Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Solar System Revelations, and the World’s Biggest Telescope Threatened?

Episode Date: November 17, 2015

Emily Lakdawalla returns from the annual Division for Planetary Sciences meeting with big news from around the solar system. Then we talk with science journalist Traci Watson about the departure of the great Arecibo radio telescope’s Director and the funding challenge that could shut down the observatory.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The latest planetary science and Arecibo in Jeopardy! this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. A special report today from Emily Lakdawalla, just back from the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences with a head full of discoveries to tell us about. Then we'll talk with science journalist Tracy Watson about what could be the beginning of the end for the world's biggest single telescope, the giant Arecibo radio dish in Puerto Rico. Bill Nye has the week off while he tours the world for his new book, Unstoppable.

the week off while he tours the world for his new book, Unstoppable. A side note now, most of the content for today's show was recorded before we learned of the horror in Paris. Our thoughts this week are with all Parisians and the French people. We stand with you. Here is the Planetary Society senior editor, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, welcome back. I know you're back home from DPS. You've had some time to think about it, and you certainly did a good deal of writing, blogging, and tweeting while you were there. Where shall we start as we go through some of the highlights? Well, let's start with Pluto, as far away as we can get from Earth. New Horizons, of course, just flew past in the summer, and this was the first science meeting where scientists had a chance to present to other

scientists what they found when they got there. Okay, what really stood out? I mean, the data continues to trickle out and it's been getting big headlines. What was new? Well, of course, people were very excited about the images and some of the ways that the scientists had combined the images. I think stereo was one of the highlights. They handed out 3D glasses at the beginning of the meeting and everybody was waiting and waiting and waiting for the talk that was going to use 3D glasses. And finally, Paul Schenck, who is well known for studying topography on outer solar system surfaces, let us all use the glasses to see a couple of really strange things, actually. First of all, nobody expected Pluto to have much topography.

But it turns out that water ice, it must be very strong at its surface, is very important in making topography. It made these huge mountains of various kinds, including these really weird circular shaped ones with very deep holes at their centers. And as one scientist remarked, it's very hard to unsee volcanoes when you see a round thing with a hole in the center. It's really difficult to explain how you would have volcanic constructs at Pluto, but there's not currently a better explanation. I don't think anybody's terribly satisfied with that one, but we'll just have to wait and see. You also wrote a great blog entry that we'll link to, of course, from the show page at

planetary.org slash radio about the moons, the lesser moons. I don't know, is Charon even still considered a moon? Charon is definitely a moon and it has its own interesting topography. But yeah, the blog entry that I wrote was about the even smaller moons, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra, which are a set of four moons that orbit Pluto and Charon in the same equatorial plane. They're like regular moons, except they're not because all the other regular moons in the solar system, they have spin orbit rotation lock where they rotate exactly once for each time they orbit the planet, which means they always spin the same face focused at the planet at all times. Pluto doesn't work that way. Its moons rotate at very rapid rates. And actually, later

in the meeting, we found out that one of Haumea's moons, Hi'iaka, also does the same thing. It's a regular moon that doesn't spin at the right rate. It spins too fast. So there's something different going on with the small moons of the Kuiper Belt objects that we don't understand yet. And there is a crazy animation that you posted of exactly this action. Now, of course, it's not real time. It's sped up. But it really goes nuts, particularly one of these moons. Yeah, Hydra, the outermost, orbits once in 10 hours, which is actually a very common rotation rate for things in the Kuiper belt. It's just not common for a regular satellite. Move a little bit closer in the solar system and talk about Ceres. Was the Dawn mission

in any way taking a backseat to what's happening to Pluto? Well, I'm afraid it was. They only had one session compared to Pluto's four sessions, but it was still a very good session. They have been orbiting Ceres for a long time and mapping it and had a series of talks, haha, a series of talks describing the surface of Ceres for a long time and mapping it, and had a series of talks, haha, a series of talks describing the surface of Ceres. They too had interesting topography. Some strange things have happened to Ceres craters. It has these extensional features, cracks running across the surface. But the oddest thing had to do with the composition of the surface. They found evidence, widespread evidence for ammonia on the surface

and think that it has to do with ammoniated clays. So that's like a clay mineral, the kind of thing they got excited about on Mars, except that instead of just water inside the mineral structure, it has ammonia inside the mineral structure. And ammonia is a weird substance. It really needs to form in a much colder part of the solar system than in the asteroid belt, people think. People were discussing two possible explanations. Either you had material from the Kuiper Belt had come in and struck Ceres and deposited ammonia on its surface. But then why aren't we seeing ammonia all over the rest of the asteroid belt? Or the alternative is that Ceres actually originated in the Kuiper belt to begin with.

