Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Saving Science Education With Pamela Gay AND Creating the Blackest Black

Episode Date: June 10, 2013

A Planetary Radio double header includes a visit with CosmoQuest’s Pamela Gay. She and colleagues are working to replace vital federal funds for science education and citizen science programs. We also go to the dark side with David Carnahan of NanoLab, developer of carbon nanotubes that may help us discover Earth-like planets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Saving science education and creating the blackest black, 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. A doubleheader in this extended podcast version of our show, we'll have our usual conversations with Emily Lakdawalla and Bill Nye. And then we'll turn to Pamela Gay, that astronomical star of online science media and citizen science. Pamela will tell us about the Hangout-a-thon for science

that she and her CosmoQuest colleagues are planning. Then we'll find out about the blackest black surface ever created and how it may help us discover Earth-like planets. We'll wrap up, as always, when we visit with Bruce Betts for What's Up. Emily, I think it's great that you're giving folks a chance to celebrate a sort of birthday in space, an anniversary. That's right, a slightly poignant one. Today is the 10th anniversary of Spirit's launch to Mars.

And I was actually at Kennedy. It's one of the two launches I've witnessed live. And so I'm going to bring up a Planetary Report article I wrote about the launch. It was a pretty amazing experience to be standing there with the science team, Jim Bell and Matt Golombek and Joy Crisp and others watching this thing take off to Mars. I'm hugely envious. That's two more launches from Kennedy than I've ever seen.

In the meantime, Spirit's sister Opportunity had news just a few days ago. She really did. And this was the whole reason that Opportunity drove all of those kilometers across the trackless wastes of Meridiani Planum to the rim of Endeavor Crater. Opportunity has found, has put her rock abrasion tool down on some incredibly ancient rocks, more ancient than either rover, either of the Mars exploration rovers has ever seen before, and found the kind of clay minerals similar to what Curiosity has seen that speak of a time when there was liquid water at a pretty neutral pH, drinkable liquid water on the surface of Mars. So it was really tough for the team to get to it.

It was a narrow vein and it took them seven attempts to get the rat onto it with enough purchase to scrape away the weathered surface and actually get at the interior composition. But it was well worth it because they've shown that basically on the opposite side of Mars at the same time as Curiosity's rocks, there was also liquid water with a neutral pH. You know, nice stuff for life if it was there on Mars. So that's pretty cool. It is quite a find. Congratulations to everybody on those teams and to Opportunity herself.

Speaking of elsewhere on Mars, what's the news from Curiosity? You have a nice piece up about taking pictures in the dark. Yeah, that's pretty neat. So Curiosity's MOLLE, the hand lens imager, has a couple of sets of LEDs for illuminating things at night. And it was using it to look inside of the drill hole and actually take a look at the interior walls just to sort of maybe look and see if they could see veins or something on the inside. But I just made for a really cool photograph of the rover basically examining the ground by flashlight overnight. Just kind of awesome. Not anything the likes of which we've ever seen from Mars before.

Curiosity 2 has packed up and started driving, as has Opportunity. Both of the rovers are now turning south to head for yet more ancient rocks. It's kind of amazing the parallels between the two missions. Yay. Two things, at least much more, really, but two recent things. This piece about Curiosity, taking pictures at night, you can see the Molly blinking, winking at you in this June 7th entry. And then this piece by Emily that harkens back to that launch 10 years ago this week of Spirit. Thanks a lot, Emily. Thank you, Matt.

Our senior editor and our planetary evangelist, your planetary evangelist. She's also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. I think I'm going to bring this stuff up with Bill as well. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society, and he's on right now. Bill, where do we find you this week? Matt, I'm in New York, New York, the town so nice they named it twice, for some business comma various,

and among which includes, right about now, this week is the anniversary of the Opportunity Rover. Now, you know, the Opportunity Rover is near and dear to us at the Planetary Society, because we did as much as we could to promote it. But for me, I worked on that crazy photometric calibration target, which we enhanced to be a sundial. But the thing is still running.

