Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Radio Live: The LightSail Countdown Begins!

Episode Date: July 15, 2014

LightSail, the Planetary Society’s innovative solar sail cubesat, will ride into space on the huge SpaceX Falcon Heavy, now in development. Bill Nye and others join us for a live celebration of this announcement.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

LightSail, the countdown begins this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier, propelled by light alone. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with excerpts from our big July 9th webcast that announced how LightSail, the Planetary Society's solar sail, will reach orbit. You'll hear from key leaders of the project, from planetary scientist Jim Bell, from scientist and award-winning science fiction author David Brin, and from our new LightS project, embedded journalist Jason Davis.

We've also got a special solar sailing edition of What's Up with Bruce Betts. The evening began in front of a capacity crowd at KPCC, Southern California Public Radio's Crawford Family Forum in Pasadena, California. Thousands more were watching the show online. The first person I welcomed on stage was the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Here's a sample of Bill's opening remarks. Through some string of remarkable clerical errors, I had Carl Sagan for astronomy. He spoke eloquently many times about sailing with sunlight. Now, this may seem surprising. Light has no mass.

Photons are massless. Yet, light has momentum. And so people have proposed for many years that we build spacecraft to take advantage of this. And for those of you who are for some reason not rocket science professionals, weird, you can either light the engine for a few seconds or even minutes and coast astonishing distances through space. But you can only get as much impulse as the engine provides while the fuel is burning. Thank you, Bill. But with a solar sail, the sun is shining all the time. I would say day and night, but we hope that there's not really any night where you are.

And so you can go, you can reach remarkable speeds, and you can go to extraordinary destinations. This is all on paper. Now, a few solar sails have been built over the years. Spacecraft have taken advantage of what we call light pressure several times. For example, the mission to Mercury, MESSENGER, which is a fabulous tortured acronym, has gotten about five extra orbits by taking advantage of solar pressure. And then NASA launched NanoSail-D. My predecessor was Lou Friedman, who worked at JPL

and then was the head of the Planetary Society for 32 years. He wrote this book about solar sailing in 1988. I guess it was published in 1988, but he worked on this mission that was gonna catch up with Comet Halley. This idea goes way, way back. And so Lou especially believed that a private organization, not a government-funded administration,

could build one of these things because the fuel, or among the reasons, the fuel is free. And so at last, the Planetary Society, after many years and a spectacular and charming and miserable failure in 2005, has now prepared another set of missions to test and then fly a solar sail. And I want to note that that failure was not the fault of Cosmos 1, our spacecraft. No. The spacecraft was called Cosmos 1 after the show that Carl Sagan produced in 1980, before Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's on our board of directors, co-hosted it, sponsored. Neil is a dear friend of many people in this room.

Neil, if you're watching, I hope you are. Of course, what else would you be doing in New York at 10.08 at night? And so this is really an exciting time for us. Bill Nye, CEO of the Planetary Society. We were almost ready to reveal the rocket that will take light sail to medium Earth orbit, where the atmosphere is thin enough to allow a solar sail to catch the rays of the sun. First, though, Bill helped me welcome the Society's president, Arizona State University professor Jim Bell, the man I call the Ansel Adams of Mars. You have been in on some big events, big announcements in the past.

Is this one up there? Is this pretty special? This is awesome. This is a very, very cool thing, I can tell you. Just for members of the society, for people in the public who love space exploration, who follow missions, I mean, it's a mission, man. It's a mission. Make a mission. A mission is a noun we use to mean space ship thing. Yeah. So very excited.

It was time for the big moment. It came in the form of a video animation from SpaceX where development of the Falcon Heavy is underway. If all goes well, light sail will be part of a payload on top of that mighty rocket. That's the big announcement. Spring of 2016. Oh, yes. Into orbit now. And you are among the first.

Bring it on. You and the other people watching the webcast this evening are really the first to hear this public announcement. It will be the most powerful rocket ever built, with the exception of the mighty Saturn V that, of course, took humans to the moon. It'll be able to put something, get this, something as heavy as a fully loaded 737 airplane into orbit. There'd be some issues. I recommend they don't do that. Wouldn't that be, they'd just duct tape it to the top

of the rocket. Its first stage consists actually of three Falcon 9 cores. That's a total of 27 Merlin rocket engines. As you saw, nearly 4 million pounds of thrust. So, you know, you would be right in guessing that our little light sail will not be the only payload on this flight, which is something we're going to talk about because we're going to talk about this other spacecraft that'll be working in tandem with light sail. That's going to come up in a few minutes. Jim, planetary scientists, you want to see more missions out there. What could a rocket like the Falcon Heavy mean for planetary exploration? We're really excited, those of us in planetary science, about spaceships like the Falcon Heavy because they can bring not just our tiny little payload, but big payloads on interplanetary trajectories.