And the dynamicists actually say that that's possible. You could actually have a situation in which Ceres was a Kuiper belt object that in all of the great kablooey that happened in the beginning of the solar system, you could have brought it there. But if you did that, then there would also need to be a lot of other material that arrived in the same way. So one theorist I talked to said, well, maybe that means that all the dark stuff in the outer asteroid belt actually came from the Kuiper belt, but nobody seems too satisfied with that either. So this was one of those things that just had people scratching their heads and saying, this is going to be a very vibrant area of future work. And I love that phrase, which you also used in your blog entry

about series, the great Kerblui or something very similar to that. It's going to catch on. You watch. What about the bright spots? Have we learned any more about them? You know, everybody always wants to know about the bright spots. I think they're kind of a distraction from everything else. They're probably water, maybe with a little salt mixed in.

People were talking about what the various surface features on Ceres would imply for the structure of Ceres. We know it has a lot of ice, but it looks very likely that the ice that's closer to its surface is not pure. It has to be actually mostly rock or else it wouldn't be able to support all the topography that Ceres has. And so, this is different from Pluto because Ceres is a lot closer to the Sun. So, ice at Ceres' distance from the sun is not nearly as strong as ice at Pluto's distance from the sun. So Ceres really has to have a lot of rock mixed in with that ice in order to support topography. And several different lines of evidence were pointing that way. So it's

not as thoroughly differentiated into ice and rock as you might think. Let's squeeze in results from one more mission. Of course, there were hundreds of presentations and posters at the DPS, and it's a shame that we can't pay attention to many more of them. Let's go to that comet that's being written out of the solar system now or to the outreaches of the solar system by Rosetta and Philae. Tell us about 67P. Rosetta has now been following the comet through its perihelion, and now it's going farther and farther away from the Sun again.

The things that they were reporting were what happened as they watched the comet go through its close approach to the Sun, just jets turning on and off as the comet rotated, and jets firing off into the darkness because of surface remaining hot even after it rotated into nighttime. And the whole surface of the comet changing color over time, becoming bluer, which is what happens when you expose more surface ice. And seeing spots appear and then disappear, seeing large areas of the surface change as whole areas seem to sublimate away, seeing blooms of different kinds of gases appear in the coma, including molecular

oxygen, which is just very difficult to explain. And ascending all of those theorists about the early solar system scratching their heads. And then all these high resolution images going down very close to the comet where you can see that the whole thing seems to be built up of these three meter size nodules that perhaps represent the building blocks of the solar system. It's pretty cool results. Wow. So much terrific science revealed from all over the solar system. There was also one other session, and we have maybe a minute left to talk about this, that you live tweeted about pretty extensively. And it was about giving an award to someone, but it became much more than that. Tell us about it. Well, the award was the Mazursky Award presented

to Chrissy Ritchie for her work in service to the community. And she works at headquarters, is already doing service to the community as a public servant. However, in addition to that, she also has been doing extensive work on sexual harassment and intimidation that's been going on in the community. And she gave a rather rousing talk, both confronting the problem and challenging the leaders in the community to do something about this. And a lot of people around me were saying the same thing that, you know, there's been a lot of young women talking about problems in the community. And it's really time for the people, the older, both men and women who are established in their community to do something about changing the environment and making it more welcoming to everyone, not just white men. You wrote about the woman who presented this award to her, and that was Bonnie Barati, who we've had on the show, of course, who talked about her own negative experiences in this way. Indeed. And if you talk to any woman in the community, pretty much anyone,

you will find that everyone has stories to tell. And the women who are here, especially the more senior ones, are survivors. Proof, of course, that scientists are no more than human. At least now it is out in the open and it's being talked about. Thank you again, Emily. We'll look forward to talking to you again next week for one of your regular segments. And again, everyone, Emily's writing about her experiences at DPS are at planetary.org in the blog. Take care. Thank you, Matt. She's our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, and also a contributing editor to

Sky and Telescope magazine. That's Emily Lakdawalla. Back in a minute to talk about the troubles of the Arecibo Observatory. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, I'm Andy Weir, author of The Martian. Do you know how my character, Mark Watney, will make it to Mars someday? He'll get there because people like you and me, and organizations like the Planetary Society, never stop fighting to advance space exploration and science. The challenges have rarely been greater than they are right now. You can learn what the Society is doing and how you can help at planetary.org. Mark and I will thank you for taking steps to ensure humanity's bright future across the solar system and beyond.