I mean, the warranty was supposed to be three months, 90 days, 90 sols, Martian days. But it's 10 years later. It's still going. And may have found evidence of neutral pH water on Mars, which seems to be of some significance. Oh yes, it's one thing to have a super salty sea. It's one thing to have a groundwater that leaves you a wall board and a layer on the surface. But it's another thing to have water that might be, if I may, potable, drinkable. And this would change the likelihood of finding evidence of living things. This would be some fossil Martian microbe, a Mars probe of some sort. And of course,

because there is so much water under the soil in certain places, frozen, I, myself, just speaking for myself, not for the Planetary Society, just cannot help but wonder if there isn't something still alive there. And if we found that, it would change the world. So this is the 10th anniversary of this, if I may, endeavor, this thing that, as I say so often, brings out the best in humankind. Now, in New York tonight, Dr. Jim Bell, full disclosure, president of the board of the Planetary Society, is giving a talk at a science cafe in sort of lower Manhattan, and I will be there along with Lon Levin, another board member and one of the co-inventors of XM Radio. So the Planetary Society continues to reach out to people wherever we can find them to get

them excited about space exploration for what, Matt? That's right, the betterment of humankind. And we should mention Jim Bell, one of the proud parents of Opportunity, and it's now passed away sister of Spirit. Yeah, he was principal investigator on the cameras. His book, Postcards on Mars, is striking, and his new book, Space, is just really something else. It's just page after page of amazing photographs citing the significant events in the history of astronomy

that you cannot disagree have changed the world. Changed the world. You know, we better get him back on the show. We'll get him back on to talk about that book a little bit, and maybe share a few of those images. Bill, I think we're out of time. It's just great talking to you, Matt. Let's change the worlds.

I've got to fly. Bill and I are the planetary guy. The CEO of the Planetary Society. I'll be right back to talk about a real challenge to changing the world through science and getting the word out to the public when we speak with Pamela Gay. If you're a fan of Planetary Radio, there's a good chance you also know about AstronomyCast, the long-running podcast hosted by Fraser Cain and Pamela Gay. I think it's safe to say that AstronomyCast was just the first step to a galaxy of online media and citizen science activity, including CosmoQuest,

Astrosphere, 365 Days of Astronomy, and much more. Pamela somehow finds time to be a working astronomer amidst all these projects. She teaches and does her research at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. I got a hold of her on Skype a few days ago so that we could talk about what is probably the biggest challenge she and many other science educators have ever faced. Pamela, it is always a pleasure to talk to you, though I suppose the reason we're speaking, I wish it wasn't necessary to have this conversation. That's definitely one of the truths out there, Matt.

It's great talking, but we're brought together by funding cuts, and that is never a good reason to need to be talking. No, but it is at least an exciting response that you are facing this situation with, and we'll get to that in a moment. But first, give us the background. What's the challenge here? Why are these great organizations in jeopardy? Well, we have a twofold problem.

The first issue is sequestration, which is the U.S. government's way to try and bring our budget under control, similar to the austerity measures that we're seeing across Europe. And sequestration is causing many of the agencies to have mandatory spending cuts. to have mandatory spending cuts, and the fastest way they've found to cut spending is to stop all new programs and to greatly restrict programs that aren't essential for day-to-day operations to continue. The other issue that we're dealing with is the U.S. government is considering a massive reorganization of how education is funded in America. They're looking to potentially centralize all of the different programs that are out there all under the departments of education, the National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian. And while centralization can be a good thing, this is moving forward at a rate that will lead to either funding cancellations

or lack of interim funding for a lot of people. And there's going to be a lot of people, potentially even myself, that lose their jobs because of this lack of bridging funding. And I have to say generically that this idea of centralization, I have grave doubts because you have all of these wonderful programs, like the education and public outreach efforts that are attached to each mission taking place in our solar system and elsewhere. These are the people who care the most about their program. It's hard to imagine some bureaucrats in D.C. doing the kind of work that these individual missions do, but that's a topic perhaps mostly for another day. You really are in jeopardy with this,

with things like CosmoQuest, and does this affect Astrosphere and other organizations? This affects pretty much all of astronomy education and science education in general. I've talked to colleagues who are working on programs with the Department of Agriculture, with the Department of Defense, and anyone who works to communicate their work to the public has their funding in jeopardy. This means that if you have a science educator working hand-in-hand with a scientist, making sure that today's innovations are in tomorrow's classrooms, those people just might lose their jobs.

