Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Solar Sail Ready for Liftoff

Episode Date: November 15, 2004

Solar Sail Ready for LiftoffLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cosmos 1, ready to set sail on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome back to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. Cosmos 1, the first real solar sail spacecraft, is ready for launch from a Russian submarine in March of 2005. We'll have excerpts from the press conference, along with the thoughts of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin. First, though, let's squeeze in a couple of other space headlines. Maybe Uranus isn't so boring after all. Observations from the Keck 2 telescope using its adaptive optics have revealed much more storm and other atmospheric activity than has ever

been seen on the big blue planet. The new images were just released last week at the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences annual meeting. And those weren't the only high-resolution snapshots on display. The European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter turned away from the red planet to catch the best-ever shots of Phobos. The amazingly sharp images exposed scores of parallel grooves running straight across the surface of the tiny moon. So far, no one has any idea what dug them. But we all knew our solar system is a groovy place, didn't we?

You can see the pictures and get the details of these stories at planetary.org. I'll be back with our coverage of Cosmos 1 right after this visit with Emily. Don't go away. It's a real cliffhanger. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, what body in the solar system has the highest cliffs? Steep cliffs are seen on nearly all of the terrestrial planets and moons in the solar system. Most of these bodies were molten at some time in their history, so you would expect them to be smooth and flat unless something happened to create a steep slope. The vast majority of cliffs in the solar system occur in the walls of impact craters, where the tremendous force of an object slamming into the solid surface of the planet dug out a steep-sided pit, leaving

cliffs in the crater walls. Cratering was much more common in the early days of the solar system, so planets and moons whose cliffs are all in craters have probably not had much happening on their surfaces since shortly after they formed. But when you see cliffs that are not formed in crater walls, then you know there's some interesting geology going on. What can cliffs tell us about geology on other planets? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. about geology on other planets. Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out.

It had been four years in the making. Finally, the time came to announce that Cosmos 1 was ready to become the first practical solar sail. Media representatives and VIPs like Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin gathered at the Pasadena headquarters of the Planetary Society on November 9th to hear the news from Lou Friedman, executive director of the society and head of the Cosmos One project. Joining Lou was Ann Druyan, founder of Cosmos Studios and widow of Carl Sagan. This is Cosmos One. It's the first solar sail spacecraft. By that, we'll be the first to fly under sunlight pressure and control flight.

It's a project of the Planetary Society and Cosmos Studios, and I've mentioned we have three principal Russian organizations. There are actually several involved. This is a private venture, and I emphasize that. Cosmos Studios, a science-based entertainment company led by Andrew and a sponsor of the project, and in many ways this is as much an experiment for them as can a private venture do such an audacious mission and make it a successful commercial venture as well. This is an experiment for them as well as it is in the technical sense

for us to prove the technical feasibility of solar sail flight for planetary travel. Our goal is very simple, and it actually distinguishes us from several efforts that have gone on in the space agency. All we want to do is achieve the first solar sail flight, but all we want to do is a tall order. You have to get high enough above the altitude where there are no air molecules that could drag this thing where solar pressure can operate, and you have to control flight. I remind everybody that the Wright brothers flew 12 seconds and went nowhere,

but that was an important, successful story. We don't have a destination in mind either, but we do have controlled solar sail flight. All other goals are secondary, how far we get, how long the flight lasts, what we prove about the technology and the technological data that we get. And of course, we have cameras on board and want to get great pictures of the Earth from space. But the goal is to achieve and of course prove the achievement of successful solar sail flight. Everybody asks how a solar sail can tack. Well, you turn the sail and you reflect sunlight pressure.

Remember, it's not the solar wind. It is sunlight pressure which bounces off the sail, and the force can then be added to the orbital velocity of the spacecraft or subtracted from the orbital velocity of the spacecraft. If you increase the orbital velocity, you fly out. If you decrease the orbital velocity, you fly in. And that way you can tack back and forth in various directions. We wish we weren't in Earth orbit. We wish we were flying in the open ocean of space, just like a sailboat likes to fly in the open ocean or sail in the open ocean. In a harbor,

you have to constantly tack and you have to be at your skillful best. But when you're sailing in the ocean, you just more or less can set your direction and hold steady. But we are in a harbor. We live in a harbor, and that is the Earth, and we have to work in Earth orbit. So we have this constant turning of the sail that has to be done relative to the direction of the sun and at the right point in the orbit so that you're increasing your orbit velocity and not working against yourself so that you decrease your orbit velocity. For that reason, this is a very challenging mission.

