Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Shoemaker NEO Grant Recipients Protecting Our Planet

Episode Date: June 14, 2010

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Amateur astronomers protecting our home world, 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. final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. All over our planet, so-called amateur astronomers are watching the skies for near-Earth objects, asteroids and comets

that cross the path of Earth's orbit. A lucky handful have had their observations aided by grants from the Planetary Society. We'll talk with two of them. Bruce Betts will join me at the other end of today's show for a quick look at the night sky, which happens to include a comet. And we've got another special space trivia contest prize.

Emily Lakdawalla will share news that has people in Japan celebrating and it has nothing to do with the World Cup. We'll visit with her right after we hear from Bill Nye about the same topics and another that has Bill worried about opportunities to explore the outer solar system and other places where solar cells don't cut it. Hey, hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy, now the executive director of the Planetary Society. This is an exciting week in space exploration. First of all, the Japanese Aeronautical Exploration Agency, JAXA, successfully deployed a solar sail. Now I just got to tell you, deployment,

unfurling, paying out, getting it to open in the icy blackness of space with a solar sail has been an old problem. These things are so thin and delicate, and when you start unrolling them, the whole spacecraft shakes around. Well, they did it. They pulled it off. So stay tuned. We'll find out whether or not it's getting pushed through space by the pressure, the momentum of photons.

The second big success for JAXA this week, the Hayabusa spacecraft returned with what we believe are little pieces of an asteroid. They shot at it. Some debris pokes back, sprays back, they capture it, and now it landed in the outback in Australia. And as of this recording, they haven't gone out there to pick it up, but the beacon's on and they're going to find it, and we're going to find out more about the ancient solar system. This is a sample return mission from an asteroid.

How cool is that? And furthermore, my friends, it's international participation. This is not NASA. This is JAXA. This is Japanese Exploration Agency. This is cool. And finally this week, if you get a chance, mention plutonium to somebody. Well, I know plutonium is toxic.

In fact, when I had lunch with Glenn Seaborg, one of the guys who invented or created plutonium is toxic. In fact, when I had lunch with Glenn Seaborg, one of the guys who invented or created plutonium, he told me he insisted on calling it the atomic symbol PU because it's so stinky. But anyway, we need a little bit of plutonium in order to make radiothermetric generators to send spacecraft into deep space. Because don't you want to know what's

under the ice out there on the moon of Saturn? Don't you want to know what goes on with the volcanoes on Io, the moon of Jupiter? Don't we want to explore Venus in a way that the thick clouds don't kill our spacecraft? Come on, we need just a little bit of plutonium. So it's an exciting week in space. Solar sail deployed, piece of asteroid back on Earth, and then the political concern about this dangerous but essential stuff, plutonium. I got to fly, Bill and I, the planetary guy. Bill isn't the only one who's excited about Icarus and Hayabusa. Emily is on the line. Emily Lochtewall is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society.

And, of course, she's here to talk to us about these two amazing stories, these great accomplishments for Japan. Hi, Emily. Hi, Matt. Yeah, it's really been quite a week for Japanese space exploration. It's really pretty incredible when you consider

that they have, I think, 400 employees. And they've pulled off two pretty amazing successes, starting with the deployment of the first solar sail. And they actually have some thin film solar power cells on that solar sail that are generating power. So with those two events, the deployment and the power generation, they've achieved minimum mission success as they've defined it. Now, they still haven't demonstrated solar sailing flight. They haven't moved the spacecraft trajectory using solar sailing yet. That's still to come. But they've achieved their minimum goals, and they are definitely to be congratulated for

what they accomplished this week. You also have on the blog some photos that confirm this full deployment. And what's more, and is very nice, is sort of a guide to these pictures, because otherwise it might be a little difficult to tell what you're really looking at. Yeah, the pictures are a little hard to understand because the cameras are mounted on the spacecraft, and they're sighting along the sails, so it's a very foreshortened view, hard to get a sense of what the sails actually look like. I hope this week, maybe not, maybe next week,

