Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Ready for Space: LightSail 2 Update

Episode Date: March 22, 2017

The Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 solar sail spacecraft is ready to be packed away for its ride to orbit on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Mat Kaplan checks the mission’s status with team members.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A LightSail 2 update, 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. The Planetary Society's second solar sail has passed another big milestone on its way to space. We'll hear from Bill Nye and others on the team, including Bruce Betts. Bruce will also grace us with his usual what's-up sublime silliness. We begin with Casey Dreyer, the Society's Director of Space Policy. Casey, the Trump administration has just issued its, at least preliminary budget,

62 pages, and of that, two pages reserved for NASA. How does it look? Well, Matt, that's right. We talk about the president's budget request as kicking off the usual budget cycle here in the United States. This is a preview of that. It's not the full budget that will come out later this year. It takes a long time to put those together, and they just haven't had the time yet. But this tells us where they're going. And big picture, what they're going to do is take $54 billion from the part of government that basically doesn't do defense and move that to the Defense Department. And that means a lot of federal agencies have to take a lot of cuts to make that math work out. So we were pretty nervous about

what NASA would look like. And lo and behold, NASA did pretty well. I was surprised it did as well as it did. Actually, we're looking at a one percent cut to NASA, about 200 million dollars. And of that 200 million dollars, those are focused on two areas of NASA, the education division, which is basically wiped away in this budget, which is about $100 million. And then the Earth Science Division of NASA sees a cut of about $100 million. That's about 5% of the budget, and it's focused on four climate monitoring programs. This is not good, right? No one will see cuts in science. Of course, the Education Division, I have a hard time seeing this cut go through.

But if you had told me the day after the election that the Earth Science Division at NASA would be funded at $1.8 billion by this Trump administration, I would not have believed you. I would have thought that was way too optimistic. So this is actually a pretty good starting condition, given the context of the overall hostility to climate science that we're seeing from this administration. So we can breathe a sigh of relief in a number of areas, but there is at least one other big project that's been talked about for years, which appears to now finally be dead.

ARM, yes, the Asteroid Redirect Mission would be officially dead in this budget. This one was not unexpected. I'd say almost everyone thought this mission would go away, myself included. It was being pushed further and further into the 2020s. It made less and less sense in the context of what NASA's goal was, either Moon or Mars. And it was tied with the previous administration. So that would be dead. And I want to emphasize, this is a budget proposal, right? This is not immediately effective. Congress takes this as its starting conditions, does its own thing, and passes that budget,

ideally, in time for the new budget cycle, new budget year, in October 1st of 2017. So there's a long way to go from here to the end of the fiscal year. This is just the beginning in setting the initial terms of that debate. We will see a lot more work being done by Congress. And of course, we will be there as the advocacy and policy program of the Planetary Society, pushing to keep NASA from getting cut at all and to put more money back into science. That's Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy. He has a much more detailed analysis piece, a blog post at planetary.org, where you can also find an overview of this preliminary budget from the administration by our colleague, digital editor Jason Davis.

Casey, I look forward to talking to you and Jason Callahan when we next record the Space Policy edition, first Friday in April. Oh, absolutely, Matt. I can't wait to go through this in just excruciatingly interesting detail. It will be, and we've got plenty of people who look forward to hearing those details. On now to talking about LightSail 2. It's time for a status update. March 14th, 2017 saw another big step toward the launch of a revolutionary spacecraft that will sail on the light of the sun. The entire LightSail 2 team gathered in the conference room at Planetary Society headquarters for what was called the pre-ship review. The discussion went all day. view. The discussion went all day. I sat in for a few fascinating minutes as the managers and engineers went through over 200 issues they had worked to resolve before the tiny CubeSat could be tucked away for its trip to medium-Earth orbit. Lightsail project manager Dave Spencer agreed to

answer a few questions during a brief lunch break. Later, we'll hear from others on the project, including Planetary Society CEO and engineer Bill Nye. Dave is an associate professor in Purdue University's School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, where he directs the Space Flight Projects Lab. So the whole purpose of today is to discuss all of the open issues. As we've gone along and done our test program, we've made careful notes of every problem that's occurred. We've tried to work off all of those problems for things where we have a problem

and we can't reproduce the problem. You know, we weren't able to get to root cause of those. We're going to discuss all of those. Can we live with the risks? Based on what we've seen so far today, we're in a very clean state. We have very few open items. We have very few problems that aren't understood.

