Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Scattered Clouds and Fog...On Mars

Episode Date: May 30, 2011

Scattered Clouds and Fog...On MarsLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Scattered clouds and fog today on Mars and on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It still seems so weird to talk about very Earth-like weather conditions on that drier-than-a-bone planetary neighbor known as the Red Planet. But the data makes it sound more like home all the time. Mark Lemmon's camera on the Phoenix lander gave us some of the best Martian weather data yet. He'll join us shortly. Bill Nye is also talking about the weather,

specifically the wild weather some parts of the United States have suffered through over the last few months. Bruce Betts hopes your sky will be cloud free so that you can enjoy the sights he'll share on this week's What's Up segment. As promised, the space trivia contest also returns. You can test your knowledge and your luck.

See if you can win a coveted Planetary Radio t-shirt. The Space Trivia Contest also returns. You can test your knowledge and your luck. See if you can win a coveted Planetary Radio t-shirt. I hope the weather is treating Emily Lakdawalla well. She's on a family vacation, but the Planetary Society's Science and Technology Coordinator still took time to talk with us about her blog. Emily, thanks so much for joining us from the road. Too bad we have to do this by phone. But the content is well worthwhile. We, of course, need to talk about spirit.

Of course, spirit. As you've said in your blog, it's all over now but the crying. That's certainly how I feel. A couple of people have admonished me for being somewhat emotional about the end of what's, after all, just a robot that survived so much longer than it was originally intended to. But, you know, you can't help but feel sad for the end of what's been such a wonderful mission. Just a robot. How dare they? Yeah.

What do you think will be your fondest memory of this mission? Well, Spirit, much more than her sister Opportunity, hers has really been a mission of ups and downs. And I think my favorite moment of the mission has to be the literal up, the literally highest point on the mission, when Spirit summited Husband Hill for the first time and got her first look down into the plains of Gusev Crater below her. You know, it was the first glimpse of a whole new vista on Mars. It was as though Spirit had just landed all over again in a new spot. To me, I think that was the most striking moment on the mission. We may not be hearing from Spirit anymore,

but you point out in an even more recent blog entry that we're not done seeing Spirit. In fact, there is a rather wistful image that you've included on the blog. Yeah, it's a really surprising and strange coincidence. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, of course, has this incredibly high-resolution camera, HiRISE, and they image the landing sites very frequently to monitor for changes. And so they'll probably continue monitoring Spirit's landing site for quite a long time, which means taking pictures that will contain Spirit. Well, the last picture they took in March at the spot where Spirit was is this incredibly bright dot of light. And it didn't take them long to figure out that what had happened is

that the orbiter just happened to be passing through the specular point, the point where the sun glinted off of Spirit's solar panels and bounced right into the camera optics. So it's like a mirror flashing a light at you. But it's just, you know, it's so strange that that happened to happen just at this moment, right before they declared the end of the mission. I like to think of it as Spirit doing this on purpose with a little signal mirror, letting us know, hey, I'm still here. I'll be waiting for you to come back and visit. Spirit always was dramatic. You know, I also like your suggestion that maybe someday, if not you and I, perhaps our children or their children, we'll be able to visit Gusev Crater Planetary Park.

That's right. I'd like to think that we'll establish national, or I should say planetary parks, and all the destinations that humans one day visit, and I hope that Spirit will one day be the centerpiece of one. Emily, you're going to be on the road for a while. Next week, we won't actually be hearing from you, except we will be hearing from you. It'll be part of our Planetary Radio live presentation.

We'll get another one of your regular reports on the 13th, or the show that will start airing and podcasting the week of the 13th. But I hope people will tune in next time to hear you and Bill Nye visiting the Mars Science Laboratory. It was awfully fun. Emily Laktawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. We talk to her here almost every week.

Up next is Bill Nye. So I don't usually get to be a participant with Bill when he does his commentary, but here we are at the Crawford Family Forum where we just finished taping Planetary Radio Live, and Bill was a major participant in that. So we'll welcome Bill Nye to do his commentary. It's great to be here. Thank you. So hey, everybody, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here.

And this week I have been on television talking about what everyone loves to talk about, Matt, the weather. talking about what everyone loves to talk about, Matt, the weather. So we have floods, we have tornadoes, we have space agencies that can monitor the flow of water from Canada and North America all the way to the Gulf of Mexico using their assets. Now assets in this talk is satellites. So we were able to manage after a, these catastrophic floods that were destroying farmland from Missouri and Oklahoma all the way down into Louisiana again. And this is, they say, the worst storm set since 1950. Now, in 1950, that was 60 years ago, there were about half as many people in any tornado's path. So by one reckoning, this is our worst

tornado year ever. Now up until late in the last century, one thing people could agree on was that it's cold, or it's hot, or it's rainy, or even, you know, it's that dry heat. But now there is controversy. Controversy about what is causing all this weather. Well, let me tell you a couple things. Here are two remarkable and very significant facts that come to us from our space assets. First of all, the Earth's atmosphere has about four percent more moisture, more water vapor, than it did a decade ago. And the world is about 0.7 Celsius, 0.69 Celsius, just about one degree Fahrenheit warmer than it was a decade ago. And that's because every year the Earth gets hit with about a quintillion kilowatt hours

or 60 quadrillion BTUs of heat. And that much energy can change things. And do you know how it's going to change things, Matt? I don't. We don't either. And that's why we've got to keep an eye on the world. That's why when it comes to the Alliance for Earth Observation coming up here in the second week of June, we need to participate. We need to be there so that we can understand this world's climate so that we can, dare I say it, change the world. Understanding our climate, comparing ours to others, is how we will know our place in space. I want nothing out there to cloud our thinking. I've got to fly. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy.

It has been almost exactly a year since we gave up trying to reawaken the Phoenix Mars lander. No one really expected it to survive a Martian winter, especially so close to the North Pole of that always frigid planet. But in its five months of round-the-clock data gathering, Phoenix expanded both our knowledge of the red planet and the hope that life may once have thrived there. Atmospheric scientist Mark Lemon of Texas A&M University was the lead scientist for the main cameras on the spacecraft. Though it was called the Surface Stereo Imager, SSI looked up at that eerie Martian sky now and then. Some of what it saw was not eerie at all. Mark and I talked by phone last week. Mark, thanks for joining us on Planetary Radio.

Well, thanks for having me. What is all this about fog on Mars? How can this place that is drier than the driest desert we have on our planet, possibly have a foggy day? Well, there are lots of different ways of measuring how dry or wet something is. And by any reasonable standard, Mars is very dry. But when it gets cold, the relative humidity can still climb to be quite high. And when that happens, you get condensation in the atmosphere. It's just so cold that it's ice rather than liquid, but we have an ice fog on Mars that's been seen from orbit before. From the 1970s and Viking,

imagers have looked down and seen fog in craters. What's happened with Phoenix is we have a lander in the middle of that fog and a laser beam shining up to characterize where it is, and the novel thing here is that we actually used the camera to take a picture of that laser beam and get information from even lower than we would otherwise see. So in addition to seeing ice clouds, which were reported earlier, we now see a fog that's right down at the surface. And if I was standing there next to Phoenix on one of the warmer days on Mars,

would I actually be able to see these clouds and fog as I look up into that pinkish-orange sky? Yeah, later in the mission, we actually saw some fairly cloudy days with patchy, scattered clouds moving through the sky. So we have little, not quite movies, time-lapse images of them. And you can see the clouds easily. They are moving around. We took those images without color because the cloud moves faster than we can acquire color imaging. But if you were there, you would certainly see them standing in stark contrast to the more butterscotch-shaded dust. There is something rather, if you'll pardon the expression, romantic about thinking of this place, which has gone from crowded with Martians to dead and desolate

to now becoming much more the kind of place that you could kind of imagine visiting and spending some time. Yeah, Mars is Earth-like in a lot of interesting ways. and spending some time. Yeah, Mars is Earth-like in a lot of interesting ways. We see spectacular sunsets. We see a cloudy sky. We see fog. I think if you were standing beside Phoenix on one of the nights we did these experiments,

you could have looked up and seen the laser shining back just like we saw it with the camera, and it wouldn't look that much different than going out on a very lightly foggy day on Earth and shining a green laser pointer straight up in the air. And, of course, nobody here has ever done that, especially when airplanes are in the area. Yeah, you've got to be careful with doing things like that. Out in a rural area, I've done that, and the interesting thing was to see not just that, yeah, you see where the laser is, but you see little sparkles as each individual crystal comes through the laser. And we see that from Phoenix as well, individual ice crystals shining light back at us. Yeah, I have to admit that I have been there when this has happened.

I won't admit to any more guilt than that. You know, we've had your boss on this mission, Peter Smith, has talked to us several times on the program, and we've talked about your camera, the Surface Stereo Imager, but you did provide the leadership for this camera. Tell us what was special about this and how it contributed to the mission in other ways. Well, it's a great camera, and it had several roles. My perspective on it was first as a scientist using it, and in particular as an atmospheric scientist, but second as someone trying to make the mission successful with the tools that we had. Surface Stereo Imager was a

camera with two eyes like we have, and it uses that for depth perception. And we use that depth perception information to derive digital elevation models, mathematical representations of what the terrain we were in was like, and use those to drive the robotic arm. So the SSI data let us know what the situation on Mars was, let us see what the trenches looked like, and let us put the arm in places to do some digging or sample acquisition or things like that. Then on top of that, it has color capabilities that take time because we take one color at a time through filters, but you can put that together for information. For instance, when we saw the, quote, white stuff on Mars, we were able to take spectra and see that it had an absorption in the infrared that corresponds

to a water ice absorption. In addition, we can just see the general contrast of the landing sites. This was the dustiest landing site that I've seen. Everything was practically the same color until we started digging. And then we saw the white ice and the dark ice, and these were distinctions that we couldn't have made without a camera like this. And did the camera, I guess it must have played a role in some of the chemical discoveries that Phoenix made, because you said it sort of helped determine where the shovel should dig. Right. The camera wasn't going to discover perchlorates, for instance.

It had no capability for that. But it was able to help us figure out where to put a trench, help us see the polygon structure, pick the middle of a polygon, give the arm team the data that they needed to drive the arm, and ultimately go through and do the sample acquisition and get something into the chemical instruments. From that, we know about the properties of the soil. Perchlorates is the thing that comes to mind as an obvious surprising thing that we learned, that that's mixed in with the soil as well.

And then later, we actually, a graduate student at Washington University, used the camera data to look for a signature, and we actually saw flecks that are probably perchlorate using one of the filters that's more sensitive to them. But we would never have known that without the chemistry instruments first saying that, yes, they're there. Would you agree with Peter Smith that it is probably this discovery of perchlorates that may be the most important part of the lasting legacy of the Phoenix spacecraft?

It certainly may be. It's not something that was on the table prior to the Phoenix mission, and now it is seen as a possible explanation for the oxidant on the surface as well. Yeah, the Viking data that was inconclusive at best. Right. So this is giving us a clue to what may have explained that. This is giving us a clue to processes going on on Mars that we didn't even know about

to be able to predict that there would be perchlorates. And it's also telling us that there's something there that has a lot of oxygen and binds up a lot of energy. And that's something that goes to the quest of NASA to characterize the habitability of Mars. We're not done talking with Mars explorer Mark Lemon about either the habitability or the weather on the red planet. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager.

Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining 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. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. My guest this week is Mark Lemon, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University. Now, in spite of that specialty, Mark led the team that developed

the Surface Stereo Imager on the Phoenix Mars Lander. He is also a member of the science teams for both the Mars Exploration Rovers and the upcoming Curiosity Rover, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory. We talked about these other missions after continuing our conversation about the legacy of Phoenix, including what it learned about the sky above the spacecraft. Your camera, the surface stereo imager, of course, its days were numbered, as were Phoenix, the entire spacecraft, by how chilly it got up there in the winter, and that was expected, of course. How much were you able to do over the months that the spacecraft was in operation up there

near the North Pole of Mars? How many images did you capture? Well, we had an incredible mission. From the camera perspective, we got 30,000 individual images or something very close to that. Those images range from when we first landed a low-resolution black-and-white site panorama to tell us basically where we were, to a color and full-resolution site panorama, to lots of detailed information on the places where we were digging and anything else of interest that we saw, including a lot of looks at the atmosphere to characterize the clouds, the fog, what I think we're arguing and are going to present some new information in the future about the snowfall,

that this fog was comprised of things that were falling down. We certainly see an interesting Mars. We saw dust devils going on during the mission. We saw dust storms come and go, as well as a fairly dry atmosphere be replaced by an atmosphere that people here on Earth might still consider dry, but something that was carrying water from the North Pole into our area, which is what eventually formed the clouds and the fogs. So we haven't heard the last from Phoenix. More data to come. Yeah, we will not get any new information from Phoenix, but there's a lot of knowledge contained within what we do have, and that knowledge is going to continue to go out and

influence the explorations of Mars for a little while, I think. I want to talk a little bit more about the weather and the climate on Mars, but before we do that, I note that you are part of the Athena science team for the Mars Exploration Rovers. You're the first person we've had on since we've had to admit that it looks like we've lost Spirit forever. Any special feelings about that? Well, certainly. Spirit was a special rover. It's definitely sad to have to let go. I think the chances that we would get Spirit back after last March when we lost communications were fairly low, but it was a valiant effort and it was worth doing.

So I think now, like with Phoenix, the focus will be on the tremendous amount of data that has come down from Spirit. You know, the surface has been scratched in terms of the things that you can get from that, and there will be many, many more discoveries to make there. And, of course, Opportunity is still trucking across the campus, and you're involved with the next rover, the big one, Mars Science Laboratory, now known as Curiosity. Yes. Let's go back to those climate studies. It sounds like SSI, the Surface Stereo Imager, its primary role was not staring up at the sky,

but you certainly got some good data out of that. True. SSI was first and foremost something to help us operate the spacecraft, second, something to help us characterize the geology of the area, third, or maybe part of that was characterizing the sky and helping to characterize the weather. So we measured how much dust was in the air every day. We looked for the clouds. We saw them. We saw dust devils going across the surface. But those were not our prime goals.

Has anyone have you been surprised by just how dynamic the climate and day-to-day weather are up there on the Red Planet? You know, I'm not intellectually surprised by it. Before we landed, I could have told you that we would see things like this. Nonetheless, when you sit down with one of these movies that we take, the time-lapse images that we combine into movies that show dust devils, not just one or two, but like five at a time, big ones, going across the plains at Gusev Crater, or these clouds moving around in the Phoenix site, it has much more of an emotional impact. So there's something there to seeing Mars as a dynamic place that you get from a camera that you simply would not get otherwise. What are you looking forward to from Curiosity, another mission that you're involved with? I think that will be a very exciting mission. We've got several good landing sites. I don't know which one we're going to end up going to, but whichever one is going to be very good. We're going to see some incredible things that tell us about Mars's past at any of them. up as well and trying to characterize the dust that we see in the sky, potentially characterize the ice clouds that we will likely see depending on which site that we go to during different times

of the year. We have clouds in other places on Mars. You don't have to go to the poles to see that. And one of the exciting things about this mission is that the science cameras will all be video capable as well, that it won't be a matter of taking time-lapse pictures through one filter or another filter or some combination and then putting something together later that will actually be able to take color high-definition video and send that back to Earth. So when we see things like dust devils or clouds moving around, I think we can bring back an even more compelling product that really shows how dynamic and interesting Mars is.

Mark, with that, we're out of time. I hope we can have you back sometime maybe to talk more about the weather, the climate, and other factors on Mars, but maybe also another dynamic spot in our solar system that you've been studying, and that's Titan. Yeah, that would be very exciting to talk about. Thank you again. We've been talking with Mark Lemon. He is a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University. He last year, last June,

in fact, received from NASA the Exceptional Public Service Medal for his work with the Phoenix Surface Stereo Imager, that terrific two-eyed stereo camera that stood just about the height of a human being on the surface of Mars and delivered so much more great information about the red planet. I'll be right back to get some great information delivered by our friend Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. I am joined, as always, by the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, Dr. Bruce Betts. Except that, as you may be able to tell, it doesn't sound quite like it usually does.

Who are all these people? They're just part of your fantasy. They're not really there. We are at the Crawford Family Forum. That's where Southern California Public Radio is headquartered. Because believe it or not, here's a little twist in time. We just finished taping next week's show, which is Planetary Radio Live. But a few of these folks have stuck around and they want to hear you tell us about the night sky. So effectively, we've traveled back in time.

Yes. Which really we shouldn't have been able to do. It is quite possible, yes, if you go fast enough. All right, how about I tell them what's up in the night sky? Please do. When do you want my news? News? News.

Your big news? About your mission? Yeah, about my mission. Yeah, why don't we go ahead and tell that now. So NASA selected their newest New Frontiers mission. It is OSIRIS-REx. It is not actually my mission, lest I get in trouble. It is run, so the principal investigator is Michael Drake at the University of Arizona.

But I'm excited to announce Planetary Society has heavy involvement with getting the public involved. Yay! Thank you. We'll do our best. OSIRIS-REx is an asteroid sample return. It will launch in 2016. And everyone book your tickets now for Planet Fest 2019. We'll watch the sampling live.

And then it returns samples in 2023. But we're going to have some contest competitions. We're going to be flying people's names to the asteroid and back. Also running a competition in collaboration with OSIRIS-REx and with the discovering organization Linear to name the asteroid, which right now has the easy-to-remember name of 1999 RQ36. Wow, that's sexy. So anyway, we're excited about it. Let's go on to the night sky. Up in the night sky, you've still got Saturn high in the west, actually almost overhead in the night sky, you've still got Saturn. High in the west, actually almost overhead in the evening sky, looking kind of yellowish. And the pre-dawn sky is still a cluster of planets.

Jupiter, by far the easiest to see them. Go check low on the horizon. In the east, you'll see a really bright object. That's Jupiter. If you have a clear view to the horizon, you can look to the lower left, see an even brighter object. That's Venus. Mars, looking dim and reddish. Might still be able to check out Mercury,

also down there in that pile of planets. And we've got a partial solar eclipse for those in high northern latitudes in Siberia and Alaska and such highly populated, densely populated places, occurring on June 1st but also on June 15th. A total solar eclipse. We'll give you more information about that coming up next week. All right, let us go on. And right now we need the help of the audience.

And you've coordinated them before. They are well rehearsed. And they kind of scare me. So if you could get them to do this. You guys ready? One, two, three. Random Space Facts. Oh, that was good.

That was really good. They don't scare me quite as much anymore. The first, we'll go teasing. Next week's Planetary Radio Live, the first trans-Neptunian object discovered was Pluto. Whether you consider it a planet or not, 1930, took more than 60 years before the next trans-Neptunian object was discovered in 1992. It was a long dearth, and now people like Mike Brown, who you'll hear from next week, is discovering a pile of those objects out there in the outer solar system.

Trans-Neptunian out past the orbit of Neptune. We have just enough time for the trivia contest. All right. All right. We asked you before, during 2010, what asteroid survey discovered the most near-Earth asteroids, near-Earth objects during 2010. How'd we do, Matt? You really threw people here. Yay. Probably more than half of our responses this week said it was the WISE mission, that telescope in space. Wrong, you say, wrong. Wrong, wrong. Although, good guess. They discovered a lot. And there was a big burst and there were many, well over 100 discovered by NEO-WISE during 2010. But the big winner, as it has been for many years, is the Catalina Sky Survey, which is actually three different telescopes, two in Arizona, one in Australia. And they discovered 602 near-Earth objects during 2010. The winner, chosen by Random.org, Edwin Devers, regular listener, regular entrant in the contest. He hails from Rio Negro, Colombia, and he's going to get a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

We've got about a minute left. What have you got for next time? Also talking about those things in the outer solar system that Mike will talk about, I want you to tell me, but not in the audience, not right now, don't shout it out, who is the Kuiper belt named after? And by the way, I need more than some guy named Kuiper. Yeah. I need at least a first name, preferably a little information. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter and try to win another glorious Planetary Radio t-shirt.

You have until Monday, Monday, June 6, 2011, at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. We're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about if you could kill a planet, what planet would you kill? Thank you, and good night. I'm really upset with those Venusians. We've got to go after them next, I think. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up.

You know what's coming. Join the fun as we bring Planetary Radio Live to you next week, including our special guest, Mike Brown. 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. Clear skies, no matter what planet you're on. Thank you.