they'll be deploying a pair of cameras that should go some distance from the spacecraft and actually finally get a look, you know, a top-down look on what the sail looks like floating in space. How cool. All right, tell us the latest on Hayabusa. It was quite a dramatic night. Very emotional, actually. It's amazing how attached the Japanese public has gotten to this mission and how they personify it in cartoons in the uniquely Japanese way. It's been really, really fun to follow. As I understand it, they almost immediately picked up a beacon from the capsule as it was drifting to the ground under parachute, and they tagged it. They flew a helicopter over the landing site, and they know exactly where it is with GPS coordinates, but they didn't want to land next to

it at night. They're going to wait until daylight hours, actually afternoon Australian time, which is in the middle of the night our time, and they're going to go is in the middle of the night, our time. And they're going to go out in the middle of daylight with some officials and some Aboriginal peoples who own the land that Hayabusa's capsule landed in, and they're going to go pick up that capsule. But they won't open it right away. They have to transport it back to Japan. They have to do several steps to get it into the cleanest of clean rooms before they crack the thing open and see if there's anything inside. Good. I'm glad they're being careful. More to protect whatever may be inside there than to protect the rest of us.

So I'm not worried about Andromeda strain. You do have a spectacular video. You have a lot of stuff, video and stills. But one taken from that NASA DC-8? Wow. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. There's a whole team of NASA asteroid scientists who wanted to watch what's essentially an artificial meteor. They know exactly the shape and size of this meteor before it entered Earth's atmosphere and how fast it was going.

So they took every possible instrument they had. They pointed them out the window of a DC-8, and they flew that DC-8 past the site where the spacecraft was coming in. They've gotten spectra. They've got all kinds of measurements on what the spacecraft did as it burned up in the atmosphere. More importantly, I think to the public, they got the most incredible video I've ever seen. The cool thing is you watch it more than once and you can actually see the capsule. It's the spacecraft that's breaking up into all these multiple little fireballs, but ahead of the spacecraft is a much smaller, more steadily burning dot, and that's the capsule as it's descending toward Australia. Well, thank you for answering a question that both Bill and I had, is that, was that little

remaining dot the capsule before it deployed a parachute? It is spectacular, and of course, it's all on the blog, and we'll put up a couple of links, but you can also find it at planetary.org slash blog. Emily, once again, thanks so much. It's a pleasure, Matt. Emily Laktawalis, the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. I'll be right back with a couple of our planet's most successful asteroid trackers. The Planetary Society is making another round of Shoemaker-Neo,

or Near-Earth Object Observation grants available. The deadline for applications is June 24, with more information available at planetary.org. We thought this might be a good time to check in with past winners of the grants named after the late astronomer Gene Shoemaker. We've gone to opposite ends of the Earth for this, beginning with Robert Holmes, president of the Astronomical Research Institute in rural Illinois. ARI is the only two-time winner of Shoemaker-Neo grants, and it has built a mighty reputation for both neo-observation

and inspiring young people to consider astronomy and other sciences as careers. Each of the Institute's grants paid for a very sensitive CCD camera. I visited with Bob by cell phone last week. ARI's new middle-of-nowhere location enjoys dark skies, but has no landline telephone service. Bob, thanks very much for joining us once again on Planetary Radio, your second visit. Welcome back. Thank you, Matt. You guys have been extremely busy over the last few years, taking lots and lots of images of near-Earth objects. In fact, your performance is actually described as astounding, and I would

tend to agree. How many images have you been capturing? I would tend to agree. How many images have you been capturing? Just in the hundreds of thousands is what we do per year. It's an extremely large number because a large number of targets that we work with per year. So, yes, we have accumulated about 25,000 observations of near-Earth objects using the Gene Shoemaker grant cameras. And so those are observations as opposed to individual images? There's a difference there? Yes, observations are completely different than images.

I've seen as many as 90 to 120 images just to make one observation. Wow. And does this have to do with that you have to see the near-Earth object move across the field of stars behind it? Right. You want to build up a good signal-to-noise ratio, and you do that with stacking images. 121,097 images, to be exact, just in 2009 from one of these cameras? No, actually that's from two different cameras.

