Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Ray Bradbury Turns 90 and The Best Mars Map Ever

Episode Date: August 30, 2010

Ray Bradbury Turns 90 and The Best Mars Map EverLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ray Bradbury turns 90 and a new map of his red planet, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Happy birthday, Ray, you old Martian you. Your hometown celebrated last week, and we'll hear a bit of the party at City Hall. Then, and how could this be more appropriate, we'll talk to Phil Christensen about the most accurate map of Mars ever created. You can make it even better. That's not a bad start, but we've also got Bill Nye, the

Science and Planetary Guy's commentary, and later today, Bruce Betts will join me to give away Packing for Mars, Mary Roach's great new book about human space travel. Ray Bradbury arrived in Los Angeles at the age of 14. That was in 1934. So it shouldn't be a surprise that his hometown for the last 76 years would want to celebrate the beloved writer's 90th birthday. Here is L.A. City Council President Eric Garcetti getting the party started. The audio quality is pretty terrible, but we think you'll enjoy it anyway. So it is my honor to declare today with this council and the mayor that we declare August 22nd through August 28th, 2010, Ray Bradbury Week in the City of Los Angeles, and we encourage the residents of the city to celebrate this

literary master's life and his work. Please, a round of applause for Ray Bradbury. Every Council person and many other guests took the mic to greet Ray. Planetary Society Executive Director Lou Friedman arrived with a giant birthday card with messages from 1,500 well-wishers. Lou saluted Ray for his wonderful works of fiction. But I want to speak about something else, which is the influence he's had on science as a scientist. He wrote the most important statement that has inspired scientists in my life and among my colleagues for many years. We are the Martians. And that has put very much, it has put all of us on Mars, Ray. It has put our team on Mars. It's put our team that we work with at JPL on Mars.

You've influenced an enormous number of people to not only be on Mars, but to bring Mars to us. We had the honor a couple of years ago to actually put you on Mars. I don't know if you remember this. But we had this little mini CD, which includes works by Ray Bradbury, which is now up on Mars on the Phoenix spacecraft. up on Mars on the Phoenix spacecraft. And it's part of bringing this world's literary tradition to another. Then it was Mr. Bradbury's turn to take the microphone.

Here's just a bit of what he had to say. I suppose you wonder why I've called you here today. My God, what a day this is. This is a cakewalk. You know what you're doing to this old man? You're making me cry. It's really quite amazing. I'm strange it must be for you to see before you this Martian.

So having a Martian among you, isn't that incredible? So God bless you for this honor. I thank you and God bless you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much. And let's sing him happy birthday. Happy birthday to you.

People love it. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Ray. Happy birthday to you. Ray Bradbury at the celebration of his 90th birthday by the city of Los Angeles. We thank the city for allowing us to use its podcast content. Much more to do on today's show, so let's get started with Emily Lakdawalla's Best of the Planetary Society blog, which had a decidedly geeky feel last week. Yeah, this week was all about me figuring out how to use some cool software tools to make it easier to understand what's going on now and what

happened in the past. Well, and also to help the rest of us understand, and not too geeky, is Google Calendar, but you've done something very useful with it. That's right. I think a lot of people use Google Calendar to organize their lives. I recently started doing that, and I realized that I should create some public space calendars that people could add into their own Google views in order to follow what's going on with current missions in space and also what's going on with science meetings here on Earth. And I even created a separate calendar to follow all the minutiae of the Cassini tour of the Saturn system. So there's various calendars that you can add to your own view to follow what's going on up there in space. A nice little free gift from Emily to all of us. All right, let's move on now to the Red Planet. Yeah, and here's another Google tool that I learned how to use this week. Google Earth allows you to visualize what's going on on Earth,

and Google came out a couple of years ago with a version, Google Mars, that allows you to visualize where images are and where the rovers have driven on Mars. Well, I recently figured out how to take the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter data, which is an instrument that flew on Mars Global Surveyor and fired a laser at the surface and timed how long it took the laser pulse to bounce back and figure out how high things were off the Martian surface. I figured out a way to get all of the individual laser shot points into Google Mars. And the reason that's important is because they were separated by at least 300 meters apiece. So our measurements of Martian topography is actually at a relatively low resolution compared to the daily traverses of the rovers.

