Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Sailing the Canyons of Titan

Episode Date: August 16, 2016

Steep canyons on Saturn's moon Titan are filled with liquid methane. That's the discovery just announced by an international team of Cassini scientists, including Alex Hayes.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sailing the Grand Canyons of Titan, 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. We're not yet ready to cruise up those magnificent, newly discovered arroyos on Saturn's big moon, but Cornell's Alex Hayes looks forward to the day when we can. My conversation with him begins right after we hear from Emily Lakdawalla and Bill Nye, and just before a particularly enjoyable What's Up visit with Bruce Betts that features a cameo by one of my favorite Star Trek actors and a new Olympian listener contest. Emily is the Planetary Society's senior editor. Emily, it's back to Mars, the red planet, where Curiosity

continues to explore. Bring us up to date from this entry that you posted on the 12th of August. Well, I seem to be at a rhythm now of checking in on Curiosity about once every two months. Well, I seem to be at a rhythm now of checking in on Curiosity about once every two months. Curiosity tends to go on drives of about half a kilometer long and then does a little drilling stop. And that's what they did this last time. Curiosity is currently headed south. The rover's finally driven around to the western edge of this dune field and is beginning to cross it at a place called Murray Buttes, named for our late co-founder, Bruce Murray. And the scenery is absolutely spectacular. These buttes, these rocks standing, they remind everybody of the American Southwest. It's just been stunning. Absolutely gorgeous. The very first image that you put in here is a 360

degree panorama. And I want to encourage people, go ahead and zoom in. Don't resist because it just gets prettier and prettier. And it's going to keep getting prettier because Curiosity is now driving among the buttes. That wasn't actually the original plan. The original plan was to go just to the east of them. So you'd have the views of the buttes on the west and views of the dunes on the east, but they seem to have changed their minds and they're now driving in among them. So pretty soon the rover is going to be completely surrounded by these topographic features. Well, I'm happy with that tribute to our founder, calling it Murray Buttes, but I don't know,

Monument Valley might have also been okay with me. The next image here, you've collected all of the drill sites that Curiosity has made. And what's striking, other than the pretty colors, is the diversity of these. Yeah, you're looking at 13 different drill sites that Curiosity has made. And what's striking, other than the pretty colors, is the diversity of these. Yeah, you're looking at 13 different drill sites that Curiosity has drilled at so far. You know, most of the rock surface is covered by a dust that's fairly similar in color, sort of a rusty red. But once the rover drills into the rock, you get a lot of different colors inside the rock. Those colors are mostly attesting to whether the interior of the rock is oxidized or reduced. The redder ones have a more oxidized iron chemistry, and the bluer ones have a less

oxidized chemistry. And that's just hints at the chemical diversity inside that the rover is doing those drill holes for. Now they're taking samples and stuffing them inside the Kamin and SAM instruments. There is much more that you will find about Curiosity and its recent wanderings on Mars in this entry from August 12th at planetary.org. And as usual, Emily has also included all of the journal entries from a bunch of the people at the U.S. Geological Survey that follow her portion of the article. But before we go, there is this one other image it was too late to include in the blog, but you tweeted about it.

Yeah, you know, wherever you have a monument valley, eventually you're going to see something, just a feature that just strikes people's fancy. Maybe it looks like a person's face or something. In this case, it's this pyramidal rock that's poised on the slope of one of the buttes. And we've been seeing it getting bigger and bigger, closer and closer. And finally, they just couldn't resist. They took a photo with the chem cam. It's kind of like the spyglass on the rover, just showing that that pyramid sitting there as it must have been doing for millions of years until a rover came by, hopefully not to disturb it as it passes. Yeah, right. Don't make too many vibrations, Curiosity. We want to keep that around for the human tourists when they arrive.

Emily, thanks very much. Thank you, Matt. She is our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. We go now to the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy. Welcome back, Bill. Thank you for stepping out of a meeting there to join us by telephone today. We've got a new public service announcement.

