Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Elevator Games and Serious Planetary Science

Episode Date: October 15, 2007

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Space elevator games in Utah and planetary scientists compare notes 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. Our show is packed denser than a neutron star this week. We'll start off with a preview of the SpaceWord Games from SpaceWord Foundation founder Ben Schelliff. Then we'll take a quick look at last week's annual gathering of the American Astronomical Union's Division of Planetary Sciences.

Our Emily Lakdawalla was there for two wildly busy days. She'll tease us with highlights from the detailed coverage in her blog. Our Emily Lakdawalla was there for two wildly busy days. She'll tease us with highlights from the detailed coverage in her blog. Did Saturn's rings start out as a moon? We'll hear from Emily about that in this week's Q&A segment. And Bruce Betts will be along for a What's Up report on the current night sky. A tip of the Planetary Radio Space Helmet to the SETI Institute and UC Berkeley. They have just turned on the first section of the Allen Radio Telescope Array. The 42 dishes are just over a tenth of what is eventually planned for the Northern California project funded by

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Details are at planetary.org, where you can also read in Emily's blog about milestones reached by Cassini at Saturn and Mars exploration rover Spirit on Mars. Hard to believe that Cassini was launched 10 years ago this week. Time sure flies when you're doing great science. And Spirit has been on the Red Planet for two whole years. Two whole Martian years, that is, each of which takes 687 Earth days. Space elevator going up. We're just a minute or so away from Ben Shellef

and a preview of the Spaceward Games. Here's Emily. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, How big was the moon that was destroyed to make Saturn's rings? Saturn's rings are huge. The main ring system is more than twice as broad as Saturn itself, about 20 Earths across. But the rings are also incredibly thin.

If they were as wide as a football field, they'd be thinner than a sheet of paper. So all of the particles in Saturn's rings, which range from the size of houses to the size of dust motes, would pack together into a ball about 400 kilometers in diameter, which is the size of Mimas, Saturn's smallest round moon. At least, that's what people thought. Recently, though, researchers have developed new models for Saturn's rings and discovered that it's likely that they are more massive than previously thought, maybe three times as big as Mimas, or roughly the size of Saturn's moon Enceladus. It's not a big difference,

but it's big enough to make scientists question their hypotheses for how Saturn's rings formed in the first place. Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out more. It was last spring that we brought you special coverage of the Lunar Regolith Challenge. That was one of NASA's centennial challenges, using competition to encourage innovative and entrepreneurial development of new and exciting technologies. It's difficult to imagine a technology that would be more exciting than a space elevator. The concept is so simple. Drop a tether from geostationary orbit to the Earth's equator.

Then build an elevator that climbs up it. Okay, it's not quite that simple, and it's not quite that easy either. But this challenge is at the heart of the Spaceward Games, sponsored by the Spaceward Foundation. Ben Schelliff is co-founder of the foundation. We caught him as he was getting ready to make the drive from his Northern California headquarters to the Utah site of this year's competition. Ben, my only regret is that I won't be there to join in the fun this year. And you're the only one that's going to be missing this show.

You know, it does seem like this year you've put a lot more into the crowd experience, the experience for those people who just come to watch these pioneers. This is our first year of going at it alone. I mean, we would have loved to do it with X-Prize again, as we did last year. But since our cranes are getting taller and they are being part of an air show this year, well, air shows and cranes don't mix. Oh. And so we can't run our show inside an airspace. You know, I didn't think about that, but a 400-foot tower and an air show, not compatible.

Amazing how many people did not think of that until the tower told us, you've got to be kidding us. And so we're on our own. And actually, and you're right, we have a lot of extra content about space elevators. It's all this space elevator show. Why two towers? There's a 100-foot and a 400-foot. Well, we started a tradition in that when the teams come in to compete, we gather there a week in advance and have a sort of a space elevator week

in which the teams get to really do the last-minute practice. 400-foot cranes are very expensive. And so we initially just rent out a 100 foot crane, which is good enough to shake out all the bugs and debug the systems. And once we have the 100 foot crane and then the 400 foot cranes, well, we're not going to get rid of the 100 foot cranes. Why not have them in parallel and have two arenas, sort of a two ring circuit. And that's the first time we're going to try that, the two-ring circuit paradigm, and we'll see how that works. You had a team or two come incredibly close last year.

This time around, some pretty exciting technology and some returning competitors. You've got lasers, you've got microwave, and you've got people using solar power. Right. You know, we look back and we think it looks like such a long time, but actually last year was the first real year of the competition, because if you want to count 2005, we provided the light beams. 2006, last year, was the first year that they brought their own power systems. And most teams came in and did with white lights, which are the commercial way to go, sort of using commercial off-the-shelf search lights. But that's just sort of entry level. And even last year, we saw the first signs of something better because one team attempted to use an infrared light beam, though it didn't quite work