You are not just sitting feeling sorry for yourself. How do you plan to respond to this? Well, funding difficulties aren't new. And one of the things I grew up watching was the Jerry Lewis telethon for muscular dystrophy. And I remember that it was interesting. It was inspiring. They talked about how this money allowed everyday people to change our ability to cure this disease. And I'm like, well, we don't have a disease to cure, but we have understanding to gather. So we're taking a page from that Jerry Lewis telethon and we're doing a hangout-a-thon using Google Hangout on Air. And we're going to hopefully be providing entertaining and fun science outreach, science craft.

We're actually going to be making T-shirts that look like they have supernovae on them and other things. going to be making t-shirts that look like they have supernovae on them and other things. And after 24 hours, we'll hope to have raised enough money to keep our programs going. And if we surpass our expectations for our program, we're going to work to hire the people on various contracts that are losing their jobs otherwise to keep them doing amazing things. I have worked on a telethon or two. This is a lot of work. How is this being pulled together? A whole lot of sweat and carpal tunnel syndrome. There's a whole team of us at CosmoQuest that are reaching out to everyone we know. We've reached out to you and other folks at the Planetary Society, and we're saying, will you join us for 15 minutes or 45 minutes?

And I have a big open attic. We're going to be setting up there with a film studio. We are going to have shifts of producers coming in to help us. These are people who make their day jobs in media who are going to volunteer to do production for us. It's our hope that if we create really good programming, we can post everything out on YouTube. And along with raising money, we'll have created a catalog of new content that people can learn from into the future.

It all starts Saturday, June 15, running into, well into, Sunday, June 16. How do people find out more? And where will they, if you'll pardon the expression, tune in? You can tune in on our event on Google+, just circle CosmoQuest. You can also get all the details

on CosmoQuest.org. There'll be a blue box at the top of the screen that will contain links to all of the event programming, all of the background information, how to donate, and to shows like this one that are talking of the background information, how to donate, and to shows like this one that are talking about the program that we're doing.

And, of course, we will put up a link to that on this week's Planetary Radio show page. You can get there from planetary.org slash radio. And I'm very glad. I'm really quite honored that you've asked me to make my pitch as well. I'm looking forward to helping you get the good word out with this event. What happens afterward? There are going to be, sadly, a few people who hear this show on broadcast who may catch it after your 24 hours of craziness with your crazy colleague, Nicole. So we understand that there's hopefully going to be people who want to donate after the fact.

We are using PayPal. And so our ability to accept donations doesn't go away just because the clock runs out on this telethon. And we're going to take all the content that we produced for this telethon and put it up on YouTube on the Astrosphere Vids page. It's the same place that our 365 Days of Astronomy episodes and all of our other videocasts, including our weekly virtual star parties, all of that content goes up there. And we hope people tune in and learn. Happy fundraising, Pamela. Best of luck with this,

and I look forward to spending a few minutes with you next weekend. Thank you so much, Matt. Science communicators have to stick together. Yes, I'll say. Pamela Gay, assistant research professor at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, but so many other things, to CosmoQuest and Astrosphere and AstronomyCast, and the list goes on. You can be a part of helping out with this really very challenging, very threatening situation,

not just to those organizations, but as Pamela said, to a good part of science education, and many people would say the best part of science education, the part that actually comes from scientists themselves and lets many of you become scientists too. We'll be back in a moment to learn about the blackest blacks ever created. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill 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. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests.

And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Why is creating the blackest possible black such a bright idea? That's one of the questions I had for David Carnahan. David is president and co-founder of NanoLab, a small research-oriented company in Waltham, Massachusetts. They've been developing nanoscale devices and growing carbon nanotubes for well over a decade. I found them in a recent announcement from NASA about its Small Business Innovation Research,

or SBIR, program. I encourage you to follow the link on our show page at planetary.org slash radio to read more about the fascinating and very diverse list of innovators the agency is working with. It might also give you an idea of why NASA is encouraging these projects and how they might benefit all of us in our daily lives. David, it is a pleasure to welcome you to Planetary Radio. Thank you for joining us. It's great to be here, Matt. Thanks so much for this opportunity. So as I had explained to you, I got this press release from NASA about the SBIR, this program that encourages innovation.

