Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Saving the Hubble Space Telescope in IMAX 3D

Episode Date: March 22, 2010

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Preparing the Hubble Space Telescope in IMAX 3D, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It may already be in a theater near you. Hubble 3D is the awe-inspiring film about the last repair mission to the Hubble. We're minutes away from a conversation with the commander of that mission and the producer-director of the film. We're even closer to our weekly report from Emily Lakdawalla,

which means Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, is not far behind. And Bruce Batts will help me tell you how you can enter to win an anniversary edition First Scope from Celestron during this week's What's Up segment. Here's something else to look forward to. What are you doing on the evening of Friday, April 30th? If you'll be in Southern California, why not join us for PlanRad Live, the first recording of this show in front of a live audience. Bill and the rest of the gang will be there along with our special guests, SpaceX's builder of rockets, Jeff Rakiki, and NASA pioneer, James Burke.

And it's free. That's April 30th. More details next week. Time now to check in with the Keeper of the Planetary Society blog. Emily, you took us back to Saturn last week. I had some pretty pictures that you posted on the 19th. But really, more significantly, what's this about learning about the interior structure of Titan? How are we doing that? And why have you called it Callisto with weather? Well, it's a tough thing to learn about the interior structures of any other bodies in the solar system besides Earth, where we have seismometers that tell us a lot about the interior structure the only way to learn about the insides of moons and planets elsewhere is to fly spacecraft very close to them while continuously

feeding a radio signal from the spacecraft to earth and we do doppler tracking of the spacecraft speed as a very very sensitive probe of the force of gravity around the planet. And geophysicists can invert information about the gravity around the planet to determine how densely concentrated the mass is. Is all the mass inside the body concentrated at the center, or is it more evenly spread out within the interior? And with Titan, it's so big, we've long assumed that its mass would be concentrated toward the center, much like it is at Earth with a metal core over which is a rocky mantle and then an icy mantle above that and then the icy crust. But Cassini's results at Titan seem to indicate that its mass is not concentrated at the center. And what that means is that it's not differentiated and that it has had a less active geologic history than people have thought.

And so more like other moons, smaller moons like Callisto? Well, Callisto is actually one of the biggest moons in the solar system, but it's unusual in that it has not differentiated, whereas its neighbor Ganymede, which is the biggest moon, is differentiated, and it shows its geologic activity on the surface. Now, Titan has a very youthful surface. It's been carved by rivers and rain of methane, but it looks like maybe that the weather that has shaped Titan's surface has hidden the fact that Titan is not actually that geologically active. Now, I should say here that there are other members of the Cassini team who would beg to differ with this result. They think they've seen volcanic activity on Titan. So it's clearly still an active area of debate. We've seen volcanic activity on Titan.

So it's clearly still an active area of debate. Well, we will commend people to the blog where you have some great cutaway images, one that shows cutaways of a whole bunch of moons around the solar system. Yeah, and I have to thank Doug Ellison for putting that one together. What's this about finding old lunar probes from the Soviet Union? Well, the Soviets have always known pretty much where their lunar probes were, but it's still always special to see them again on the surface after more than 30 or 40 years since these missions landed. And two of them that were found last week were the Lunokhods, the two lunar rovers that the Russians joysticked across 20 or 30 or 40 kilometers along the surface

of the moon. So we've seen the rovers and their tracks now. We'll finish with Buzz Aldrin, of all people, who tomorrow starts a whole new career. That's right. He's going to be dancing with the stars. And you got a cute comment from one of your blog fans. Yeah, one of my readers said, that's one giant leap for a man, one small step for mankind. All right, so no comment on that. That's Emily Lakdawalla, the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society, who maintains the Society's blog.

She's also a contributing editor for Sky and Telescope magazine. Emily, thanks again. We'll talk to you next week. See you then, Matt. Hey, hey, Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy here, Vice President of the Planetary Society. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy here, Vice President of the Planetary Society, and this week is the 50th anniversary of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It's the 25th anniversary of the SETI Institute.