NASA is going to be using the Falcon Heavy in its stable of big rockets that could be used not just for sending people out into deep space, but for sending missions to Europa or Uranus and Neptune, Saturn system. And compared to the normal way that you have to do it with a smaller size rocket like an Atlas or a Delta. Cute little. Cute little rockets. Very nice.

Or a solar electric propulsion. You know, those kinds of missions will get you there, but they'll take 10 years, 15 years. A rocket like the Falcon 9 Heavy or the SLS rocket that NASA is developing, we can get us out to Jupiter in two, three, four years, depending on the alignment. So we're talking about opening up the outer solar system to much more rapid exploration than has been done before. So we're very excited about that. Next to be heard in our celebration was the project manager of the LightSail mission. Doug Stetson had to join us via Skype from the East Coast.

Doug was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 25 years, most recently as the manager of the Solar System Mission Formulation Office, where he was responsible for development of all new planetary missions and technology strategies and programs. Here's just a bit of what he had to say. As you've heard, there's a lot of excitement throughout the space community about the potential of solar sails, and I think we're very lucky and honored to be able to play a role in advancing this technology,

and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to participate with you. The idea of solar sailing has been around for a very long time. Now it's probably hard to say that going all the way back to Kepler in 1610, you know, that they were really thinking about sailing. I mean they didn't know anything about solar radiation pressure and the types of, you know, dynamics in space that we do now. Clearly the analogy to sailing the oceans of Earth is something that they were very familiar with and that they were able to extend in a thought-provoking way towards looking up into the heavens. I think that speaks to the real appeal of solar sailing, which has been sort of a dream of space explorers for a long, long time. And we're just now at the point where that can become a reality. And speaking of dreams, I think no discussion of light sail would be complete

without really referring, as you guys did a minute ago, to the visionary who really made this come to pass, and that's Lou Friedman. Lou deserves a lot of credit for basically being one of the world's leading advocates for solar sailing for many decades. Let's give Lou a hand. Can you see the book, Doug? Yeah, I can see part of it there, Bill. Thank you.

You know, Lou, together with another guy named Tom Spitek, really came up with a concept for LightSail. Now, Tom Spitek runs a company called Stellar Exploration located up in Mountain View. And it was Tom and his team that really transformed Lou's vision of a small, compact solar sail mission into a reality. And I think when you see the spacecraft that's sitting right next to Bill there, you can see that it's really a very innovative design, and it's the type of thing that breakthroughs are made of. One of the big advances of light sail is being able to provide a CubeSat with meaningful propulsive capability, the capability to travel throughout the solar system.

A CubeSat is a very small, lightweight, very inexpensive spacecraft, and they've been able to do a lot of things in the last 10 years or so, but one thing that they've been lacking is enough propulsion to really take them places, and that's what LightSail can provide, and that's why we're so excited about it. But clearly, for something as small as that, a couple of the key challenges, one is packaging, how to get that sail big enough to actually provide that propulsion packaged down into that small volume that you see in front of you. Along with that, one needs to deploy the sail. It needs to unfurl itself and be able to, you know, just like a sail on a sailboat, it has to be able to catch the wind, so to speak.

And so the deployment mechanism and all the booms that are associated with that also have to be packed inside. That's another thing that Tom and his team up at Stellar did so well. And the third challenge that I want to talk some more about is what we call attitude control, and that's a key for any spacecraft. Now, I'm not talking about, you know, don't worry, be happy kind of attitude. What we're talking about, although that would be nice as well, what we're talking about is the attitude of the spacecraft and controlling the orientation of the spacecraft so that you can actually point the sail where you want and be able to do useful

things with it. A light sail and any solar sail has to go through this intricate dance of controlling its attitude so that it catches the solar radiation pressure when it wants to accelerate and it feathers the sail or goes edge on so it doesn't pick up a lot of drag when it's going in the wrong direction. Light sail project manager Doug Stetson went on to talk about another spacecraft that will fly into medium-Earth orbit with the little solar sail. In fact, LightSail will ride into space inside PROX-1 before it is ejected to fly on its own. That's P-R-O-X, as in proximity. Doug showed us artist's conceptions of the two satellites in space.

