Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Rocketing Into the Aurora With Neal Brown

Episode Date: April 1, 2014

It’s back to Alaska, this time to the Poker Flat Research Range, where former Director Neal Brown and his staff launched sounding rockets into the heart of the Aurora Borealis. Emily Lakdawalla explores newly-discovered and very distant dwarf planets, and Bill Nye the Science guy has the latest on NASA’s planetary science budget.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Rocketing into the aurora, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, back with more from my recent trip to Alaska. This time we'll visit with Neil Brown at the Poker Flat Research Range near Fairbanks. He ran this sounding rocket launch facility for 18 years. Join us for a tour. Meanwhile, Bill Nye will give us an update on NASA's planetary science budget, and later Bruce Betts gets us ready for an exciting eclipse that is just days

away. We begin with senior editor Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, we're looking way, way out there, still in our solar system, but a long ways from Earth. That's right. There's a whole lot of news about the most distant reaches of the solar system in the last week. Start us off with what first showed up in the blog as your March 26 entry titled, A Second Sedna. What does it mean? Well, what does it mean? Yeah, well, when astronomers first discovered Sedna, Mike Brown discovered it, it immediately posed a whole lot of questions about the whole structure of the solar system. Because here was a world that we kind of tend to think of all of those things that are beyond Neptune as just being beyond Neptune.

But there's different classes of things. Most of them have orbits that eventually bring them back to Neptune's orbit, which tells you that it's Neptune that put them on these scattered orbits in the first place, encounters with giant planets that gave them the current distant orbits that they have, but they all come back to Neptune's neighborhood sooner or later. Sedna doesn't do that. And so Sedna hinted at part of the formation story of the solar system that we didn't understand yet. So ever since Sedna was discovered, it was hoped that we would find more objects like it whose different orbits would tell us a little bit more of that story about the formation of the solar system. And finally, they announced a new one,

2012 VP113 is its current name. And it also has a very distant orbit like Sedna, it never gets anywhere close to Neptune, the closest it gets to the sun is 80 AU 80 times Earth's distance. That's almost three times Neptune's distance from the sun. And so the current best guess for how it got there is either that there is a another sort of planet x distant undiscovered planet involved. But that's actually not the explanation that most astronomers favor. Astronomers favor that it has to do with the original formation of the sun in a cluster of other stars and that the gravitational influence of stars that we used to be close to and that we're not anymore are what put these scattered objects in their current position.

So it's still a pretty cool story. Yeah, it was fascinating to see that galactic gravity and influences may have a lot to do with this. With the time we have left, talk about this other fascinating discovery circling an object out there. So another announcement last week was the first discovery of rings around anything that is not a planet. And this object, who I think his name is Kclo, it definitely has rings. The detection is rock solid. There's no question. It has a pair of rings circling it. It's not a gas giant like Saturn or Uranus or Jupiter.

It's not even a terrestrial planet. It's probably not even round. It's a body about 250 kilometers in diameter. That would make it look kind of like Phoebe, one of Saturn's distant moons, probably pretty lumpy. And yet it has rings. And this had all of my astronomer friends on Twitter last week just scratching their heads, trying to explain how. You know, it's one of those wonderful, surprising discoveries that immediately makes all the scientists go back to the drawing board and say, how in the universe can anything like this possibly happen? And I think the jury's still out, but it's going to be a real fun puzzle to explore.

Keeps it exciting. And more to come about LPSC, too. That's right. More reports this week. Hopefully it'll wrap it up. There was a lot of science last week. I have a lot of guest bloggers covering the news. That's the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference that we talked with Emily about last week.

Check out the blog if you want to know more. It's planetary.org. That's where you'll find it. Thanks very much, Emily. Thank you, Matt. The senior editor and planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. We've got Bill Nye coming up next. Bill, I want to welcome you back, as always, to Planetary Radio for your regular segment. You were talking budget stuff with our advocacy guy last week. Yes, Planetary Society has a representative in Washington, D.C., Bill Atkins. We also have

a member of the staff who does nothing but analyze politics, think deep thoughts, and make recommendations. If you're like me, and I know I am, you're furious because there's a cut to planetary science of $65 million. And as a young man, you may know, I worked on the SOFIA airplane, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy acronym airplane. And they're talking about mothballing that altogether. So no, as the saying goes, heliophysics. No observing from this extraordinary airborne observatory. But that aside, planetary science has cut $65 million.