out. And two teams brought in microwave systems, but they were not quite up to the job last year. But still, you're right. Last year, they climbed one meter per second, almost two seconds shy of getting the prize money. And that spooked us enough, so we doubled the challenge. Twice as high and twice as fast. But I can tell you for sure that in this harder competition, they're coming much more prepared this year than they were last. So we're pretty confident that it's not just going to be a race of who makes the minimum speed to the top. It is actually going to be a real race between all the teams that make it to the top in time as to who carries more payload and who goes fastest. Two infrared laser beams, two teams with infrared lasers, two teams with, actually three teams with

microwave beams, one of them using a steel engine and two of them using direct-to-electricity conversion, and four teams using direct solar reflection, which the Kansas City Space Pirates from last year dubbed helio-beaming, which we like. We don't want to give the beam climbing competition all the glory because you have the tether pole as well. Do you expect to see people with stronger tethers this year? Well, we don't know whether we're going to get stronger tethers. We will have for the first time a carbon nanotube-based tether. Ah, great.

We're all going to be rooting for that one. Well, this is the one that everybody keeps saying, okay, now we have the material if we can just put enough molecules together. Right, and somebody has put enough molecules together. We don't know if it'll be strong enough. Again, materials take a longer time to mature. We always expected the tether competition to lag a little bit behind the beam power. That's sort of why we coupled them together. We expected to see the most shock and awe, if you will, from the beam power, followed closely by the more important competition, which is Tether. And we will see what happens this year.

It's going to be a close call. You know, the games are called Elevator 2010 rather than Elevator 2007. We still have three more years to show all the building blocks of the space elevator. You've got something else that I think is new this year, something for kids, which I know is a major part of the Spaceward Foundation mission. Right. Of course, the beam power competition became a very high-profile competition, and it's hard to get in now, especially with infrared and microwave and high technology.

And we did want to open something for high school level, and we came out with something called the Light Racers, which is beam-powered remote control cars. Not only are they controlled remotely, they're powered remotely. Going back to those searchlight beams, kids design and build and then compete electric remote control cars that cannot carry batteries, but rather carry photovoltaic cells that convert the beams into electricity. Those are the lightracers.

It's going to be great fun, as with all the centennial challenges from NASA. The Space Foundation is responsible for all the expenses, except the prize money. Is our friend Ken Davidian going to be there to oversee that end of the business? Yep, he is, of course, showing up, and he's got the big checks, and this time

he's probably going to go back with a little bit less checks than he came in with. Oh, that would be great. And we expect to talk to the winners. Should you have some? Should you be that fortunate? Should they be that fortunate? Tell us where we can learn more about this.

I know that it's Friday through Sunday, October 19th through 21st, not far from Salt Lake City. Ten minutes north of Salt Lake City, October 19th through 21st. You can read all about it at www.spaceward.org. That's S-P-A-C-E W-A-R-D dot org. And we will put that website up right where people may be

listening to this show at planetary.org slash radio. And maybe next year I'll be able to join you out there. It sure would be fun. Have a great time and I hope you get to give away some money. Sure thing. Glad to be here. Ben Schelloff is co-founder of the SpaceWord Foundation. He will be at the Davis County Event Center near Salt Lake City on October 19-21 for the SpaceWord Games.

And we shall see if somebody has that prototype for the space elevator that might just be in our future. Time for a break. I'll be right back with Emily Lakdawalla. She'll give us her list of greatest hits from this year's Division of Planetary Sciences gathering. You're listening to Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work into this show and all our other great Planetary Society projects. I've been a member since the disco era. Now I'm the society's vice president. And you may well ask, why do we go to all this trouble?

Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. You probably do too, or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen. You can become part of the action, helping us fly solar sails, discover new planets, and search for extraterrestrial intelligence and life elsewhere in the universe. Here's how to find out more. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

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. You know Emily is the mind and voice behind our regular Q&A segment. Every now and then we get to hear from her about other topics, and this is one of those weeks. Last week she attended the 39th annual gathering of the American Astronomical Union's Division of Planetary Sciences. Held in Orlando, Florida this time, the conference once again

attracted just about everyone who makes a living studying big round balls of gas or rock, and a few who study not-so-big and not-so-round objects. We talked to Emily shortly after her return. Emily, that was a very busy two days you were able to put in at DPS last week. It was very busy. I was working from morning till night at sessions where every speaker only had 10 minutes to present his work before going on to the next speaker. Well, of course, here we don't have time to cover more than a couple of highlights, but we will let folks know that all of these postings from DPS are in the blog. You just have to go into

the archives for some of them. But give us a little taste. What do you want to start with? Well, I guess we can start with some of the reports on near-Earth objects. There was a whole session devoted to NEOs, and one of the things that they were looking at is the fact that the Space Guard goal has pretty much been reached. Space Guard was a goal where we were supposed to find all of the, or 90% of the asteroids smaller than one kilometer in diameter by 2008. And it looks like if the goal hasn't been reached yet, it is just about to be reached. And we are in fact going to have found nearly every asteroid that's in our neighborhood that's bigger than a kilometer in

size. So now the next step is to, what they say is to retire 90% of the remaining risk. So they look at what the population of asteroids is and figure out how many asteroids they have to find to be able to make sure that there will be fewer deaths, 90% fewer deaths than there might be if we didn't know where any of these asteroids were. And that means that we have to find 90% of the asteroids down to 140 meters in diameter.