Hey, hey, Bill Nye here. I'd like to introduce you to Merk Boyan. Hello. He's been making all those fabulous videos which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right. We're going to put all the videos in one place, Merck, is that right? Planetary TV.

So I can watch them on my television? No. So wait a minute, Planetary TV's not on TV? That's the best thing about it. They're all going to be online. You can watch them anytime you want. Where do I watch Planetary TV then, Merck? Well, you can watch it all at planetary.org slash TV.

Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I, Merck? Well, you can watch it all at planetary.org slash TV. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. It is one of the best-known and most successful science instruments on our planet. It's also one of the biggest. It is the Great Arecibo Observatory, a giant bowl set in the middle of a gorgeous green forest. The observatory's revelations began soon after it became operational in 1963. Sometimes the radio telescope merely listens to the cosmos. At other times, its powerful transmitter sends a radar signal across the solar system, bouncing it off planets

and asteroids. The dish may not have changed much, but the electronics are several orders of magnitude better than the original equipment. Now, after more than 50 years of discoveries, the future of Arecibo is in doubt. To learn why, I called science journalist Tracy Watson. Tracy's work is seen regularly in USA Today, along with other publications. I reached her in her hometown of Washington, D.C. Tracy, thanks so much for joining us on Planetary Radio. Thank you for having me, Matt. I was caught immediately by this piece that you wrote for Nature. We will link to it, this online article,

Arecibo Observatory Director Quits After Funding Row. Very disturbing, since Arecibo has long been on my bucket list of places, great science facilities to visit in the world, and it's quite disturbing to think that its life may be jeopardized. Tell us first of all, although most of our audience probably is well aware of this big dish, just give us a very brief introduction to what it is, where it is, and what it has accomplished. Arecibo is a radio observatory on the island of Puerto Rico, and it is absolutely gargantuan. The radio dish is, I believe, 350 meters across. That means it's the largest fixed-dish radio observatory in the world.

It's been around for 50 years, and in that time it has made many pioneering discoveries, including at least one that led to the Nobel Prize. Today it's not as cutting edge as it once was, but it's still quite crucial for getting information about near-Earth asteroids, and researchers still do work on pulsars and experiments on the upper atmosphere there. We probably don't even need to mention that a lot of people who may not know what it has accomplished at least remember it from a certain James Bond film. It's kept very busy still, isn't it? Yes, there are a lot of people who want to make observations at Arecibo and don't make it onto the list of those allowed to use it. The number of applications for telescope time is a lot longer than the amount of time they have available. for telescope time is a lot longer than the amount of time they have available. All of which would seem to indicate that,

though perhaps its capabilities may not be as cutting edge as some others, it's still very much in demand. How is it possible that this would be in jeopardy? The National Science Foundation provides the bulk of the funding for IRCBO, and the NSF is caught in a tight place. It wants to fund new telescopes that will have greatly increased capabilities and needs to provide grants to scientists who are still doing research. And so it has been advised by several outside panels of experts to cut down on its funding for older facilities such as Arecibo.

There's no way they can do everything. They have to make some pretty tough choices. And one possibility is cutting back on the funding of Arecibo and trying to find someone else to take the NSF's place as both the fund, the major funder and the kind of owner of the place. That's tough, though. It's an expensive place to run. And if you take control of it, you also take liability for decommissioning the site once the observatory does eventually close. And that's going to be a huge job, kind of restoring the landscape to what it was before they put this enormous dish in. I can imagine. Last summer, we did a story about another dish that was in jeopardy,

another radio telescope facility, Green Bank, and how it may have partially been saved from the same sort of fate, to reduce funding from the NSF, by funding from a somewhat surprising source. And this seems like it has also come up in this effort to save Arecibo. I presume you're referring to the enlistment of Green Bank by the Breakthrough Initiative, which seeks to search for signals from an extraterrestrial civilization. So Breakthrough enlisted Green Bank to help listen for signals from the universe that might signal that there's another intelligent group of beings out there somewhere. And you would think that Arecibo would be the perfect