This is what intrigued me so much. When I read the name of your proposal, nanostructured super black optical materials. What do you mean by super black? Well, we have a situation here where a discovery has been made with carbon nanotubes in that they have emissivities that are just much more close to one than anything else. So they are, in fact, blacker than anything else that we've had as a material in the arsenal of the astronomer for years and years.

So emissivity, and you said close to one. So what would one be? Something that doesn't reflect or refract light at all? It basically is invisible, essentially? That would be a perfect black body. And today we don't have those kinds of things, but these carbon nanotube grasses or materials that we're able to grow are very, very close. If we take a look at black paints like the cryolons and the other materials that are commonly used to darken up optical

instruments, they have emissivities of say 0.8 or maybe 0.9. And all of a sudden, we've had this leapfrog or jumping event to materials that have two or three nines throughout the visible range. And so that has a big impact on the optical terrain of these instruments. I can see why you call them grasses, and we have what appears to be an electron microscope image that you provided to us. We'll put that up at our web page where this show can be heard. These are pretty fascinating images. But what is it that actually allows these nanotube arrays to have this incredible level of, as you called it, emissivity?

I don't know about your artistic taste, but I'm sure you're familiar with the Elvis paintings on black velvet. Oh, who isn't? They're so beautiful. The reason those things are so amazing, or at least so unique, is that they are essentially very dark black backgrounds that are very non-reflective. And that velour or velvet surface has a lot of structure to it. And that structure keeps light from coming right directly back at you to the eye. There's very little specular reflectance that comes right back at you. So instead, you have a small amount of diffuse reflectance. So light is

scattered over an entire angle across your visual field. So you don't see light coming back at you from these nanostructured or small structured coatings. How do they actually achieve this, or do we understand that mechanism? Well, one of the things that is fascinating about these nanoscale materials, these carbon nanotubes that we grow, is that they are essentially anisotropic, so that their directional dependence is very significant to their optical properties, but they're also very, very small, so they can be sub-wavelength in one dimension, like their diameter, but comparable to the wavelength or much longer than the wavelength in the other axis.

So we have some abilities to tweak our structures to make them very, very black using these dimensions of these features. But we can also use a number of macro- scale analogies and structure to drive these things to be as black as they can be. Just like the velvets or the velours, which are not made of nanoscale materials, they do have a large amount of surface roughness. And so those will get rid of your specular reflectance and push you into a more diffuse reflectance realm.

And then the other thing that we care very much about goes back to your physics class and Snell's Law, which really governs that intersection when water, say, when, say, light hits a sheet of water and your fishing line or your anchor line appears to bend. And that index of refraction mismatch is one of the things that governs how much light is reflected or refracted inside. And so with the carbon nanotube forests that we grow, there's an awful lot of space in between these carbon nanotubes. And so the light barely notices that it's entered into another material that suddenly will begin to absorb. By minimizing that effective mismatch between refractive indices, the amount of reflection is

minimized. I wish we had time to talk about how you physically manipulate these things at the nanoscale level. Maybe another time, but what I'm very curious about is why NASA saw this as something valuable. And I think you began to touch on it when just in passing a few moments ago you mentioned telescopes. Sure. The search for exoplanets is one of the big motivators for our time. You had Ben Oppenheimer on for a previous segment.

Yeah, just last week. He was chatting about these Colting chronographs and the like. Those type of instruments will definitely benefit from coatings that have better stray light control. And that's what NASA saw in the work that we've been doing. In fact, they've done some of their own work. And in fact, it's been an area of research that's gone on. NIST has done a lot of work. John Lehman's group in Boulder, for example.