Yes, I know budgets are tight. I know, Matt. I know. But planetary science is where we get the greatest return on our investment. That is our argument at the Planetary Society, and I stick with it. I stand by it. This is where we solve new problems, problems that have never been solved before. Now, the administrator, Charles Bolden, talked happily about the Orion spacecraft, and human spaceflight often dominates any meeting about the budget.

But planetary science, $65 million. I know that to you, Matt, $65 million is nothing. Ah, chicken feet. Yes. But to planetary science, it's a great big deal. And we advocate, as always, that NASA's budget for planetary science be $1.5 billion. If you are a European listener, if you're a Japanese listener, Canadian listener, I'm with you.

We are an international organization. Your work is great. NASA is still the largest space agency in the world, and it leads. It leads the way. I encourage everyone to check out Casey Dreyer's blog on planetary.org here in the electronic world of today in which we now live. Yeah, he's got a couple of entries here. One describing what the Planetary Society will be doing over the next couple of months, but also a little very nice summary of Charlie Bolden in front of the House committee that is considering this budget. There's going to

be push and pull, I'm telling you. Bill, thanks for pulling us along. Thank you, Matt. Let's change the world. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the science guy. Now we take you back to Alaska and the Poker Flat research range. I first shared portions of my trip to Alaska two weeks ago. I had flown to the huge and beautiful state to join a Planetary Society tour group. Though our goal was to witness the sometimes elusive Aurora Borealis, that chart expeditions had much more in store for us. There are pictures on the Planetary Society Flickr page.

I've also got a link to my blog about the trip on this week's show page that you'll find at planetary.org slash radio. A very special and unexpected treat began by boarding our bus to travel about 30 miles north of Fairbanks. Passing through a gate guarded by an old sounding rocket, we turned onto Neal Brown Road, the entrance to the Poker Flat Research Range. You may remember Neal from that earlier show. He directed this University of Alaska facility for 18 years. He directed this University of Alaska facility for 18 years. Neil greeted us at the range's modest headquarters and ushered us inside for a talk that explained the connection between sounding rockets and the Aurora.

Why do you use a rocket? We only see a very narrow range of light here on the surface of the Earth. The ozone layer absorbs a lot of the ultraviolet as well as the infrared. A lot of the energy in the aurora is out there in the ultraviolet. There's a quite a bit of energy out in the infrared. So the only ways we can get to them is get a sounding rocket to take the payload above the Earth's atmosphere. Neil Davis was the one who started Poker Flat as a part of the Geophysical Institute, as a part of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, a research organization. Almost everything about a sounding rocket payload is sent back to us on the ground by radio. We don't have to go get it and bring it back to learn what happened,

but rather while it flies, we're listening here on the ground, and it carries a radio system on board. We're listening here on the ground and it carries a radio system on board. We measure the energy of the material as leaving the sun and coming towards the earth, but it runs into kind of a dynamo system. The Earth's magnetic field turns with the earth once every 24 hours. You have this electric current flowing from the sun past the earth. Between the two of them, we actually end up energizing those particles anywhere from a hundred to a thousand times more energy than they had when

they left the Sun. Ultimately, this led to the experiment that I consider sort of one of the peak of my career. The idea was here in Alaska we would fire a rocket, it would fire an electron beam that could create an aurora in the southern hemisphere and we had people down there in airplanes looking for it and they saw it. That had to go 68,000 miles along the Earth's magnetic field line in space and come down to create that aurora in the southern hemisphere. And it reflected back up and created a pencil-like beam of aurora in the northern hemisphere about one and a half seconds later. So it was an amazing, amazing experiment. For years we communicated with Space Command.