telescope to do something of the same sort, because they have an even bigger ear on the universe than Green Bank does. And in fact, Arecibo has done quite a bit of SETI work. Yes, it has. Frank Drake, who was one of the original researchers involved in searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, and who was also involved with the Breakthrough Initiative, sent signals out to the universe at Arecibo decades ago. But Arecibo didn't make it onto the list with Green Bank. Apparently they couldn't come to terms on how the approach would be funded and what would happen to the NSF money. And this has led to the departure of

its director, which is kind of at the heart of your story. Could you give us that background? Sure. There's a lot about what happened that's in dispute. But what did happen is that the folks from the Breakthrough Initiative approached the folks running the observatory for discussions about whether Arecibo could be involved in the breakthrough program. The director of the observatory at that time was a physicist named Robert Kerr. He didn't work directly for NSF. He worked for a contractor, SRI International, that manages the observatory for NSF. Robert Kerr says that NSF told him that if he took any money from the breakthrough initiative, he would lose the

same amount of money dollar for dollar from NSF. And he was quite crestfallen about this, as you can imagine. He's hoping to augment the funding of his observatory. And he claims NSF said, no, if you get money from outside sources, we're going to punish you by taking it away. That is not what NSF says. NSF maintains that it had made no decision about how breakthrough initiative money would affect its own funding, and it maintains it has still made no decision. Because of this disagreement, and because Robert Kerr spoke about this publicly, he was eventually relieved of one of his roles at Arecibo and decided to step down from the other as well

and has now left the observatory after spending a number of years leading it. According to other folks that you talked to, people who have had an ongoing research relationship with Kerr at Arecibo, they seem to have had a lot of respect for his direction of the facility. Absolutely. I spoke to a number of people who know Robert Kerr, Of the facility? Absolutely. I spoke to a number of people who know Robert Kerr, and they have the highest regard for his leadership. They said he's completely and totally devoted to the observatory and to the staff at the observatory,

that he did everything he could have to protect the observatory and protect his staff there. They said he made the best out of a very bad situation. No one was completely surprised, though, to hear about his clash with NSF and with his bosses at SRI. People who know him well say that he has had clashes with folks in authority before, so they weren't stunned to hear of another one that unfortunately led to his resignation from one job and his being relieved of another job. So where does this leave the Arecibo Observatory? It sounds like it's still very much in jeopardy. Arecibo is a bit adrift right now. It doesn't have a permanent director. It has a temporary director at the moment. But Robert Kerr was really leading the effort to find

universities and foundations that might take over the management and funding of the observatory. And without him in place, there's really no one to do that at the moment. Eventually, they will find someone to do that, of course, but it's kind of a bad time for the observatory to be directorless. Some people I spoke to were optimistic that generous people with deep pockets will eventually step forward and fund the observatory. Others I spoke to said, frankly, I don't know how this can happen. Who's going to come up with this kind of money? There's a long tradition of visual or optical wavelength telescopes being supported by private institutions. There is not the same tradition for radio telescopes.

So it's not clear how Arecibo will make that transition. In the case of Green Bank, it's getting money from the local university in West Virginia, but Puerto Rico is pretty broke, and most people do not expect Puerto Rico to be able to contribute in any significant way to Arecibo's support. We've talked in the past on this show about the sort of poor stepsister status of a lot of radio telescope facilities around the world, which is such a shame because they have done such terrific science. Am I off base in thinking that it truly would be tragic to see this mighty instrument shut down? Or just, you know, speaking for yourself, do you think maybe it has run its course? Yeah, that's difficult to say. Certainly it would be a tragedy for the observatory folks who have kept this place running against all odds and with great personal sacrifice and with skimpy funding. It would also be a bad thing for those who keep tabs on near-Earth asteroids and for researchers who specialize in the kind of science that our seaboard really shines at at the same time this outside experts who have evaluated nsf's science portfolio did make it a lower priority than some of the upcoming projects that are now

online so it's quite difficult for me as an outside observer to weigh you know should we keep it open should should this nation keep it open or shouldn't it? They're really difficult choices to make, and they're pretty vocal and passionate proponents of Arecibo, and then there are others who say it's time to move on. I'm sure that you are glad that that's not a decision that you need to make, but I wonder, is this a story that you'll continue to follow? I'd certainly like to see what happens to Arecibo, and maybe it can become a new model for funding this kind of observatory. The folks trying to plan for its future have a real difficult task in front of them, though. Well, it's an unfortunate story to have to report, Tracy, but I sure am glad that you did such a fine job with it.