If we could somehow magically have built this sail in interplanetary space and just set course, that would be somewhat easier. But the magic isn't there. We have to start here. The deployment has to work in orbit, and then you have to turn the sail in the right way to achieve that controlled solar sail flight. The big inhibition in solar sailing is the lack of a test flight. We've not been able to have a test of solar sailing,

and so the people in the space agency say, it's not proven, we can't fly it. At the same time, how do you get it started? You have to do it. Someone has to take the risk. And now, Planetary Society, with our Russian colleagues, and with the generous support of our sponsor, Cosmos Studios, who's taking the financial risk, we have been able to put together a team that's able to break through all of this and actually set a launch date and try this mission for the first time, to try the first solar sail flight. We've chosen to make this announcement on the anniversary of what would have been Carl Sagan's 70th birthday, if you can

imagine. So it's a very, very auspicious day for us. Some of his children are here Sasha, Sam and Nick is where? Oh there he is and so we're really honored that you could join us there's a line from J.D. Salinger about people who die too young they never grow old in your mind so it's hard for me to imagine Carl at

70 years old he's still pretty young we're all old but Carl never got that way, unfortunately. But it's a poignant remembrance as we choose this day for making this announcement. Several of our advisors are here, including Buzz Aldrin, who's been a longtime advisor and friend of the Planetary Society and has kept the vision of space exploration alive in so many ways ever since his historic landing on the moon.

Then it was time to hear from Ann Druyan. I'd like to acknowledge Lou, who has, as he mentioned earlier, has really been a visionary in the field of solar sailing. He literally wrote the book long ago and has now come to realize it through an enormous amount of years of hard work, years of traveling back and forth to Russia to work with our colleagues there. And I think it's especially meaningful to me that this is Carl's birthday, that along with the children that Lou mentioned, and Clannette Minnis, who was like a daughter to him,

who's here today also, he was certainly one of the parents, the founding parents of the Planetary Society. And he did it because he had this dream that we would use our scientific knowledge to good ends, not to destroy everything that we cherish, but to come to know the cosmos and the wonder of nature. And I think this week it's particularly poignant for me because Carl's dream was not just a

dream of a scientifically literate society, which we desperately need, but of a democratic society where the knowledge of the cosmos was the birthright of every person, and it would help them to make informed decisions as citizens of the country, of the planet, and of the cosmos itself. I can't think of a better way to honor Carl Sagan than by taking a delivery vehicle for a weapon of mass destruction, a Russian ICBM, and to convert that into a means for exploring the universe.

That is the dream of Carl Sagan, that we would not just be clever with our science and technology, but that we would be wise, too. It's just a thrill for me to be here, to start this countdown clock, to know that in a couple of months from now, it's possible that our beautiful, elegant solar sailing spacecraft will deploy, open up its vast reflective sails,

become a naked eye object to the whole planet and a signal flare for the kind of world that all of our children deserve. Carl lives as long as people continue to do the kinds of things that the Planetary Society is so valiantly doing. So thank you very much. I'll be back to talk with Buzz Aldrin about the solar sail right after this. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the

Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. You can learn about these adventures and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in The Planetary Report. The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine. It's just one of many member benefits.

You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. And you can catch up on space exploration news and developments at our exciting and informative website, planetarysociety.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. conference. An hour later, I sat down with Buzz Aldrin to talk about the revolutionary spacecraft, along with other recent news that is making Buzz even more excited about space exploration and development. I've known Lou for quite some time, maybe even before the Planetary Society was put together, and I admire pioneering efforts. I was in New York when they had an announcement about the solar sail

project. I'm not sure what the occasion was, but I felt that this was a good opportunity. To me, right now, so many things seem to be coming together after a period of great, great frustration and apparent procrastination by all the parties involved in space exploration. My group of people tried to put together a space vision institute last summer, but then the president's vision for space exploration came along and removed the need for our doing that. I did put together a conference the day after the Kitty Hawk celebration where we looked at the past, the future, how to get where we want to go, what are the pathways, and that was a good success. So things have been slowly building,

and the XPRIZE of putting the attention-grabbing headlines of the possibility of people being able to get even only briefly into space through suborbital flight, and then to find that the people that want to do that are sincerely, I hope, interested in orbital flight. I see that maybe dovetailing with the exploration initiative, and I see some of the things that I've devoted a lot of time to and created, discovered, cycling orbits between Earth and Mars. They may find a little bit of a home. Many years ago, I wrote a story about going to another star. The people from there came here, and of course their journey was a laser-powered gigantic sail, and now we're beginning to try and get our feet wet with a solar sail.