It's not zero. It's never zero. So we're going to have to, you know, bite the bullet and live with some of these things. But things are looking very good. Lightsail has come a long ways. It's come a long way. And there's a marked difference between LightSail 2 versus LightSail 1. We've learned so much in the LightSail 1 flight experiment in summer 2015.

We captured all of those lessons learned, and we've made several dozen changes to both the hardware and the software for LightSail 2 compared to LightSail 1. And we've had more time to test the system than we did previously. And so we're actually in a very good shape relative to LightSail 1. Once we actually integrate LightSail 2 with the Peapod, we're not going to be able to interact with it anymore. We can't charge its batteries. We can't turn it on. We can't do a health check. So we want to be sure that all of the testing is done. The spacecraft is healthy, ready to go, ready for flight, essentially. Once we make this assessment, if there are some actions that we need to do, we'll go off and tie those up, get everything completed. And then we'll send the spacecraft up to Cal Poly, integrate it with the PPOD.

And then the spacecraft and the PPOD will be shipped down to the Air Force Research Lab in Albuquerque for mating with the PROX-1 spacecraft. Remind us of what the PPOD is and very briefly, PROX-1. The PPOD is a deployer device. It's a standard deployer device for CubeSats that was developed by Cal Poly a number of years ago. And it's really become the standard system for deploying CubeSats as secondary payloads. So it actually hangs on to the side of the launch vehicle upper stage. It deploys the CubeSats as a secondary payload. There's probably a large spacecraft that's the primary payload. We're hanging off to the side as a secondary payload. There's probably a large spacecraft that's the primary payload. We're hanging off to the side as a secondary, and the Peapod ejects the CubeSat and gives it a small

nudge out into orbit. Just with a spring, right? Yeah, it's a simple spring device, but it's designed to be very reliable. Yeah, few moving parts. The fewer, the better, right? That's right. We like few parts. And Prox-1, that other spacecraft that's going to do a little dance with LightSail. PROX-1 is a spacecraft that's being built at the Georgia Institute of Technology. It's a student-built spacecraft. It's a much larger spacecraft than LightSail 2. It's 70 kilograms. It would sit on a desktop. It basically carries LightSail 2 into orbit with the Peapod, deploys LightSail 2, and then the purpose of the PROX-1 mission is twofold. First off, it's got its own technology demonstration that it's doing in terms of components as well as automated behaviors,

maintaining its orbit relative to another vehicle, which will be LightSail 2. And then it's providing on-orbit inspection for the LightSail 2 solar sail deployment. And that'll be a really cool event. I was lucky enough to get to sit in the meeting for a little bit. And it was impressive to hear our CEO, Bill Nye, getting to be an engineer once again. Really fun, actually. Amazing amount of detail in all the systems and all the parameters that have to be gone through. How did that compare to similar meetings that you may have been in for spacecraft that cost, you know, rather than a million or two, hundreds of millions of dollars? Right. My background is in planetary robotics.

And so I've worked with missions to Mars, missions to comets that do cost on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars. And I can tell you that we're going through the same process that those missions go through as well, with really the same rigor, same level of detail. The spacecraft is not as complex. From that aspect, we don't have as many items to verify as we go through our requirements. We don't have as many requirements. We don't have as many components. But the level of rigor and the completeness with which we're going through this process is very similar. When all of this got started, CubeSats were still kind of out there. I mean, there weren't a whole lot of them being prepared to go into space.

Now, and it has been years, years later, there are already hundreds and hundreds of these and many more hundreds going up. Hundreds and hundreds of these and many more hundreds going up. What sets LightSail, this three-unit, this 10-by-10-by-30-centimeter CubeSat, apart from a lot of those other spacecraft? Well, even with all of the advancement in CubeSat technologies, LightSail is still at the end of the spectrum in terms of the complexity of the overall system. Packing this 32-square-meter solar sail into a very small portion of this three-unit CubeSat and deploying it and having the ability to control the orientation of the solar sail, that's still at the extreme end of what's being done in terms of CubeSat technology

today. So that's what sets us apart. So the rest of the industry still has reason to be watching what happens with LightSail 2. They might be learning how to do similar things for their purposes. Well, I think that's definitely true. And there are other missions that are planned that NASA is actually going to fly using solar sail technology from three-unit CubeSats. We've been working with them, with the NEOScout folks at Marshall Space Flight Center. They're planning to launch in a couple of years, and they're very interested in what we're doing on LightSail, and we're working with them to pass on information. So how do you feel? I feel great. And like I said, it's a marked difference from LightSail 1. LightSail 1, you know, we knew we

were launching with some significant risk items still open. For LightSail 2, I think we're in a much better risk posture. Still going to be a tough mission. It's never easy, but I think we're in as good of a position as we could be. Best of luck, Dave. Thanks so much. Okay, thank you. Dave Spencer, LightSail 2 project manager, speaking outside the spacecraft's pre-ship review meeting at the Planetary Society.

