Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Society All-Stars Look Back at 2019 and Ahead to 2020

Episode Date: January 1, 2020

Happy new year in space! Editorial Director Jason Davis, Chief Advocate Casey Dreier and Solar System Specialist Emily Lakdawalla join Mat Kaplan for a review of 2019’s biggest news from the final frontier. Our experts then turn to the promise of 2020 for Mars exploration, humans in space and much more. The theme continues as Planetary Society Chief Scientist Bruce Betts adds his highlights in a special What’s Up segment. Got a great joke that combines space and the new year? You might win this week’s contest! Learn more and enter the contest at https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2020/0101-2020-looking-back-looking-forward.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our all-stars review 2019 and predict a great new year in space this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Join me for a nice, long look back over the year just passed, and an exciting view of what's ahead on the final frontier. The Planetary Society's best and brightest will share their greatest hits and hopes. Editorial Director Jason Davis takes a break this week from the downlink, but he has joined a panel that includes

our Chief Advocate Casey Dreyer and Emily Lakdawalla with her new title of Solar System Specialist. Stick around for What's Up and you'll hear Bruce Bett's nominations for the best of 2019 and 2020. Bruce also offers a special challenge in this week's space trivia contest. I sat down with Jason, Casey and Emily back on December 21st so that I could catch all of them before anyone started a vacation. The only thing that has changed since then was the less than 100% successful first flight of Boeing's CST-100 commercial crew vehicle. You may have heard on last week's show that a timer error kept it from a planned rendezvous

with the International Space Station. But the mission otherwise went very well. Boeing announced on December 30 that the capsule returned to Earth in excellent shape. With that, we're ready to welcome my colleagues. Hey everybody, happy holidays. Well, we're a little late for that, but happy new year. I mean, we're going to be looking forward at this year that has just begun. Although first we're going to take that look back at 2019. And let me just say how happy I am to get to have this opportunity to bring all four of us together and get us all in one session on Planetary Radio.

Hey, good to talk to y'all. It's always fun to get together in virtual space, since none of us actually work in the same building most of the time. That's true. It's the worldwide reach of the Planetary Society. That's what we represent. That's right. Casey, welcome to you as well. You're going to get us started. Where should we begin? Of course, I'm going to represent the policy perspective here. And no discussion looking back on 2019 would be complete unless we acknowledge the complete wrench in

NASA's plans that was thrown into it by the vice president of the United States on March 26th, when he surprised everyone, and I think surprised the NASA administrator by declaring that NASA should land humans on the moon by 2024, as opposed to late 2020s or early 2030s, basically creating a five year mandate and a very immediate ticking clock to accelerate NASA's human landing exploration efforts. So that I think is probably the defining surprise, the policy surprise. I think Marsha Smith, we talked about this on our space policy edition called this a policy of surprise that has been running NASA's human spaceflight program for a while. This is only the latest in it, but it's certainly been motivating to NASA, and we'll see if they can pull it off, though signs aren't

looking great, let's say. Casey, is there actually any more money for NASA to speed it up like this? Well, let's see. It depends what you mean by is there. The administration, as a consequence of this, actually did something relatively unprecedented. They had already released their budget proposal for NASA, which included the run out for the following five years back in February. That included no money for landing on 2024 because they weren't doing it yet. So after Vice President Pence's announcement, they went back and released a supplemental budget request to Congress to help fund what is now called the Artemis program.

I really can't find any other equivalent piece in NASA's history where this has happened. So they requested money, and for a while everyone was thinking, you know, maybe this could be pretty exciting. Maybe they're going to ask for, I don't know, 20, $30 billion, lump sum up front so they can have the money to spend it as they need it. You know, how important, how critical is this to the administration? And then it came out, the request, and it was a measly $1.6 billion and not very impressive. The idea being they're going to request more money down the line. You didn't

see that much of a press coming from the White House to Congress that ultimately has to provide the money. And we're wrapping up our fiscal year 2020 budget now in Congress. We're seeing the final legislation. They're coming up with out of the $1 billion requested to start work on a lunar lander, Congress looks to give them $600 million. Not a strong start for a 2024 lunar landing deadline. Now, in spite of all this, hasn't NASA been doing other things that appear to be getting us ready for this human return to the moon? I mean, contracts going out and are at least being discussed? Yeah. NASA's in this weird kind of reformulating period that so much is actually quite consistent with the Obama era that is kind of just being relabeled in a different way. So the big new development under human spaceflight is the Gateway, basically an orbiting space station around the moon, renamed from the Deep Space Gateway

or whatever they were calling it at the end of the Obama administration. Basically, they put out a contract to begin building that. Maxar is the company building the first step of that. Of course, you have your ongoing space launch system, a mega rocket being built, continuing to be, let's say, pushed back a few months here and there. So it's in progress. And then, of course, your deep space capsule with Orion. Orion and SLS date back almost 10 years at this point, Orion even older, and eventually they're

going to fly, you know, it will provide a capability to send humans for the first time beyond low Earth orbit since the early 1970s. So even though it's a frustrating kind of period of waiting for all these things to come online, the fundamental enabling infrastructure is being built. And I would have to say, unlike the lunar lander is very popular among Congress, the SLS and Orion, they are willing to put a lot of money behind these things. So in that sense, I think we have a lot of ongoing progress that you're seeing in both of those key hardware elements that are going to provide this enabling infrastructure. What do we think is going to happen here, like, realistically, by 2024?

Will this have happened? I mean, you know, I already bet all of my life savings on this, that it was going to happen. Yeah. What do you have as your over-under for the lunar? You should talk to Casey first. I'll talk about that, yeah. I'll put it this way. So five years is an extraordinarily tight timeframe. The last time NASA has ever developed a new human-qualified, basically, spacecraft in less than five years was during the 1960s in the peak of Apollo,

you know, basically Gemini. And so not a great track record for hitting tight timelines like this. The fact that we saw a pretty modest request from the White House that threw this out onto NASA's lap, and then followed up by an even weaker financial commitment from Congress. And again, this is from a Republican led Senate, right, the president's own party. And even in their version of the bill for NASA funding, they didn't give what they requested for the landing system. So I'd say low.

I'm sorry, Jason, you might have to break the news to your family. They're not going to be going to college. They're going to be eating beans from a can. Exactly. I wouldn't bet on 2024 at this point. We've seen this before, occasionally in the past. And we I wouldn't bet on 2024. At this point, we've seen this before, occasionally in the past, and we see this even within congressional legislation. You can't just mandate that things be on time. You can't just wave away, you know,

you can't just say NASA do this by 2024. And then they'll say, Okay, where's the resources doing? It's like, Oh, you'll figure it out. You'll just do more with less. For any of you who remember the Simpsons when Homer worked for Hank Scorpio and Homer became like this manager for the first time at this nuclear reactor, and he just walks in and he sees a bunch of people working at consoles and goes like, hey, are you guys working hard? And they go, yes, sir, Mr. Simpson. And he goes, could you guys just work a little harder?

