Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Searching for ET With Pete Worden

Episode Date: October 25, 2017

Are we alone? The nearly sixty-year effort to answer that question has gotten a big boost from the Breakthrough Initiatives, funded by Yuri Milner and led by former NASA Ames Research Center director Pete Worden, who is our guest this week.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Searching for E.T. 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. Are there civilizations out there waiting for us to discover them? That is our theme this week. The best-funded search for extraterrestrial intelligence ever is underway. It's run by former NASA Ames director Pete Worden, and he's our special guest. We'll have our usual fun with Bruce Betts as he brings us another

What's Up segment and a space trivia contest with more cool prizes. We begin our SETI update with the Planetary Society's digital editor, Jason Davis. His latest blog post is a fine introduction to this search that has now been sweeping the heavens for nearly 60 years. Jason, I was able to read, I don't know if it was an early draft, but I got to read your terrific piece about SETI, which should now be available at planetary.org as part of your blog. It is excellent. I've already recommended it to several people. And what great timing, considering that we'll be talking to Pete Wharton in a few moments,

the head of the Breakthrough Initiatives. Thanks, Matt. Really appreciate it. I appreciate the plug. Well, tell us about this. I mean, you very briefly trace the dramatic and exciting history of our search for extraterrestrial intelligence. most fascinating part, at least in terms of the Planetary Society, because we have been involved with SETI over the years, really since the organization's founding, through projects like Serendip and SETI at Home. We were a founding sponsor on the little program that people can

put on their computers to help process SETI data. And then our O-SETI efforts at Harvard. And those are just the major ones. There's been a lot of one-off projects over the years as well. This was a long, long time coming. It took a few months of research and interviews to put all this together. But yeah, I'm pretty happy with the result. And it also takes a look at some of the future technologies that are coming on the horizon. Mention some of the people that you talked to for this piece. Of course, Pete Warden is in there, but some other major SETI celebrities.

Probably the biggest one was Jill Tarter. Listeners probably know she is the inspiration for the Ellie Arroway figure in Contact, the novel by Carl Sagan and later the movie played by Jodie Foster in the movie. She was great to talk to. You know, a lot of these people have been in the field for a long time, and they've made an entire career out of it. And she is one of them. And she's still involved today. So she just had a lot of great insight, great stories. We tried to pick some great quotes from her out that we used throughout the story.

Also talked to some folks at UC Berkeley. There's like Dan Wertheimer, who's been involved with the Planetary Society, SETI Connections, Paul Horowitz at Harvard. So these are all names that, you know, if people have been around the Planetary Society for a while, these are kind of heavy hitters that have been in the field for a while.

So yeah, it was a lot of great interviews. And all people I'm proud to say who've been on Planetary Radio, some of my favorite guests, and certainly one of my favorite topics. And all people I'm proud to say who've been on Planetary Radio, some of my favorite guests, and certainly one of my favorite topics. And if you want to get a quick primer on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, like I said, it's there in Jason's blog at planetary.org. Thank you, Jason.

Yeah, thanks, Matt. Jason Davis is digital editor for the Planetary Society, also our embedded reporter for the LightSail project. More about that from him very soon as well. Are we alone? Does the universe host more than one species that has achieved the ability to look and listen for others? No one knows. The only way to answer that question is to search across the nearly endless light years for the spark of intelligence. That search began less than six decades ago. It has become increasingly sophisticated, but it has also

been conducted in fits and starts, mostly by brilliant, dedicated but underfunded men and women who bet their professional lives that the answer would be worth having. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence got a major boost in 2015 when the Breakthrough Initiatives opened for business. The two men at the center of this grand effort are a Russian physicist and billionaire named Yuri Milner, and an astronomer, retired Air Force general, and former director of NASA's Ames Research Center, Pete Worden. Worden serves as executive director of the Breakthrough Initiatives. He recently joined me online for a conversation about the legacy of SETI and the work he leads. Pete Worden, welcome to Planetary Radio. Thank

you very much for joining us to talk about the current status of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and in particular, the Breakthrough Listen project. Well, thank you. I'm happy to be here to chat. When did you first become intrigued by SETI, by the Search for Intelligence, somewhere away from this planet of our own? Well, I'm probably a little embarrassed and proud in some sense to say a long time ago in a state far away. I grew up in Michigan and frankly, I was about six years old. And one of the first books my mother got me, she actually got me two books, one called Planets and one called Stars. And one of the first questions I asked was, are there people on these planets and are there planets around the other stars? So that was a long time ago,