This is quite an idea. It started with Frank Drake back at Cornell University, and he asked the question, well, what if you really were going to look for life on another world? I mean, isn't there some way to think about this, some way of reasoning? And indeed there is, my friends. You say, well, there's so many billion stars. And then how many of those stars might have an Earth-like planet? How many of those Earth-like planets might have water? And how many of those Earth-like planets with water could have intelligent life? And how many of those have life to start with?

And how many have intelligent life? And then how many have intelligent life that has to be emerging at the same time we are i mean it's quite a step in thought and you can say we haven't found anything there's 400 billion stars are you guys crazy and then we say well sure we are crazy but the longest journey starts with but a single step and if we were to find life on another world, my friends, evidence of life, a signal, indicating that they're watching extraterrestrial sitcoms or something, it would change civilization on this planet, let me tell you. It would be a whole nother world because then we'd know that we are not alone

and would help us wonder where we came from. Happy anniversary, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and to many more. Except I hope you find something before the next 50 years go by. I've got to fly. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. On the final mission to Hubble, seven astronauts embarked on an expedition to save it. T-MOS 10, 9, 8, 7, 8. And an IMAX 3D camera was on board to capture it.

That exciting excerpt from the Hubble 3D trailer doesn't come close to communicating either the excitement or the beauty of this new IMAX production. It tells the story of the STS-125 mission in May of 2009. Commanding Atlantis was retired Navy Captain Scott D. Altman. On board with the seven-person crew were several high-definition video cameras and one very strategically located IMAX 3D film camera in a space-proof housing. That camera documented the sometimes excruciating repair and upgrade of the space telescope. Among other dramatic moments, you'll watch spacewalking mission specialist Mike Massimino cram himself up inside the telescope housing, where a false move could have torn his suit or done irreparable damage to delicate telescope components. The film premiered in the

U.S. last week. Commander Altman and Hubble 3D producer-director Tony Myers were on a press junket in New York when I got them on the phone. Tony Myers, Commander Altman, thank you so much for joining us on Planetary Radio. I was prepared for beautiful IMAX 3D shots of the Earth rolling by. I was prepared for terrific characters in Commander Altman and his crew. What really got to me, and I would have paid money just to see this, were the amazing animations based on what Hubble is able to do and continue to do thanks to this mission. I'm so glad that you found the fly-through sequences of the Hubble data fascinating because they certainly were to me the whole idea of attempting that.

And they are the work of three teams, my own film production team, plus Dr. Frank Sommer's team at the Space Telescope Science Institute, and then a third team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. That one's led by Dr. Donna Cox. And that is all real Hubble data, different data sets combined and manipulated into two different sequences. And it was a real experience to work on those.

Well, worth the price of admission on their own, as I said. But the film itself is a tremendous achievement. The IMAX format, I can't imagine a better way to capture an experience like this. I don't think there is probably a better way than IMAX 3D. You had a lot of cameras on the shuttle, and you worked with the astronauts a whole lot to make sure they knew how to run everything, but only one IMAX camera, and there was film in it. I was just thinking if I'd been the guy who loaded that camera, I don't think I'd have slept until it came back and the facade was okay and had been loaded properly. Well, Scooter here can tell you

about the on-orbit operations, but we were able to fly the IMAX cargo bay 3D camera. We just, at the very last minute, John Grunsfeld helped us find a spot, the last remaining spot in the cargo bay that was empty that gave us a good view of the telescope. That single camera carries a single load of a mile of film, 5,400 feet. That shoots eight minutes of 3D IMAX footage. There's quite a lot of pressure on the crew to spend that eight minutes widely. But why not video? Is that just because this camera is so special?

I mean, obviously, if you'd shot video, you could have had a recorder inside the cabin. Well, we did. We did shoot all the video that's inside the cabin. It's an HD video camera that's already part of the shuttle package. It's certified to fly. For capturing the exterior spacewalk, there is no video 3D camera that's high enough resolution that exists today to do that.

The hardware just doesn't exist. And so that's a film camera that's out there in the cargo bay. And we could not fly an IMAX film camera in the cabin because there wasn't space for it. There was way too much equipment and tools and suits and everything. These cameras weigh hundreds of pounds. I mean, even though it would be weightless in space, that would still be quite a mass to push around in there. Well, the cabin camera in IMAX that didn't fly, it flew on Space Station, is really not that massive.

