Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Pluto's Diamond Jubilee

Episode Date: February 14, 2005

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Pluto's Diamond Jubilee, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. On February 18, 1930, Earthlings learned they had another neighbor. The young astronomer who found it was Clyde William Tombaugh. Though he was helped by calculations

made by Percival Lowell, Tombaugh's discovery remains one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of observational astronomy. We'll talk with Tombaugh's longtime colleague and friend, Rita Beebe. We'll also get an update on the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond from Principal Investigator Alan Stern. Did you miss the first week of Bruce Bett's new televised astronomy class? Well, don't worry, you can get makeup credit by entering his new What's Up Space Trivia contest.

Here's a brief review of headlines from around the universe. Space Shuttle Commander Eileen Collins and her crew say they are ready to return to space, possibly as soon as mid-May. Many new systems will be in place to detect the kind of damage that caused the Columbia disaster just over two years ago. There may have been just a mild breeze down at the surface, but you'd have to hold on to your hat in Titan's upper atmosphere, where the Huygens probe was buffeted by 400 km per hour winds. Meanwhile, the Cassini orbiter is taking yet another look at Saturn's big moon this week.

It's increasingly apparent that our galaxy is absolutely filthy with planets. One of the latest possibilities is the discovery of a so-called protoplanetary disk of dust and gas found by the Spitzer Space Telescope. What's especially interesting is that this disk is circling a star that isn't quite a star. is that this disk is circling a star that isn't quite a star. You can read more about brown dwarf OTS-44 at planetary.org. And apparently some stars think Two's Company, several hundred billions a crowd. Scientists have found a star that is headed out of the Milky Way galaxy at almost two and a half million kilometers per hour.

Gee, was it something we said? As always, there's much more news at planetary.org, where you can also get an update on launch plans for Cosmos 1, the solar sail. I'll be back in a minute with Rita Beebe's remembrance of Clyde Tombaugh. You might call it a plutonic relationship. Emily is up next with a Q&A about making noise on Mars. Stay tuned. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, Having heard the amazing sounds from Titan, I wonder if sound recording was ever attempted on Mars.

Funny you should ask. In fact, it was the Planetary Society, funded by its members, that developed and built an instrument called the Mars Microphone in order to do just that. The Mars microphone launched toward Mars on January 3, 1999, aboard the Mars Polar Lander, and would have recorded the sounds of wintry breezes blowing across Mars's south polar desert. Unfortunately, faulty software on Mars Polar Lander caused her to crash, and she never recorded any sounds from Mars. The Mars microphone was subsequently accepted

onto the French Netlander mission, which was later cancelled. The Planetary Society continues to pursue sending the microphone to Mars aboard a future landed mission. Once the microphone gets to Mars, what will it hear? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. Almost 84 years passed between the discovery of giant Neptune and Clyde Tombaugh's detection of tiny Pluto. It remains an amazing feat. Not only is Pluto almost six billion kilometers away, it's considerably smaller than Earth's moon. Even today, the Hubble Space Telescope is barely able to make out a few tantalizing features. If all goes well, humankind will get its first close

look at the distant planet in less than a decade, when it is reached by the New Horizons spacecraft to be launched early in 2006. We'll hear more about New Horizons from the mission's principal investigator, Alan Stern, in a few minutes. It's fitting that Tombaugh is remembered for Pluto, but few people outside his profession know that he made many other discoveries over the next six decades. He passed away just eight years ago, when he was almost 91. Rita Beebe has been a professor of astronomy at New Mexico State University for well over 30 years. She first met Tombaugh when she was a student, but remained a friend and colleague till his death. We asked her to help us celebrate the 75th anniversary of the discovery of Pluto

by sharing some of her memories. As you'll hear, we learned the spirit of Clyde Tombaugh lives on. Rita, can you tell us how it was that you came to have a long, close working relationship with Clyde Tombaugh? In 1969, after completing my doctorate at Indiana University, I moved to New Mexico State and began work with the Planetary Group. At that time, Clyde was still quite active. He was still teaching.