They said, sure thing, boss. And they all start typing faster. Like that doesn't actually work. And this is kind of where we are with NASA being told to by this administration to, hey guys, just land on the moon in five years. You'll figure it out, I'm sure. Let's stay on the moon for a bit. Emily, it's been a popular place for robotic visits in 2019. Not all of them successful though. Yeah, I'm afraid not. The first one was quite successful and that was the Chinese Chang'e 4 landing, which was a remarkable mission. I continue to be in awe of

what China manages to pull off for the first time that something has ever attempted. In this case, it's a lunar far side landing. So they placed an orbiter at a Lagrangian point, a place where the gravity of earth and the moon balance each other out. It makes it rather easy to kind of do some station keeping around a fairly fixed point in space. And the orbiter permitted them to later make contact and do relay from the radio of the lander that was on the far side of the moon in a place that we've never landed before. It's not clear to me how much great science we're going to get out of this mission. The rover is moving rather slowly. It wasn't really equipped with the kind of instruments that scientists really want on the far side of the moon in the South Polar Achen Basin to try to

answer these longstanding questions about the lunar composition and how much the Apollo samples were influenced by just one of the impacts on the near side of the moon. But it was still a remarkable accomplishment. And both rover and lander are still operating nearly a year after they landed. So that's been going very well. The next one was not quite so successful. That was Israel's Beresheet lander. Following that, India tried to land as well with a lander named Vikram. And both of those landers experienced the same thing. They had very smooth descents. Everything seemed to be operating just fine until the very last seconds to minute or so of the descent when it seems like the landers just were not able to safely come to a landing. The landers went out of control and they crashed. India at least does

have a new orbiter in place at the moon. I haven't seen much in the way of results from that yet, but it's a little early, and I hope to see some stuff at LPSC, the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in March. What an astonishing human interest story, both of those last two, where we were able to watch those in real time. To me, it was just incredible how much more emotionally invested I felt for the scientists in Israel and in India, watching, you know, things slowly start to turn bad. And then the realization that this is almost certainly not worked. It's amazing with the ability to stream those things live like that. And the fact that they chose to do so, it's just really been exciting and heartbreaking and

reminds us that, you know, there are real people behind these missions with lots on the line. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because like you, I'm very happy that they chose to share that all with us. And the two countries, it was a little different. I mean, with Israel, the landing nearly worked and then it failed. And the statements that were made to the public immediately after were they immediately acknowledged the failure and they talked about what they wanted to do next, which isn't necessarily to try to land on the moon again. They demonstrated nearly all the technology they wanted to develop. They may be pushing on to a different challenge that would springboard off of the successes that they had on their way down to the failure upon the landing. The Indian response was quite a bit different.

They actually did not publicly acknowledge that it was a failure, even though it was fairly obvious from the telemetry that the spacecraft had spun out of control right at the last moments. And they still were searching for signals from the spacecraft, which isn't an irresponsible thing to do. But I think it would have been a little better to acknowledge upfront that, yes, it really does seem like it was a failure and that what we're looking for is a crash site. I'm not sure what that's going to mean for future attempts at either landing missions or the kind of openness that we're talking about here, because India was very open. And the fact that they then weren't so ready to face the failure might bode ill for what they might do in the future.

so ready to face the failure might bode ill for what they might do in the future. Before we leave this, Chang'e 4 specifically, Emily, what happened with that report of gel or goo or something that they found? Did that become kind of a bust? That was almost certainly a mistranslation. Probably it was, maybe it was glass. Maybe it was, it's hard to say what the story was really talking about, but you have to remember that most people outside of China are getting their news through Google translations of Chinese news sources. And so I think that anything that sounds that surprising, one should go find a native Chinese speaker and try to figure out exactly what was said in the original article. It was actually aliens. I think we should just go for the record here, Matt. Jason. For all of your listeners. Me? You heard it here first.

They weren't goo until Chang'e 4 landed on them or blasted them with its descent engine. There's one other thing. I thought it was the protomolecule. It was the protomolecule. Oh, God. We won't talk about the expanse here, okay? There is one other factor about Chang'e 4, though, that I really feel compelled to bring up. And that is this old dream of doing astronomy, in this case radio astronomy, from the far side of the moon where you're blocked from Earth.

Something that I know Arthur C. Clarke was talking about in 1940s science fiction stories. And it's apparently they're either doing this or getting ready to do this from Chang'e 4. They absolutely are. You know, I'm not sure if I go to the kind of conferences where I would hear the results from radio astronomy on the far side of the moon, but I'm sure I'll be looking, finding the results from that in the news in the future. Well, let's head a little bit farther out, not to Phoebe, where the protomolecule actually will be found someday, but to other asteroids and some big successes out there. Jason? Yeah, this was kind of the year of asteroids. We had two missions that thus far have been

pretty successful. Japan's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft visited asteroid Ryugu and ended up collecting two samples from the surface it created one artificial crater in the process uh kind of blew a little explosive plate into the surface and stirred up the regolith there and grabbed a sample from that area uh dropped another one of its little rovers that bounced around on the surface um dropped target marker with the planetary society's membership etched on the inside. This was just a really fun mission to watch. They've since left the asteroid and they're en route back to Earth. They'll return with the samples next year.

Boy, it was just really fun watching how Japan's mission was a little bit different than the way you'd see NASA run this. And you can compare it to OSIRIS-REx as well. They were willing to try riskier things. It wasn't clear if they were going to go in and get another sample, but they did it, and they were able to touch down pretty much exactly where they thought they were going to. It'll be nice to see what they get back next year. OSIRIS-REx, on the other hand, from NASA, has been very methodical and very slow to survey the asteroid really in depth. It's at asteroid Bennu right now. They just chose the sample site for it, the primary sample site where

they'll get the sample next August. The big finding, and Emily can correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seems like both missions were equally surprised that the asteroids they visited were much rockier than they thought they were going to be, which is good for the science returns that are going to come from both of those. Yeah, it's really weird that they both turned out to be surprisingly different from expectations in the same way. Like the two asteroids look so similar to each other and yet so different from anything that we've explored before. There were parts of Itokawa, the asteroid that the first Hayabusa investigated that looked this rocky, but parts of it that didn't. The difference with Itokawa is that it was shaped kind of like a big cheese

doodle. It's like long and kind of skinny or peanut shaped. The Japanese, of course, being a little more creative, saw a sea otter in Itokawa. But I think that Itokawa had these ponds of small, very fine-grained material. And maybe that was related to the shape of Itokawa, whereas these much rounder objects of Ryugu and Benu don't have places where that kind of material can pond, except in a few scattered impact craters. And that's one of those is where OSIRIS-REx is decided to sample in August next year. There's another object out there. It's just a visitor to our solar system, but it's a second one in not a very long period that seems to be visiting from elsewhere in the galaxy. Yeah, we had that first interstellar asteroid that made big headlines when it came through. I think it was discovered in 2017. It was big news in 2018. It got the name Oumuamua. It was exhibiting some kind of weird behavior on its way out of our solar system where it seemed other than kind of a long cigar-shaped object.

So, you know, there are lots of science fiction ideas from that. I already mentioned alien once. Let's mention it again. Yeah, it was definitely aliens. And then this year, an interstellar comet is on its way through the solar system. And that one's definitely a comet. It has a discernible coma and tail around it. And that one's definitely a comet, has a discernible coma and tail around it.