Ajan's group has also done a lot of work in aligned carbon nanotube blacks. As it happened, we had been growing these things for a long time and said, yeah, they're black. We didn't really put that together with exactly how black they are, just because we hadn't bothered to measure that kind of thing. One of the things about nanotechnology is that you start very early using the dumbest things that you can do. How black is it? How conductive is it? We use the very simplest things first, and then we build on those and become more sophisticated later. Very briefly, I mean, you've got other people working on this,

but you seem to be on the track of making these flexible, putting them on a flexible base or substrate. That's right. We have a couple goals for this kind of a technology. One is that we'd want to be able to coat the insides of instruments, but the process conditions for these things are pretty extreme. We need pretty high temperature. We need specialized gases because we want to control things about carbon nanotubes,

like their diameter and their site density and such. So the processes are pretty intense. And so for us, that's going to exclude some materials from being coated with these structures, like all plastics will melt under these conditions, for example. So we wanted to be able to either offer a coating that we can put on materials directly or something that we can roll up and insert into a tube to place that coating within a structure. Like the inside of my telescope is an example. Right.

Is it fair to say that this work may someday give me a better television picture? I suppose it is fair. There is, between each of your pixels, a small dark segment that serves to reduce bleed-over from one pixel to the next. This kind of material could very well be used as an absorber for displays. And there are lots of other, I mean, this has made me my favorite part of the proposal that you sent to NASA, the non-NASA applications for this, which are just fascinating. Thermo-acoustic

loudspeakers, nanotube yarns, super hydrophobic coatings that repel water, even things like electric propulsion. But what is this about gecko foot adhesives? Well, the foot of a gecko, and in fact many insects, have a property where they can find all of the surface area. They can have these little tiny fingers that will touch and find all of the gaps and all of the surface irregularities in a surface and hold onto them and they stick to them exceedingly well. You've seen a gecko climb up the side of a pane of glass, for example, and you think, wow, how is that even possible? That occurs because

they have an amazing amount of surface area on these little feet and are able to adhere that foot so completely and use so much of that surface for adhesion. And that's something that we would love to be able to replicate with carbon nanotubes or other materials. Before we started to record, you mentioned one other potential application. You've actually gotten some inquiries from what must have been a very unexpected sector. There's been a number of different inquiries. Sometimes I get a call from magicians.

Magicians are often interested in, well, I should say illusionists, right? Yes. Maybe they're magicians too. I can't speak to that. But illusionists care very much about having very black things to draw attention elsewhere. The other inquiries that I get is from the artistic community. I guess that people don't like the Elvis blacks as much as they like other materials, but artists are in general interested in very, very good and dark black paints.

And so we're trying to figure out what we can do for that community as well while we're doing this work for NASA. Just a word then, as we're almost out of time, about the value of a program like this. I mean, obviously you're going to be somewhat biased, I would expect, but NASA has actually, in this latest round, selected 44 additional proposals, and we'll put up the link to the SBIR site on the NASA web. People can read more about some of these other projects that may receive additional funding from NASA, some of these small business innovation research projects. How important is this kind of

thing for a relatively small company like yours to be able to make innovations like this? Well, we use the structure of this innovative research project funding as a springboard for us to launch ourselves into new application areas. There's some opponents for this kind of funding because they'll see companies that will use it more as a crutch to support a larger research and development organization. But when you use it right, it lets you jump into a new industry or a new application area that you didn't have the funds to develop before. They're very selective these days, so the technologies that they will fund typically have a pretty solid basis in terms of having potential as a commercial success.

The government has realized that these kinds of things can be very much a win-win. They get a technology that they need for their missions, and they also get a new tool in the toolbox of America to generate advances and new technologies. David, best of luck as you continue to develop this. I look forward to having it on the inside of my own telescope, and even more so, I hope that someday you'll be able to say, hey, we helped discover that super-Earth and discover oxygen in that atmosphere. That would be a pretty nice thing to look back on for your nanotube work, wouldn't it? It would certainly be great to be able to even say that we helped a little.

We've been talking with David Carnahan. He is president and co-founder of Nanolab Incorporated, which does lots of stuff at the nanoscale, including this development of the blackest black materials ever created using tiny carbon fiber nanostructures. They are based in Waltham, Massachusetts. We'll bring it back home to Pasadena for a visit now with Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. It is time for What's Up on Planetary Radio.