There was a tradition with Clyde of collecting a group to go to lunch every day, and I soon joined that group. And that continued as long as he was able to go to lunch. And the group still continues on and his wife still attends and the group still gets together for lunch on Wednesdays. He was a hard-working observational astronomer for many, many decades. Yes, he's known for the discovery of Pluto, but actually he should be more famous

for the things he didn't find. Really? After he found Pluto, he continued a very detailed survey of the sky, looking for other planets. And that was done at Lowell Observatory, and the care and the precision with which they did that analysis was trusted by the community for a long time.

And as a matter of fact, the planning to find new ones was based on that. They knew they'd have to have a certain size aperture and exposure to go beyond that survey. So even though he found no planets, it basically biased our thinking of the structure of the solar system very strongly. We thought about our solar system as having an outer limit that had probably been imposed by the process of the rotation of the galaxy and near passage of other stars. And it had a very strong influence on the thinking of formation and evolution of solar systems. And it's really only in the last handful of years that anyone has come close to once again equaling what he did with, I guess you could say, some of the Kuiper Belt objects, but maybe some extrasolar planets as well.

That's right. What kind of a colleague was he to work with? He had a perpetual sense of humor. He loved puns to the point that it got tiresome. My way to torment him was to pretend I didn't get his pun, and then he couldn't resist. He'd have to explain it. Do you remember? Were there any particularly good ones? Oh, he had terrible, a whole collection of crow jokes. Do you know what a crazy crow

is called? No, I don't. A raven maniac. And they get worse. Well, I guess all you observational types, you have to find something to stay awake during those long nights as the old photographic plates gathered photons, right? That was right. Who do you think carries on his legacy today? Is it some of the folks who are finding extrasolar planets and other odd objects in our own solar system? You're certainly well qualified to say since you've been

at this. Well, I think it's the group that's trying to map the structure of the outer solar system. That was an area that he was interested in. He was also extremely interested in Mars. so the exploration of Mars would be an area that he would continue a high level of interest in. Before we sent the little Pathfinder down on Mars, I obtained a cartoon from JPL that showed the descent and landing and the collapse of the airbags and the exit of the little rover. And I took it over. He was, at that point, on oxygen and pretty much chair-bound.

And I showed it to him. And being naughty, I said, you know, Clyde, if we can do this kind of thing on the computer, we really don't need to go to Mars, do we? What was his reaction? I got a tongue lashing. Tell us about the experience that you've just had as we celebrate the 75th anniversary of this discovery of the planet Pluto. One of our outstanding elementary schools here in Las Cruces

is the Tombaugh School. And each year they celebrate his birthday and the discovery of Pluto. And last night they unveiled a time capsule which they're going to bury in their secret garden, the inner courtyard of their school, and it's to be opened on the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Pluto. It was a delightful capsule.

The children had put together mosaics of Clyde's work, and Alan Stern wrote a letter to go into it. Patsy Tombaugh wrote a letter to go into it. Patsy Tombaugh wrote a letter to go in it. That's his widow, right, Patsy? And I took Patsy to the event, and after this occurred, then children came up to talk to her, and one of the little boys said that he wanted to be a teacher at Tombaugh Elementary School so he could be there when they opened the capsule. That's wonderful.

We are going to run out of time in a couple minutes here before we move on to talking to your other very active colleague, Alan Stern. But I wonder, did Clyde Tombaugh ever talk to you about the notoriety that he achieved as the discoverer of the ninth planet. Yes. Of all of the people I've known who were famous, he probably enjoyed it the most. Really? You know, he always took time for people. People would drop in as they were passing through Las Cruces, and he would greet them. He had a very active correspondence with children who wrote letters to him, and

he really enjoyed it. And he was active pretty much almost to the end, I guess. Yes, and he enjoyed interacting with the graduate students, attending colloquia and seminars. He asked very good questions. He was very intent in helping the students with their development. Rita, we have maybe a minute left here, but you should tell us a little bit about your work. You have been at New Mexico State University as an astronomer for, what, over 30 years, and won a very prestigious award in 2003 from the American

Astronomical Society. What are you up to? Well, I've been working on NASA missions to the outer planets. I worked on Voyager, some on Galileo. I'm working now on Cassini. I've just had a lot of fun. And still are. Oh, yeah. And what was the award, which I see was the Harold Mazursky Award

from the Division of Planetary Sciences. And did this have something to do with your work, which you will have to explain, as the director of the NASA Planetary Atmospheres Data Node? Well, partially that, but quite frankly, the fact that I was a girl led me to get involved in a large number of planning committees and interface with the community, which were service roles.