but I grew up in the 1960s, was an undergrad at the University of Michigan, and it was during the Apollo program. And I had a very strong interest in astronomy since I was six years old and read those books. And I told everybody I wanted to be an astronomer. But when I graduated from Michigan in 1971, one of the local newspapers did a little article on me. I guess it was a short news day. But I had forgotten about that, but about a month ago I was home. My father, who's 96, still lives in the house I grew up in, and he pulled out this yellowed kind of scrapbook his parents have, and he said, you remember this article? And I did what

he reminded me, but it started out and said, this young man thinks our future lies in space, and he has a very strong interest in space, And he actually believes that in his lifetime, we're going to be building probes to the nearest stars. And so my dad smiled and he said, well, at least you're consistent. So the whole question of life in the universe was, and it's really the key questions that we're working now, but there's three of them. The first question is, is there any life elsewhere?

And then if there is, maybe this is the most important one for your listeners today, is there intelligent life elsewhere? And of course, the third one, which is related to the other two, is it possible to send probes and maybe even life between stars? So those are the key questions of the Breakthrough Initiatives, and they're all interrelated. Some years after you got excited about all of this, a fellow in what was still the Soviet Union developed the same enthusiasm. Can you tell us about Yuri Milner and his vision? Well, Yuri is one of the most incredible people I've ever met. He was studying for his PhD in theoretical physics at Moscow State University when the Soviet Union crumbled.

He actually was born a few months after Yuri Gagarin's historic flight. And so he, like myself, grew up as kind of a space guy and very interested in this. Of course, Yuri then went into investment and did very, very well. He was, I think, one of the first Russian paid students that went to Wharton Business School, became very successful. But he's never lost his primary interest in these big questions, particularly life in the universe. And I met Yuri about seven years ago. I was the director of the NASA Ames Research Center, and my chief of staff came in and said,

you'll never believe who's here to see you. And I said, well, pray tell, who is it? She said, well, it's Vanity Fair. And I said, well, I doubt if they're here to see my, you know, fine clothes as a NASA employee or lovely, lovely couture. They came in and they said, well, there was this entrepreneur, Yuri Milner, that had started a new prize called the Breakthrough Prize. And in that case, the first one was the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, which was the world's largest prize in science.

It was $3 million. It's almost three times the size of some Swedish prize we won't mention. But they wanted to hold the ceremony at the Ames Research Center campus to have really the only black tie affair in Silicon Valley. And they've certainly done things upright. One of the nice things about getting invited to it is I got to meet the sponsors and particularly Uri Milner. Over the following few years, I met with him a few times and discovered that he had these exact same interests that I did. A little over two and a half years ago, he told me about his dream to start not just honoring scientists with big prizes, but actually doing some real research work on these three fundamental questions.

And it didn't take me long to say, hey, I really love this. Can I work with you? He invited me to come and lead these programs. That was about two and a half years ago in early 2015 and haven't looked back since. I mean, I love NASA. It was the greatest job I ever had until this one. A big change too, I'm sure, in terms of culture. Regular listeners to this show know that we've talked about Breakthrough Listen, one of the projects within the Breakthrough Initiatives in the past with Andrew Yen, the widow of Carl Sagan, and Karen O'Neill, the head of the Green Bank Observatory. I'm going to come back to Breakthrough Listen, and that'll be mostly what we talk about. We've also talked to Phil Lubin at UC Santa Barbara and others about the portion of the breakthrough initiatives

called Starshot, Breakthrough Starshot. We'll talk about that more in the future as well. But can you give us a quick update? Where is that effort to begin building the ladder that might get, if not humans, at least our robotic representatives out to other stars? humans at least are robotic representatives out to other stars. Well, you know, as I noted, I've had a strong interest in interstellar flight ever since I was a kid. Yuri did as well. So when we started our initiatives, and Breakthrough Listen was the first one we did, one of the key additional questions was traveling between stars. He asked us to put together a study plan to see can we find any way to go between stars.