Just ahead are two young LightSail team members and Bill Nye the Science Guy. This is Planetary Radio. Where did we come from? Are we alone in the cosmos? These are the questions at the core of our existence. And the secrets of the universe are out there, waiting to be discovered. But to find them, we have to go into space. We have to explore. This endeavor unites us. Space exploration truly brings out the best in us, encouraging

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Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. So many of you have asked for a report on the progress of LightSail 2, the innovative solar sail CubeSat from the Planetary Society that will soon attempt controlled flight high above the Earth. We heard from Project manager Dave Spencer before the break. Two more attendees at the recent pre-ship review meeting have been working on LightSail since they were students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Now they work for the company that has been another key part of the LightSail collaboration. I am Stephanie Wong and I work

at Ecliptic and on the LightSail project I work on the mechanical systems as well as integration and testing. Hey I'm Alex Diaz I'm also with Ecliptic and I work on the avionics system for LightSail. You've been with this a long time Alex I think you have too haven't you Stephanie but how many years Alex? It's got to be going on six, five or six years. So we're excited to launch the spacecraft and move on with life. Why would you want to move on after a triumph like this? Dave Spencer was just telling us how this spacecraft has evolved enormously from LightSail 1 to LightSail 2. Would you agree?

Yeah, there were a lot of lessons learned with LightSail 1. Oh, yeah, wholeheartedly agree. Compared to LightSail 1, we have more instruments. There's a lot more tests that we went through on this round, and so we're really hopeful for it. Yeah, our team grew a little bit as well, so that's been a big help. I mean, this has really been for a lot of folks including the two of you an education hasn't it? Yes a lot of lessons learned that's

for sure a lot of problem solving and troubleshooting definitely. Yeah LightSol has been really interesting definitely a career has grown since we started, and there's been a lot of knowledge gained from the project, and we're pretty grateful to be on the project. Yeah, I think we have a pretty interesting mission, especially LightSol 2. We're definitely deploying a pretty big mechanism, and while LightSol 1 was a demonstration, we're actually going to try and control it this time. So it puts a lot of bigger goals on the ADCS team. That's the big difference this time, right? You're going to be high enough in medium Earth orbit that we can actually try to control the spacecraft

and maybe even raise that orbit? Yeah, that's right. We're hoping to raise the orbit over a couple days. I think we get about a month's worth of time to attempt to raise the orbit. And so hopefully we'll demonstrate that this time around. How will light sail maneuver once it's in space? Once the sail deploys, the sail will be facing the sun during half of the orbit. And then when it gets close, it will change 90 degrees and slew the rest of the orbit and

then it'll continue to 90 degrees get hit by the sun i'm waving my hands yeah alex you can you explain it better so basically the big maneuvers are going to be 90 degree maneuvers so we go from relative to the sun we go basically broadside to the sun. Because you want to pick up as much momentum as you can. That's right. So we want to get as much sun on the sail as possible. But since we're going around the Earth, you can imagine on the way back towards the sun, if we're broadside, the sunlight will slow us down.

So what we end up doing is we end up going edge on for half of the orbit and then broadside for the other half when we speed up. And so we rinse and repeat that for a while. And the idea is that as we speed up, our orbit starts to change and we'll be able to measure it on the ground. Mechanically, how will the spacecraft reorient itself? How will it twist itself on orbit? So we have a momentum wheel that we'll use to change to 90 as well as the torque rods. And the gyros will tell us what rate we're at.

And so with all those combined, it'll hopefully orient into its path. So the wheels I understand. I know about those. But torque rods, what are those? Yeah, the mechanical guys like spinning mass. They just take mass and they spin it and they do fun stuff. For us electrical guys, we'll run current through basically when you were a kid, you'd get a nail and you'd run a wire around it and you'd hook up a little DC battery.