PROX-1, as you can see represented here, is a student project. It's a student-run mission from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia Tech. A guy named Dave Spencer, who's been a friend of LightSail for many years, is the professor at Georgia Tech. He's the principal investigator for PROX-1. And what they're doing is demonstrating a number of technologies for what's called proximity operations, being able to operate one spacecraft autonomously close to another one. So they got funding to do this, and they're going to launch in 2016. Now, what they needed was a target. They needed a partner spacecraft to fly along with

so that they'd have something to point their sensors at and be able to fly around it, take pictures, and demonstrate their proximity operations technology. And they've approached the Planetary Society, said, you know what, LightSail would be perfect. We could carry LightSail up to a high enough orbit. We could deploy it for you, and then PROX-1 will use it as the target for its experiment. And when that's done, LightSail pops out at sail, gets a lot of cool pictures from PROX-1 will use it as the target for its experiment, and when that's done, LightSail pops out at sail, gets a lot of cool pictures from PROX-1 along the way, and then we go and do our sailing experiment.

So it really was a match made in heaven, so to speak, and got us a free launch. There is a free launch after all. He's been saving that, everybody. Wow. 720-kilometer orbit or something like that. to... He's been saving that, everybody! Wow! 720 kilometer orbit or something like that. High enough so that we're outside of the atmospheric drag and we can conduct a light sail experiment.

Doug Stetson, project manager for LightSail. When we return, we'll hear from another key player in the solar sail mission, along with science fiction author David Brin. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, this is Casey Dreyer, directorin. This is Planetary Radio. before. If you're interested, you can go to planetary.org slash SOS to learn how you can become a space advocate. That's planetary.org slash SOS. Save our science. Thank you. Your name carried to an asteroid. How cool is that? You, your family, your friends, your cat, we're inviting everyone to travel along on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu. All the details are at planetary.org slash b-e-n-n-u.

You can submit your name and then print your beautiful certificate. That's planetary.org slash Bennu. Planetary Society members, your name is already on the list. The Planetary Society, we're your place in space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. A special show today with just a handful of excerpts from a very exciting evening. We had gathered on July 9th to announce that LightSail, the Planetary Society SolarSail CubeSat, will fly into space on the tip of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. You can see the whole show online, including videos of LightSail and the Falcon Heavy. The link is on the show page reached

from planetary.org slash radio. Bill Nye and Doug Stetson stayed with me as we welcomed Barbara Plant to the show. Barbara is the founder and president of Boreal Space. The company develops and integrates complex space missions like the one we're talking about. She was previously with Lockheed Martin and other companies, and she's working on a CubeSat of her own called Wayfinder. Barbara has been a key leader in the development of light sail software and the critical attitude control system that will steer the spacecraft. I have part of the solar sail right here, and advocating to the team here that we should be passing this along to everybody in the audience

just so you can get the feel of it. How crazy thin it is. It's crazy thin, and gosh, I mean, I've seen it unfurled now, and it's like 32 square meters. I mean, I've seen it unfurled now, and it's like 32 square meters. It's huge, and the spacecraft is just so teeny. Can I ask you, come on up here, and we'll hand this to you, and you can start passing it around. Please don't eat it.

Don't tear off any pieces. But we'll see if we can get it around to everybody. If you miss the chance later, we'll give you a chance to feel that material. Barbara, is it 4 1⁄2 microns? I think that's right. Doug, does that sound right? Very, very thin. Yeah, very thin. So 4 1⁄2 microns for typical people, it's about a 50th of the thickness of human hair.

How many lines of code for attitude control? For attitude control? It's probably around 10,000 lines. 10,000. So if any one of them is wrong, that's it. We always watch out for that divide by zero problem. That's good. That will get you every time. This is an elegant spacecraft.