And it's interesting to see exactly where we measure the topography along the surface compared to where Opportunity is driving. One interesting thing that I discovered is that the nearest rim of Endeavour Crater where Opportunity is headed falls right between two MOLA orbital tracks. So MOLA doesn't even notice the rim of Endeavour Crater, at least not its western rim. You do provide enough information for other people to try and follow in your footsteps across Mars. Even if you don't do that, folks, it makes for some very interesting reading and some beautiful images. And how about those hills rimming the crater Endeavour? Yeah, and here, once again, it's an example of how I'm trying to help inform people on how they can actually dig into the original science data and visualize it for

themselves. The rovers have to deliver all of their science data to the planetary data system within six months of its acquisition. And it's been about exactly six months since Opportunity first sighted those hills on the rim of Endeavour. So I went in, I got the original science data, and I made what I think is, if I do say so myself, a very pretty panorama showing the first view of those distant hills. It's quite beautiful. Emily, as always, thanks very much. You're welcome, Matt. My favorite planetary geek and the science and technology coordinator for the Planetary Society,

also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. That is Emily Lakdawalla. And in a moment, Phil Christensen, another guy who studies Mars and uses MOLA data. He'll be with us right after we hear from Bill. Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, soon to be executive director of the Planetary Society. And this week, the exciting news in space happened here in the Earth's atmosphere, right on the heels of the successful launch of Falcon 9, a commercial rocket to take things and maybe people into Earth orbit. The same company, SpaceX, had a successful splashdown test of their Dragon space capsule.

Now, those of you who listen to this program regularly may recall back in the spring, we had a live show. Jeff Rakiki, a structural engineer at SpaceX, described how they're not starting from scratch. Not at SpaceX. No, they read the old National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA documents, to learn how it was done 40 years ago, and they figured out how to do it again. And they dropped this capsule from a very powerful helicopter at 18,000 feet above the Earth's ocean. It landed successfully. These parachutes deployed without ripping apart. They all diswreathed, which is a fabulous verb, successfully. And they all opened and the thing splashed down beautifully. So this technology from 40 years ago is not lost. It's being recaptured by the

commercial space sector of the future space economy. This is exciting. This is very cool. And by the way, there's proposals to give tax breaks to people that get into commercial space exploration. And this will then unburden the many space agencies around the world of having to ferry stuff into low Earth orbit. We can have commercial space ventures do that. Then we can go on to explore new and exciting places in deep space. So more advancements in space here in the Earth's atmosphere. I've got to fly, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. Next up, the best map ever of Mars with Phil Christensen. That's just a minute away when Planetary Radio continues. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth.

That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join 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. 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. Phil Christensen has joined us on the show several times. He directs the Mars Spaceflight Facility at Arizona State University in Tempe. He usually has exciting news for us about the Themis instrument. That's the thermal emission imaging system on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. Themis and Odyssey have now been circling Ray Bradbury's planet for almost nine years. The pioneering device has revealed many of the planet's secrets,

and in the process has also snapped tens of thousands of infrared pictures of the Martian surface. Those images have now been assembled into one heck of a jigsaw puzzle that you can explore and even improve. Phil is the Themis Principal Investigator. He talked to me a few days ago from his ASU office. Phil, it has been a little over a year since we last talked, and that was about Google Maps. Now this new, amazing map seems like you're in the Mars cartography business. You're right, and that's where we've headed. And that's the beauty of

having a camera that's been able to image the entire surface of Mars. And, you know, whether we want it to or not, that's put us in the cartography business because it's like, wow, we've got to turn all these 100,000 images into a map. Well, people have to take a look at this map because when I got the press release a month ago, I did. And at first glance, zoomed all the way out, I thought, what is this? And then I zoomed in and I zoomed in and I zoomed in and, zoomed all the way out, I thought, what is this? And then I zoomed in, and I zoomed in, and I zoomed in, and I zoomed in, and it is really awesome. The link, the URL to get to it, at least at the Arizona State site, is a little convoluted, but we will definitely provide that at planetary.org. Just click the radio link up in the top corner.