I can lift it myself. It's bulky enough so that it doesn't just fit in one locker or something. And the film is bulky. But the outside camera weighs 575 pounds in its housing. And it's the housing and the mile of film that's not the actual camera mechanism isn't that large, but it's a package that's quite bulky by the time you're finished. Commander Altman, Mike Massimino, who was at the California Science Center premiere, said that watching this film really brought the mission back to him.

He said it probably, at least for him, was maybe the closest thing to being there. Well, one of the best things about having the IMAX along with us is giving us the ability to bring those images, that feeling and emotion home, and have a chance last night to share it with my family and friends watching the movie. So I agree with Mike. It is almost like being there. When I got up to walk out of the theater, my brain in watching the movie, it kind of put me back in orbit, and I felt a little wobbly on my feet, just like I did when I came back from orbit for real. Maybe the greatest success of this mission, other than, you know, your restoration of the Hubble Space Telescope itself, is that you

got to fly the mission, that it even took place, because that was in question for some time. Oh, yeah, it's an amazing story to look back at. It's something I'm not even sure you could sell in Hollywood, in that the mission was on and then canceled after the Columbia accident, that the risk was too great. Then working through all those problems, came up with a plan that dealt with the ability to handle orbital debris damage and to be able to ensure that we could safely carry out the mission, and then packing it full of objectives, more than we thought we could handle, and getting to the end, and when we released Hubble to continue on its voyage, to have everything done that we set out to do. It was an amazing journey.

It sure was. You and your colleagues spent hundreds of hours, I'm sure, maybe thousands, rehearsing every move that could be predicted or what would be required to basically bring the Hubble back up to, you know, full working order and beyond that. And yet, you still ran into surprises. You ran into unexpected problems. Does that, though, say something about maybe the importance of having resourceful humans up there to deal with these kinds of things? I think Hubble is the perfect example of people and machines working together. Hubble is an incredible instrument. It's up there 24 hours a day taking those images. It's up there 24 hours a day taking those images, and yet it depends on people arriving to be able to inject new technology to keep it a new instrument and not a 20-year-old

out-of-date obsolete piece of electronic equipment. So having that interaction and then people on the spot. We had looked at doing a robotic servicing mission at one point after they canceled the mission, and in the end, it's just too complicated to build a machine to do that at one point after they canceled the mission. And in the end, it's just too complicated to build a machine to do that at this point. And when you run into those unexpected obstacles, you're exactly right. Having the human element both in space and on the ground, looking at the problem and adapting to it gave us the ability to overcome. Hubble Telescope Repair Mission Commander Scott Altman. He and Hubble 3D Producer-Director Tony Myers will tell us more in a minute.

This is Planetary Radio. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions.

It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio T-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan.

Hubble 3D is the new and spectacular IMAX 3D movie about last year's successful repair of the Hubble Space Telescope. Veteran IMAX director and producer Tony Myers called the shots from down on Earth and assembled the footage into a beautiful and immersive experience. Mission commander Scott D. Altman was one of the seven astronaut stars. He also helped run the camera that captured gorgeous footage of the repairs underway in the Atlantis cargo bay as the surface of the Earth slid by below. How are you feeling inside the cabin watching your colleagues, mission specialists outside, struggling with stuck handles and stripped screws and things like that?

Well, I was floating, but I felt like I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. Well, they certainly pulled it off well, and you really get a feeling from the IMAX and other footage of the difficulties that they faced. It was pretty amazing. Tony Myers, you spent a lot of time training with the crew, just showing them how to properly operate all this equipment. Do you think you turned them into pretty good filmmakers? We have an excellent trainer in James Nyhouse, who's also our director of photography for the ground scenes. And he and I do about eight months training of the crew,

about 28 hours overall. It turned out to be a little more than that because we observed a lot of the training was sort of for training us about the mission. So we observed all their rehearsal spacewalks underwater in the pool. We had a video camera there that was fixed up for us that didn't have the right lenses, but it was in the right position in the cargo bay,