So we can probably expect to see more of these discovered, especially with some of the new telescopes that are coming online. I was going to ask, is this a function of being able to look more effectively with more sensitive detectors that we're seeing too into the last couple of years? Or is this really like the rate or is this a weird anomaly that we're getting a weird clumping of visitors here? I've thought of that myself. And I don't know that anyone's definitively, you know, talked about that, of why we're suddenly seeing so many more. I suspect it's better detection. And you know, I keep hearing that there's that telescope array that's going

to come on very soon, come online very soon, that's expected to pick up a lot more of these objects. LSST. LSST. Yeah, we'll keep finding more of these objects. LSST, yeah. LSST, yeah. We'll keep finding more of these. I mean, I guess we have two data points. You could draw a line through them and extrapolate pretty much whatever you want. Yeah, exactly. There are actually a lot of these coming through the solar system, and we will be finding more and more as these larger surveys come online. It's a wonderful byproduct of a lot of things happening at the same time. We've got big surveys that are happening in part because we want to survey for asteroids, but also because we've got much larger CCDs available. We have much better ability to

store and move large amounts of data around and to process it so that we can detect these things in an automated fashion. So this is just the beginning. When you found two things in one year, you know that the next year it's going to be five, the following year, it's just going to go up exponentially. And pretty soon we're going to have more and more of these. We'll be finding them every day. It'll be delightful. Jason, I'm reluctant to go back to your alien theme, but I hope we've determined that these two objects came from very different directions. Yes, that was one of the first things that was asked and confirmed that, no, they come from completely different regions of our nearby Milky Way.

Okay, so no rendezvous with Rama here to bring up Arthur C. Clarke once again. Listen, these objects, we don't have to worry about them, the three or four that we've talked about so far. But there are all those thousands out there that we do have to worry about. And Casey, let's go to you for an update on planetary defense. Well, some really important developments occurred in 2019 for the concept of planetary defense, right? Protecting the Earth from these impactors of asteroids or comets. There are two things I just want to mention. Probably the most important that I'll start with was the most recent,

which is that NASA publicly committed to building a space-based telescope dedicated to finding near Earth objects that are threatening to the Earth. It used to be called NEOCAM as one of the concepts we've talked about a lot. Now it's called something else, NEO Surveillance Mission, NEO-SM. It's in the works. But basically, the idea is that, you know, NASA is committing to build a half a billion dollar space telescope just for this purpose. It's in the works. But basically, the idea is that, you know, NASA is committing to build a half a billion dollar space telescope just for this purpose. It's been probably two decades of trying to get this mission to happen. So this is something that the Planetary Society has worked really hard to support over the years.

Our members have supported it. I mean, basically any thinking person supports this mission. It's hard to really stand against it. So this was a big step that NASA has been willing to embrace this, because it's been difficult to build a mission like this, because there's no natural home for it inside of NASA. And up until very recently, there wasn't a planetary defense mission line. In the past, they tried to cram it into science, but it wasn't exactly a science mission, though it can do science. The other

major development that happened this year was that NASA formally created kind of this new budget line item for planetary defense, specifically to support ongoing missions, medium, small to medium sized missions in perpetuity to support not just detection like NEOCAM, but deflection like the DART mission that's being made right now. In the last 10 years, you can, you know, I did some of the budget analysis of this. It's grown by something like 4,000% because we were effectively spending almost no money

trying to find near-Earth objects that are threatening to the Earth. Now we're up to about $150 million a year. That's a pretty solid level of annual funding for this, And it's enough to kind of spread out over the years to build these smaller missions to test deflection and detection technologies, in now they have a team of people internally running this program. So it's a huge development and something that, again, now it has a permanent home. It can fight for its own values internally within NASA.

It's an easy place to put funding towards. There's a lot of stuff that falls out of this bureaucratic change internally that it will enable missions like NEO-CAM or NEO-SM, DART, and others to proceed going forward. So I feel much better about the future of planetary defense because NASA has now formally adopted into its kind of self-identity that it has the responsibility to find these objects. Casey, our listeners will forgive us if I go back to the Planetary Society's role in this that you mentioned. This is a real point of pride for the society, right? using their own time and primarily their own money, and we help support them to search for follow-up observations of these hazardous objects. Through our advocacy work, this is something that

we did mainly on the low down, not just because there are times for big public pushes for things, but for the last two years, we've been running a very consistent targeted effort to talk to key members of Congress, to raise the awareness of planetary defense, to raise the awareness that we have a mission like a space-based infrared telescope that would serve this need and actually meet a congressional mandate set by Congress in 2005 to find 90% of objects 140 meters or larger by next year, which we will not do because Congress neglected to fund it, NASA neglected to request money for it. NEO surveillance mission will help get there by the end of next decade. It could be one of the most important missions we ever do because it's going to be the first

one dedicated to finding these potentially threatening asteroids and comets that could be out there or could not be out there. We literally have no idea. We have statistical guesses based on what we've found so far. Emily, while we save the planet, maybe, all this stuff is going to result in some good science, right? Oh, absolutely. These missions are designed to detect asteroids that we haven't found yet. And so it'll be really interesting, this whole class of asteroids that is just in slightly different orbits. It'll be interesting to see if whole class of asteroids that is just in slightly different orbits. It'll be interesting to see if they're different or the same as the kinds of asteroids we've

seen before. We'll have better population statistics. We'll be better able to track things over time and see how the orbits of smaller and larger asteroids change. Anytime you can add more statistics, you'll get more robust results. So I can tell you that scientists are salivating to get at the data that these missions will produce. And the very fact that it's looking for them in the infrared, the quality of the data from the infrared detections is literally an order of magnitude better than using visible wavelength of light that they use on the ground. So I mean,

anything, even in pre-existing stuff, they'll get refined understanding of their characteristics as an asteroid. Yeah, actually, that's a very good point, because when you're looking at asteroids and optical wavelengths, what you're seeing is light that's reflected from the sun. And how bright something is, is a product of both how distant it is from the sun, how large its diameter is, and also how reflective its surface is. And you can't really disentangle those last two things to figure out exactly how big an asteroid actually is. But when you have the infrared data, it's much, much easier, especially in combination with the optical data, it's much easier to disentangle those two things. And you can actually get much better estimates of the size and mass of these objects. I want to remind everybody that it was just a couple of weeks ago

that we met a couple of those Shoemaker-Neo grant winners that Casey was talking about, that program that is funded by the Planetary Society. So you can check that out in our December 18 episode. Much more from Jason, Casey, and Emily is moments away. I know you're a fan of space because you're listening to Planetary Radio right now. because you're listening to Planetary Radio right now. But if you want to take that extra step to be not just a fan, but an advocate, I hope you'll join me, Casey Dreyer, the chief advocate here at the Planetary Society

at our annual Day of Action this February 9th and 10th in Washington, D.C. That's when members from across the country come to D.C. and meet with members of Congress face-to-face and advocate for space. To learn more, go to planetary.org slash dayofaction. Emily, back to you. It's hard to believe that it's only been about a year

since a whole bunch of us gathered at Caltech, standing room only, big cheers for the landing of InSight on Mars. Give us an update on that mission, which is still working away on the surface, though not without some continuing difficulties. Yeah, InSpy has been a bit of a frustrating mission to follow because both of its main science instruments ran into some problems. The mole, which is the one that's supposed to bury itself in order to measure how much heat is coming out of the interior, has still not managed to bury itself. It got stuck for a long time. They started using the scoop in order to press against the soil around where the mole was trying to bury itself. And it seemed to be making progress. And then

suddenly it leapt right out of the hole that it was digging. So who knows what's going on with that? I think that the main thing that we've learned from the mole so far is that we simply don't understand the properties of Mars soil. You know, the silver lining is that we're learning more about that. I think that they have been making some forward progress recently. So all hope is not lost. And JPL is trying very hard to get that thing buried. But last week, we actually had some terrific news from the seismometer instrument, the

other instrument. At the American Geophysical Union meeting, they released news that was also reported in Nature magazine that the seismometers detected more than 300 earthquakes, Marsquakes, of course. Most of them very small, but a couple of them quite a lot bigger, and they've actually localized them to a specific spot on Mars very close to one of the youngest volcanoes on Mars,

and that's Elysium. The exciting thing about that is that we already knew that Elysium, like I said, was young. There's evidence that its last eruptions were only a couple of million years ago, which is basically present day when you're talking about geology. And the fact that there are Mars quakes there tells you that Mars is still responding to that volcanism. And it's hard to know whether the Mars quakes are related to actual magma moving around beneath the surface, or whether it's the relaxation of Mars's brittle crust in response to the loads and loads of lava that came out of the Elysium volcanoes. But either way, it's a sign of active tectonics, active geology on Mars.