People are going to hear your voice in a few minutes talking about the 100th anniversary of the National Park System. I know it's fantastic. The thing's been around 100 years, started by Woodrow Wilson to preserve our wild lands and preserve all sorts of things. It's really a visionary idea. In this PSA, people are going to hear you quote our friend Tyler Nordgren, who was on the show with us not long ago from Death Valley, a national park. After the park is after dark. Precisely.

It's just one of many things to do in a national park is to look up. Not all of them, but many of them are in wide open spaces with very dark skies. Not all of them, but many of them are in wide open spaces with very dark skies. Speaking of wide open spaces, Matt, Grand Canyon-sized features on Titan. That's what we're going to talk about today. This discovery of these tremendous canyons full of liquid, liquid methane most likely, probably made by that methane. We're finding this Earth-like geology more and more on this very strange world. For me, it just gives you more respect for the people, Carl Sagan especially, who talked about comparative planetology back over 50 years ago.

You compare Venus to Earth to Mars to Europa to Titan, and you get these insights, the same geological or geophysical processes that happen on our world happen on all these other worlds. And by studying these other worlds, you've got to figure it's going to give us insight into ours.

So find your park, to tie it back to the national park. Find your park and appreciate what our ancestors wanted us to preserve, what they wanted us to see. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Matt. Let's change the world. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy. We go on now to a conversation with Alex Hayes about those canyons

on that frigid world, Titan. The latest big announcement by scientists working with the Cassini spacecraft came less than a week ago. Using the orbiter's radar in a new way, they found geological features that appear astoundingly similar to some of the most spectacular locales on our own world. Alex Hayes is a member of the international team that made the discovery. The astronomer and planetary scientist directs the spacecraft Planetary Image Facility at Cornell University in upstate New York.

He joined me from there via Skype. Alex Hayes, congratulations to you and your colleagues on this remarkable discovery. It is incredibly exciting, and I look forward to having you tell us about these canyons. That's great. I look forward to telling you about them myself. I do want to point out before we get going, though, that this entire study was led by Valerio Poggialli, who's a graduate student at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, who was a visiting student at Cornell during part of this work and was mentored over in La Sapienza by Roberto Say. the Italian Space Agency continues to play a very large role in the success of the Cassini mission. Maybe that's something we can talk about a little bit later, how collaborative this kind of work in science is. But now go ahead, tell us about these Grand Canyons on this moon of Saturn. So this is an amazing discovery. What Valerio has been able to do is take advantage of a different operating mode of the radar than you're used to seeing. Most of the time when you take a look at images of Titan,

they're acquired with the synthetic aperture radar system when the radar is turned to the side, collecting imaging data in a method known as synthetic aperture radar. But you can also turn the radar so it points straight down at the surface in a mode called altimetry. And the altimetry mode lets you do several things, two of which are to measure the time it takes for the radio emissions you send to come back, which is the ranging part of radar and gives us a height estimate on the surface and also tells us how bright the surface is, how much reflection we get from the surface by looking at the ratio of what we send out to what we receive.

And this altimetry mode of the radar has been phenomenal recently and has been this great public interest story of how we can take a spacecraft that has been operating around the Saturn system for 10 years, then have young scientists who were not around when the Cassini was launched, utilize that mode in a different way to make some amazing discoveries, the two of which that has come out of the same group at La Sapienza is the ability to measure the depth and composition of Titan seas.

And then Valerio's work where he took advantage of those altimetry passes around the North polar terrain of Titan, where we have hydrocarbon lakes and seas, and we have these channels that we believe are made of liquid methane. And when you went over the channels, Valerio saw a transition from a low-reflecting surface to a specular-reflecting surface that would occur if you had basically a mirror on the surface. Those specular reflections occurred at the same location we see what we perceive to be river channels.