We've been using another camera from our last grant funding. So this is from two cameras. They went back. They're using another camera from our last grant funding. So this is from two cameras. Obviously, these cameras have been able to do a lot for you, but really, what's the significance of having received two of these grants? What has it been able to do for your work? Just a large number of output of observations, and also the fact that we can go very, very faint. We confirmed a WISE space telescope discovery in the past week at magnitude 22.4. Wow. And that was with one of the cameras from the Shoemaker-Grant. And we've talked about WISE lately on this program, those 11,000 brand-new asteroids

that it has discovered. So obviously you're helping to back that up. I was interested to read on your website, and we'll put up a link to that as well, that while you're doing a lot of great science, it looks like education, working with young people, is still the prime mission, the prime directive there. It began as an education and public outreach program back in 2002. And to get funding, we kind of went the science route so we could actually get some grant funding in 2006.

And it's kind of taken off from there. How many schools do you work with, or how many young people, and where are they located? We're up to close to 200 schools that we work with on an annual basis and that includes about 900 students and that goes to about 31 countries around the world. Wow, what do the students actually do? Do they make observations? They're measuring these near-earth objects that we take images of at night, we upload them to the Internet, and they'll measure those in the classroom. It's amazing that this funding for Gene Shoemaker and Neil Grant has reached students all over the world now.

Some of them win awards, I guess, killer asteroid awards. Right. We have a killer asteroid project that's specifically geared towards student education. Asteroid Project that's specifically geared towards student education. And in the past year, we've provided 900 certificates, over 900, to students around the world. And we gave out right around 118 plaques this past school year to teachers and to the schools. And each one of those plaques has the students' names engraved in it that participated in the project. You know, it's just very significant to have students participate, you know, in near-Earth object observation so they can learn science but yet motivate them to go into science in higher education. Tell us a little bit about the facility there.

I saw pictures of quite a few telescopes on your website. We currently have three. We have a third one just now coming online, which is a 30-inch, and we also have a 24 that's currently working, and we also have a 32-inch telescope. I thought I saw pictures, now these were a little bit old, of a 48-inch mirror blank that was, I guess, ready to be ground? Well, since then, we have received the blankets here, and it's actually 50 inches. We got a better deal. Hopefully, we'll be working and putting the Gene Shoemaker camera on that. Talk about these cameras. I mean, we've talked many times on this program about these tremendous advances in CCD cameras that far outperform even digital

cameras of a few years ago, and certainly far better than the old film cameras that so much traditional astronomy was done with. Yeah, the CCD cameras that we work with today are just phenomenal. Our quantum efficiency on the camera that we got from the Gene Shoemaker NeoGrant is a 73% quantum efficiency camera, and that just kind of really bumps it up to a league that allows us to work with professionals as far as observations are concerned, simply because we can produce professional results. Quantum efficiency, what does that term mean? Basically, we collect 73 out of every 100 photons that strike the camera. That is a very important number because with old film cameras,

you were getting maybe 8 out of every 100 that would hit a piece of film. So you really want to collect every photon that comes through your telescope and makes a measurable observation for you. If people want to learn more, for example, if I am a principal at a school or even just a student at a high school, or I think you work with college level as well, what's the best way for them to learn how they might get involved? Well, the best way is to contact us on our contact page on the website. Once they contact us, we'll put them in touch with the appropriate educational people that can direct them so that they can learn what it takes to do near-Earth object observations

and be a part of the project. what it takes to do near-Earth object observations and be a part of the project. Robert, or Bob Holmes, is president of the Astronomical Research Institute in Charleston, Illinois, or I'm willing to bet a little bit outside of town at that dark site where he has moved his facility. That's where they are tracking thousands upon thousands of these near-Earth objects, making sure that none of them get in the way of our planet, but at the same time providing an enormous amount of inspiration and education for young people around the world. I'll be right back with the youngest Shoemaker-Neo grant recipient ever in Guangzhou, China.