Before we get to that, remind anybody who maybe wasn't listening a little over a year ago what Themis is. Themis is two cameras in one. It's an infrared camera, which is the first of its kind, and that's actually the imagery that we used to make this map. There's also a visible camera associated with it, and we're chugging along trying to image all of Mars at the higher resolution vis data, but we haven't covered the whole planet yet. The great thing about the infrared, in the daytime, the infrared images look very much like a normal image that you would see. The sunlit side of craters, for example, are hot, and therefore they look bright,

and the shadowed sides are cold, and therefore they're dark. So to your eye, it looks very much like a typical image of Mars. We also have nighttime temperature data that we have another map for, and those give us a lot of information about the rocks and how many rocks are present. But it's the daytime, just explore, look at Mars, zoom in, zoom out, scroll around. That's what we've put together, and we've put it together from these daytime temperature maps. Something like 21,000 images? Yes, and that was the challenge. The thing to me that's fantastic about this map is it lets you, as you said, look at the entire planet at once, which in this particular map doesn't look very impressive, but you can zoom in to where you

can see things. The pixel size is 100 meters. So literally, you can see regions the size of the western United States or zoom in to see features the size of a football field. That flexibility is what really makes this map pretty special. It's been called the most accurate map of Mars so far. What does that actually mean? Well, imagine you've got 21,000 images taken over the course of five or six years from a spacecraft orbiting. It took a huge amount of effort to geographically reference those images. effort to geographically reference those images. And so what we've tried to do, there's a topographic map by a laser altimeter called MOLA that's really, really precise as to where everything is located. However, the resolution of that map is like a kilometer. So the first thing we had to do

was tie all of our 21,000 images to each other and take out all the seams and make it look pretty, which was a huge amount of work. And then we tied that set of images back to the MOLA data. So it was actually geographically accurate. So if, for example, you said, I want to land on the floor of this crater, the engineers trying to land there would actually land in the right spot. So we tied the images to each other. We got rid of all the seams and blemishes between the images, and then we accurately referenced it to this MOLA map. Again, that's the first time we've had the data to where we could do that.

So this isn't just a pretty picture, in a sense, for laypeople like me to enjoy. This is really going to help our future exploration of the planet? Absolutely. You know, I'm a geologist, and to geologists, it's all about context. So if I'm looking at a really high-resolution image, or, say, a beautiful high-rise image, you know, you're looking at a tiny little postage stamp on Mars, you need that context. What's it like around this image? What do the surroundings look like? And scientists definitely will use this map to give the context, put things in perspective.

And so, yeah, we tried to do both. We tried to make it something that was really engaging to the public, but was also a rigorous scientific product that researchers can and will use as the foundation for the work that they're doing. site which has, I guess, it's hard to believe it's low-res, but the low-res version that I've played with. But it also mentioned a site which might be more for professionals or for scientists doing this research with much higher resolution images. Have I got that right? And really, how much data, how many gigabytes are we really talking about out of these 21,000 images? Themis alone has returned in raw data about a terabyte of data to the Earth. And those data are compressed in fancy ways. On the computer that we have here, the Themis images, once we've uncompressed them and calibrated them and processed them and geometrically projected them, it's about 20 terabytes of data that comes from the Themis image collection. Part of that

is in this map, but it's still, you know, a huge amount of data go into this. What we've been trying to do is, you know, I love Themis. We built it. We run it. It's our baby. But there's a whole lot of other beautiful cameras in orbit around Mars. And so in building on this tool, we have built other tools that let people look at every image taken by any camera that's ever orbited Mars. And in some of those images, you know, you've got resolutions where the pixels are 30 centimeters. I mean, it's insane. And so this marriage, as you said, with our data, you can zoom in and zoom in and zoom in, and then using these other images, you can keep right on zooming to where you can see things. You could see a car sitting on the surface of Mars.