And so this is the first time we've been able to directly confirm that indeed the surface is as smooth as a liquid-filled channel at those locations. And it's very strong evidence that these channels that we're seeing on Titan are currently filled with liquid. And on top of that, because you can also tell how far away from the spacecraft your reflections were by timing the amount of time it takes for the energy to go from the spacecraft to the surface and back. We were also able to tell that not only were those channels filled with liquid, but surprisingly, they were filled with liquid and they were between 150 to 300 meters below their surrounding terrain. And that the distance over which that depth occurred is very shallow, very small. And so the walls of these canyons are greater than 45 degrees and

more likely very steep, close to cliff faces. So that now what Valerio's work has showed us is that these channels on Titan's surface are currently liquid filled and they sit in these canyons like the gorges of upstate New York that permeate Cornell University, where I'm talking from. And I already made that comparison to the Grand Canyon in Arizona, which others have called out to compare to these on Titan. Do you think that's also an accurate comparison? It could be. I hesitate to draw the comparison further than just saying that we have steep-sided canyons with liquid on the bottom of them because we don't exactly know how these canyons formed, and we don't want to take the analogy too far to say they formed in the same way the Grand Canyon did.

Will we have a chance of learning how these were formed and the geological similarities between Earth and Titan? Let me answer that in a couple of ways. The first point I'll make is in relation to your last statement, in that Titan is eerily familiar. You have pretty much the same geomorphological geologic features you find here on the Earth are found on Titan. Saturn between Titan has dunes, and these dunes are the same size and shape as the dunes you might see in the deserts of Namibia or the Sahara Desert. But instead of being made of quartz grains or silicate sand, these dunes are actually made

of what's compositionally closer to plastic, solid hydrocarbon grains. You also find rivers on Titan, which are the subject of our discussion today. But instead of being filled with liquid water, those rivers are actually filled with liquid hydrocarbon. Titan has lakes and seas, and the coastlines of those lakes and seas are very indicative of the same coastlines you find here on Earth, but the same presumably processes or coastal morphologies and shoreline processes occurring and eroding or depositing material. Titan also has mountains, and those mountains, instead of being made of solid rock and granite,

are actually made of what we believe to be water ice. So in general, Titan has the same morphologic features as Earth, but in an extremely different environment, at the extremes of the environmental conditions. Titan is sitting at over 200 degrees Kelvin colder than the temperature that we're in this room right now. And the working fluid or the material that's moving around and eroding and carving the surface, it's not liquid water, it's liquid methane. And so Titan's entire sediment transport system is built off of a methane hydrologic cycle that's completely analogous to our water-based hydrologic cycle. And when you mentioned this similarity to the hydrological cycle, you're talking about evaporation and rain, storms of these hydrocarbons, right?

I am indeed. Titan has rain. Titan has evaporation off its lake surfaces and transported the material across the surface. There is a closed cycle system similar to the cycle that we have here on Earth. One difference that's an interesting one to point out, though, is that if you took all of the water in Earth's atmosphere and condensed it onto the surface, you would have a global ocean that's about the depth of your fingernail. If you did the same thing on Titan and you condensed out all of the liquid methane, which is the fluid that's near the triple point in its phase diagram, it's near the point where both solid and liquid coexist, you would have about six to seven meters of a global ocean. So think 20 feet deep ocean circumventing the surface. And so unlike Earth, where there are many, many orders of magnitude more liquid stored in the oceans on our surface than there is in the atmosphere, on Titan, there's seven times more moisture in the atmosphere than there is in all of the liquid that we've seen on the surface.

Wow. So it's directly analogous to our water cycle, but perhaps in a different regime. That is just amazing. So much more that we need to learn about this world. You were talking about the geology and the morphology and whether we're going to be able to figure out how these formed. I've read a little bit of people hypothesizing that maybe they were formed in the same way features like the Grand Canyon were. Right. Titan's polar terrain, which is where we find the lakes and seas, is also its most

interesting terrain from my point of view, and others may have different opinions, but I'll say at least it's the terrain that is most intriguing from a geologic point of view in terms of process. And the way that you try to discern the history of a landscape or how a surface formed is by looking at the interaction between different geomorphologic features that you see, whether they be lakes, empty lakes, holes or depressions, and these rivers and canyons. And you look at the way the processes that formed those features have interacted, and that tells you the story of how the surface formed. And so these canyons that Valeria has discovered is one bit of information that couples with everything else we've learned to tell an extremely interesting story about the way these polar landscapes may have formed. The other feature that has to be thought of in conjunction with these canyons

are the small lakes that we find around Titan. And by small, I mean tens of kilometers in size. And these lakes do not have any channels that flow into or out of them. They're topographically closed depressions. That's interesting because it means there's no easy way to figure out how the material that formed the hole, the material that was left behind after the hole was formed, got out. kind of like what you can you form topographically closed depressions into, and can you form steep-sided canyons into like this? It has to be easily erodible and partially soluble in the working fluid. And on Titan, water ice is completely insoluble. Oh, just because it's so incredibly cold? Well, because it's incredibly cold, water ice acts like rock on Titan.