It's beautiful. Unlike other spacecraft that I've worked on, it's very mechanical and it's, you know. Clunky. Clunky. It's beautiful. Unlike other spacecraft that I've worked on, it's very mechanical and it's, you know, clunky. It's clunky, but this is elegant. And one can imagine, this goes to science fiction. Now, the sail is going to take us places. And with a completely green method of sailing, it's a beautiful thing. Barbara Plant of the LightSail Project. Doug Stetson wasn't the only person to join us via Skype for the celebration. Fans of science fiction are very familiar with David Brin. Among his many awards are a couple of Hugo's. David is also a futurist and a scientist. He put all these jobs together

back in 1990 when he worked with Arthur C. Clarke to create a collection called Project Solar Sail. It featured nonfiction and fiction by Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and a host of other fans of sails in space. What if there is no warp drive? We still hold out hopes, and it could happen, maybe. How would the galaxy become civilized? would this the galaxy become civilized and this talks about the far implications of the work that you folks are doing and that is might it be a solution to the worst problem we have in getting to the stars there are two problems one is it takes so darn long and the other is the rocket equation and the rocket equation means you have

to take the fuel to take the fuel, to take the fuel, to take the fuel, to take the fuel to get there. And likely you're probably having to take the fuel along to get back. But what if you didn't have to take fuel at all? And that's what Bill was talking about earlier by talking about how solar sails make things so much less expensive because you get to jettison the old rocket equation. Now when you're talking about going farther out, well you leave the sun behind and therefore the solar sails become less powerful unless you provide an artificial sun. And that's exactly what we'll do because if we get out into space and build a space industry out there

that uses solar power, say at the orbit of Venus or even our own distance, we would then have unlimited supply of energy that we could pour into a laser. And this laser can then shine upon a light sail. And notice it's not called a solar sail anymore. And you could, in theory, propel this thing with a

coherent, tight laser beam all the way to Alpha Centauri. Author and scientist David Brin. There was one more person to hear from before we got Bruce Betts on stage for What's Up. Jason Davis has been blogging on the Planetary Society website since 2011. Now he has joined the full-time staff. His first assignment, and it's a big one, is to be our embedded journalist in the LightSail project. I know what embedded journalist means in Afghanistan.

What does it mean in terms of LightSail? Well, it means kind of the same thing in the sense that I'll be working closely with the LightSail team and kind of being an honorary team member, I suppose, and getting a lot of access that I normally wouldn't get if I wasn't right there with them. Some of the things I've been doing is listening in on conference calls, being a part of their email distribution list so I can see all of the back-and-forth chatter about anything that has come up during testing, being able to read through loads of documentation, which ultimately gives me a very unfiltered look

at what's going on behind the scenes. You don't have to sound so nervous about it. It's been really good, right? It has been. Unfiltered behind the scenes? Well, I've only been on the project for, what, now a month. So from what I've seen, it's been very good. And the team has been very welcoming of me.

They haven't kicked me out as a nosy reporter yet, so that's good. I envy your position. What can we expect to see at Planetary.org and elsewhere? We'll be doing a lot of deep dives on some of the technical background. On some of the topics that we've covered already are the cameras, the boom deployment tests that they've been doing, and there's a full day-in-the-life test that's coming up that I'm going to be covering as well. And then we're going to be launching a full microsite that's specifically dedicated to

LightSail. And we hope to have that in the next month or two that's going to be kind of in the style of these new websites where it's a fully immersive experience. And I know you're going to be shooting video because we just bought you a nice camera. You bought me a very nice camera and I appreciate that. And we will put it to good use. LightSail embedded journalist Jason Davis. We'll close this special edition of Planetary Radio as we always do

with the Planetary Society's Director of Science and Technology, Bruce Batts, and What's Up. Nice shirt. Hey, thanks. It says LightSail. All right, so this is What's Up, and every week for the last 11 1⁄2 years, you and I finish the radio show together, and we tell people, or you tell people, what's up in the night sky. I do indeed. Some lovely planets in the evening sky. We've got reddish Mars, yellowish Saturn over in the south in the early evening,

and then in the pre-dawn, if you're up at such times, you can check out bright Venus, although it's getting quite low and even lower than that for the next week or so. You can check out Mercury below it. On the 24th, we've got the moon hanging out with Venus looking quite lovely. And that's what to look for in the night sky. We'll move on to this week in space history. That's what to look for in the night sky. We'll move on to this week in space history. Big, big, big week. That whole pesky 45 years ago first humans on the moon thing. And then 20 years ago was hard to believe it's been so long.

The first fragment of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter. Wow. 20 years ago? 20 years ago. 1994. Too bad there wasn't a solar sail right out there to watch that. No, there was a spacecraft. It was called Galileo.

