Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Public Outreach and Amateurs in Space!

Episode Date: September 29, 2008

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Reaching out to the public from space and your home computer, 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 of the Planetary Society. takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Last week we talked with Andrea about her late husband's dedication to opening up science for all people. I think Carl Sagan would be very pleased to see how his concept has been embraced. Around the world, amateur scientists, imaging experts,

and other assorted space exploration fans have worked their way inside some of the world's most ambitious interplanetary missions. We'll talk with Doug Ellison of unmannedspaceflight.com about this phenomenon. Bill Nye is in Scotland this week on Science Guy Business, and Emily Lakdawalla is on assignment. They'll both be back next time. What that means is that we'll have time to bring you someone special in a minute or so. First, though, how about those taikonauts? I woke the other morning to see one of the Chinese space travelers

waving the flag as he ventured outside their three-person capsule. Next up, rendezvous and docking practice. Did somebody say déjà vu? Meanwhile, I hope you've seen the very cool shot of side-by-side space shuttles standing in the Florida sun. And then there's the fourth time's a charm success of a SpaceX Falcon 1 booster, making Elon Musk a very happy man. Opportunity has set off on a trek it may never complete, leaving Victoria Crater for the much larger endeavor. And with all of this going on, NASA celebrated its 50th anniversary with a huge gala at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Among all the speeches and

presentations, one stood out. Ladies and gentlemen, a man who needs no introduction, here's just a bit of what Neil Armstrong had to say. We learned that Homo sapiens was not forever imprisoned by the gravitational field of Earth. Performance, efficiency, reliability, and safety of aircraft have improved remarkably. We've sent probes throughout the solar system and beyond. We've seen deeply into our universe and looked backward nearly to the beginning of time.

We were a competitor and perhaps the greatest peacetime competition of all time, the space race, USA versus USSR. Like a war, it was expensive. Like a war, each side wanted intelligence on what the other side was doing. And I'll not assert that the space race was a diversion which prevented a war. Nevertheless, it was a diversion. It was intense.

It did allow both sides to take the high road with the objectives of science and learning and exploration. Eventually, it provided a mechanism for engendering cooperation between adversaries. In that sense, among others, it was an exceptional national investment for each side. I submit that one of the most important roles of government is to inspire and motivate its citizens, and particularly its young citizens, to love to learn, to strive to participate in and contribute to societal progress. By that measure, NASA will, without doubt, rank in the top tier of government enterprises. The goal is far more than just going faster and higher and further.

Our goal, indeed our responsibility, is to develop new options for future generations, options in expanding human knowledge, exploration, human settlements, and resource development outside in the universe around us. Our highest and most important hope is that the human race will improve its intelligence, its character, and its wisdom so that we'll be able to properly evaluate and choose among those options and the many others they will encounter in the years ahead. And I look forward to watching the progress and those exciting developments and hearing the status report when we gather again for NASA's 100th anniversary. Neil Armstrong speaking at NASA's 50th anniversary celebration in Washington.

While Neil was being applauded, Doug Ellison was in the German town of Münster attending the Third European Planetary Science Congress, also known as Europlanet. But Doug is not a scientist, and he doesn't work for a space agency. So what does he do that got him invited to make a presentation? Well, Doug is dictator for life, self-appointed, of an online forum called unmannedspaceflight.com. The site is a gathering place for a new breed of amateur explorers and popularizers. They are working on their own and increasingly with mission personnel to share space science results with the public. Sometimes they even create those results. with the public. Sometimes they even create those results.

Doug, it's great fun, and we're very grateful to have you speaking to us from the site of Europlanet. And where are you right now? It kind of sounds like a place of worship. Yeah, it's not so much kind of religious worship. It's more kind of, you know, worshiping science in here. The conference is actually winding down. It's an afternoon of the final day here, so I've managed to find one of the empty session rooms. As soon as the thing winds down, the rooms begin to empty and the people go home. So I'm in a huge kind of

echoey lecture theater, but it's just me sat at the back. So I apologize for the echo, but it's the quietest place I can find. That's quite all right. Well, we should get Bruce in there to say random space facts sometime. It would go well here. Listen, we're going to talk mostly about outreach and its role in space exploration. Europlanet itself, how has the show been?