It has a strength of somewhere between sandstone and more traditional granite, but probably closer to sandstone. So you can mechanically erode it, but it's completely insoluble in the liquid. So if you put a pool of liquid onto a small depression of water ice, it would just sit there happily. But if you did the same thing with solid organics, specifically organics like acetylene, which are prevalent on Titan's surface, liquid hydrocarbon would actually dissolve that material into the liquid itself, and you can form these dissolution-based features like these topographically closed lakes that we think we see. And because of that, we have strong evidence to suggest that the layers that these canyons are cutting into are not actually made of water ice. They're made of solid organics

that are soluble to liquid methane and ethane. And in fact, the poles of Titan could represent polar caps where you've had the solid material transport over geologic time to build up at the poles. So acetylene is a candidate for what these canyons and other features are made of? It's one of the candidates, yes. You know, you have to take a step back to understand the importance of that and realize that Titan's hydrologic system is based off of methane, and methane is prevalent in its atmosphere. And that in itself is a very intriguing fact, because methane is an ephemeral gas. Methane is broken up in the upper atmosphere of Titan by high-energy particles from the sun. And so methane CH4, and if you throw a high-energy photon at it, it breaks up into CH3, which is a highly reactive radical. And in fact, those radicals combine to form a series of higher order hydrocarbons and nitriles

and Titan's upper atmosphere is like an organic chemical factory. And that organic chemical factory results in hazes, which is why when you see a picture of Titan taken in the visible or in the infrared, you typically see this hazy orange ball because you're looking through a smog layer that puts Los Angeles and Beijing to shame. Cornell University's Alex Hayes. He'll have more to tell us about the liquid-filled canyons of Titan in a minute. And there's an extended version of our conversation online. You can get there from planetary.org slash radio. This is Planetary Radio. to say half the park is after dark. So when you're in our national parks, please look up at the night sky and wonder

because we want everyone in the world to know the cosmos and our place in space. Hi, Emily Lakdawalla here with big news from the Planetary Society. We're rolling out a new membership plan with great benefits and expanded levels of participation. At the Planetary Society, passionate space fans like you join forces to create missions, nurture new science and technology,

advocate for space, and educate the world. Details are at planetary.org forward slash membership. I'll see you around the solar system. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Alex Hayes is a Cornell astronomer and a co-investigator on the international team that has discovered big canyons on Titan, the weirdly Earth-like moon of Saturn. And in those canyons is liquid methane that appears to have carved them much as the Grand Canyon was carved by water here on Earth. If we were on Titan looking at these canyons, would you be surprised if we saw the kind of stratification or layering

that we expect to see in canyons on Earth? I would be surprised if we didn't. Wow. You could argue that with only a few small minor changes, the north polar terrain of Titan would look very similar to the terrain of your favorite lakefront vacation home here on Earth. This just gets better and better. Those organics, you cannot help but talk about other worlds like this that are so similar to Earth, other than being incredibly frigid, and get away from talk about the possibility of life. Where do you stand on this investigation that is only barely beginning of the possibility

that life, not as we know it, to use the cliche, could exist in this incredibly dynamic place? Well, there's two parts to my answer. The first is that I continue to be amazed by the fact that within our own lifetimes, within the next, say, two decades, we have the capability to explore and look for the signs of life in the ocean worlds of the outer solar system. Titan is an ocean world. Underneath its icy crust, there's a liquid water ocean. Other ocean worlds include Europa, a moon of Jupiter, and Enceladus, another moon of Titan. And there is strong evidence that suggests there could be habitable environments at the bases of these oceans that are very similar to some of the hydrothermal vent systems like Lost