And I think that I can speak for most geologists when I can say that we're thrilled that we know that it's worthwhile to actually look for earthquakes or Marsquakes on Mars. And we can use them now to trace the structure of the interior. It makes me really glad that they actually delayed the mission to make sure that that seismometer worked. Because if that hadn't worked, and then the mole had still having this kind of problems, you would basically have the failure of its two primary instruments of this mission. And looking at how difficult it's been just for the mole

to get into the ground and stay in the ground, and you just want to just reach out and grab it and just push it right into that soil. So it just works. Insight was a billion dollar mission just to do that. So imagine the amount of effort to get a person to the surface in order to shove that mole down into the ground. The lesson here is that keeping a certain sense of humility in the face of this level of exploration people are trying to do. I think 2019 was a good point of that. And I think to emphasize one of your points, the things that made us humble in 2019 were the ones that involved interacting directly with surfaces. It's gotten pretty routine to get into orbit or fly past a world. Pretty much

anybody can do it. The deep space communications are a little hard, but Europe and the United States are always there to help people out with that. But when it comes to actually landing on surfaces and interacting with them, trying to get sampling devices into them, trying to retrieve samples, all of that stuff that involves physical interaction is really tough. It's exponentially more difficult than it is to do remote sensing. And I think people do need to keep that in mind. Emily, any other highlights, 2019 highlights at the Red Planet, other than that it may not be as dead as people thought for a long time, at least geologically speaking?

I suppose the highlight for me is that so many missions are still active there. The fact that Odyssey is still going and Mars Express and even Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is really venerable now. And there are all these spacecrafts still operating. When you have more than one mission working at a time, it's not just addition, it's multiplication of their capability when you have so many different eyes looking at a world with different wavelengths. So we're blessed with the longevity of these missions. Every year, I predict that one of them is going to fail. And every year, I'm happy to be wrong. Yeah, well, let's pour one out then for opportunity on that very same note, which despite

its best effort, I mean, it only lasted what, 15 years? What's that? 60 times its warranty? That was just an amazing mission. I vividly remember as a younger person now, I guess technically we all were, watching that land and just being so excited back in 2004. It was a bittersweet moment to see that mission end. It definitely was. You know, that opportunity, the Mars Exploration Rover mission and Cassini, which also was last heard from in 2018, really spanned my entire professional career. So having all those missions come to an end in the last couple of years has been a little sad, but I have to say that like most of the members of the Opportunity team, I'm so glad that it was Mars that killed the rover and not some human error.

The rover did everything that it could to survive winter after winter that it wasn't supposed to be able to the engineers did everything to eke every bit of power out of the solar panels and in the end it was what we expected it was a dust storm too much dust on the solar panels that killed it and that's uh the way that it should have gone emily i had one more question to talking about things at mars i heard a lot about methane or not methane being detected. The trace gas orbiter not finding any methane seemed very surprising to me. I am also surprised about that. I think that the methane story is very confusing right now. I think that the trace gas orbiter not finding any methane does call a bit into question the results from Curiosity. And

Curiosity's methane detecting instrument actually has a contamination problem that they believe, and I was convinced, they believe they have managed to calibrate out. But now I wonder. And so I think that the methane story is very confusing. We don't know how much there is. We don't know how variable it is. It's hard to trust any one instrument's conclusions. And so I guess the jury's still out. So as much as we have studied Mars, still much, much more to learn and confirm. Jason Davis, let's go to the International Space Station, which of course is what a couple of American companies are vying to do uh to return humans there as we speak yeah every year when we do these end of year roundups i always say

like next year next year that's the year that we're gonna see people fly from uh florida again to the station and then it doesn't happen um i think next year might actually be the year. But anyway, to recap what happened this year. Well, I took out a second mortgage, obviously, because, you know, go big or go home. So Crew Dragon, and this is the crew-capable version of SpaceX's Dragon capsule, finally made its first flight to the International Space Station. And it just went pretty much flawlessly.

And there was the whole thing where they put a little stuffed Earth toy on there, and it was cute and floating around, and everyone was happy and was like, yay, commercial crew is back on track. We're almost there. We might even see humans fly later this year. And then SpaceX goes to test their abort thrusters on that capsule that returned to Earth and it blows up. And I mean, it's just the amount of ups and downs this program has endured over the years. When you think about it, 2006, I believe, was when the very first

commercial orbital transportation services contract was signed with NASA for a few companies. And 2008 was when SpaceX got picked to be an official provider for commercial cargo. So this program now is, we're going into the third decade, technically, of commercial crew trying to get online and still not quite getting there. Obviously, they've had a lot of successes with the cargo side of things, but they're still trying to fly humans. We haven't seen humans launch from the United States since 2011 at this point. So it's been quite a long time. As we're recording this tomorrow, Starliner, which is Boeing's crewed spaceship, is going to make its first test flight to the International Space Station. So we don't know yet whether that will go successful. But if it does, we might actually see humans

on both vehicles next year. But in the meantime, this still drags out. NASA is now talking about buying more Soyuz seats to fill the gap. They're going to have to use some of these initial crewed flights for actual crew rotations, possibly, where they were supposed to be just very light lift demos. So, you know, a lot in motion there. That first Starliner flight, that's also going to be on crew, just like the SpaceX Crew Dragon flight that's made it so far, right? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, no one will be riding in the first one. And it's important to note that unlike Shuttle, where you had to have humans sitting at the controls,

both of these can just fly up there by themselves and dock autonomously. A big difference between the cargo and the crew variants of these vehicles is that cargo, they had to kind of sidle up to the station to where an astronaut could grab the vehicle with the Canadarm, the robotic arm on the station. Whereas the crew variants, they dock directly. So that means they all by themselves fly up and make contact with the station just the way Russia's Progress vehicle does. It's a big change, and it's really exciting that it's happened once, and hopefully we'll see it happen here a second time, and that'll pave the way for people. While we're on the ISS, I think it's also worth mentioning that it shouldn't have been a big milestone, but it was that we had the first all-woman spacewalk this year. Christina Cook

and Jessica Meyer both went outside on a spacewalk. That was to repair batteries or to swap out some batteries that are aging. So that was a big milestone. We hope to see more of that one day when it's not such a big deal that it was only women going out. And there were also a series of spacewalks to repair the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. And a lot of people don't know this, but I always love to mention it when I mention AMS. This is an astrophysics experiment. And it's actually the most productive scientific experiment on the International Space Station. It doesn't really have much to do with human