How has the conference been? I think everyone here would probably agree it's not been a week full of dramatic scientific revelation. There haven't been any major headlines. There have been quite a few press releases that have come out, but people who read the blog entries I've made this week will probably not see those because they'll be in the mainstream media. I was hunting for little interesting and discussable topics here and there. But even if there's no really good science at a conference like this,

just the very act of bringing together scientists is always a good thing. We've got a huge contingent from the USA this time. I sat next door to Alfred McEwan from the high-rise camera earlier. Tom and Linda Spilker were in a poster session. It's fantastic to get all these minds from around the world, and you crash them into one another, and you're only going to get good things happening. So, not full of revelation, but full of good discussion, if nothing else. Well, I'm envious, and by the way, Linda

Spilker is going to be back on the show in a week or two. Probably a couple of weeks to do another of her Cassini updates. Listen, very briefly, if you had to pick one highlight out of the show, from everything you've written up in the blog at planetary.org. What would you point to?

I think it would have to be the update I heard this morning for Kaguya, or as the science team is still calling it, Celine, the Japanese lunar orbiter. They gave some kind of not rich scientific details, but, you know, the spacecraft's doing well. They've had more than an hour of this beautiful high-definition TV footage that they've been filming. They're getting better spectra. They're getting great imaging coverage. Their two little subsatellites that they launched off Kaguya

once it got to the moon are both doing well. In fact, the first of those will actually impact the moon next February. It doesn't have any propulsion to keep itself in lunar orbit, so you hang around the moon long enough, eventually you crash into it. And so next February, unfortunately, on the lunar far side, one of the two relay satellites will be crashing into the ground. But most of the instruments are doing very, very well, and they're hopefully going to get an extension there.

Their primary mission technically ends in October, and they're hoping to get many months of extension thereafter. So Spacecraft's doing well. They're getting good science. They're just taking their time to make sure they've got something interesting before they start telling people about it. That, in fact, is one of the things that we want to talk about, that taking your time to make data available.

I think it's safe to say that you are one of the world's leading advocates for amateur space exploration outreach. And much of that takes place through your website, unmannedspaceflight.com, which we will suggest that people pay a visit to. I think you're a firm believer in letting the information out. I am. And in fact, fortunately, you know, so are a few scientists in the USA. Space exploration is a very, very expensive thing to do. You know, we can't pretend that it isn't. You have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars or euros or pounds or whatever your home country is to go and do these sorts of things.

And so to let people have the most rapid, the most thorough, the most broad access to all of this stuff on an ad hoc, as it's happening basis, gives people a better idea of what their money is doing and reminds them of what it's doing very, very regularly. If nothing else, it's a beautiful way of justifying your salary. But also at a certain level, people can come along for the ride. I think Spirit and Opportunity and Phoenix as well, of course, are a good example of an unfolding adventure that you can follow along with just by looking at the images. You can see a new trench has been dug, or you can see that a new drive has taken place, or that a new target has been reached. And then you can take it up even to the next level, and that's what people do on

the forum, is take these raw images, you know, sometimes a bit stretched and a bit JPEG-y and a bit ugly, though they can sometimes be. These people will pull them together, and they will produce some stunning mosaics and animations, and even go as far as producing software to really pull it all together and see these missions happening in context, and to kind of become a bridging point between what's a comparatively easy thing for scientists just to throw out there and then producing swathes and swathes of really accessible, easy-to-understand publicity material

via this community is a great way of letting people know what you're up to. In your blog entry from September 25th, you give some very specific examples of where amateurs have really been able to contribute in ways that the scientists might not have gotten around to for a while, in some cases, I suppose, if ever. Yeah, I think that certainly, you know, we amateurs don't have to be kind of scientifically responsible. You know, we don't have to be accountable to anybody in particular. And so, you know, one particularly well-known example, perhaps, is the cover image that made it to Aviation Week magazine