City that we found here on Earth. And so from one perspective, Titan is interesting from a life-as-we-know-it standpoint, because we could have these vent systems on Titan, Europa, or Enceladus. In this aspect, what makes Titan extremely interesting is even though that ocean is hard to access through a very, very thick ice layer, Titan has one thing that we don't know if Enceladus or Europa have, which is abundant organics that you just mentioned. And if those organics can interact with liquid water in any way, and there's several ways to do that, either by driving them down into the subsurface or maybe even bringing the liquid from the subsurface up in melt pools or

cryovolcanic features, then you have a really interesting scenario for talking about both prebiotic and biotic chemistry and the origins and existence of life as we know it. So that's one aspect. The second aspect, which makes Titan a very special place, is that Titan is actually a world of two oceans. In addition to this liquid water ocean in the subsurface, we also have these hydrocarbon seas on the surface. And you can ask a really interesting question about, well, are there reactions that can set up processes that grab nutrients from the environment that form an inside and an outside that then form cells or some cell equivalent that then can mutate and reproduce those mutations and start actually clicking all the tick boxes of what we use to define life.

And can you have some kind of exotic life in a Titan Sea? The answer is, I don't know, but that there are several people that have published papers showing how such systems might set up and exist. And the only way to find out is to go there. out is to go there. It seems, therefore, that just about everything that you've talked about, this biological speculation, but also the geology that we now are developing such excellent knowledge of, much more to learn, of course, all of this seems to be an awfully good argument for sending another robotic explorer down to the surface of this cold moon. I completely agree. And in fact, a large swath of the planetary community agrees with you. And we are working on a mission right now that would send both an orbiter to Titan

as well as a small sea probe that would land in Titan's largest sea, Krakenmari. And we try to answer the question of how prebiotic chemistry works on Titan and maybe even take a hint at whether we see evidence for the existence of some kind of weird life. And that proposal's name is Oceanus. And that proposal will be submitted to the New Frontiers 4 call or opportunity that NASA is planning early next year. And I would just end by pointing out there that not only would that mission tell you things about whether you expect to have life as you know it on Titan, whether Titan could tell us something about the origin of life on Earth by the prebiotic chemistry that is undoubtedly going on. And also perhaps even the more intriguing and far-fetched question of weird life.

But you also have the geology that's so similar to Earth, as you mentioned earlier. But you also have the geology that's so similar to Earth, as you mentioned earlier. And an analogy for that is that Titan's hydrologic system and all these geologic processes happening on the surface represent an extreme of what we see here on Earth. And by studying them, you can understand the physics behind the processes and learn more about our own planet. It's very similar to the argument that you use for Venus. So, you know, Venus is often shown as the example of Earth's greenhouse gone exponentially larger. So Titan is to Earth's hydrologic system as Venus is to Earth's greenhouse effect. This probe that you want to send into the seas of Titan, Oceanus, sounds like a terrific topic that we ought to get you back on the show for some other time,

because I already have lots of questions like, will it be powered? Will you be able to maybe sail it up into one of these canyons or some other feature, a Titanic fjord, if you will? I don't know if you want to address that. I would happily spend hours speaking with you about the advantages of going back to Titan and the different ways you would do it. And I will happily tell you about Oceanus, which is the orbiter, and Calypso, which is actually the name of the sea probe. Ah, okay. Which is... A nice tribute to Jacques Cousteau, for one thing.

Nice tribute to Jacques Cousteau and also the Titan gods. I mean, Oceanus is the Titan god of the ocean river around Earth, and depending which history you read, Calypso is related to him typically as his daughter. I should also point out that there are a series of other mission concepts that we'd like to pursue into the future and have a whole campaign to Titan. So I happily will talk about Oceanus, but my hope is that Oceanus is only the first step in a series of missions to explore Titan. Let's finish this by going back to where I said, to the collaborative nature of so much of the work that Cassini has done. And this study, you mentioned before we started recording that the timing of this was pretty critical. Right. And there's two reasons for that.