And that's something we've really tried hard to do, is to let scientists, interested people, anyone who wants, look at all of these images. Now, is that the Mars Image Explorer site that you've also put together at Arizona State? Yes, it is. And we have a variety of tools. The Image Explorer is a map of Mars that shows little outlines. You can click on those and bring up the images. We have another tool that we call JMMARS, which is more for researchers,

but that lets you literally look at almost all the data acquired from any instrument, not just cameras. So in the process of becoming cartographers, we've also gotten extremely committed to the concept of making Mars accessible to people and going beyond the boundaries of just our own experiments and our own cameras, but really trying to make these tools that are relatively easy to use that people can just sit in their armchair and explore away. There is yet another site that I want to get to before we run out of time, and that appears to give the public a way to get involved with making this map even more perfect. That's true. I mean, computers can go so far. We've got these 21,000 images.

We have software tools that do the best they can to align the images to each other. But that's not perfect. And so we've been working with JPL and with Microsoft to come up with a site where anyone who wants to can look at these images and manually move them around to align them. And that makes a huge difference. Again, a computer can do so well, and the map we've made is the best that's ever been made, but we can make it significantly better. But that involves people looking and moving manually, moving images. Now, imagine if I hired two undergraduates and said, OK, you've got to align 21,000 images.

They would probably run screaming from the room and say, that's too much. But it's amazing what these experiences have shown that the public, there's thousands of people who are willing to help us align 10 or 20 images each, and suddenly you're done. Yeah, this sounds like, you know, we're used to SETI at home. This sounds like Mars mapping at home. That's exactly what it's intended to be. And, you know, we're really trying to set it up so that this isn't just, it's really useful to us, that this is information that will it's really useful to us, that this is

information that will go into making these maps better, and there's just no way we could do it on our own. We need to, you know, get the public helping us. So that is the Be a Martian site, and we'll put up a link to that as well, but folks who listen to this show, I can just about guarantee you a good time if you check out this new and most accurate map ever of the red planet. Phil, it is always a pleasure. Thanks so much. You're very welcome. It's been great talking.

Phil Christensen is the principal investigator for the Themis camera on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. He also directs Arizona State University's Mars spaceflight facility, And that's where we've been talking to him today. Don't go away. I'll be right back with Bruce Betts for our weekly look at the night sky. And I think we'll give away a T-shirt. Time for What's Up? Way too early on a Sunday morning for yours truly and Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. And we're both going to stay awake, right?

Bruce? Bruce? Oh, what? Hey, Matt. How are we on? Time for a showbiz. Hey, everybody. Let's talk about the night sky, shall we? Things that you should look at. Among them are planets. And in this case, we've got Venus getting low in the west but it'll still keep hanging on for another month or so in the evening sky. After sunset it's the super bright thing still really easy to see. Harder to see because of the twilight glare is Mars which is a little above Venus and Saturn which is far to its right and all of this pretty low on the horizon. Again, Venus easy.

The others, you might pull out some binoculars. Don't point them at the sun. Wait till the sun sets, in fact. What's also easy to see is Jupiter looking like an extremely bright star-like object over in the other part of the sky. So check it out in the early evening in the east and middle of the night, high in the sky. Brightest star-like object out at that point.

Let us move on to this week in space history. Pioneer 11, 1979, becomes the first spacecraft to fly past Saturn. Forty years ago, a highlight in 1970, NASA cancels the last two planned lunar landings. Yeah, that's a highlight. We wanted the Saturn V rockets to be nice museum displays at those centers. Far more important than continuing the first ever exploration of a body other than our own planet. Yeah, I get that. But back to the positives.