so we could kind of see what the interesting moments were. What can I say? This crew was absolutely phenomenal at learning anything. They're very, very clever people. Makes our job really easy. You just have to say something once and they've got it. Show me the hardware. But the camera is operated by a laptop from the flight deck,

and it's got nice software in it that allows you to, it's got three lenses, and you can select one of those on the program and pick your f-stop and focus, and it tells you how much it's shot. But it's a fairly simple thing to operate, but the hard part is when you push the button to start it, and Scooter can tell you about the pressures of that. Talk a little bit about that, please. I know, you know, it went a little bit beyond that. You had to deal with some pretty challenging exposure problems, too, as you flew around the Earth. Well, that is the biggest problem. So we have a general script of what we think we want to shoot and when it happens. And of course, we can only shoot during the daylight passes. And that's about

50 minutes out of every 90 is in daytime. during the spacewalks things would get delayed a little bit and something you really wanted to shoot would all of a sudden be happening at night and you'd have to respond to that or we'd be ready to push the button one time we were getting ready to film a door opening sequence and I figured it would take about a minute to open the door we wanted to get the right right 30 seconds of most action, so I figured we'll see movement, and then we'll push the button. And as the guy first grabbed at the door of Spring Force, it just sprang open instantaneously. I'm like, ah!

That shot just... So that moment to push the button was really the most challenging part of deciding what was going to be a good shot. Welcome to Showbiz, Commander. Tony Myers, in spite of having such great camera operators up there, I bet you wish you could have directed on site. Of course, of course. I've had dreams over the years of being late for my launch, you know, running up the gravel track to the pad and everything. But it was kind of a no-hoper. But I feel actually between the training and the editing process,

especially listening to sound through earphones, I feel like I've been there. And we felt like you were on board with us. I could hear you whispering in my ear. So, yes, get that shot. So it was great. Being a good director. Tony, am I right? Have you been involved with all of the previous IMAX films shot in space?

That's correct, yeah. The first film we made that we didn't fly in space was Hail Columbia, which was about the maiden voyage of the shuttle. And that was really a proof of concept film we made to show NASA the power of a launch and try to convince them that taking the IMAX camera to space would be a good thing. They realized that, and then we've made six films since. Well, Commander Altman and Tony Myers, congratulations on an extremely successful mission and on an extremely entertaining and really very beautiful film. I'm just going to have to see it again myself. And it is highly recommended by this program and yours truly.

It is IMAX Hubble 3D. We've been talking with Commander Scott Altman, who commanded the mission that repaired Hubble, brought it back up to speed for all of us down here on Earth, and Tony Myers, the director and producer of IMAX Hubble 3D. I just have one other question, Commander. You've had four missions, two as commander now, 51 days in space. You're a lucky guy.

I think about that every morning when I wake up. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us once again to tell us about the night sky. And boy, do we have a lot of other stuff as well to talk about this time. So start laying the sky on us. I will lay it on you. We've got Saturn right about now at opposition. It's on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun, which has the implication that it will rise right around sunset in the east, and it will set right around sunrise in the west, looking like a yellowish star.

It'll be high overhead in the middle of the night. And we've got Mars continuing to fade, but still up there in the south-southwest in the evening sky, looking reddish and sort of near Castor and Pollux, the Gemini stars. And Venus, bright, stunning, looking like an extremely bright star in the west, any time within a little while after sunset, hard to miss. Let us move on to this week in space history. 1996, comet Hyukutake had its closest approach to Earth and challenged English speakers everywhere on its pronunciation. I was going to say, and challenged English speakers everywhere on its pronunciation.

I was going to say, easy for you to say. And we also had, in 2001, the Mir space station re-entered the atmosphere. That's our This Week in Space history. Let us go on to random space fact. Tenderness. Tenderness. Mars' north polar cap region is surrounded by a dark sand dune sea, or at least mostly. And it's probably basaltic in composition, just dark sand dunes all over the place. It's almost as big as Texas. Now, nothing is actually as big as Texas, but it's almost as big as Texas.