The first is a great human interest story showing how collaborative and open the Cassini project is. Cassini launched in the mid-1990s, and people have spent their careers on this project. But despite having been on this project for so long, they are very open to bringing in young scientists such as myself when I first got involved, and more so recently, folks like Valerio and Marco Mastro Giuseppe, also from the University of Rome La Sapienza, who came in with new ideas of a way to use the altimetry mode of the radar. And the Cassini project listened to them and actually said, you know, that's a great idea. That's a great way to utilize the spacecraft.

Let's scrap the plans that we've had for 15 years that people have spent 10 years developing, and let's take advantage of your idea. Let's have the spacecraft do something a little different than it was planning to, which was acquire these altimetry data sets. case, this data set would have never been acquired and we never would have made this discovery. The processing of the altimetry data that was necessary to acquire the information that led to the publication of this paper and other more recent works that demonstrate the depth and composition of Titan Cs required access to the processing software that is not always made available. And so it emphasizes the importance of not only making the final data products available to the general public for use in future years, but also the processing software that led to them. I will make sure that our friend Linda Spilker, the project scientist for Cassini, hears about this praise that you've had for how they have conducted this portion of this

incredibly successful mission, which sadly is coming to an end. We don't have any choice about this. Cassini will run out of gas, basically. I bet you are one of those who wishes it could go on for many more years. I do actually wish more than anything that we were able to have enough fuel left in the spacecraft to argue for turning Cassini into a Titan orbiter. But sadly, we do not. But what I can say is that the decision that was made to have Cassini go between the ring plane and Saturn and get ever closer to Saturn on multiple passes called the F-ring and proximal orbits is a glorious way for it to go and is going to fundamentally change what we know about the way the Saturn system formed, about the formation of giant planets, which leads to exoplanets. And it's just going to be an entire new mission, the data that's going to come down from these final years of Cassini. So I can't be

too upset, although I would be much happier had we been able to put an orbiter on Titan and have it sit there for another five or 10 years. We'll just have to go back, Alex, and put that orbiter there, and maybe put that boat down on the seas of Titan, and see what else we can learn about this amazing little world. Yes, and I should close by just getting back to Valerio's paper and emphasizing that Valerio's work has been the first direct evidence we have that these liquids on Titan are filling up these channels, and more so that these channels are not shallow sloping valleys, but instead steep-sided canyons that

are telling us something about how the polar material is eroded, meaning that it has to vertically erode faster than it can laterally migrate. And that is a piece of the puzzle that's going to be put together with the rest of the pieces that we have from other observations to really tell us how that landscape has evolved and what it's made of. A very exciting, very intriguing conversation. Alex, thank you so much for joining us on the show. And I look forward to hearing more, particularly about those spacecraft that you hope to send back to Titan before too long. And I hope everybody and anybody we can get in touch with will hear about them as well. Alexander Hayes is a professor of astronomy and the director of the Spacecraft Planetary Image Facility at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where so much fantastic planetary science

has been done, including by Carl Sagan, of course, one of the fathers of that field. He has been talking to us about these steep-sided canyons on Titan and the liquid that both filled them and almost certainly formed them. And we'll look forward to another conversation about that before too long here on Planetary Radio, where next we are going to Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. edition of What's Up. We are going to have some fun today. Just wait till you hear this week's edition of What's Up with Bruce Betts. He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. He's on the Skype line. Hi. Hello. And welcome. I'm really looking forward. I'm excited. There's such fun stuff going on today. Let's get right into it. We've got Mars moving between the star Antares and

Saturn low in the west in the early evening over the next week to two weeks. They'll kind of be lined up on the 23rd. So reddish Mars, yellowish Saturn, reddish Antares. It'll be a little bit dimmer. It's cool. It's in the south. It's in the early evening. Go check it out. On to this week in space history. Two landmark missions were launched during this week. Viking 1 in 1975 and Voyager 2 in 1977. We have, and it is perfectly timed, a celebrity random space fact intro. One of your heroes, one of mine.

Here he is. Hi, it's Rene Auberginois. I'm here at the Star Trek 50th anniversary. Very exciting. I played Odo on Deep Space Nine. Bruce, we're ready for your random space fact. Let's hear it. I am such a fan of René Obruchamon.