spaceflight. If you look at which papers coming from the ISS program have been cited the most, the AMS paper, the initial results from it is at the top of that list. So in that sense, it's a pretty big deal for them to be doing a repair on it because it was never meant to be repaired. Well, there are two things, Jason, that you just said that trigger some of my policy side of things. Related to commercial crew, there was an extraordinary, I think, and again, it's always kind of amazing sometimes just how Congress tends to take some of these things in stride because we don't have a lot of good options of what to do about them. things in stride because we don't have a lot of good options of what to do about them. But there was a NASA inspector general report about both contractors, SpaceX and Boeing, but saying that Boeing basically wrung an extra 230 or so million dollars out of NASA for their quote unquote fixed price contract for this public private partnership in order to keep doing Starliner with the kind of

the insinuation that Boeing was willing to walk away from that program unless NASA gave them more money. The whole thing that you brought up with the history of COTS and commercial providers is that NASA is supposed to be entering into a fixed price contract so that the companies are incentivized to deliver their product on time and on budget, because if they don't, they eat the difference themselves. The public, the taxpayer doesn't have to pay for it. eat the difference themselves. The public, the taxpayer doesn't have to pay for it. But in reality, when you put these programs into the critical path of something like the space station, which has to be serviced, you have to get humans up there. You have to get NASA astronauts up there. The power doesn't lie with NASA. The companies themselves have an extraordinary amount of leverage in order to keep wringing money out if they want to. And so in that sense, I think we're starting to see hints of the optimism of

these public-private partnerships may be misplaced because the companies themselves can pull additional money for their own ends, you know, to cover their own development costs as needed. And so they don't actually have this protection for the taxpayer the way they're pitched. They're just cost plus by a different name. The space station itself was only designed to last through the early 2020s. Now we're talking about, the Senate is talking about extending the ISS operations until at least 2030, which makes the space station a 30-year-old project by the time that that's ended, and committing the United States to spending an ongoing three and a half, $4 billion a year on just the space station, as that's a significant

chunk of NASA's budget. These companies need to have a payoff on their investment, and they need a long term contract to keep servicing a space station. And if you end the space station program in 2024, three years after you first start launching commercial crew to them, they're not going to make that money back. These ideas are tied together very tightly. And the idea of space station, kind of like space shuttle, just this ongoing program that's always going to cost something because NASA and members of Congress want to preserve programs and jobs and ongoing things where they are now is going to be an ongoing policy problem and budgetary limit to what NASA is going to be able to do in terms of going beyond low Earth

orbit. And the whole idea of these public private partnerships, as you said, is to spur on future uses for these vehicles. I think with SpaceX, it's easier to make the case, you know, because they've become so successful in the launch industry and kind of changed the launch landscape in the United States. That may not have been the actual intent of doing these contracts with them, but, you know, they have been able to leverage that money to shake up the monopoly that United Launch Alliance has here in the U.S. With Boeing, it's definitely even harder to make the case. And that was pretty extraordinary that NASA had to pay them essentially to keep going, which makes it more like a cost plus project than a fixed price contract. And we should probably note that Boeing did vociferously dispute that report.

Well, it is the International Space Station. And as you talk about extending its life, Casey, space station. And as you talk about extending its life, Casey, our partners in the space station come to mind, Europe and Russia, of course. You've done some reporting, I know, on this passage of a new ESA budget, which gave a lot of people reason to be pleased. I don't know how the ISS fits in there, but there's a lot of other good news. Oh, the ISS fares well in that budget. ESA is committed to partnering with NASA through 2030 on the ISS in this new three-year budget that just was approved by the member states of the European Space Agency. It's ESA's, I think, best budget ever,

and it's roughly, it's kind of weird to compare directly because it's a much more complicated system than NASA, but you could say roughly it's about a 10% per year increase over the previous couple of year chunk. ESA, unlike NASA, budgets in multi-year commitments. And so this is a three-year budget that they're guaranteed to have now from all the member states. This makes it really easy for ESA to very carefully plan and phase its spacecraft development. Again, as part of this ongoing agreement, they committed to a number of really great missions. From the Planetary Society's perspective, there was two really highlights of this. One was a planetary defense mission. Their

first is going to be called HERA. It's going to be sent to the Didymos system to follow up on the impact test that the NASA mission DART is going to do in 2022. So this mission will come a few years later, finally characterize the system to really understand how well DART did to deflect the small moonlet around Didymos. And then the other big commitment that ESA made was to Mars sample return. This is this huge effort that NASA has been working on for years, or the entire, I'd say,

Mars community has wanted for decades. NASA looks to be committing to landing a rover to bring samples created by or collected by Mars 2020 back to Earth. ESA is coming in with a major contribution, a multi-billion dollar or multi-billion euro, I should say, contribution to provide a return to Earth vehicle and a fetch rover for the surface to pick up the little samples left by the Mars 2020 rover. So this is a huge commitment, really important to help keep the cost down on the U.S. side, creates a huge amount of political stability for the United States to kind of continue investing in the next great missions for Mars exploration.

Really important development here to see that. How about Europe's participation in getting humans to back to the moon as part of Artemis, I suppose? It is. Yeah, they've committed to starting to build two modules that will be added to the Gateway, the lunar orbiting space station. And it's actually technically their commitment to the ISS, but they pay off their ownership stake in the ISS by building the service module for the Orion crew capsule that will be taking astronauts to the moon. And so they've committed to building, I think, at least three more of those. They're committed to ongoing development of those service modules to support Orion. Let's go from Europe to the outer reaches of the solar system.

And Emily, it was the commitment to a mission which has really lit the imaginations of a whole lot of people. I'm so excited about Dragonfly, and so is just about everybody who is on Team Outer Planets. We're going back to Titan with not only a spacecraft that's going to land on Titan, but it's a quadcopter for Titan. It's so cool. It's got helicopter blades. It jumps up off the surface and lands somewhere else. And it takes pictures and it does sampling. And it's going to be so extremely cool. Given the fact that I talked earlier in this conversation about how

hard it is to land on other surfaces, I think it's worth mentioning that Titan is actually one of the easiest places to land on because the gravity is rather low and it has a nice thick atmosphere that is a very tall atmosphere. So you hardly need to do anything to slow down. You just have a little heat shield and a parachute and you can drift downwards very safely. So as long as you can get your spacecraft out there, it's not so hard to land. It is very far away. And so it's going to take a long time for Dragonfly to get there. And it's going to be a very scary moment when it does get there. But I'm just, I couldn't be more excited for this mission, in part because the team is so wonderful. It's headed up by a woman named Elizabeth Turtle, known as Zibby Turtle,

who's at the Applied Physics Laboratory. She's just assembled the most wonderful team of people who are all equally passionate and excited about this mission. It's just going to be great fun to watch it go forward. And we have talked to Zibby a couple of times on this show, specifically about Dragonfly. It sure is an exciting thing to look forward to.