Thank you for this piece, and I do hope that we can talk, if not about Arecibo again, though I'd be happy to do that, perhaps about other stories that you'll be covering as part of your career as a science writer. Thanks very much for joining us. Thank you, Matt. That's Tracy Watson. She is a contributing writer, a science writer for USA Today, based in Washington, D.C., but obviously does work for many other publications, including her work for the online Nature.com, Nature, the great journal of science. And it is in this article from November 9th of this year that she wrote about the Arecibo Observatory.

Director quitting after a disagreement, at least, at minimum, over funding, leaving that great facility that has done so much fantastic science for many decades somewhat in limbo. Time for this week's edition of What's Up. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. You know what that means. We're going to talk with Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who's going to tell us what's going on up there and a little bit down here, too. Hi. Hey there. Hi there.

How are there? We have an interesting winner in the contest this week, someone that we've heard from before. I'll explain when we get there, but tell us about this guy first. Oh, how exciting. Cool lineup of planets and a bright star in the pre-dawn east, going from top down in the pre-dawn east, bright Jupiter, much dimmer Mars, then very bright Venus, and Venus below it for the next several days is the brightest star in Virgo, Spica, a bluish star, and they'll be getting closer together over the next several days. You may hear about the Leonid meteor shower, which is awesome about every 33 years.

This is one of those not awesome years, although there will be increased meteor activity peaking around the 17th or so. On to this week in space history. It was this week in 1969 that Apollo 12 landed on the moon, the second venture for humans on the surface of the moon. They waited a long time after Apollo 11, relatively long. Yeah, I suppose they did. We'll never know why.

Never. There's no way we could ever possibly find out. Yeah, if only there was some worldwide repository of all the information available about everything. Now you're just talking crazy and wasting everyone's time. I'll slap myself here. All right, fine. On to Wondell's Respect. Find that on the internet. Actually, you can.

So Apollo 12. It's an Apollo 12 themed show. Apollo 12 landed near the robotic Surveyor 3 that had been sent a couple years before, brought parts of it back. It was the first and so far only time one spacecraft has caught up, so to speak, to another spacecraft landed on another world. It's going to happen on Mars in the 2030s, I think, when Mark Watney goes there. So I won't explain. Okay, I'll pencil that in. Good. All right, on to the trivia contest, because I want to know who won the contest. We asked you prior to the International Space Station,

what was the record for continuous human habitation in space? Because ISS just passed 15 years of continuous human habitation. How did we do, Matt? We did well. There was a good response. And our winner is going to get a Planetary Radio t-shirt and a 200-point itelescope.net account on that global network of telescopes. I didn't see anybody who didn't have the right answer. Let me not state that as a double negative. Everyone had the right answer. That's so cool. Random.org chose Christopher Midden of Carbondale, Illinois, who said nine years and just short of another year, nine years, 358 days of the Soviet Russian space station Mir.

Indeed, almost 10 years. So really, space station is way out there in front, doing very, very well. A word about Christopher Midden. Some listeners may remember him. He has a sixth grade class at mighty Unity Point School in Carbondale, Illinois, and they once did the Random Space Fact intro for you via Skype. Long-time listener. He says thanks for a great show, to be specific, but first-time winner.

So congratulations, Christopher, and shout-out to be specific. But first-time winner. So congratulations, Christopher. And shout-out to those sixth graders at UnityPoint. Cool. I remember that. The next question. What were Pete Conrad's first words spoken on the lunar surface as he stepped out of the lunar module on Apollo 12? Go to planetary.org slash radiocontest. You have until the 24th.

Tuesday, the 24th of November at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. And here we go. I didn't tell you that we get to go back to a sort of traditional end-of-year, beginning-of-year prize right now. We're going to start giving out the 2016 Year in Space wall and desk calendars, those wonderful, really gorgeous calendars that are done by our friend Steve Caridi. They're ready, and we've got good content in those. He's been doing these in cooperation or collaboration with the Planetary Society for quite a while. They're beautiful, and somebody's going to win one in two weeks. They are.

They're super cool, have good facts, pretty pictures, and is the official source, of course, of this week in space history. Yes, credit where credit is due. Okay, I think we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about dog beds and how comfortable would they be? I think I'll go find out. Our dog is busy removing the stuffing from his bed, so it's becoming progressively less comfortable. Not very logical, little Dennis. That's his name.

Looks better here. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the director of science and technology, who joins us here in the primary vehicle bringing you the age of Bet bets every week on Planetary Radio. Little inside joke from the Planetary Society staff there. He's with us every week for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its many members.

Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle created the theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. C'est clair et vive la France.