Oh, that is so cool. I know. And so appropriate. That's awesome. We'll get to why it's appropriate when we get to the trivia question. But it's always appropriate. He can do it every week if you want. You bet.

Yeah, I would be happy to have Renene back absolutely every week. Go ahead. The LightSail spacecraft, the LightSail 1, LightSail 2 of the Planetary Society, in its launch configuration is the width of a gymnastics balance beam. 10 centimeters or four inches. Yes, it is a small spacecraft, and gymnasts can use it. No, no they can't. That wasn't any of the testing that we did, did we? Having a tiny gymnast stomp on it? No, we did more severe testing than that.

I think we can handle that. On to last week's contest. I asked you, what spacecraft flew past Comet Borelli in 2001? How'd we do, Matt? Some of you have already figured out the Rene Aubergine tie-in, Odo from Deep Space Nine. The question that Bruce gave us was, what spacecraft flew past Comet 19P Borelli in 2001? And the answer, Bruce, is...

Deep Space One. And we got, I think at least a third of the people who entered made Deep Space Nine references, some of them very deep. We have a lot of Trekkies out there. Chris Capobianco was above all that. He's in Tucson, Arizona, and he said it was Deep Space One. So, Chris, you are the winner of that signed copy of The Martian, signed by its author, Andy Weir. You're also going to get a Planetary Society rubber asteroid and a 200-point eye telescope account. So, congratulations, Chris. The only other entry that I want to mention this week is this

one. It starts this way. Human memory is both very fallible and very deceptive, but my memory is that it was Deep Space One. DS-1's spectacular encounter with Borelli was the culmination of its two-year extended mission and yielded NASA's first close-up pictures of the nucleus of a comet, as well as other data. And it goes on. And then at the end, he adds, On a personal note, I'm not only a fan of Planetary Radio, lifelong space enthusiast, and was the project manager and leader of the team that flew DS-1 to the comet.

Well, I guess he'd know. This from our friend Mark Raymond of JPL, who, of course, now spends his time going round and round and round asteroid Ceres. The second stop, the Dawn spacecraft that he also runs. Deep Space One, that great proof of ion engine technology that later would get us to Vesta and Ceres with the Dawn spacecraft. Hi, Mark. Good to hear from you. Yeah, it's cool.

Deep Space One, I think, doesn't get enough recognition. It was a technology demonstration, not just of ion engines, but a whole wealth of other technologies and did some very nice science, and as he mentioned, gave us our first U.S. flyby of a comet nucleus. And we're going to put Mark's entire response up on the show page that you can get to from planetary.org slash radio. It's a pretty good recap of that spectacular mission.

And we're ready to go on. Well, there's something about me I don't know if you know, Matt, but every two years I become obsessed with watching the Olympics. God bless DVRs. It's because of your days as a luge rider. Yeah, that certainly has affected it. And my dabbling with Team Handball. As you were on the luge, I think. It was quite a performance. Go ahead. Yeah, I like to combine the Summer and Winter Olympics, but that's not important right now. What is important is here is our next trivia question. We haven't had a subjective judging one for a little while.

question. We haven't had a subjective judging one for a little while. If you were designing an Olympic event for another world in our solar system, what would it be and where would it be? You get points for coolness factor and or for humor and whatever else Matt and I decide we like. Sound good, Matt? Sounds great. I love it. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest and get us your Olympic gold medal winning entry. But be sure to get it to us by the 23rd, August 23rd at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And you'll be part of this Olympic competition on Planetary Radio. And we'll give the winner a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, and a 200-point itelescope.net account. That worldwide nonprofit network of telescopes. You can do astronomy till the cows come home.

Which is another Olympic event, I think, driving the cows. Oh, I'd be good at that. Well, really more leading the cows. That's a much longer story than we have time for. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about what event you would have the highest potential of meddling in the Olympics. Thank you, and good night. What did I tell you?

This was a fun one, right? He's always the gold medalist in our book. That's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. TPS, TPS, TPS. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its deep members. Danielle Gunn is our associate producer.

Josh Doyle composed the theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.