We'll go right on to the last thing we'll mention, although there certainly are many that we could have extended this portion of the program with. It was a busy year. But we cannot leave it, Jason, without talking about a mission that is still underway as we speak, maybe surprisingly, LightSail 2. Hey, what's LightSail? Yay, we did it. Light launched finally yeah so light sail which has been under development uh the planetary society since uh 2009 and that followed cosmos which launched on a russian rocket didn't make it into orbit long development period for this thing um long wait to get it actually on a rocket. It was initially supposed to launch in

2016, but the Falcon Heavy, which it hitched a ride with, got pushed back for three years, finally launched and successfully deployed its solar sail and was able to demonstrate controlled solar sailing in Earth orbit. So that was a huge moment for the Planetary Society that all of our members who supported it throughout the years or made donations to it, supported the Kickstarter that they ran a couple years ago. Thank you for that. And it was great to finally see it fly. And we will certainly see this come up again when we talk a little bit later today with Bruce Betts during the What's Up segment, because we'll get his highlights of 2019 as well. And I have a feeling LightSail is a pretty big one for him since he

headed that program. We do have some neat results that will be out in the next couple of weeks by the time this airs around January 10th, I think is when we're aiming to release some results from the mission. Basically, there's an attitude control paper that's coming out, and we'll try to summarize that because it's a very meaty and dense paper into some lessons learned. So in case you're wondering what the spacecraft's been up to, yes, it is still up there doing its thing. They've had some challenges. We'll talk about that very soon. Yeah, and we're not alone in our pride, apparently. Time magazine, popular science, getting a lot of recognition all around the world. Let's go on to the new year that has only just begun as this program becomes available online.

And we can start with some missions that are ahead. Mostly a lot of missions, well, we hope a lot of missions that will be headed to Mars in 2020. Emily, let's begin with that rover that is still only known, as we speak, as the 2020 rover. Yes, there's four missions that are planned for launch this summer, and still, so far, all of them are on schedule. NASA is sending one currently called Mars 2020, although it will have a different name by the time it launches. It's based on the body plan of the Curiosity rover, but everybody involved in the mission will tell you that it's actually quite a different

spacecraft. And the instrument package is very different. It's not designed to do the kind of intense laboratory analysis activities on the surface of Mars. The space that was occupied in Curiosity by two very sophisticated sample analysis laboratories, are completely taken up in Mars 2020 with this sample acquisition and caching mechanism. And it's designed to drill into the surface to take samples from soil, place them in these little hermetically sealed tubes, and then drop them on the surface for a future rover to come fetch and bring back. So those are gone, but what about this new spectrometer that it is carrying that has not gone to Mars before? And I guess there'll be two of them headed there

if ESA's Rosalind Franklin leaves for Mars in 2020. Is it Raman or Raymond? I believe it's a Raman spectrometer. And there are two of them, one on each of the rovers. And it is a type of spectrometer that scientists have been wanting to get to Mars for a long time. And so it's great that they are managing to get two of them. It'll be really interesting to compare the results from those two missions on different sides of the planet. You know, it's a different way of analyzing the light elements that are preserved in the Martian rocks to try to get at an understanding of what kind of organic materials were available and how they were processed in the Martian environment before they were sealed within rocks. It's a new way of looking at Mars. And every time we bring a new way of seeing to another world, we get access to answering questions that we haven't been able to answer

before. So it's going to be exciting to see those results for sure. Emily, can I just say, as a non-scientist, I just love looking at the pictures of, I'm going to pronounce this wrong. I want to say Jezero, but I believe it's pronounced slightly differently. Technically, it's a Jezero crater, but I think you'll find most American scientists are going to go ahead and pronounce it Jezero. But yeah, so Jezero is a really cool crater because it's got this ancient river Delta exposed in it.

It's been processed a lot since the Delta formed, probably this Delta was buried and, um, the Delta was actually better lithified, turned into stronger rock and the rock, the material around it has been eroded away. The rover is going to be able to land in the floor of the crater, drive up to the toe of the Delta, which is where the very finest sediments would have settled as the river was emptying into the crater lake, and then drive up the delta to see all the different kinds of lake near shore environments that had been preserved to try to figure out how long this delta was running, to see whether it was built by fairly continuous flow that you might get from a

regular precipitation, or whether it was seasonal, or whether it was just episodic, whether this area was quiescent for a long time before you had occasional floods. And all of those things will enter into how habitable an environment that persisted in this crater in the past. And so it's going to be really cool to see Curiosity just drive from the oldest to the youngest rocks all the way up this delta. Seeing the orbital pictures of that delta in history as a kid, you know, when you learn about ancient Egypt, they're just like the Nile, the delta there, it's like it is the cradle of civilization and life and the fertile crescent. And I just always immediately picture something like that when I see that Jezero crater delta. And I'm just like, if there's any good place to look for signs of past or present life, that would be it. So yeah, I'm super pumped about it.

Even people who disagree about how wet or warm Mars was in the past, everybody agrees that these craters like Jezero and Gale held lakes in the past. And the debate is really about how persistent they were, how long they lasted, how habitable the environments really were. But there's absolutely no question that you can imagine yourself standing on Mars in one of these locations in the distant past with a river trickling into a crater lake, soft waves lapping at a Martian shore. It was all there at some time in the past for some length of time. Wow. Thank you for that image, Emily. You said this is one of four.

Briefly, take us through the other three that hope to lift off. ESA is also sending a rover. It would be its first rover on another world. It'll be its third attempt to land on Mars, and the first two were not successful. That was Beagle 2, which arrived with Mars Express, which was kind of a spacecraft on a shoestring, and nobody was particularly surprised when it didn't succeed. And then there was Schiaparelli, which accompanied the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. That was a little more surprising. It was another one of those spacecraft that survived nearly all the way down and then failed close to the very end

of the attempted landing. It's going to be a nail biter when they try to land ExoMars on Mars. This is a mission that's been in development for so very long. It's festooned with instruments. It has a very deep drill. It's got a drill that can go down two meters in order to acquire samples. That's going to be exciting if that works. The mission is solar powered, unlike the Mars 2020 rover, which is nuclear powered like Curiosity. That means that the mission has a relatively short warrantied lifetime of about six months. Of course, everybody would hope that the spacecraft

would be able to last longer than that, but it does need to try to get an awful lot done in its first six months on the surface. Beyond that, there are two more missions. There is a Chinese orbiter lander and rover mission. And so that's one of those things where we'll be watching the arrival with bated breath. The likelihood of succeeding on a first attempt at Mars landing is pretty low. But if anybody can do it, the Chinese can, based on their track record on the moon.

But I would expect that their orbiter would work. And the orbiter has a very large scientific package, including a camera that's supposed to rival the high-rise camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. So that should be a very capable orbiter that should be arriving at Mars. And then finally, there's the United Arab Emirates is planning to send their first deep space mission beyond Earth, skipping over trying to do anything at the moon, they're headed straight to Mars. And their orbiter is designed to be an atmospheric mission. It will be in a not particularly tilted, not particularly close, fairly circular orbit around Mars, which is quite a bit different from

MAVEN and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. So it'll be interesting to be able to combine that data set, which is a little bit more like a distant weather satellite, like the kinds that we have observing here on Earth. It'll be great to be able to combine that data with the much closer in data being acquired by MAVEN and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. And I've read just very recently that India's planned follow-on to the Mars orbital mission, MOM, that that is likely to be delayed till 2022? India's missions develop just on very different timelines. And the timings of missions have a lot to do with the vicissitudes of politics. And they tend to only work on one mission at a time. So you don't really get a certain launch date for these

missions until quite close to the launch sometimes. All right, let's leave Mars, come back down here, where Casey, it's only in the last few days we have finally seen, it appears to be anyway, a budget for 2020 that should have been in place on October 1st. Are you saying that we need to start thinking about 2021 already? Oh, of course. The job of a space advocate is never done. The annual budget cycle for the fiscal year 21, which confusingly begins on October 1st of 2020, calendar year, that president's budget request for that comes out in early February. Going back to how we started this episode, I'm going to be looking very carefully for how they project over the next five years they're going to pay for this Artemis effort to continue to attempt to land in 2024. They requested $1.6 billion last year.