a couple of years ago, and it's not something you'd see Cornell or JPL putting out there because it's not a particularly scientifically accurate representation of Mars, but it's a very aesthetically pleasing representation of Mars, and it's one that Aviation Week liked and thought it would make a good cover image. That sort of thing happens quite often with people taking, say, black and white nav cam data from Spirit and Opportunity, colorizing it based on what Pan Am is telling us, but it's not color data from these images,

and producing stunning views, many of which make it to places like Astronomy Picture of the Day and so forth. I also think, for example, of the image that Emily put together, the montage she did of all the asteroids and comets that have been visited to scale, in the same scale, which apparently nobody had thought to do before. Are you seeing the amateur world have some influence on folks who are lucky enough to get paid to do outreach at places like JPL and elsewhere around the world? The New Horizons Jupiter flyby a couple of years ago. And John Spencer, who's actually a fellow Brit, but he works on the New Horizons science team.

And he came onto the forum and says, right, you know, New Horizons is launched. Here's a website you can go to to find out what the trajectory will be like as we fly past Jupiter. Do you have any ideas amongst yourselves of where we should look and when we should release the shuttle to take pictures just because they're pretty? You know, what are our Kodak moments for this flyby? And it's not every day you get invited to come up with ideas for an $800 million spacecraft.

So we, you know, oh boy, did we give suggestions. And astonishingly, you know, four of these did make it through into the sequence. And a couple of them are probably the signature images from that flyby, especially one of Europa rising behind Jupiter or Io spewing forth in that way that it so beautifully does, juxtaposed against Europa's two beautiful crescent moons. I'll be right back with more from Doug Ellison of UnmannedSpaceFlight.com. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo.

I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail.

It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan.

Doug Ellison loves space science, and he shares that love with other amateurs and the general public on his website, unmannedspaceflight.com. It's a forum for a growing force of talented, highly motivated space fanatics that use their home computers and skills to enhance and enlarge the influence of robotic missions throughout our solar system. Doug was invited to make a presentation about public outreach at last week's Europlanet conference in Germany.

He spoke to me via Skype from one of the empty lecture halls. The final example, I'd say, is very recent, which is, in fact, quite pertinent, with the decision to take opportunity on its very, very long drive to this Endeavour crater. One of the rover drivers who has actually came on the forum and said, perhaps you guys can give us a bit of help, a bit of review of the distance between here and Endeavour crater, and looking at the high-rise imagery that that team put out there so quickly and so easily accessible, we can review where the worst dune fields are, where the easy driving is.

And people are doing some pretty advanced mathematical analysis of these pictures and pulling out good driving routes so that an opportunity might make it all the way to this crater. So it was fun early on just to grab these images and have some fun with them. But now it's coming back and people are saying, okay, maybe you can help us achieve something, which is really very, very nice. Also opportunities that are being taken advantage of now by folks around the world,

and especially, I guess, in the United States, using new tools for getting the word out. I'm thinking of the conversation that you had with Veronica McGregor. You know, back in the 60s and the 70s, that people will wait 80s to see a picture from a spacecraft on their newspaper. It's turned completely upside down. And now the outreach specialists at JPL, Veronica in particular, are using this new media to go straight to the people. The Twitter feed that they started as just an experiment has actually taken off and hopefully become a model for new ways to getting out to people in the future. You managed to spend a couple of minutes with her there at Europlanet.

Let's listen to a little bit of that conversation. We have, in the past few years, ventured into some of these new venues, such as YouTube. We post all of our videos to our own website, but we also add them to YouTube. We started podcasting and have those available on iTunes. We've done that for about the last two and a half years and they're very popular. And we're always looking for new areas to go into. And this past year we began a JPL Facebook page and that's doing okay. We've got a couple thousand people following us there on Facebook. And then earlier this year we started a page on Twitter for the Mars Phoenix lander.