Hal Mazursky did a lot of that when he was alive. He was a good friend of mine. And the Division of Planetary Sciences set up a prize in his honor to honor the type of thing he did. prize in his honor, to honor the type of thing he did. And it was the entire block of work that I have done in planetary development and for the community for which I was honored. Are you pleased with what you've seen? Certainly you have to be with the incredible discoveries that have been made in astronomy in the last decade or two, but also in how the faces of astronomers themselves have changed.

There are certainly a lot more women in your profession now than when you started. That's true. And another thing that is changing I think is wonderful is that the collaboration between ESA and NASA is increasing. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a beautifully integrated mission with people working on both Huygens and Cassini from both groups. And I think that's a major step forward. Rita Beebe, we'll let you go. Please pass along our very best wishes to your lunchmate, Patsy Tombaugh,

and we will give your best wishes and greetings to Alan Stern, who will be joining us in a minute or two. Thank you. We have been talking with Rita Beebe. She has been an astronomer for more than three decades at New Mexico State University and was a close personal friend and colleague of Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, who we are honoring this week,

very near the 75th anniversary of his discovery of that far-off little planet. And we'll be back with Alan Stern of the New Horizons mission right after this. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. You can learn about these adventures and exciting

new discoveries from space exploration in the Planetary Report. The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine. It's just one of many member benefits. You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. And you can catch up on space exploration news and developments at our exciting and informative website, PlanetarySociety.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds.

Planetary Radio is back as we continue our special tribute on the 75th anniversary of the discovery of Pluto. And as you heard me say just before the break, we would come back with Alan Stern and sure enough he's on the line Alan is the Executive Director of the Department of Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute more importantly for our discussion today

he's the Principal Investigator for the New Horizons mission and as a past guest on Planetary Radio and Alan, thanks for coming back we don't have much time today for anything but a quick update about the mission. How are things coming? How is the spacecraft? Coming along really well. We're in the final stages of assembling the spacecraft.

The launch vehicle is under contract. We are, when I say we, I mean the project and NASA are applying for launch approval, which is a long process. We have five of the six scientific instruments on the spacecraft. The final boxes for the flight computers, avionics, et cetera, are going to be going on in the next month to six weeks. And you have a launch window that opens up a little bit less than a year from now? That's right. In fact, about 11 months from now. I know that the shape of this mission depends a little bit

on when you manage to lift off during that window. Yeah, if we lift off in the very earliest couple of weeks of the launch window, and most planetary launch windows are only a couple weeks long, we'll arrive in July of 2015. Then there's a period of time where we can launch, but it's a little bit harder to reach Pluto, and we'll arrive in July of 2016. And then in the waning part of the window, arrival dates slip out into 2017, 18, and 19.

But it's very probable that we would launch towards the beginning of the window. So we're expecting an arrival in 2015 or 2016. Nine, ten years for you to wait as the principal investigator. It's a good thing you've got a few other projects going on. Well, you know, there's a large community in the planetary science world that's waited 15 years to see this come to fruition as a launch. We think we're past halfway, so we're looking forward to that launch, if we're granted launch approval, and if we can get everything together

so that we know it'll be a safe journey. What are we going to learn about Pluto from a successful New Horizons mission? And I should add, beyond Pluto. Well, as you say, we're also going to the Kuiper Belt. But at Pluto, we're going to assay the atmospheric composition and structure. We're going to map the surface. Pluto, its moon, Charon, and any other satellites we find, we're going to map the surface compositions because we have a composition mapping spectrometer. And we'll be able to make a variety of other studies, for example, thermal maps