Space Command. But it turns out there's two trailers buried there in Cheyenne Mountain. One of them is the airborne threat. The other one is the space threat. And they didn't talk to one another. And there was a little bridge right between the two. And we didn't know that. We thought we were doing our thing, but they were worried about when we launch a rocket from the surface to 50,000 feet above the ground and from 50,000 feet back to the ground on the outbound trajectory, then we're in FAA airspace and we're in the weapon airplane threat area for the U.S. Space Command. After his great presentation, Neil Brown joined us on the bus for a driving tour of Poker Flat. He told us how an Idaho farm boy who had never taken much notice of the Aurora Borealis ended up running the only university-owned scientific rocket range in the world,

exploring those mysterious lights in the sky. When I got the chance to become the first director of Poker Flat Research Range, I had really no knowledge of the technical ends of the rocket. What I did have was a history of growing up on a farm where you have to take care of things and fix them the best you can. So here we are 30 miles out of Fairbanks. Mind you, it's a nice paved road and all, but when something goes wrong, you have to fix it here.

You can't just be running to town every few minutes to get something to fix something. Turned out that, I guess, was the reason I was picked. It seemed to work. I had a really great time, 18 years. I suspect there was a good deal more to the choice of Neil as director than his farm experience. Some of it might have been his great talent for sharing his excitement about science. He has the self-bestowed yet well-earned title of Alaska Science Enthusiast. We got additional evidence of that as we drove through the range. The blockhouse here on the right

has four feet of dirt over the top of a firm concrete shell underneath it. It should be able to take anything we're capable of launching. It could come back and land on us and we'd survive. The little launcher that we're driving past here on our right, we use that with the student rocket program. The University of Alaska Fairbanks has a student rocket program. That building we just passed on the left there is the payload assembly building.

This is the NASA radar system. You notice it has no covering on it and it's got three gigantic pillars it's standing on. Those are pieces of the Trans-Alaska pipeline that we welded together to make a support for that radar. We start out with a place on the ground that's safe to land the rocket and then we wait for the Aurora to get to that place in the sky that we can still hit that zone. So we don't sit here and try to chase the aurora around in the sky with the aiming point of the rocket. We're pretty restricted on that, but that's the ultimate is the safety thing. And it usually works. We don't have too much trouble with it.

Thank you. Don't have too much trouble with it. Science enthusiast Neil Brown conducting a tour of the Poker Flat research range that he ran for 18 years. We'll rejoin Neil at one of the Poker Flat sounding rocket launch sites when Planetary Radio continues. See you in a minute. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, Neil Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from, and are we alone?

This is the most exciting thing that people do, and together we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Your name carried to an asteroid. How cool is that? You, your family, your friends, your cat, we're inviting everyone to travel along on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu. All the details are at planetary.org slash b-e-n-n-u. You can submit your name and then print your beautiful certificate. That's planetary.org slash Bennu. Planetary Society members, your name is already on the list.

The Planetary Society, we're your place in space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're back in Alaska, specifically the Poker Flat Research Range, about 30 miles outside Fairbanks. The huge facility is in the business of launching rockets, among other things. Its former director, Neil Brown, has been conducting a tour for the group of adventurous Planetary Society members that I had joined. Exiting the bus, Neil led us to a giant metal structure that was open on one end. Inside was a long and hefty overhead rail. It is from this rail that multi-stage sounding rockets are suspended before they are launched skyward, often targeting the Aurora Borealis on behalf of curious scientists. Neil was asked why Poker Flat had never put a payload in low Earth orbit.

The problem is we can't get it going 17,500 miles sideways. There was interest in doing that. We did the calculations. Typically, for that, you use a four-stage rocket, and the upper stage, if something went wrong with it, the impact point for the fourth stage was Moscow, Russia. So that killed it for us. And instead, the state of Alaska built its own launch facility down in Kodiak, Alaska, south of Anchorage.

And all the rocket stages fall into the Pacific Ocean, and nobody knows how close they come to anything else. But the idea of doing the commercial launches started here with Poker because we had this wonderful safety record. I had a few more questions for Neil Brown before reboarding our bus. Where are we? What are we standing in? We're standing at Pad 3 at Poker Flat Research Range, one of five major launch pads that can be used to launch sounding rockets to study the Aurora Borealis. You've been doing this for a very long time. Now, you're retired now, but this may be the least well-known major rocket launch facility in the United States.