A serious level of commitment would be at minimum, I'd say, a $5 billion increase to that program. $5 billion increase to that program. The NASA administrator has repeatedly said that he does not want to raid science funding or any other programs at NASA to pay for Artemis. So we will have to see a significant increase to NASA's top line, or we don't take Artemis seriously anymore. It's really going to come down to that. This also happens to be an election year here in the United States. And as we all know, the number one issue for every presidential candidate is space exploration. Yes, defined the presidential debates ever since the 1960s. Yes. Yeah, there's a little thing of the presidential election. Obviously, we know who the Republican candidate is going to be, we will find out who the Democratic candidate will be by midsummer. It's going to be a long year, and we will do our

role to keep space as much as we can in part of that development process. We'll be reaching out to the Democratic candidates, trying to get their policy perspectives on space, try to keep it as part of the conversation, going to dominate all of politics, as you know, for anyone who's been following this every four years. It very likely means that we won't actually have a final NASA budget until after the elections. There is actually fewer and fewer congressional votes as the elections come up because no one wants to take stands on anything. We'll see a NASA budget at the very end of the year, possibly. Obviously, a lot of that depends on who wins and who also, again, Congress is up for

election. All of the House of Representatives is up for reelection and a third of the Senate. And so we will have potentially quite a bit of change or potentially no change at all. So plan accordingly. Casey, I'm glad that it'll be another year where you and your colleagues will be in there pitching for us inside the Beltway. Jason, you covered it pretty comprehensively, but you think we're going to see Americans on and in American vehicles return to space? Providing nothing goes bad with this Starliner demonstration, I think there's a very good chance we'll see humans launching from the US this year. Sometimes it seems fantastical at this point that it could actually happen because, you know, I have in my mind no other images of humans boarding spacecraft in my lifetime than either getting on the space shuttle or getting on a Soyuz rocket,

you know, with the exception of like China had some scattered launches here and there. The idea of them doing the walkout to the Astrovan in Florida and getting on it and driving out to the pad just seems incredible at this point. And to actually see it happen and see their faces on the ISS when they come through that portal, which hasn't been used. It's the front portal, essentially the front door of the International Space Station, which hasn't been used. It's the front portal, essentially the front door of the International Space Station, which hasn't been used since the shuttle days. It's going to be quite a moment. I'm very excited for it. I hope it actually happens.

We will see. And we'll also see who makes it first, whether it's Boeing or SpaceX. I should have qualified my question by making it not first to return American astronauts to orbit, because there may be Americans who will return to space, at least suborbital space this year. Let's briefly mention that both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, this might be the year that they get paying customers up there. We did have in 2019, Virgin Galactic astronauts take a test flight on Spaceship Two and actually cross the boundary of what is space, or at least what most people think is space. There's a technical debate about where exactly that delineation is. Anyway, close enough for most people. And then they are relocating their operations out to New Mexico and might start tourist flights as early as this year. In the meantime, Blue Origin has just been very successful with their new Shepard capsule, and it seems like they're getting close as well. So we might have one or both of those

conduct suborbital flights this year as well. Emily, we'll give you the last word as we look to the future, or at least the near-term future, 2020 future, of robotic space exploration around our solar system. Nobody follows this more closely than you. What are you looking forward to? Well, I'm looking forward to OSIRIS-REx touching down and grabbing that sample and bringing it back. I'm looking forward to Hayabusa 2's return at the end of this year. It's always such a wonderful moment to see a spacecraft come back from deep space and return its sample. And it's going to be especially poignant

given the way the Hayabusa sample return ended. That one, of course, ended with the spacecraft burning up in the atmosphere. Hayabusa 2 should be able to go right past Earth and go on to another mission someday. But I think that the thing that I remain the most excited about is just how many

spacecraft there are exploring how many different locations in the solar system. Everywhere from spacecraft on its way to Mercury, to one currently orbiting Jupiter, to the Voyagers that are still way beyond, far beyond even the Kuiper Belt and exploring the interstellar space beyond our heliosphere. There's just so many everywhere. And there are so many more countries entering it. There's going to be brand new data sets becoming available for us to see beautiful photos from places from the asteroid belt to the moon and Mars.

It's just a great time to be a space fan. And of course, that's Juno that is out there still orbiting Jupiter. And with any luck, we're going to have Scott Bolton, the principal investigator for that mission on. Casey, Jason, any final words from either of you? There's like 18 other things I wish we could talk about today, but I'll just, I just want to list things that won't even talk about it. But important things I think to keep in mind that also happened this year, Space Force

actually looks to be happening in some version of that. The start of mega constellations like Starlink and how they're going to impact ground-based astronomy is also a really big deal potentially moving forward. And the whole growth of investment into commercial space systems, particularly with, I'd say, rocket labs and very small rocket systems. This huge burst of potential happening in the commercial space market, but also focusing on how we're going to use that

and to manage this incredible growth, not just around Earth, but also to preserve science and access to space for everybody. Jason? One thing we might mention is SpaceX's Starship. That's the stainless steel spacecraft that they're building versions of in Texas and Florida. It's been interesting watching those come together. This past year, they managed

to get one of them completely assembled, and then they had an accident with one, but they're already moving on and building a new version of one. So I expect that to continue into the next year. They always do these things very aggressively where they'd rather build and test and learn from their mistakes rather than doing it all on the drawing board. But it'll be fun to watch that play out over the year and we'll see what happens. Casey Dreyer, Jason Davis, Emily Lakdawalla, thank you so much for being a part of this excellent start to the new year of 2020. I will only add that I feel so fortunate to be able to call all of you colleagues and friends. I am awestruck by the expertise that all of you represent, and I look forward to talking to all three of you as we head out across a brand new

year. Thanks very much. Looking forward to it, Matt. Oh, thank you. Thank you, and Happy New Year to all of you. Time for a New Year's What's Up on Planetary Radio. So we are joined by the Chief Scientist of the Planetary Society. That's Bruce Betts. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. We should come up with some fireworks. Maybe I can find a fireworks uh effect for that uh although it probably wouldn't be good to talk about it and then do it um anyway starting off on a smooth note for 2020 hardly what kind of fireworks are going on up there in the night sky oh excellent 2020 segue the year of excellent segues. What a save. In the evening, Venus is just going to be our friend for the first few months of 2020. Looking over in the west, brightest star-like object up in the night sky. Check it out in the early evening. And you might still catch

Saturn down low in the west. You might not. In the morning sky, it'll be fairly easy to pick out Mars in the pre-dawn east, looking reddish and getting brighter over the weeks and months. To its upper right is the bluish star Spica. In the evening, you've got Orion coming up in the east, Fomalhaut in the south, the lone bright star in the south in the evening. And then on January 3rd, 4th, the Quantra tids, an above average meteor shower that I always have trouble pronouncing, will peak that evening, the 3rd, 4th, from a dark site. You might see as many as 40 meteors per hour.