that tell us the temperature fields across the surface from place to place. So it's really a very complete analysis of the surfaces, atmospheres, and even the material flowing off the atmosphere and escaping from Pluto, which will directly sense with instruments on board New Horizons. I noticed on the website, and we'll put the link for that website, of course, at planetary.org, right on the page where people can hear this show and maybe are hearing this show, but I noticed there that 12 weeks out from Pluto, 12 weeks from the nearest encounter, you will already have a better image than can be gotten from the Hubble Space Telescope. Right. You know, it's a little appreciated fact that this encounter is going to last five months.

People think it's a weekend at Pluto, but in fact, because we have long focal length instruments, we're going to be getting better and better data as we approach and then recede from Pluto. So there will be a long period where we can study the surface at increasingly better detail, look for changes in the atmosphere or on the surface, and of course ultimately in the few days right around closest approach we make those best maps. What makes you most excited about going out to this place where nobody has been before? Well, I think as a human being and as an American, you know, I think back to the summer that I was 14 years old, 1971, when Dave Scott landed the first of the so-called J-series, the scientific

lunar landing missions. And when he stepped on the surface, he said, this is exploration at its greatest. And it's in that spirit that we're going to Pluto. We're opening up the third zone of the solar system, the Kuiper Belt, for the first time. And I think what we'll learn is everything we expect and more, because every planetary mission has always surprised us with the richness of nature. And that's what I think we look forward to most. What a great finish for this little tribute to that faraway planet, the edge of our solar system,

and beyond it to what we now know is a much farther out edge of our solar system. Alan, thanks very much, and we'll definitely check back with you as we get closer to that launch window opening up. Love to do it. Okay. Thanks, Matt. Alan Stern is the Executive Director of the Department of Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute and Principal Investigator for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the edge of our solar system, scheduled to arrive there on the 85th anniversary of the discovery of Pluto by Clyde Tombaugh.

I'll be back with Bruce Betts right after this return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. What sounds might a microphone sent to Mars record? Despite the fact that Mars' atmosphere is less than 1% as thick as the Earth's, sound on Mars wouldn't sound that different from sounds on Earth. The thin atmosphere would make the sounds relatively quieter, and it wouldn't transmit high-frequency noises efficiently, so sounds would sound lower-pitched than they do on the Earth.

The primary natural source of sound on Mars would be the wind, and in fact wind speeds at a landing site could be studied using the sound data. But any Mars mission would likely introduce unnatural sources of sound, such as the noises of motors and actuators in a robotic arm. Microphone recordings could provide engineers with valuable information as to the health and operation of their instruments without the high bandwidth requirements of video image data. Got a question about the universe?

Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. We're joined by the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, Dr. Bruce Batts. Bruce, happy post-Valentine's Day. Happy post-Valentine's Day, Valentine's Day to you. Some people will listen on Valentine's Day. Some people will hear it on Valentine's Day, but we can hope they already celebrated. May the spirit of love fill your planetary activities.

How was that? Spoken like a true romantic. Okay, why don't I just tell you what's up in the night sky? So when you're feeling romantic, you can go out there and look at planets. Saturn, Saturn's up in the evening. Very cool to see. It is partway up the sky after sunset in the east-southeast. It'll head to overhead in the south, and it is near the bright stars Castor and Pollux. It is very bright, about the same as Castor and Pollux, but has

a yellower hue. And if you check that out, have you checked it out again with your telescope? I have, and I actually tested, quizzed my daughter to make sure that she could find it. Good, good, good. Good. Yeah, fun in a small telescope. Another thing that's fun in a small telescope or even binoculars is Jupiter, which is rising in the east about four hours after sunset. It is the brightest object up these days now that Venus has vanished from our view. It's missing, but we're looking into it. But Jupiter, very, very bright. And if you look through binoculars or a small telescope,

you can actually see the Galilean satellites, the four large moons of Jupiter looking like little white dots of light, and you can watch them move from night to night. But you can also just take it in with your naked eyes and enjoy the beautiful sight of bright Jupiter. It is near the moon on February 26th, something to look forward to. And it's also up in the pre-dawn sky, brightest thing out at that time, up high in the sky. Mars, much dimmer, kind of reddish, very high in the sky before dawn.