No, wait, I have to insult Richard Nixon first. Thank you so But back to the positives. No, wait. I have to insult Richard Nixon first. Thank you so much, Dick. So anyway, in 1976, Viking 2 landed on Mars quite successfully. And 2006, Smart One intentionally crashes into the moon. European Space Agency spacecraft starting a whole party of lunar crashes yeah i guess they'd actually started even before then on to this should be good so much sleepy pressure kind of creepy, but distinctive. Well, not creepy is the Big Dipper.

Yes, that asterism. And I just wanted to pull that word out. So not officially a constellation, but that asterism of what appeared to the naked eye to be seven bright stars in the northern sky. You know, it's got all sorts of names around the world, Matt. I'm not surprised. Things that represent entirely different things than we see it as? You know what's interesting? I actually find it almost boring. Compared to some of the constellations that get really strange and weird, a lot of those kind of make sense or are fairly consistent around the world. So the whole

dipper ladle thing gets pulled in a lot, used a lot in Asia as well as here. We also have carts are popular. I never thought of that. I can kind of see that. Yeah. Drinking gourd coming from parts of Africa. Great Britain alone has a number of things, and they like the plowow occasionally pull out the saucepan and my personal favorite which apparently is less common the butcher's cleaver oh yeah the dutch uh going with big bear of course uh nicely tied to ursa major the official constellation that's part of we also have just seven of whatever so uh we got seven gods, seven plinths.

Okay, no, I made that one up. It's very important in Taoist astrology. Taoist. Not Dallas astrology because I know it's big in Dallas, bigger than Houston, but Taoist astrology. Somewhere in there, there's a Texas big things joke. I'm just going to leave it to the listener. All right, let us move on to the trivia contest. And we asked you, speaking of naming, where did Lutetia, the asteroid that Rosetta successfully flew by and countered, got cool data for recently.

Where did it get its name? How did we do, Matt? Quite well. Very good response to this. The winner of the Planetary Radio t-shirt is Reynard Primulando of Williamsburg, Virginia, who said Paris. He kept it very simple, but that's quite accurate. I'm going to go to our friend with the European Space Agency, Uwe Voigt, who happens to be the head of the Flight Dynamics Division there and is a regular listener. He said the name Letitia, Latin name of ancient Paris, was given since the asteroid was discovered by Hermann Mayer Salomon Goldschmidt, Salomon Goldschmidt, who was standing on his balcony on November 15, 1852, when he discovered this and named it in honor of the city that he happened to be standing in at that moment. So this is what the Romans used to call Paris.

But our winner, as I said, Renard Primalando, and we're going to get a shirt out to him. And you know what? I didn't tell you we got a special prize for next time around. Yay! What is it, Matt? A copy of Packing for Mars. It's actually a pre-publication copy, paperback. That terrific book that

we talked to Mary Roach about a couple of weeks ago. We're going to send that out to whoever answers this one and gets picked by Random.org. That's really cool. I'm in kind of a constellations mood these days. So of the official 88 constellations, which one is the smallest? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter.

Interesting question. You have until the 6th, September 6th at 2 p.m. Pacific time to answer that interesting question. And I think we're done. I did forget one thing, which is what the people farther down in the southern hemisphere call the Big Dipper. They call it that annoying asterism that we never get to see. It's not a very catchy title, but it is effective. I hope it's a good acronym, but I'm too tired to figure it out.

All right, everybody. Go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about deodorant. Is it really necessary? Thank you, and good night. Let me assure you that this is merely a philosophical question for Bruce. Otherwise, it would be even more important that we're doing this via

Skype today. He is the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. I smell sweet! Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up. I smell sweet! Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Keep looking up, Mr. Horkheimer. Thank you.