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. Transcription by CastingWords 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. Just a handful of amateur astronomers in China have been searching for near-Earth objects. One member of that elite club is about to graduate from college. He was still a teenager when he received a Shoemaker-Neo grant from the Planetary Society.

Qianzhi Ye had already become principal investigator for the Lulin Sky Survey, based in Taiwan. We managed to connect via Skype a few days ago. Yeh generously allowed me to use his surname, as his close friends do. Yeh, thank you so much for joining us. Are you in Guangzhou right now? Yes, I'm at my home. It really is an honor to be able to speak to you. You, of course, received your grant in

2007 when you were just 18 years old and yet you were already a principal investigator for a sky study. I just tried to do my hobby. I think it's not very special. You think? You know I'm not a native speaker, so... Oh, you're doing fine. And I disagree with you, though. I think it's quite special that an 18-year-old, you are the youngest recipient ever of a Shoemaker-Neo grant. So congratulations. Now that was three years ago. What did you receive the grant for?

I received the grant for buying a laptop for providing assistance to the Lunar Sky Survey, which is looking for asteroids and providing follow-up observations for the near Earth objects. In 2008, I wrote a program so it can process the data automatically. I can process the data on the go. I scan the sky for new asteroids and then provide follow-up observations for the newly discovered NEOs. Because the Luling is located in the west of the Pacific Ocean, and you know that the most big surveys in the United States are located in the east of the Pacific Ocean. So I think that the Luling is located in a quite good geological location, so sometimes it can provide very valuable observations of the newly discovered objects.

How exactly were you able to make use of the laptop to aid your observations? Because at that time I only had a PC, a personal computer, in my home. At that time I got admission to the college. So each time when Lulin obtained the observations, I had to go home, you know, have to go home and then download the data and then process them.

So I think I need a laptop, then I can do all the things on the go. As long as there is internet connections I can download data and process the observations and subject observation to the MPC. So it's much more convenient for me and I can provide a much more quick response to the newly discovered objects. How many were you actually able to observe? I was able to observe a few thousands, I think, because I didn't calculate how much I have observed.

I only care about how much the new asteroids and how much newly discovered MEOs I have observed, actually. But you did say several thousand. That's amazing. I have observed, actually. But you did say several thousand. That's amazing. Certainly some of them include some MEOs that can present a hazard to our Earth. A hazard to our Earth, yeah,

which is, I suppose, that's the most vital portion of this work. But even those that are not posing a danger to us, you were still giving us knowledge about the nature of our solar system. Are you going to continue your studies in astronomy? Yeah, I plan to apply for a graduate school in probably the United States, but I think it will be

overseas because the success of carrying out the rolling skies survey and working something out, I think, is a quite good start for me. And being an astronomer is my dream since I was a child. So I will try to get it. Well, we will look forward to talking to you again, perhaps here in the U.S., or once again as you continue your research there in China. And I'm also told, I read on our website, where people can find a picture of you, and we'll put up a link to that,

that I can congratulate you that you're about to finish your undergraduate studies. Oh, thank you. Well, it has been a delight to talk to you. I know it's late in the evening there and early in the morning here, so we'll let you go on to do whatever it is that you need to do tonight, including getting some sleep. I need to go to sleep now. I'll let you do that.

Thank you so much once again, and congratulations also on not just receiving the grant, but making such good use of both the grant and your time there as part of this discovery of near-Earth objects. I'm honored to have time to talk with you and meet the audience of Planetary Society Audio. It's amazing that we can talk across the ocean. Isn't it? Yes. Also amazing that science can be conducted this way from both sides of our own planet. And that's one of the reasons I'm so happy to be able to talk with you today.