Now, the Phoenix Twitter feed has become something of an Internet phenomenon in some respects. How did that start, and how did it get that friendly first-person perspective? Earlier in the year we were discussing different ways to put out information on the mission, and we had thought about doing a blog, which we did do, a landing blog, which was very successful. But a blog takes quite a bit of time to do and involves multiple people on staff, between the person writing the blog and editors and web personnel posting it. So we wanted to do something that was a little faster and a little bit easier. And someone mentioned Twitter. And not many of us had ever even heard of Twitter, didn't know what

exactly it was. But we looked into it and realized it was a way that really one person could do it. It would take up very little amount of their time. And we could post updates that not only would go to the web, but also people on Twitter can sign up to receive messages on their cell phone. So it was a way of delivering news we thought of the landing over the three-day holiday weekend that Phoenix landed. We wanted to make sure that everybody had multiple ways of getting the news. And early updates were kind of Phoenix is doing this, but now it's this very kind of approachable and kind of cheery first-person perspective. How did that come around?

When I started doing the posting, and I took on that assignment, I thought it was something I could do without invading too much of my time doing the other projects. I started writing on Twitter, and Twitter only allows you to use 140 characters, which is about two sentences. It's very difficult to put into two sentences if you're using up half your characters saying the spacecraft is traveling or Phoenix is going to do something today. I realized quickly that if I just said I am in the first person, I could put so much more information into each individual tweet, as they're called. And I did that before we started landing, maybe three weeks out, and I really thought people would respond saying, that's silly, don't do that.

And instead, everybody started looking at it as if they were getting their update straight from the lander, and it took on a personality, and it's just been very popular to do it that way. You've got kind of 35,000 close friends as a result who are very fond of their tweeted Phoenix. We're on Sol 120, that sort of number not that long from what is going to be a fairly certain mission end how are you going to handle that how are you going to say goodbye people seem to get very upset every time i even mention the fact that it will succumb to the ice and the darkness soon um so it's going to be a difficult time to say goodbye really i love this audience this is is a fantastic, intelligent, technology-savvy audience

that has fantastic questions. They're humorous. And it'll be tough to go. But one thing I want to make sure is that all the followers are encouraged to pick another space mission and follow another one as well. Don't stop with just Phoenix. Now they've realized they're interested in space exploration and I want to make sure they continue. With the growth of new media and kind of

experiments like this having gone quite as well as they have, what advice would you give to other space missions in the USA and here in Europe? Well, there's a lot of new ways of putting information out on the internet. It's just a matter of being willing to explore with many different ones. Not all of them will take off, and I don't know if Twitter is going to be the most popular thing around two, three years from now. It might be. I think something, if not Twitter, will be a service like it. So it's a little bit of being willing to experiment and see how things work.

I think Twitter has worked far better than Facebook, which I wouldn't have thought six, eight months ago. So it is a little bit of experimentation. And again, just looking for all those different ways now that we can take advantage of to put the information out to the public. That's Veronica McGregor of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She's on the outreach team for the Phoenix mission, and she only plays a spacecraft on the Internet. Doug, thank you very much for having that conversation with her. Where are you headed from here? Back home to add more to unmannedspaceflight.com? Yeah, back home, flying home tomorrow.

Dinner with Veronica and Alice Weston from the Cassini outreach team tonight just before we all head home tomorrow morning. And then, you know, trying to get ready and do some more outreach. I'm doing a talk to a public meeting in a couple of weeks' time, trying to do my part to try and tell people about this exciting stuff that's going on out there. Well, we will simply recommend that you look in on some of Doug's more detailed description of what took place at Europlanet, including his write-up about the importance of outreach, which began in the blog, Emily Lakdawalla's blog at planetary.org,

on September 21st and is not finished as we speak. Doug, thank you very much for bringing us up to date, and best of luck with the website. Thank you very much indeed, Matt. Doug Ellison is the dictator for life of the online forum known as unmannedspaceflight.com and is known around the world for his outreach activities done as an amateur. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society.

He's here. He's ready to go, but trumpetless. Welcome. Thank you. You're going to be teasing people because we had several people say they were really looking forward to that trumpet solo, Because we had several people say they were really looking forward to that trumpet solo. And they really wanted me to make sure that I pushed you to provide a little concert. That's only because they haven't heard me. Well, but you said it's here.

You said it's here, but we're not going to. Oh, of course. Because you'd have to oil the valves. I would. I can't play now. I have to oil the valves. Yeah, all right. And then I have to wash my hair. All right, next week. Next week. Yeah, all right. And then I have to wash my hair. All right, next week.