You did that too, huh? Oh, yeah. You can pick up paper clips. And so for the spacecraft, we basically have electric magnets on the spacecraft, and we push off of the Earth's magnetic field. And so that allows us to control the spacecraft more finely. And then when we need to do our big slews, we basically spin that mass really fast. And the reaction wheel, it's like a bicycle wheel, kind of, right?

Yeah, it's like a perfectly wheel, kind of, right? Yeah, it's like a perfectly balanced mass going around a rod. Stephanie, last question. I'm told that you will be the person who buttons up the spacecraft, puts it in the peapod, never to be seen on this planet again. Yeah. Will the two of you be up there at Cal Poly when this happens? Yeah. Yeah. We're going to be each other's eyes to make sure everything's okay. And did you button up Light Cell 1 as well? Yes. So you're an expert light cell button-upper.

Yes, I guess. You can call it that. I sure would love to join you up there when that happens, and I hope that that works out that I can. But whatever happens, best of luck. And thanks for all those years of work that you've put on this little spacecraft. All right. Thank you.

It's been fun. Engineers Stephanie Wong and Alex Diaz of Ecliptic and the LightSail team. One of the other engineers in the pre-ship review meeting has been making his living in a different fashion for more than 20 years. Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye joined me just outside the conference room. How do you feel about how things are going? Oh, it's great. This shows you the value of test flights. LightSail 1 really has turned out to be a test flight. That was how we pitched it, but just many, many details that the team did their best to not have any trouble with the first time, but they did.

Now we're straightening out all of those things. And it's surprising to me from my, you know, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, Matt. You know, I used to do electrical packaging, as it's called, circuit board layouts and the arrangement of circuit boards in a black box for airplanes. circuit board layouts and the arrangement of circuit boards in a black box for airplanes. And it's amazing how much the antenna gets messed with by operating relatively high power components on board the spacecraft. You get up around a half a watt on a tiny spacecraft, it's a big deal. But that's what the kind of problem they solved. It's really good. It's cool. It's fascinating to listen to. I missed a story in there. I missed recording it, but I got to hear you talk about it. And it went back to your days as a student of engineering.

And it was like, wow, he really is an engineer. Oh, yeah, okay, yeah. But not just a student young man. I worked on airplane autopilots and this other thing. And you guys, I had one very eccentric professor, Richard Phelan, Dick Phelan, who insisted that this classic way to control something, be it your elevator arriving at the floor precisely, not overshooting. Have you ever gotten off an elevator where there's a little step up or a little screws up? He had a thing to correct that. Whether you're making beer in Delaware at an industrial brewery or orienting a spacecraft with respect to the Earth's magnetic field or the sun,

they have the same problem. The problem is addressed with the same mathematics. So it's a proportional integral derivative controller, PID controller. And Dick Phelan said, you guys, this is not the way to do it because you're integrating a signal that you just differentiated. Any noise in the differentiated signal, it gets amplified. People, people, people. And so once in a while, people stumble on to Dick Phelan's idea, which he called pseudo-derivative feedback. Other people made up other letters for it. But every time it comes up for me,

but how long has it been? 40 years. It still gets me every time that guy came back. He didn't use Laplace transforms people. Imagine doing control without Laplace transforms. You heard me. I am shocked. It's so crazy. I can't even, the dogs are sleeping with cats. It's just nuts out there. Yeah. Is this one of the reasons why this project is still so much fun for you? Yeah, I guess. No, plus, you guys, it's just my old, yeah, you're right. It's the old engineering, you know, little circuit boards, aircraft or aerospace things, all the requirements,

electromagnetic field interference, all this stuff. It's really fun for me, Matt, it is. But these guys are experts. And when it comes to the software, I am 25 years late, but I get it. I follow it. You know, this whole signal compression thing and all that, that's after my time mostly, but I get it. The big thing is they've addressed the known unknowns. Let's put it that way. That's all getting figured out because they've had time and they had time because they were getting paid. They were on a salary because of support from listeners like you. So thank you out there for supporting our LightSail 1 spacecraft and LightSail 2. And LightSail 2 is going to send down real nice pictures. We're going to increase the orbital

altitude, get the orbit bigger using the pressure from the sun. And I'm very, very excited about it. Everybody asked me, Bill Nye, CEO of the Planetary Society, when are you going to fly? When is this going to fly? So we are on the manifest. We'll be loaded into a rocket, but we do not have control over when that rocket flies. The rocket is the second Falcon Heavy from SpaceX. Falcon Heavy for lifting heavy things.