That's right. I think it was on the wrong side at that moment, right? We were on the wrong side. Anyway. Alright, anyway. One, two, three. Random Space Fab! I didn't think they could top the first one, but they did. That was brilliant. So, a little light sail random space fact for you.

Icaros, the Japanese spacecraft, first controlled solar sail spacecraft, much, much, much larger, but still a small spacecraft, but 315 kilograms instead of 5 kilograms. Bigger sail, though, much bigger sail. But it turns out, in terms of acceleration, light sail is about ten times higher acceleration than Icarus.

I'm sorry. You've been watching too much World Cup. I think Icarus is terrific. I don't want to do that. No, it's a very impressive mission. So let's move on to the trivia contest show.

Yeah. And last time, I asked you, how many moons has the Cassini spacecraft discovered at Saturn? How did we do, Matt? Very good response for this. It seemed to pick up again. I think we lost some people for the Fourth of July weekend there. But we're back. I think you shamed people.

You shamed people. I must have. They just want that Planetary Radio t-shirt, which is the prize. We got this one. This is not the winner, but this came from Jason Bachum in Apex, North Carolina. You didn't specify which Cassini. He said, in addition to Cassini-Huygens, Giovanni Cassini discovered four moons. That is a fascinating fact, but I beg to differ.

I was specific and said Cassini space. I think you actually did, and that's how we put it on the website. Because I knew. The man, the myth, the legend, Giovanni, also a moon discoverer. But Jason deserved honorable mention for that. But here's who Random.org actually picked for us as the winner this week. It's Ronald Kaltenbaugh. I think he's a past winner from Jefferson, Maryland.

He said that as far as he could tell, seven moons have been discovered by the Cassini spacecraft, but it may be eight if you count the possible new moon that appears to be forming in the A-ring, which Cassini discovered just this past April. Is he correct? Yes. Cassini mission defines it at seven,

but yeah, we got that vagueness. So yes, he wins. Ronald, we're going to send a Planetary Radio t-shirt your way. You know what? Let's now go to the folks here and then we'll do the one for the folks at home where they will have a week to get it in. What are they winning in the audience? A choice. You can either have a beautiful light sail fleece vest. Really, shouldn't we see Bruce model one of these?

Yeah, here you go. Put that on, please. Or, you may have the polo shirt that he's already wearing. Well, not that shirt, because you don't want him to take that off on stage. Though it had no sails per se, what recent spacecraft used light pressure on its solar panels to make small adjustments to its trajectory on its way to Mercury?

We go to the audience here at the Crawford Family Forum. We've got somebody right over here on this side. What's your name, sir? Ian Jimenez. And what spacecraft used sunlight? Messenger. Mercury. We go to the audience here at the Crawford Family Forum. We got somebody right over here on this side. What's your name, sir? Ian Jimenez. And what spacecraft used sunlight? MESSENGER. That is correct, MESSENGER.

Okay. Big question of the night. Vest or polo shirt? Polo shirt. We're going to dig down in here. We're going to test Bruce's arm here. Now you always mock my throwing. Maybe you should.

Oh, hell no. That would be, that would be, it wouldn't even be funny. All right, here we go. Oh, very nice. Well done. Sorry, didn't, didn't. I think the pressure of the lights here in the forum caught it and it hooked a little bit. Yeah, I didn't plan for the attitude control properly.

Okay. Let's do one more for the audience here. Okay, those things that are hitting the sail. What is a quantum packet of light called? A light particle. Oh, my gosh. Oh, God. Everybody's in on this one. Where are we going here? Stand up. What's your name? My name's Paula.

And what are those things? It's a photon. A whole bunch of them. Indeed. Photon. Excellent. Vest or polo shirt? Polo. Polo. All right, all right. Polo's fly better.

I love that. Not bad. Not bad at all. Excellent. Excellent catch. We're going to wrap it up. What about for folks at home? All right, for the folks at home, so you can compete in this, but you have to go home and submit your answer.

And if you're listening tonight, you should have the answer. Don't yell it out. Approximately how much total area do the light sail sails have? What is the area of the light sail sails? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest to get your entry in. And what are they trying to win, Matt? We're going to send them both a beautiful, a lovely form-fitting light sail vest and a light sail polo shirt.

They need to get us that answer by Tuesday, July 22nd at 8 a.m. Pacific time. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky and think about attitude control in your life. Thank you, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about attitude control in your life. Thank you, and good night. Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. Thank you for joining us this evening, everyone. Good night and smooth sailing. Thank you.