Sort of interesting when you get right down to it. It's the largest land range in the United States. Sort of interesting when you get right down to it. It's the largest land range in the United States. It's had a wonderful history working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Army, NOAA. It's just amazing. But the focus has always been science, never military applications, never testing rockets to make sure they'll just fly right as a rocket. It's always been focused on the science.

I was really interested to hear that you and your predecessors set the tone by saying we're only going to do public projects here, stuff we can talk about, nothing top secret. Well, you know, we got this started about the era that there was a lot of concern that universities were doing classified research. That was the same era that we could see that students were rebelling at Stanford University in California and at the University of Wisconsin against their universities doing classified research and not telling the students and faculty what they were doing. We walked into this with this Department of Defense program that was going to do things here, and we said, can't be classified. And they said, okay. It was amazing.

Obviously, there were things that were ultimately classified things about it, but they weren't what was happening. The launches were public. The results were published in the major journals. And that's what we set out the tone to begin with, and we're successful in keeping it up. You do sounding rockets. Nothing goes into orbit. What's the highest something has gone from here?

About 800 kilometers, 500 miles above the Earth, well up past stuff that orbits around the Earth, and thankfully we've never hit anything. But just ballistic, did I hear you correctly? No guidance systems. How do you manage to get a bullseye on a curl, as you called it, in the aurora? There's a, the aiming point is not a precise point. It's rather a region. So when they were seeing curls occurring over Veneti, Alaska, they were stretching for maybe 150 to 200 miles east-west along that arc, and they continued for the next half hour or so. So that gave us a window of opportunity.

That's sort of typical. Truth of the matter is the multistage rockets have a bigger error in their flight, so what would be a 10-mile by 20- mile zone on the ground for a two-stage rocket might be 50 or 60 miles in diameter for a four-stage rocket. And that'd be the same thing at altitude. But the Aurora is a huge phenomena. So we've usually been really lucky to get the rocket payload into the right place in the Aurora. Sounds like this place has run very successfully on a shoestring budget. Oh, that's for sure. A shoestring budget. Our first summer, we had a budget of $400 for a couple, three people. And it was just a joke. I mean, that was after the first launches, the first

seven successful launches. We had $400 to get through the next three months of the summer to get ready for a NASA program coming in the next winter, which turned out to be around a $200,000 to $300,000 program. But you might remember that I said earlier, we only got paid after you launched. So we kind of ran a line of credit with the rest of the university. And then fortunately fortunately we were successful and got paid for what we did and the same was true in the following year when I came on board in August of 1971 we had a budget of four hundred thousand dollars and we did about seven or eight launches that winter but then the department of defense had a huge program. They came in with a million dollars

worth of upgrade funding and almost a million dollars worth of operational funding. And we had that, enjoyed that through all of the rest of the 1970s and the mid-1980s. You're pretty proud of the record here. Absolutely proud of the record here. Real can-do organization. Real esprit de corps. When you have people coming in, the first thing we did was get everyone to understand what it was the scientist wanted to get done with his rocket, no matter who you were. And everybody at POCR is sitting and trying to get that rocket off the ground and working together. Contrast that with, say, a space shuttle operation or some of the others.

Maybe they're up for 11 days in a row. You have to have three crews every day, and something might happen when you're not on board. That's not the case with a sounding rocket. Everybody comes out every day, same time, sets up, talks to one another, and are really proud of their esprit de corps of getting that rocket off the ground and into the type of Aurora that they want. And they celebrate afterwards. We're going to have dinner later this evening, I believe, at the Chattanooga Lodge,

and that's a rounding place that would open up late in the morning for us to all stop by after a successful launch. So that's celebrating this March 3rd launch that you just did. That's great. Right. Last question, because you've got all these big Aurora fans here that we're holding up on the bus. You heard about the enormous interest, the curiosity that people have, I have, about these rumors of the sounds that people at least believe they're hearing Auroras make.