Here's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Welcome back. How's the sky? It's lovely, not surprisingly. We've got Venus looking super, super, super bright, as it always does. You've got to catch it fairly soon after sunset. Low in the west, looking like a super bright star. And also still hanging out with Mercury over there, looking much dimmer, but hanging out near Venus. Saturn, just a rock up there.

Well, actually a ball of gas. And it's good over in the east in the early evening and then in the west later in the night looking yellowish. And we'll be able to keep seeing it for a while. I want to bring up a little bonus thing here because you very kindly, very generously, let those of us on staff at the Society know when something cool is going to happen over our heads, like a flyby of the International Space Station. And you did that last week. There apparently was quite the traffic jam. It was almost a demolition derby up there. Well, that's what it looked like to our eyes, perceiving three-dimensional space in two dimensions.

In reality, nothing was particularly close to each other. But yeah, I went out there, and I know some other staff members did, and I'd only really researched the International Space Station. And then as soon as we started looking at that, then another bright object came up looking like it was on an intercept with it. Turned out that was the Chinese unoccupied space station, Tiangong-1. But then as the space station kept flying across the sky, I just kept seeing more and more. So I saw four different spacecraft. Someone with darker skies saw five. So yeah, it was busy up there.

A whole variety of different kinds of stuff, from rocket bodies to former spy satellites, all sorts of stuff. Yeah, busy sky. And I happen to know, a tip of the hat to Brandon, our IT guy, who's the guy who lives out there where the darker skies are in the godforsaken desert. So this is the one advantage he gets to it. IT guy, who's the guy who lives out there where the darker skies are in the godforsaken desert.

So this is the one advantage he gets to it. Yeah, if you ever want to check that out, I don't call those out on the air because we, of course, have listeners all over the world. And it's really a region thing. So like a space station, mostly spacecraft flyovers are good for like the LA area or your region. But you can look these things up a couple good places. One is heavens-above.com where you can set up an account and track these regularly. Also, if you just want to see station, which is the brightest spacecraft object because it's the

biggest, go to the NASA website, search on spot the station. And for the really good flybys, they will send you an email heads up. We move on to this week in space history. 50th anniversary this week of the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova. And the 10th anniversary of the launch of Spirit off to Mars for its successful multi-year roving around. Yes, as we heard from Emily a little bit earlier and some of those accomplishments. And now...

We're in the space! Fact! Yeah. Kind of grating, but unique. You can try to edit that in post. So, related to what you're asking about, Matt, the International Space Station is usually similar in brightness to Jupiter in the night sky. Always dimmer than Venus and brighter by quite a bit than all the other planets. It does vary a little bit depending on its orientation, but ballpark Jupiter brightness.

Very good. All right. We move on to the trivia contest. I asked you, in what year did more humans fly in space than in any other year? How'd we do, Matt? I'm just going to tackle this quickly. I think everybody got it right, but it was just Andrew Ridd, Andrew, of Midvale, Utah, a first-time winner, I believe, who got past random.org with the correct answer, which was 1985. 1985.

God, that's so long ago. 63 men and women on nine shuttle and two Soyuz missions, according to Andrew. So congratulations, Andrew. You're going to get Bill Nye's voice on your answering system. All right, we move on to the next question. And related to the James Webb Space Telescope, who was James Webb? Now, I don't need a whole biography in the context of why have they named a space telescope after him? Who was James Webb? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. scope after him. Who is James Webb?

Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until the 17th. That'll be June 17 of this very year. Monday at 2pm to get us that answer. And I think we're going to give away get this, a classic edition Planetary Radio t-shirt. We really

we're getting so close to the new t-shirt, folks. Be patient. I've seen the design. It's supposedly going to the new t-shirt, folks. Be patient. I've seen the design. It's supposedly going to the silk screeners. So any minute now, if you want to get one of these classic shirts, though, collect the whole set. You should get in on this week's contest. And I think that's it. We're done.

This isn't going to be a new Coke experience where we pull it back and go back to the old one. It's more popular than ever. We'll let the consumer determine that. Alright, everybody go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about masking tape. Thank you, and good night. I'm really much more partial to duct tape myself. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects

for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up and reveals that, who knew space is three-dimensional. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation

and by the four-dimensional members of the Planetary Society. Or is that eleven? Clear skies.