Best viewing will be after midnight after this moon sets. I hope that a lot of people who had a chance to see it did see, as we speak about two days ago, two nights ago, the moon and Venus very close together, really cozying up. And it was just a gorgeous sight. Yeah. I always, when I look up and see those, and it was like, wait, I said that would happen. And look, it did. It's like a miracle. It's almost as if the universe was a big clockwork. So that was a highlight for me of 2019. I do want to talk to you, because we just spent time talking with our colleagues about their faves from the year that has just passed and the year

that has just begun. I want to get to that with you as well, but go ahead and tell us some of the other weekly stuff too. This week in space history, this first week of January, 15 years ago, Stardust encountered the comet Wild 2 and sampled it and brought samples back to Earth a wee bit later. And Spirit, the rover, landed on Mars this week, 2004. It was a busy, busy activity, which is why we had an event called Wild About Mars. Wild About Mars. It's now getting to the point where even when you look that far back planetary radio was already underway which is just making me feel old yeah there's some

great segments from that time period as as always thank you we move on to random space, random space. Old acquaintance will not be forgot. So speaking of New Year's, the beginning of Mars years is defined as the Martian vernal equinox. In other words, the beginning of spring in the Martian northern hemisphere. The next Mars happy new year will be February 7th, 2021 in our calendar, right about the time several spacecraft will be arriving to party at Mars. I'm glad they can get there just in time for all the Martian parties underway. Yeah. Moving on to the trivia contest. I asked you where, oh yeah, we were playing where in the solar system?

Where in the solar system is the crater Fajoku? How'd we do, Matt? Did anyone know how to pronounce it better than I do? No, but a lot of people had fun with it and learning about it too. Here from Corey Hannon, who is clearly a fan of The Expanse and also speaks Belter. So here's the answer in that dialect. Oye, Beltaloda, fejoku es en Ceres. Anyway, basically, he's a Belter, which is appropriate since Ceres is in the belt. Is that where we'd find this odd crater?

It is indeed. It is on the dwarf planet largest asteroid, Ceres. A little more Expanse trivia here since we just did that interview with the authors. And boy, what a great series. I binged on it and I'm tempted to watch it again. Henry Sanford Crane in Elton, Maryland, said he believes that the current population of Ceres, according to The Expanse, is about 6 million belters.

He really enjoyed our Expanse episode. And here's our winner. It's Sean Piper, a first-time winner in Alexandria, Virginia. Ceres, watch out for those belters. And he adds, I love your show. Thanks, Matt. We said we would send out one of the new Planetary Society, excuse me, Planetary Radio stickers. But Thomas of ChopShopStore.com, where the Planetary Society store is, and you can check out all of our merchandise there.

He thought, oh, come on, don't be cheap. We'll send him three stickers, three really cool stickers, all having to do with the Planetary Society and space exploration, including that new Planetary Radio sticker. And we're going to do that again in the next contest with a Planetary Radio t-shirt. But I got some other stuff for you first. Dave Fairchild, our poet laureate. The Joku is a crater and hexagonal in shape. It has some streaks along it where ejecta has escaped. You'll find it up on Ceres if you check the diagrams.

A god from Earth's Nigeria who always brought the yams. Did you discover that? I mean, we had a ton of people who responded who said that, yes, it is supposedly the god to people in Nigeria, who brought humanity yams, which Devon O'Rourke in Lakewood, Colorado, is very grateful for. He says, I guess we can thank Fajuku for sweet potato fries. Oh, nice. Finally, Gene Lowen in Spokane, Washington. Just a part of the poem that he sent.

If it could explain this hexagram, it's sure to say, I am what I am. All right. I didn't clear this with you ahead of time, Matt. I just want you to think about that. But unfortunately, you edit the show. So I got rid of my original idea and came up with this idea that hopefully you like. I've challenged the audience to make up a joke that relates to space and to New Year's Eve day or the new year. I have nothing. Maybe you do. Go to planetary.org slash radio. We'll look for what we think is the funniest

or most creative or whatever tickles us. And you've got until the 8th, the 8th of January to answer this wonderful challenge, Wednesday at 8 a.m. Pacific time, that is. So it has to be something, a joke that mentions both space in some aspect and the new year. In some aspect. So I'm trying to give you specifics. You have to tie two things together in a joke. But other than that, it's fairly broad. Yeah, I just got challenged for my super cool space facts book, Making Up Dumb Jokes, which some have referred to, perhaps pejoratively, as dad jokes.

And I thought, let's challenge other people to come up with some dumb jokes or good jokes. Your pick. So you're basically saying, you think this is easy? Exactly. All right. So I know you folks are up to it out there. At least one of you is going to get that package. Three terrific new stickers from chopshopstore.com,

including the Planetary Radio sticker. And from that same source, a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Is a riddle okay, if it's a humorous riddle? Sure. Riddles, poems, question, answer, knock, knock, two planets walk into a bar, whatever. Okay. Now I'm thinking, I'm already distracted trying to think of one of my own. Let's go to your thoughts about the year completed and the year to come. What do you look back on most fondly or at least most significantly in 2019?

I'm going with light sail too. Such a surprise. Did anything else happen in 2019 in space exploration? I'm just kidding. I don't think you had much time to consider anything else. No, I didn't. Still don't. Anyway, LightSail 2, obviously a big highlight for solar sailing demonstration with a small satellite, small spacecraft.

And we did it and it's still flying and we're still solar sailing so that as well as you know doing presentations and papers and all sorts of good stuff to share share the share the knowledge share the love i bet you've got at least one more thing that you look back on well yeah it was a party on several fronts tied to planetary defense, protecting the Earth from asteroid impact. You got two spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa 2, that I'm sure you discussed in your conversation, getting groovy images and Hayabusa 2 doing sampling and OSIRIS-REx getting ready too. We also had the Every Other Year Planetary Defense Conference. We just gave out our Planetary Society Shoemaker Near-Earth Object Grant. They started a new mission that the community has been calling for for a very long

time to do a space-based infrared telescope survey to find more stuff. It's just been a planetary defense party, which I'm loving. Let's look to the year that has just begun, as people hear this. What are you most excited about? The new fleet of Mars spacecraft, of course. And so that launching in the summer with Mars 2020, which Planetary Society is involved with, but it's just another amazing mission. Then ExoMars and Chinese mission and the UAE mission. Just going to add to the flotilla that's already there. And it's very exciting. All sorts of good stuff, good science, good mission stuff.

Did I use the word stuff enough? It's 2020, the year of using the word stuff. Good stuff. More obscure, BepiColombo doing Earth and Venus flybys as it winds its way towards Mercury. What do you got? What have I got? Just one thing. And it's a little self-serving, but it didn't come up with our other colleagues.

And that is that we will be celebrating. We've already begun. But this will also be the year that we do much more celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Planetary Society. And so I hope people will get a chance to participate in that one way or another. Yay. Happy New Year and happy anniversary. And happy new year to you, my friend. And I look forward to, as I've said before, another year of hanging out with you every week for this segment of the show. Me too. Me too, friend. And thank you so much for doing this, making it happen. Oh,

okay. That's enough. I think we're done. Take us out for the first time in 2020. Wow. All right, everybody go out there, look up the night sky and think about what you're looking forward to in 2020 and in the decade of the 2020s. Thank you and good night. Nice. All right. I resolve to do exactly that in the new year. And he is the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, Bruce Betts, who joins us every week for What's Up. A program note, what would have been the January 3rd Space Policy Edition is going to be delayed one week to January 10th. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its members, who also look forward to a great new year out there on the final frontier.

Want a piece of it? Join us at planetary.org slash membership. Want a piece of it? Join us at planetary.org slash membership. Mark Gilverde is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. Member or not, I hope you'll be exploring with us throughout 2020. Happy New Year, all, and Ad Astra.