You guys have done a surprising amount of research into this, but anything conclusive? We have not been able to record that sound, and yet we have a lot of substantial anecdotal evidence from people that convinces us that it really does do something that causes people to think they're hearing it. We haven't been able to record the sound with an audio tape recorder or that sort of thing. So sometimes we wonder if maybe it's happening as an interaction with the human brain because you can have two people who one hears it and one doesn't and yet their actual physical ability to hear is about the same. So there's something else going on here that we just haven't put a finger on yet.

Great fun talking to you once again, Neil. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Science enthusiast and former head of the University of Alaska's Poker Flat Research Range, Neil Brown. We talked inside Launch Pad 3. You can see it on the Planetary Society Flickr page. Back in moments with Bruce Betts. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio.

Here is Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. There's really no point in even trying to say that a different way each time. I think there's security in saying it exactly the same way each time. I know, it would just be stupid to try to say the same phrase differently over and over again. For 11 and a half years, really, what kind of idiot? Oh, wait a minute. We'll get to that. So night sky, Matt.

Mars, Mars, it's a party. It's at opposition or on April 8th. It's closest point it'll be to the Earth for another 26 months or so. So go check it out. It's about as bright as the brightest star in the sky. And we'll dwarf the bright star Spica that's not that far from it. Spica looking bluish, Mars looking reddish. It is coming up, as things do at opposition, around sunset,

maybe a little bit after in the east and up all night. But also, while you're out there, Jupiter's high up in the south in the early evening, looking super bright, brighter than Mars. up in the south in the early evening looking super bright brighter than mars saturn coming up hour two after mars in the east and venus dominating there in the east looking super bright in the pre-dawn sky but wait there's more don't miss this i'll i'll remind you next week there is a total lunar eclipse april 15th visible throughout most of North America. So depending on where you are, you may have to check it out in the wee middle of the night. I'll give you details next week.

We can always look them up. The moon passing into the Earth's shadow, completely going within the dark part of the Earth's shadow, the umbra, and forming a total lunar eclipse. Totality lasting for about uh 78 minutes wow not bad many hours of of eclipse of partial eclipse and then 78 minutes of totality you're probably bumming if you're in uh europe western europe might catch a little of it after sunset similarly asian not not well placed but the Americas, well placed, and most of the Pacific. Off to this week in space history. 1966, which was a very fine year, Luna 10 became the first spacecraft to orbit the moon this week, 1966. On to...

Cold there? A little bit. I was just thinking about your trip to Alaska. I still am. The lunar eclipses, starting with the one on April 15th in 2014 and 2015, there are four consecutive total lunar eclipses. So not partial. This type of series is known as a tetrad. The last one occurred in the years 2003, 2004. So you don't have to go back too far. No, but it's a weird complex series. So you can go

many decades without a tetrad or go many decades with tetrads. It's just a festive party. We move on to the trivia contest. And I asked you how many of Jupiter's moons are bigger than the Earth's moon. How'd we do, Matt? I'll just give it to people quickly here. It's Wayne Likely, who won this time, at least I believe he did, with his answer of three moons, specifically Io, Callisto, and Ganymede. Is that the biggest of all? It is indeed. Largest moon in the solar system. Those three bigger than the Earth's moon, the fourth Galilean satellite Europa, a bit smaller. We got one vote from Mark Wilson for the 2001 monolith in orbit around Jupiter, which I assume is because it's an extradimensional device. But we were looking for traditional

rocky bodies. Indeed, and nothing involving extra-dimensional or device or unnatural or fictional. Yeah, right, fictional especially. All right, so for the next contest, I've got a tetrad question for you for the next time around. In what year after 2014 does the next total lunar eclipse tetrad begin? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest to get us your entry. When should they get it to us by Matt? By Tuesday, April 8th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. That's the 8th at 8 a.m. Pacific time.

What are we giving away? Oh, a t-shirt. A really, 8th at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. What are we giving away? Oh, a t-shirt. A really, really nice t-shirt. I like these new t-shirts a lot. They're excellent. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about pencils. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Batts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He sharpens us up every week here on What's Up.

Intriguing biology experiments in zero-g with Cheryl Nickerson. That's next time on Planetary Radio, which is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the never-dull members of the Society. Clear skies. Thank you.