Yeah, of course, of course, of course. Moving right along to our trivia contest, we asked you, in round numbers, how much data has Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter returned in four years at Mars? And they just passed a round number milestone recently. How did we do, Matt? We actually got it in very specific numbers based on the report that was available from NASA at the time that people were getting their questions in to us. Oh, I wonder where I got the idea. The round figure you were looking for, 100 terabits. Pretty darn impressive.

As we heard actually from Dr. McEwen last week, more data than all of the other deep space probes combined. More specifically, Ian Jackson, our winner this week, told us at that point 102.2 terabits of data. Ian, good enough to get you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Hey Matt, you know what Ian also told us? What's that? He told us since one Planetary Radio Archive shows about 14 megabytes, this roughly is equivalent to 900,000 Planetary Radio shows. Oh, well, that's just one of the interesting measures that we got from our listeners. Can I tell you some more? Oh, please do. All right.

That's obviously the most important. Yes, I do agree. He, by the way, said that the value of each bit of data from planetary radio, those is very high, despite being way behind MRO. Go ahead. Quality over quantity, I always say. Philippe Espy tried to translate it into Star Trek units. Those would be kilo quads. But since Star Trek folks never defined the kilo quad,

we should ask Andrea Bormannis about this. We really weren't able to arrive at any good numbers. Now, here's one that everybody can really connect with, and this came from Peter Carr. 100 terabits is equivalent to 8.92857143 times 10 to the 10th mobile phone text messages. Makes a nice image, MRO, their text message. Doesn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Makes a nice image, MRO, their text message. Doesn't it? Yeah, absolutely.

Will White figured out that it would be about 36 miles, a 36-mile-high stack of floppy disk drives. Now, these are the 720-kilobyte drives, not the 1.44, so that would divide by two. But you know my favorite? Wasn't even trying to translate it. This is from Edward down in San Diego, a regular entrant. He said that yes, 100 terabits, and that coincidentally, he got 100 terabits of email spam just that morning. Half of it was actually from you, as I recall. I can identify and I guess I can originate. So anyway, what do you got for us for next week? About how much thrust did the Saturn V rocket produce at liftoff? How much thrust Saturn V liftoff? Go to planetary.org slash radio.

Find out how to enter and to compete for this week's fabulous prize. Matt, tell us about it. It is quite fabulous. As I said last week, the winner of this space trivia contest is going to get the anniversary edition first scope from Celestron. They're celebrating their 50th anniversary at the Celestron company where they make telescopes and a number of other things nowadays. They only made a thousand of these 50th anniversary first scopes. a thousand of these 50th anniversary fur scopes. And I'm looking at a picture of one right now.

I'm telling you, it normally sells for 50 bucks, which is incredible by itself because just the focuser on here looks to me like it's worth 50 bucks. But this is actually an entire kit. I mean, they're including filters and eyepieces. It's really a very impressive little scope and it's that nice Celestron orange. And by the way, they asked us to mention to folks that their 50th anniversary documentary,

Generation of Dreamers, is now available at the Celestron website, and I've looked at it. It's pretty cool. It's really fun. It sort of traces the history of building pretty sophisticated and yet inexpensive telescopes, which is what Celestron does. So you got until the 29th of March to get us the answer to this one, and best of luck. And Bruce, just before we finish, I think you've got one more thing to tell folks about. I do, and I'll just do a quick mention this week. We can discuss more in future weeks, but we have just announced the call for new proposals for our latest round of the Gene Schubaker Near-Earth Object Grant Program, where we fund primarily amateur but also professional astronomers all around the world hunting and following up near-earth object studies. So if you're interested, if you're a hardcore amateur or professional, check out our

website. Go to the projects under Shoemaker Neo Grants, and you'll find the new call for proposals due June 10th. Thank you. Excellent. Help save the planet, please. All right, everybody. Go out there, look up the night sky, and think about what color you'd make your telescope. Thank you. Good night.

I love the orange. See, mine's gray and I think the orange is just really cool and probably gets you, keep you from getting hit in the middle of the road if you set up your telescope in the middle of the road, which is probably not the smart... Anyway, he's... Yeah, we're not recommending that, just to be

clear. Bruce Betts is the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Keep looking up, and don't forget PlanRad Live on April 30th. Thank you.