Me too. I wish you a very bright future in astronomy and hope that we get to talk again someday. Thank you. Thank you very much. Young astronomer and Shoemaker-Neo grant recipient Qianzhi Ye speaking to us from his home in Guangzhou, China. What's Up is up next. Time for What's Up with Bruce Betts. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Got him at the other end of the Skype line,

and he's here to provide us with a quick look at the night sky. Welcome back. Thank you very much. How are you doing, Matt? I'm doing great. Fun to talk to those Shoemaker-Neo Award winners, and I wish we could talk to all of them. I know that you're very involved with that project. I am, sadly for them. I'm their interface. Well, it's a great program.

It is. We're excited, and they do great work, and we're excited about the new round of proposals that are due June 24th. Let's go on. How's the night sky? Night sky looking very night sky-ish. Venus dominating the east shortly after sunset. Bright star-like object. Over to Venus's right, Castor and Pollux, the bright stars of Gemini. And then as you go to the upper left of all of that, you'll find Mars looking reddish, and it's now to the upper left of Leo's brightest star, Regulus, which is much bluer. Farther to the upper left, you will find Saturn looking yellowish, and if you have any

trouble finding it, it will be near the moon on June 18th. So check that out. In the pre-dawn, Jupiter looking exceptionally bright, and also in the pre-dawn, we have a comet. Not really naked-eyed, but a comet visible with binoculars, or even better with a small telescope, Comet McNaught. To find that, you're going to want to find a finder chart online. Check that out. It's brightened up to about fifth magnitude, but it's a dispersed object, so it's tricky to see without some type of aid.

We move on to this week in space history. It was First Women Week in 1963. Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. And 20 years later, during the same week in 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. Another one of those odd space coincidences. Weird, isn't it? Speaking of weird, we move on to random space fact, random space fact, random space fact.

That's good. That's good. You're branching out. I like this new approach. Hayabusa, kind of cool. Hayabusa, which means falcon in Japanese, and has just returned to Earth. It has a couple of firsts. It's definitely the first mission designed and flown that was designed to go reach out and touch an asteroid. Now, NEAR did this before then, but it was designed to reach out and fly around an asteroid. They just got really clever and landed on it. If it has returned samples, it certainly got a sample return capsule back. And if they open it up and find samples,

it will be the first ever asteroid sample return mission. And we'll know very soon, perhaps by the time most people hear this radio show. All right, on to trivia. In the trivia contest, we asked you, how quickly is the moon moving away from Earth? And in this case, over the measured period since about 1970, how fast is it moving per year on average? How do we do, Matt? Our winner is Phil Haddock. Phil, who is a faithful every week listener, enters the contest every week, but his name has not come up in about, oh, it's almost two years now, I think. Phil out of New Mexico at Holloman Air Force Base said, the moon is receding from

Earth at 3.8 centimeters per year. So, Phil, congratulations. We're going to send you one of those Planetary Radio t-shirts. I got a couple of cute answers for you here, too. People who Random.org did not pick. But Susan Noe pointed out that that means that the moon is about 144 centimeters farther away since Apollo 17, or about a quarter of the height of the lunar module. this from William Stewart, who said that 3.8 centimeters per year,

that's about the same as the average rate of, wait for it, human fingernail growth. Wow. And so then he points out that basically, no matter how far we reach, it would always be out of our grasp. Our nails would never quite get there anyway. Very cute. Thank you, William. That's a really cool analogy. That teaches me something else because that's also human fingernail growth is the common analogy for how fast the mid-ocean ridges are spreading out the plates. So, wow. It's a day for cosmic coincidences comes in threes coincidence you be the judge

all right we move on to the next trivia contest what are we giving away matt i don't know you know what why don't we give away a weather station a celestron weather station very cool all right to get that weather station we return you now to hayabusa. Hayabusa visited the asteroid Itokawa, named after a Japanese rocket pioneer. What was the original name of the asteroid? And it sounds like it's a joke, but it's not. What's the original boring number letter designation of the asteroid before they renamed it? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter.

You got until the 21st of June at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer, and we've got to get out of here. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about your fingernails growing. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. We get a lot of excitement here watching our fingernails grow. He joins us every week, though, for What's Up.

Ooh, look, paint drying. 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. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова