds good. That sounds fun. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about the fact that the word map backwards spells Pam. Thank you, and good night. And I'll think of that the next time I have to fry something in a nonstick coating. He's Bruce Fetz, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, once again joining us with this week's edition of What's Up. Our live celebration of the Cassini mission is at Caltech on the evening of Monday, September 18th. It was nearly at capacity as we finished production of this week's show, but KPCC's Southern California Public Radio will be live streaming it.

I hope you can join us. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its members. Danielle Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.