You talk about things, you write about them for years, and then finally some people get together and they decide it's time to do something about it. So as somebody who has seen the potential of space exploration, space flight, for more than the 35 years since Apollo 11, particularly gratifying time for you, and you see parallels between efforts like Cosmos 1, the solar sail, and Spaceship 1, the X-Prize. Cosmos 1, the solar sail, and Spaceship 1, the X-Prize. There certainly are, and I think it's becoming better understood how to balance the use of robotic spacecraft that can reach many inaccessible places much sooner

than we can with the human observation, the human judgment, and the great expense and care involved in protecting the humans in order to expand our understanding. We need an appropriate mix of all of this. We also need an appropriate mix of government-enlightened awareness of what the private sector can do and how we can partner the two of them together for what I would call space tourism and what the Planetary Society would call an understanding regulatory government that allows the efforts of things like Cosmos One to be able to succeed as a private sector effort that is encouraged, enhanced, and not objected to by the government. So the next big challenge really is how can we bring together the mix that in the days of aviation resulted in the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics

to be of assistance to the airmail people that then developed an industry that began taking people somewhere. At the same time, they were exploring the science of the atmosphere, the knowledge that can be gained by objects, observing things at a great distance, all the things that come from what now in space we could call the resource of having something in space. It's a vacuum, but we make use of the position of being there and the wealth of information, the sense of being there, observing, knowing what's there, how you get there, and how that benefits humanity. Many of the things that are billions of light years away

are interesting academically, but they're not too useful to Joe Sixpack. But we still do them anyway because we have a curiosity, and we need all this mixed together. We need to be able to find something to interest the impatient youngster's curious mind with what he can do in 10 minutes, but also where it fits into the big picture of where we all came from and maybe where we're all going. This may be the ultimate example of what we do in space, of getting something from nothing. Well, nothing exists where what we call microgravity exists too, and that's a place. It gives us a vantage point. It gives us a vacuum, unaccelerated. There are so many resources that are there

with nothing. When we start putting humans there, we have to protect them against that environment of nothing. We seal the human in a container, and then whatever's in the container wants to leak out. But contrast that with putting the instrument or the human in a container seven miles down in the ocean, where the ocean is trying to get in with great ferocity. We have a hazardous environment deep in the oceans, and we have a hazardous environment way up out there, beyond. Wow. You've already stated a lot of reasons why we should be pursuing this.

Is it human nature? I'm sure that as soon as Cosmos 1 shines as a bright light in the sky, there will be people signing up to go to the nearest star and expect that that's going to happen

in 10 or 15 years. Just like with the X Prize, people think that, well, I'm going to get into space, yeah, for two or three minutes, but you're not into orbit yet. That takes a tremendous amount of energy, and so does it take a tremendous amount of energy to propel ever so slowly that sail that will be able to go from one star to another star. I'll finish with this. If they offered you a ticket in a few years, if Richard Branson handed you one, would you

go back up in that slightly larger version of Spaceship One, get one more look up above the atmosphere? No. No. I've been beyond, and I think there are ways that I could take that ticket and spread it around. In much the same way, I'm reminded of the Ansari family, that Anusha decided not to go up in the Soyuz and spend lots of money to do that, but instead to use those resources and that wealth to enable many, many more people to potentially experience the activities that can happen in space. It's a lovely thought and a good spot for us to end at. And, Buzz, thank you not only for taking a couple of minutes now,

but for all the times every week that you're heard on this radio show talking to people about joining the society. Well, there are a lot of good advocacy groups. We need to circle the wagons and not fire inward, but accomplish common objectives by banding together and doing that in ways that are not empire building, but are building for the good of the outside people. Thank you, Buzz. Stay tuned to Planetary Radio and visit planetary.org for regular updates as Cosmos 1 prepares for liftoff in March of 2005. I'll be back with Bruce Betts

and this week's What's Up right after this return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla back with Q&A. When you see long, straight lines of cliffs running across a planet or a moon, then you know that there's been some geologic activity going on, a kind of activity called tectonics. Tectonics happen when there are huge stresses within a planetary body, stresses that act to change the shape of the planet. Because the outside of the planet is stiff, the shape change can make the surface fracture.

The planet's crust slips along the fractures, making high mountains and deep valleys, like at Death Valley on the Earth and Valles Marineris on Mars. At both Death Valley and Valles Marineris, the action of water has served to change the shape of the canyon walls, smoothing out the cliffs. But on bodies where there is no atmosphere and no water, the cliffs can remain unaltered over billions of years.

So it's Uranus's moon Miranda that wins the prize for the highest cliffs, with vertical offsets of about 15 kilometers, or 9 miles. These cliffs are so high that with Miranda's low gravity, rocks launched horizontally from the tops of these cliffs could take as long as 10 minutes to fall to the bottom. Got a question about the universe?

Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. We are rejoined by Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, and it's another one of those location What's Up. It is indeed, Matt. We're on location at Caltech, a little celebration following the launch date announcement for SolarSail.

Nice celebration. This is, of course, where we talked to Buzz Aldrin, and there's still a lot of people here as things come to a close. It's been a pretty good day. It has. It's been a great day. A lot of exciting stuff. We're looking forward to it.