Next week. Yeah, don't count on it. But I'm glad people are excited. Don't worry, folks. I'll keep pushing. What's up? You've got me so frazzled now. I don't even know what's up.

Jupiter. Jupiter's up in the evening sky, still looking lovely, bright. South to southwest in the early evening, it's the really bright star-like object. It's in Sagittarius above the so-called teapot. And if you've never checked out the constellation Sagittarius, the brightest stars do bear quite a resemblance to a teapot. So go check it out and bond with the constellations of the night sky. You can also check out now Venus in the very early evening. So within a half hour or so after sunset, look over in the direction of the sun over in the west, and it will be the bright

star-like object over there in the bluish purplish sky as it gets dark. Sounds lovely. It is lovely. I saw it. It's lovely. And in the pre-dawn sky, Saturn, kind of tricky, but will keep getting easier and easier. Saturn up in the pre-dawn. Again, look, half hour to hour before sunrise over in the east. And you can try to check out Saturn. Looking kind of yellowish. But it'll get easier to observe in the coming months, and we'll keep you posted. This week in space history, 50 years.

50th anniversary of NASA. oh yeah right this week they've been celebrating you know for forever but this is the week i didn't tell you before we started we had a little tiny clip of neil the man at the top of today's show because he spoke at the 50th anniversary gala wish we could get him on this radio show. That would be cool. Which leads us to go on to Random Space Fact! Now, very nice, but we also have a special

guest Random Space Fact tour. Alright. Random Space Fact! Doug Ellison, our guest on the primary segment today, taking advantage of that great haul that he found at Europlanet. Nice acoustics. I'll say. What is the Random Space Fact?

Random Space Fact, NASA, 50 years old. I've got a couple of space facts for you. NASA began operations, of course, October 1st, 1958, absorbing into itself the earlier NACA, National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, sucking it in intact with 8,000 employees and with a jump start already with three major research laboratories, Langley, Ames, and Lewis, which is now Glenn, and two smaller test facilities. The head of NASA is called the NASA Administrator, of course. There have been 13 different NASA Administrators in NASA's 50 years. One served twice, James Fletcher. We just might come back to NASA Administrators and the trivia questions.

Stay tuned. Meanwhile, we'll talk about the trivia question from last time around, though. And we asked you about planets and internal magnetic fields of the eight major planets in our solar system. Or even if you take nine, how many of those have an internal magnetic field? So the answer you were looking for was six. Six, indeed. Hey, you've got it in front of you, I think. Our winner is Torsten Zimmer in Germany, who has won a couple of times in the past,

and indeed identified the six planets. Yes, so all but Venus and Mars. Mars is a little tricky, which is why I kept focusing on global magnetic fields, because it does have patches of frozen-in magnetic field in its crust from presumably a past global magnetic field, but no longer. But everything else out there, four giant planets, Earth, Mercury, all have global magnetic fields. And didn't Torsten say that there may be a lot of other reasons to be attracted to Venus,

but magnetic field is not one of them. All right, anyway, Torsten, we're going to send you a T-shirt. What do you got for next time? Who was the first NASA administrator? Okay. not one of them. All right, anyway, Torsten, we're going to send you a T-shirt. What do you got for next time? Who was the first NASA administrator? Okay. In 1958, first NASA administrator. Go to planetary.org slash radio.

Find out how to get us your entry. I don't know why I snorted at that. That's a perfectly legitimate question. I have no idea why I snorted at that. Well, thank you. We'll see after you stop taping whether you know the answer. It's the 6th of October that you'll need to get that to us. Coming up on the 6th anniversary here, too, of Planetary Radio. October 6th, Monday at 2 p.m. to get us your answer.

Thanks. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about the organizing power of bookshelves. Thank you, and good night. I'll close out with pulling out the trumpet. You go ahead. Okay, go for it. Well, what can I say about bookshelves as we listen to the girl from Mipinema in the background? Next time, we'll try and get him less of a virtual trumpet. That's Bruce Betts,

the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. He's a trumpet hero. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.