We wanted to get really some of the brightest people around, so we had a team that was led by Professor Avi Loeb at Harvard, who now chairs our Starshot effort. But he and his group, which runs an institution called the Center for Theory and Computation, as well as also now an international black hole institute, started to look at various ideas. And I have to tell you that my initial idea is I loved antimatter. I mean, everybody knows Star Trek uses antimatter. But he started looking into that and said, well, it's a great great idea if it wasn't fact that we can't make much antimatter, you know, we're about 10 to the 15th off from enough antimatter. UC Santa Barbara, had published his papers that was under the sponsorship of the NASA Institute

for Advanced Concepts, which talked about using the concept that Robert Forward had developed in the 1960s initially of a light sail using a laser to drive it. Lubin's paper made the point that, well, it looked kind of impossible in the 60s, but our ability to build ever more powerful lasers and focus them at the same time make ever smaller satellites was to the point where we think in the next few decades, a laser light driven nanocraft, some gram class spacecraft using a light sail could actually get us to 20% the speed of light. percent the speed of light. We looked at that very carefully, spent several months in detailed analysis, set up an advisory panel, and it looked pretty promising. So Yuri Milner committed $100 million over the next five to seven years to do the preliminary research on three key questions. The first one is, can you build a laser powerful enough and affordable? This is a big thing. And affordable, we mean something that costs like the Large Hadron Collider or the James Webb Space Telescope, sort of of order $10 billion.

And can we build a, so that was the key question, was a laser. Can you build a light sail that can take that much power? I mean, it's a 50 gigawatt beam. And the third question is, can you communicate back from the nearest star, Alpha Centauri? Just a few weeks ago, we had an industry day, and we're releasing our request for proposal for the laser device. In a few weeks, we'll do the same with the light sail. In a few months, the communications efforts. So over the next few years, we're going to be doing the research, and we're going to kick off these studies with

research institutes around the world and put it on contract soon. So that's going along pretty well. Everything works well in the next five or seven years when we'll look at building a prototype. That'd probably take another 10 years. If that works, then we would move on to a full-scale system. Of course, the level of funds needed for that, as I mentioned, is of order 10 billion. That would be outside what the private sector could do. It would probably be a public-private partnership. So it started, and we're pretty excited about it. It is a wonderfully exciting, even inspiring, well, pathbreaker, I guess, pathfinder. It's a breakthrough to use the...

Well put. We'll put up a link to at least one of the conversations we've had with Phil Lubin on this show on this week's show page that people can find at planetary.org slash radio. Back to Breakthrough Listen, though, the sister project to Breakthrough Starshot. As I said, we've talked with Ann Druyan about it, and as you know, she is extremely enthusiastic. Significantly as well, Karen O'Neill, I mentioned the director of the Green Bank Observatory, who has given you or given the Breakthrough Initiatives credit for keeping that wonderful radio astronomy facility operating. Because it is now doing what? About a quarter of its time is devoted to listening for extraterrestrial intelligence?

Exactly. About 20% of the time on that telescope, plus 25% of the time on one of its sister telescopes in Australia, the Parkes radio telescope. And we have some other efforts ongoing to look for optical signals, laser signals, which in light of our Starshot effort is probably pretty significant. We're bringing other partners on board. We hope very soon to add some other of the world's largest telescopes. We've signed an agreement with the Chinese on their new 500-meter telescope. This is the world's largest radio telescope, to see if we can do SETI research on that. So it's really caught fire with the world scientific community. That's Pete Worden, executive director of the Breakthrough Initiatives,

including the Breakthrough Listen project. We'll talk more after the break. This is Planetary Radio. Where did we come from? Are we alone in the cosmos? These are the questions at the core of our existence. And the secrets of the universe are out there, waiting to be discovered. But to find them, we have to go into space.

We have to explore. This endeavor unites us. Space exploration truly brings out the best in us, encouraging people from all walks of life to work together to achieve a common goal, to know the cosmos and our place within it. This is why the Planetary Society exists. Our mission is to give you the power to advance space science and exploration. With your support, we sponsor innovative space technologies, inspire curious minds, and advocate for our future in space. We are the Planetary Society. Join us. future in space. We are the Planetary Society. Join us. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. I believe the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is one of the

noblest of human endeavors. That nobility will not be reduced if it never discovers neighbors in the Milky Way or beyond. Simply attempting to answer the question, are we alone, is enough for me. But SETI is also advancing our technology. It has taught us how non-scientists can conduct illuminating citizen science, and it forces us to think beyond our pale blue dot. Pete Wharton apparently agrees. He has added to a long and distinguished career his leadership of the Breakthrough Initiatives. They include the Breakthrough Listen effort that is investing $100 million in answering that most intriguing of questions. I also have read a little bit about possible collaboration with what will eventually, in the late 2020s, I think, become the world's largest radio telescope array,

that square kilometer array that will be established. Is it in South Africa or Australia? Well, there's several parts of it. This is a very exciting project. It will be the most comprehensive global effort. The high-frequency part, the sort of gigahertz class levels, will be in South Africa. The first section of that, called Me Meerkat is about to be completed, and we're in discussions with the South Africans on using that. We're also in discussions with the team that are expanding that to eventually be 2,000 radio dishes

that will have the equivalent gathering power of a single kilometer square telescope. The other part of that is a low-frequency array, which is being built in Australia. So the two pieces of it that are ongoing are the low-frequency and what's called mid-frequency efforts. And we're in discussion with all of those folks to work with them. And it's those so-called mid-frequencies, right, where people have been looking in the past, where it was decided, boy, back at the beginnings of SETI by people like Phil Morrison, that this would be the most likely place to look for ET saying hi. Exactly.

I think it was Professor Morrison that wrote the first paper that said the technology we had then in the 50s, late 50s, and the radio dishes we had then could be seen at interstellar distances. Of course, they caught the attention of another really famous scientist who's also on our advisory board, Frank Drake, who soon started working with a young graduate student at the time, Carl Sagan. They started actually in the early 60s trying to see if they could see these signals. The frequencies that penetrate interstellar space the best, and of course interstellar space isn't empty, there's gas and dust in it, are these sort of high frequencies centered around one and a half gigahertz. And so they started to do some analysis. I think when we started looking at this, it was, you know, a lot of people said, well, they looked and they didn't see anything. In fact, they did the best they could. But with

new technology, we want to look across much broader frequencies. We want to use new data handling algorithms to look for signals and noisy data. But maybe most important, we'd like to look at the million nearest stars. I mean, the most stars have been looked at today are a few thousand, but the million nearest stars takes us out about a thousand light years. And so that's one reason we want to use these new instruments like square kilometer array, because it's an array telescope, it can actually very quickly electronically steer to different stars. So we're looking in the next eight years or so to look out about a thousand light years and do a pretty thorough survey to see,

is anybody trying to communicate? Now, of course, that's just the first part. The second part that we're very interested in is that what if they're not trying to communicate with us? Can we maybe overhear communications they're making for their own purposes, maybe between planets or even between star systems? For this, we really need to do kind of an all-sky look, and we'd like to look both in optical frequencies to see if there are laser signals, because increasingly our civilization is using light rather than radio frequencies just because it's very efficient, but also do the same in radio. So the second part of this is to look for what's often called leakage. And of course, the standard

description of leakage was since the 1950s, we've been broadcasting I Love Lucy into interstellar space. But if you actually do a calculation and say, could I broadcasting I Love Lucy into interstellar space. But, you know, if you actually do a calculation and say, could I hear I Love Lucy out in space if I had equipment like we do today? And the answer is just now with things like the square kilometer array, could we hear an equivalent of I Love Gork from the Alpha Centauri system? That's something we're going to try to look at. And, of course, the third thing to look for is, you know, maybe that civilizations don't last very long. It would be a depressing thing, but maybe the reason we don't hear anybody trying to communicate with us or overhear their own communications is there aren't anybody nearby. So we're going to look to see if we can, is there evidence of artifacts that maybe the civilization millions of years ago built something in their own star system that we can see a remnant of it,

and indeed that's an effort we've also done something in. A few years ago, it was actually amateur astronomers that noticed that one of the Kepler stars, the stars they were looking for planets around, had these very strange light changes, tend to be a series of them every 700 days or so. There wasn't a lot else weird about the star. It was a little hotter than the sun, a little bigger, but as far as we could tell about the same age. One of the explanations for these activities was they were alien megastructure, you know, that there are ideas that the science fiction people have written about, about building giant rings around the star, artificial structures, and was this one of them, that star was dubbed Tabby Stark, as the astronomer that really was leading a lot of that,