Our spacecraft is not especially heavy, but we're secondary along with a bunch of other heavy stuff. So this is very exciting, man. And these meetings, it's very nice of these guys to let me sit in, frankly, because I'll say just ignorant things and they're very patient about it. I think they're honored, actually. No, it's cool. It's really cool. And so I just want to thank the listeners again and the members of the Planetary Society and our community. A lot of people visit our website and support us without joining. But we invite you to join because the benefits are so fabulous. And I defy you to watch the last Planetary Post with Bob Picardo, Robert Picardo, and Tim Russ,

both Star Trek Voyager actors, and not laugh out loud. I defy you. It's pretty darn funny. We were just watching it during the lunch break here in the meeting. And I better let you get back in there. There's no telling what you might be missing. Oh, who knows? Yes, they need me.

No, it's really nice. It's good to see you, Matt. Thank you again, everybody. Let's go to What's Up on Planetary Radio for another visit with the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. Bruce Betts is the Program Manager for LightSail. Welcome back. Thank you. You were obviously in that all-day meeting, that pre-ship review that we've just heard from Dave Spencer and other people about, including the boss, Bill Nye. What's your impression since we spoke to them before the meeting was over? The bottom line is that we're in very good shape. Could ship now if we needed to, but

since we have the time, there are some minor issues that we knew about and that came up in the review that we want to look into, and then additional tests. Test, test, test as much as we can on the ground so we don't have to test things in space. We'll keep people up to date, of course. I told Alex and Stephanie that I'd like to go up there when the spacecraft gets buttoned up. Somebody said that that may now not happen. Oh, actually, I read this from Jason Davis, who also has an update in the blog at planetary.org,

that that buttoning up may not happen now until May or late May. Yeah, I think it'll probably be in the May timeframe. We're just one piece in a very large process that culminates in a Falcon Heavy rocket. We tie our schedule to everyone else's schedule. And right now, there's no point in shipping before roughly May. Well, good luck to us and everybody else who are going to ride that big rocket. Tell us what they're going to find up there in the sky if they were up there tonight. Nice segue.

I tried. Well, if they were up there, I can't do this. In the early evening, if you look over low in the west, you'll notice we pretty much, we've lost Venus. Don't worry. It'll be back in the west, you'll notice we pretty much, we've lost Venus. Don't worry. It'll be back in the morning sky soon. Did they look behind the refrigerator? Because that's where I find things. Oh.

Huh. No, I will pass that along. No, I don't think you understand. We didn't literally lose it. We know where it is. We just, never mind. So anyway, Mars is low in the, fairly fairly low in the west looking reddish and visible in the first couple hours after the sun sets and for the next two or three weeks you can actually pick up

hard to find mercury usually the hiding planet it will be below mars and even closer to the horizon and looking whitish and brightish. But you can check that out in the next couple of weeks. And then we've got Jupiter up in the early, early evening in the east and then Saturn up in the pre-dawn in the south. It's bouncing around. We move on to this week in space history. We move on to this week in space history. Hard to believe for some of us that it was 20 years ago that comet Hale-Bopp made its closest approach to Earth, one of the last brightish naked eye comets that we had. Hard to believe indeed, though I remember it pretty well. I actually got to see it from a plane, out the window of a plane.

Wow, cool. How'd it look? It looked cool. I had binoculars. They helped. Wait, I'm sorry. You brought binoculars onto the plane to check out the comet? It's a long story. I was on a trip for a previous job. We knew the comet was going to be up in the sky and that if we got lucky we would see it I brought my binoculars. Nice! Way to plan ahead. Yeah. Speaking of planning ahead in no way whatsoever we move on to

random space fun! Lovely. So New Horizons the hero of the Pluto system will next visit the object 2014 MU69 I thought people might be interested in why it's named 2014 MU69. That is its provisional designation. It indicates when it was discovered and what number object it was during the period. It was discovered in 2014.

That's the easy part. And the first letter tells us what half month of 2014 it was discovered. Each half month is lettered starting with A. So M indicates between June 16th and June 30th. And then there's kind of a rather contorted system I won't go into that the U69 indicates it was the 1,745th object discovered during that period. Wow. Thank you. That's very educational. Someday we'll get another name and we'll all be lost to the land of random space facts.