Get ready for Mercury at the end of this month. And into March, we're going to have a nice apparition of Mercury for two or three weeks where it pops up in the west after dusk. On to this week in space history. I don't know if the listeners have heard this yet, Matt, but it turns out the February 18th is the 75th anniversary of Clyde Tombaugh discovering Pluto. Yeah, Bruce, I think they did hear a little bit about Pluto, at least if they've joined us a few minutes before what's up. And so happy 75th anniversary to you as well. And happy Diamond Jubilee to you as well, Matt. On to Random Space Fact!

This one takes us down to Earth for our Random Space Fact. Observatory domes, those things that have big telescopes in them, are kept during the day at the same temperature you expect that night. So it's cold inside those domes. They do that to try to avoid expansion and contraction of the telescope and warm air currents and things that will screw up your observations. This really confused me the first time I went to Palomar and went up. It was 65 degrees out. Up I went to the 200-inch dome.

I was so happy as a grad student. Walked in, and it was 35 degrees inside. And you had a T-shirt. I did. I did. The experienced astronomers definitely found it amusing. I think this was hazing. I think so.

Well, if I thought about it, I guess I would have figured it out. But I didn't. So anyway, on to the trivia contest. We asked you before on what date was Skylab launched and on what date did it re-enter the atmosphere? How'd we do out there, Matt? Lots of new contestants this week. We get, you know, we get our regulars and we love every one of them and they are in there every week. And because it's random, periodically one of them wins, but we get all these new people who show up.

And our winner this week, I think, I don't believe that he has entered the contest before. But here he is, and he's won. Kevin Blue. Kevin Blue of Clarkston, Washington said, Skylab was launched on May 14, 1973, fell back to Earth on July 11, 1979. Congratulations, Kevin. You're going to be getting a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Nice job.

We also heard from a couple of our regulars. This is the mother-daughter team. We thought they might be sisters for a while. They're the prebys. Kathy, who says, a little more detail, that when Skylab reentered, it scattered debris over the Indian Ocean in Western Australia, hurting no one except a cow, which I hadn't heard.

And then Bonnie had a, she's got an epitaph. Here lies Skylab, May 14, 1973, July 11, 1979. Beloved Sky and Lab. Loved being launched and reentering Earth's atmosphere. Unmanned in a cruel, cruel world. No, make that universe rest in peace. Should have been rest in pieces. Ah!

Nice one! What do you got? What do you got for next? I'm going to quickly take us to our next contest. Okay, this one's phrased a little funky here on the phrasing. What is unusual about some of the writing on some spacesuits? For example, those used for extravehicular activities outside the space shuttle. What is unusual about the writing on the spacesuits, or at least some of the writing?

No kidding. I am totally stumped. Okay. Ah, a baffling one. Go to planetary.org slash radio and give us the answer and win your Planetary Radio t-shirt, or at least make us happy. Get it to us. Get that entry into us by the 21st of February at noon Pacific time. And we promise you'll be considered for the next contest and maybe win that t-shirt.

All right, everyone, go out there, look up in the night sky and think about whose cell phone conversations radio waves are passing through you right now. Thank you and good night. If you're lucky, they might be Bruce Batts on a Monday or a Wednesday when he's doing his astronomy class from Cal State Dominguez Hills that you can see on the web. Check it out at planetary.org. There are links there that will tell you how to get there. Excellent.

We'll be back next week with another edition of Planetary Radio. In the meantime, maybe you can help us out. We'd like to get some listener comments we can share with radio stations that might be interested in adding us to their schedules. Write to planetaryradio at planetary.org. That's planetaryradio, one word, at planetary.org. Have a great week, everyone.