Thumbs up. And what's up? What's up? Well, there are things you can look for in the night sky these days. In the evening, you can see Saturn rising before 10 p.m., around 9 p.m. in the east-northeast. It's outshining Castor and Pollux in Gemini. That's where it's hanging out in the sky. Before dawn, you can see it in the south, way above Venus, which is also in the pre-dawn sky still, although it's starting to run away.

Venus, the brightest object in the east, looking like a really bright star before dawn. Look to its upper right, and you will see Jupiter. They continue to grow apart after their nuzzle fest a couple weeks ago. There's also a slim chance you can catch Mercury really low in the southwest at sunset, if you look for it. And bouncing back to the predawn sky, look for Mars to the lower left of Venus. Anyway, there's also a meteor shower, the Leonid meteors, which were spectacular in around 1998 to 2002.

That was the good news. Bad news is, not so much spectacular anymore, at least not expected to be. The Leonids, more than any other meteor shower, have a real peak every 30 years or so. Well, we're probably past it. But you can go out and try to see them if you want on November 17th in the pre-dawn sky. There ought to be a few more meteors visible than usual, right? Yes, yes. Certainly more than visible in your average sky, and more than visible probably for most of the Leonid shower. We're still sort of near where you might get some peaks and meteors.

On to this week in space history. 35 years ago, Matt, 35 years ago, November 19th, 1969, Apollo 12 landed on the moon. How appropriate, having just heard from Buzz Aldrin. On to random space facts. Excuse me. Speaking of the solar sail mission, Cosmos 1 has eight solar sail blades, each one triangular in shape about 15 meters or about 50 feet in length. This gives a total area of about 600 square meters for the Cosmos 1 solar sail once it's unfurled. I saw a great picture of the solar sail if you put it in Rockefeller Center in New York,

and it's vast. It's huge. How bright will it be from Earth? Well, it's going to be highly variable because it'll be much brighter when you're actually seeing a reflection directly from the sun off the blades to Earth. If you're in the right place at the right time, it could be as bright as the full moon or brighter but concentrated in one spot. However, there are other times if the blades are facing away from you that it will probably be very dim, may not, you know, be close to not visible at all. Usually it'll be somewhere in between, probably look kind of like a bright star. We will be giving you more information in coming months on how to go look for solar sail once it's up. How about we move on to the trivia contest?

We asked you a couple weeks ago, in what year did Christian Huygens discover Titan? Now being explored by the Cassini spacecraft and Christian Huygens' namesake in January, what year was Titan discovered? The answer being, of course, 1655, the same year that Huygens looked up there and said, whoa, hey, what are those ring things? He discovered the rings at the same time, same year. Yeah, he actually saw a ring plane crossing. The rings go edge-on to us periodically.

Right now they're very open. It's a great thing to look at in a telescope, but he saw it edge-on and that came out of the pesky configuration. He said, whoa, rings. I forgot. Galileo saw them, but he thought they were like cup handles or something. So it was Huygens who realized, no, no, that's the ring around the planet. Yeah, Galileo actually thought they were love handles. It was, um...

I don't know. He had a lot of psychological stuff going on. Anyway. He was kind of cooped up for a long time. Yeah, yeah. Have we got a lot of psychological stuff going on. Anyway. He was kind of cooped up for a long time. Have we got a winner here? Yes, we sure do. And it's our first at least self-identified military person. Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Air Force Robert A. Fabian in Fredericksburg, Virginia,

came up with the correct answer, 1655, for the discovery of that big mysterious, although now less mysterious, increasingly less mysterious moon. We are very happy that you went for it, Rob, and that you won, and you're going to be getting that Planetary Radio t-shirt in the mail. Congratulations. Yay, congratulations. On to the next trivia contest. I'm going to stick with that discovery of moons thing.

I don't know why. I'm just in the mood. Tell me, to win your Planetary Radio t-shirt, who discovered Pluto's moon Sharon, or Karen, or Caron, or wiki wiki wiki woo? It's hard to figure out how to pronounce it, but in any

case, who discovered it, and when? Who and when? The discovery of Pluto's moon Sharon. Tell us at planetary.org slash radio, where you can find out how to email us your fun and festive answer to that question. And when do they need to get that in by, Matt? They need to get it to us by noon Pacific time on November 22nd. Monday the 22nd, noon Pacific time.

Be there. Be there. All right. Well, that seems like that's about it. So everyone go out there, look under the night sky, and think about all the light that's pushing on you right now. Thank you, and good night. I am bowled right over.

And that's Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us each week here on What's Up. Join us next time as we mark the arrival at the moon of Europe's Smart One spacecraft. Smart One is a testbed for lots of new technologies, including an ion engine. Till then, why not tell us what you think of the show? Write to PlanetaryRadio at planetary.org. That's PlanetaryRadio at planetary.org. Have a great week, everyone.