is Tabitha Boyarjan at Yale University, Tabby. So we've been trying to look at those stars to see if we can get any evidence of sort of strange behavior. So those are the three things that we're really doing with the Breakthrough Listen program. And we're well underway, certainly on the first part of that. So if we go back to that question that Enrico Fermi so famously posed, where is everybody? It's a big universe. Should we be increasingly surprised that we haven't yet? I mean, yes, there was in the mid 70s, the wow. Is that in any way surprising considering the current status or state of our ability to listen and in the case of optical communication, to watch? Yes and no. You always hope when you look for something that you find it right away. And in fact, Frank Drake told us that when we asked him, did you ever see anything interesting?

He said, well, actually, the first time they turned the telescope on, they looked at, I think, two of the nearest solar-type stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, and got signals from, I forgot which one of them, and got very excited. But it turned out that was, you know, some terrestrial interference. We haven't really looked very hard, and it isn't because we didn't try, but our technology just now is getting good enough. You know, I mentioned the million stars that are, that takes you out about a thousand light years. But you might say, well, why would somebody be trying to signal us? Every star in the galaxy, or most of them have planets, and there's a lot of Earth-sized planets there may be life everywhere uh but why would you beam a signal at a particular star like our sun well the first evidence that there was

some sort of civilization here was was probably 2 000 years ago or so when the earth's atmosphere began to show industrial pollutants mostly due to the fact that the romans burned down all the forest in spain to smelt silver. You know, so that says, well, that might have been the first signal. And there were other maybe signals you would see in the atmosphere of some sort of industrial activity. Those signals would be visible thousands of light years into space. But you say that a civilization was watching our planet. You know, that's 2,000 years ago. The signal went out 1,000 years and

then he decided to send a beacon. So from my perspective, it's kind of interesting that beacons that would be visible halfway across the galaxy may only have been sent recently. And, you know, so that's one explanation. The second one really is that, you know, when we looked at what we needed to do, we discovered that past efforts have only been in very narrow frequencies, not a very complete sample of stars. So with our current technology, we can look over 8 or 10 gigahertz of spectrum

with very high resolution that allows us to begin to pick out these signals. Of course, the third thing is the signals are likely to be noisy, and there's just now methods that are being used to pick signals out of very noisy data. So the first question is just looking for a beacon. That's what we're going to try to do. The second one is on the leakage question. You know, as I noted, that we're just now getting the level of technology where we could see signals from very nearby, I think we really need to do a comprehensive

look to look for transient signals that weren't intended for us. And one of the most interesting ones to us is if one of these alien civilizations was doing what we're doing in Starshot, and they're using lasers or other directed energy, maybe microwaves, to push spaceships around, not only in their own solar system but to nearby stars. We did a calculation a few years ago as how visible would our, say if we build a laser like we're going to do for Starshot, how far away would you be able to see that? And it turns out you'd be able to see that across the universe. All of this makes me more excited and admire all the more the work that you and Yuri Milner

and the other members of the Breakthrough Listen team are doing. But I do wonder, as you look back at the mid-1990s, when the United States withdrew government support for SETI, that's when Jill Charter, I know she says, that's when SETI became a four-letter word to Congress and NASA. Do you hope, do you wish that the United States or perhaps other nations would provide the kind of support that would allow this to continue at an even higher level? Well, of course, we welcome support from wherever it comes from. And indeed, our objective is to develop a

global initiative that's about all these topics of life in the universe. And indeed, I think that's happening. You know, one of the interesting things is that, of course, the hardware that we're using, things like the Green Bank Telescope, the Square Kilometer Array, the Chinese Fast Telescope, and others were developed at great cost by these governments. I think we're already seeing a cooperation in the fact that they welcome us to work closely with them on the SETI question. So I think this question of life in the universe is beginning to really catch fire and get the kind of support from governments that we expect. That may eventually include direct support in something called SETI, but I certainly want to

make the point that it's already a very, very successful public-private partnership. We could not have afforded to build telescopes like the Green Bank Telescope. It's really wonderful that we can use things that the publics around the world are paid for. What are your thoughts about SETI work being done by other institutions that are not part of the Breakthrough Listen effort? I would say, you know, like the SETI Institute would be a primary example. Well, the absolutely critical thing is the more groups of people that are looking at this problem, the more likely we are to succeed. So we really welcome them. We work closely with the SETI Institute.

Indeed, we've discussed, you know, working on some joint projects, and I hope that will go forward. Like any scientific question, you really want a variety of groups that take different approaches. They have different resources. They get funded by different sources. So, you know, our point is that we really want to ignite this excitement. Indeed, one of the measures of that is there has long been an organization that has supported SETI. It's the International Astronautical Association, the IAA, that every year meets at the International Astronautical Congress. And there is a, probably the International Academy of Astronautics, there's a SETI working group that meets every few years. And I'll tell you that

five or 10 years ago, when I first were familiar with them, there was only a handful of people that got involved. This year, their major meeting was in Adelaide, Australia, and there were literally over 100 people at these meetings. It was one of the highlights of the meeting from people that have told me that have been there was that this is a topic that's getting very serious attention, and I think that's only going to grow. You're now as deeply into this as any of the SETI pioneers that we've mentioned and others that we could mention. Has your own thinking, or maybe feeling is the better word, about our chance of success?

Has it changed at all since the beginning of Breakthrough Listen? Well, I think the key thing I take away from having worked in this for a couple years is, first of all, it's a hard problem. Second is, I think we have a very coherent effort to really look at the three aspects of this. The first one being, is there anybody trying to signal us? The second one being, is there any possibility we can listen in on somebody else's conversation for their own purposes? And the third one is, if there isn't anybody actively speaking, can we find any evidence of artifacts of their past existence? This is a very coherent scientific effort.

I think in the next five or ten years, we're going to, if there is somebody there, we've got a pretty good chance of detecting in one of those three areas. somebody there. We've got a pretty good chance of detecting in one of those three areas. But if not, then we begin to be able to set some scientifically meaningful limits on how many intelligent species there are, and perhaps in our galaxy or even further away. Sounds like good progress to me. Please keep it up. I know that my boss, the science guy, the members of the Planetary Society, the vast majority of them, and certainly listeners to this show who love it when we talk SETI, would send their best wishes and their gratitude to you

and to Yuri Milner. Won't it be exciting if someday you guys are able to put out that press release that says we are not alone? Well, we're really looking forward to that. And I suspect whoever succeeds in doing that may be a candidate to win the Breakthrough Prize.

So in addition to maybe one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time, they may also be rich. Something else to look forward to. Pete Worden, thanks so much for joining us on Planetary Radio. Thank you. That is Pete Worden. He is the executive director of the Breakthrough Initiatives, which include the Breakthrough Listen Project. We're going to listen now to Bruce Betts, as we do every week, for this week's edition of What's Up.

Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts, he's the director of science and technology for the Society, and he has rejoined us to tell us about the night sky, and we've got a bunch of other fun stuff that we can go through this time around. Welcome back. Lay it on us. Got Venus still in the pre-dawn east, looking super bright. Mars to its upper right, looking a lot dimmer, but reddish. Saturn hanging out in the evening southwest.

That's what's going on in the sky, at least planet-wise. We move on to this week in space history. I know a NASA toy that you enjoyed. It's the 50th anniversary of the last glide test of the Enterprise space shuttle. Yes, I believe I was there and was right up against the Enterprise, got to touch it at the first landing of Columbia, the first actual spaceflight of one of the shuttles. I have a wonderful photo of that. Maybe I'll share it. I'll have to scan it first because that was pre-digital photography, of course. We can just paste it to your forehead and then take a picture of you.

Yeah, maybe I'll paste it to a t-shirt. There you go. You ready? I'm ready. Random Space Fact. I won't tell anyone if you don't. We're talking about quiet things. It's gravitational waves in Random Space Fact. Of course, big announcements of gravitational waves being tied

to light coming from colliding neutron stars. Well, detecting gravitational waves from space requires amazing engineering. LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, is designed to detect a change in distance between its mirrors of one ten-thousandth of the width of a proton. This is equivalent to measuring the distance to the nearest star to an accuracy smaller than the width of a human hair. Wow. Bill used that same figure, the ten-thousandth of a proton, the width of a proton, last week. But he did not add that wonderful analogy that you were so good at. I wanted to kick it up a notch.