We move on to the trivia contest. I asked you, what is the diameter of the primary mirror on the very successful infrared telescope in space, the Spitzer Space Telescope. How'd we do, Matt? Big, big response. Anna Grunseth. Anna Grunseth in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Go Packers. Oh. Bruce is a Vikings fan.

Maybe you can tell. She said. Congratulations anyway. Anna said, it's not big by JWST, James Webb Space Telescope standards, but Spitzer's 85 centimeter primary mirror is one of the, ready, coolest mirrors around. Okay, first of all, is she right? And then explain her nice pun. trying to keep everything as cool as possible because that increases your sensitivity when you're doing infrared observations, where depending on your wavelength, you're basically detecting heat. So the more you can cool what you're using, the better. Well, congratulations, Anna.

You are going to get that Planetary Radio t-shirt. I bet you might want one of the new ones in the women's style. And a Planetary Society rubber asteroid. Also, from itelescope.net, and we'll have more news about them in a few minutes, a free account, a 200-point account for use of that nonprofit network of telescopes all over this planet. We got a bunch of other fun stuff, as you might have imagined. Eric O'Day, Medford, Massachusetts. You're going to love this. While a Tyrannosaurus rex had feet that were much larger than Spitzer's mirror,

footprints measuring just about 85 centimeters suggest that it walked on its toes. And thus, a T-Rex could balance on one foot on Spitzer's primary mirror. A T-Rex could balance on one foot on Spitzer's primary mirror. I'm pretty sure they would not be happy about that. That's funny. Samantha Glick, Sam Glick in Minneapolis. She says one of her favorites. Minneapolis, Vikings territory. One of her favorite Spitzer accomplishments was when it took the first images of planets using their own infrared emission.

She says, infrared astronomy is close to my heart. I worked with dust clouds around mirror variable stars with infrared data. We have some very talented people out there. We do indeed. Mel Powell, Sherman Oaks, California. 85 centimeters, yeah. Or the width of 11.15 hockey pucks. Because we need to get a hockey game going on Enceladus,

and hockey doesn't get nearly enough coverage on planetary radio. Mel, you've partially solved that challenge, and I don't think it'll be mentioned again for a very long time. Finally, this. We didn't get a poem from Dave Fairchild, unless I missed it this week, but we did get this from a young person named Ava Burns. And I'll explain. SST, that's Spitzer Space Telescope, of course. The SST up in the sky sins as gravity it defies.

Jupiter says, look at all of Earth's blue. But then Spitzer says, what do you mean? It's obviously maroon. So I'm sorry to say that this poem you've told comes from an 11-year-old. So thank you, Ava. I'm not sure I understood it all, but a very nice work. That's just because you don't understand the subtleties. I'm not sure I understood it all, but a very nice work. That's just because you don't understand the subtleties. I'm just not

sophisticated enough. Could you write an explication and get it to me in the next couple days? I'll do my best. It's the maroon part I'm not sure about. Maybe because it's an infrared telescope? Well, anyway. It's probably the false color used often in the infrared images.

That's my guess. I like that. I like that explanation. All right, Ava, we're going to go with that. Thank you very much for the poem. We're ready for the next one. What is the only Apollo command module flown in space to be currently displayed

outside the United States? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. I think I know this one. You have until Wednesday, March 29, at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer. And it's that prize package you just heard about, a shirt, an asteroid, and an itelescope.net account. Excellent.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about clouds falling very, very slowly. Thank you, and good night. Someday I'll tell you about my great uncle, who was apparently crushed by a falling cloud. I'm both disturbed and amused. Well, that amused person is Bruce Betts. He is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society and the Program Manager for LightSail, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Remember I said we've got more news from iTelescope?

Here's something I wish a major American TV network would do. The BBC and the ABC, or Australian Broadcasting Corporation, are about to present Stargazing Live, the series that features great British physicist and science communicator Brian Cox. Students will use iTelescope's instruments to explore and share the night sky. It's set for March 29, 30, and 31 in the UK, and then in Australia on April 4, 5, and 6. Sadly, it may not be possible to see these remarkable events in the U.S. We've got a link to more information on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. Good on you, iTelescope. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society

in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its SailReady members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Gaplan. Clear skies.