And you did. All right. I got it from the LIGO website. Credit where credit is due. We can go on. I asked you, we were playing, where in the solar system? And I asked you, on what body can you find a 92-kilometer diameter crater named Murray? After Bruce C. Murray, one of the founders of the Planetary Society,

my PhD thesis advisor. How'd we do, Matt? This was fun. It backed off some from last week, but, I mean, that was really an outstanding response. I do have a couple to give you sort of pre-answer responses here. One from Sarah Bandell in Vancouver, British Columbia. She says, let me be the first to say it's high time another Bruce gets something extraterrestrial named after him. Please tell me she means me. I'm pretty sure. I couldn't pass this up, even though I've heard

the joke before. Craig Balog, who is in Woodbridge, New Jersey, he says, this question reminded me of a joke. Grasshopper walks into a bar, asks for a beer. Bart New Jersey, he says, this question reminded me of a joke. Grasshopper walks into a bar, asks for a beer. Bartender says, you know, there's a drink named after you. Grasshopper replies, there's a drink named Marie? You're probably ready for our winner. It's Ashley Collette. This is her first time answering a trivia question.

And her correct answer, I believe it's correct, was pulled up by Random.org. She loves the podcast, and she says that 92-kilometer diameter crater named Murray is on Mars. That is correct. Quite appropriate, since Bruce spent a good portion of his research career studying Mars. Well, congratulations. studying Mars? Well, congratulations. You are going to get the Chop Shop designed Planetary Society t-shirt, a 200-point itelescope.net account, and that really pretty print, mounted

print from an original painting of Neil Armstrong. Not Apollo 11, but his Gemini 8 space helmet is what he's wearing in this one. Comes to us from space artist Simon Kragar. SimonKragar.com is his website, and you can see this work and lots of other stuff in the gallery that he has there. It is fine work. So once again, congratulations. Mel Powell in Sherman Oaks. He was thinking if it wasn't a crater, if it was Murray Ridge, it's easy to find. Near Endeavor Crater, right next to the omnipresent Starbucks and the kitschy Marvin's Diner.

Indeed it is. Dave Fairchild, our poet laureate, need I say, Murray Crater can be found northwest of Hellas Plains, near to Lambert Crater, where it never, ever rains. Another place on Mars that is a Murray franchisee is Murray Ridge, a spot explored by Opportunity. Finally, this from Martin Hajoski in Houston, Texas. He says, of course, it won't really be a true Bruce Murray thing until they put a camera on it. You can explain. Well, he was a big advocate. If you're going to fly a space mission, you should include a camera to get pictures and not only for the science, but because the people are paying for it and the people want to see pictures.

And it's surprising that we still have that argument with some spacecraft to this day. Yeah, it really is. We want our snapshots. All right, we're ready to move on. Back to gravitational waves. Where are the LIGO gravitational wave detectors located? Go to planetary.org slash radiocontest. You've got until November 1st, Wednesday, November 1st, at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer.

And this time, once again, we're going to give away a Planetary Society T-shirt, not the Planetary Radio one. This is the Venn diagram with Mars at the intersection of the circles. Very cool. You can check it out at chopshopstore.com. And a 200-point itelescope.net account. iTelescope is the worldwide nonprofit network of telescopes that anybody can use to do astronomy.

And one more piece of artwork, but this one interesting. It's a work called Apollo from Michelle Rusch. We've given away a couple of her things already, those prints. This is different, though. This is the world's classiest shopping bag. She took this wonderful painting she did of the god Apollo, a sculpture, and superimposed it over an image of the moon. But you really can't.

We'll have to find this and put it up on the show page because it is just gorgeous. And I will tell you, you will be turning heads if you don't already when you use this at the supermarket, this shopping bag. By the way, her work is at ruch.com, R-O-U-C-H dot com. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky and think about what you'd like on your shopping bag. Thank you and good night. That's more what I want in my shopping bag, but okay. Sometimes it gets on the bag. He's Bruce Betts. That's more what I want in my shopping bag, but okay. Sometimes it gets on the bag. He's Bruce Betts.

He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its carefully listening members. Daniel Gunners, our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. If you're listening, aliens, give us a call. Clear skies.

Clear skies.