And this is going to be done with these, I think you referred to them, are they referred to them as next generation studies? That's right. They're next generation sets of telescopes, basically, that are being set up. These are enormous telescopes, often multiple telescopes. And what's enormous about them is the size of their detectors. Just some of them, there's one system that has 1.4 billion pixels in its CCD detectors. And so these survey large areas of the sky to very dim magnitudes and are looking for some of these very small asteroids. While we're on the subject of asteroids, I guess you heard one presentation,

very unofficial or informal, I suppose, about a human mission to an asteroid. That's right, and this is something that kind of tickles my imagination. We're talking about sending humans beyond Earth orbit to Mars eventually, but Mars is going to be extremely difficult because not only do you need to get humans to survive the trip there and back for a long period of time, you have to get them down onto the surface of a body that has a decent-sized gravity, about a third of that of Earth,

and then get them off the ground again and back home. And so it seems to me that this is going to be a pretty difficult thing to pull off all of these new engineering challenges at once. So the idea is maybe if we go to an asteroid, we can overcome some of the problems without having to deal with the gravity problem. You can get humans onto an asteroid without too much effort and get them back off again and back to Earth. What I thought was most interesting is that these folks who did this study

based it on the coming technology, the crew exploration vehicle, and really found that it didn't require any major modifications. They said it was a very limited feasibility study just to see if they were out of their minds considering this as a possibility. And in fact, they found that it looks like it's going to be feasible. You would use an Orion, which is the crew exploration vehicle. You would have a mission that lasted somewhere between 60 and 120 days with about a 14-day stay at an asteroid. They even checked the current known catalog of asteroids and found that there were eight that were in orbits near enough to Earth's orbit to make it pretty easy dynamically

to reach them, do your two-week mission, and then return in this relatively brief period, this three to six-month mission. How about this traditional night, which really is all about NASA, in the past has not always been that happy or friendly an occasion. Well, yes, at this meeting, which was the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society meeting, and also at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference meeting, they have this thing called NASA Night, where basically a few representatives from NASA headquarters get up

and show a couple of view graphs, usually an organization chart showing who's in charge of what, and then little hints of what's coming in the next year or two as far as new funding opportunities, new mission opportunities. And, of course, for the headquarters people, they generally give a positive spin on things, and then usually the crowd then gets up and asks very pointed questions about the future of funding, the future of missions, and other things like that. And yes, in the past, last couple of years, it's been really ugly because budgets have been tight and things have been getting cut, particularly research and analysis, which is the funding that any space scientist gets who's not working on a mission.

Missions fund their own research, but if a scientist doesn't work on a mission, then he needs to get funding from NASA for the rest of his research. And research and analysis has just been cut very severely in the last couple of years. Well, this year, Alan Stern, who's the new associate administrator for the science mission directorate at NASA headquarters, stood up and said that they're bringing money back to research and analysis. They're back to 2003 funding levels.

And they announced a whole lot of new opportunities for scientists to get funding to do future research. They announced a new Lunar Science Institute because they say they need to create a new crop of lunar scientists in order to support science on the moon with the return of humans to the moon. And Alan, of course, a past guest on this show, and we'll have him on again soon with an update on the New Horizons mission, which he is the principal investigator for. Only about a minute left. What the heck is the YORP effect? This is something that caught my eye.

I've read about it before. YORP is an acronym. This was something that caught my eye. I've read about it before. YORP is an acronym. It refers to the names of four researchers who have done studies on the effects of solar radiation pressure on small asteroids. But in this case, it's photons either impacting asteroids and recoiling or photons getting absorbed by asteroids and then re-radiated as heat later on. And these effects can impart asymmetric forces to the asteroids. And what that means is that they can either get pushed around in their orbits or they can get increased rotation rates or sometimes decreased rotation rates. Sometimes these little asteroids can spin up so fast that they actually fragment. They fission. They come apart. And some scientists were talking about how this may be the origin of close binaries in the asteroid belt, that these Europe effects spin up the asteroids so much that they just spin out into two very closely orbiting binary pair asteroids.

So much more we could talk about, but we are out of time. So we will simply tell folks, please go to the blog. And I guess you're not even quite finished talking about what you saw and heard at this year's DPS. No, I've got more stuff from Cassini at Iapetus and a lot more stuff from Pluto. So stay tuned. Excellent work. Thank you very much for your reporting. It is always great reading, Emily,

and we'll keep an eye on the blog. Thanks very much. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator on the staff of the Planetary Society and the author, the main author, of the blog, the web blog that you can find at planetary.org slash blog.

We will be right back with a report on what's going on in the night sky, that from Bruce Betts, of course, after this return visit by, who else, Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla back with Q&A. Where did Saturn's rings come from? Saturn's rings have enough mass in them to make up another medium-sized moon like Mimas or Enceladus. And at least part of the ring system, the A-ring, is made up of bright ice, suggesting that it's a relatively youthful feature, because older icy material would have been dirtied by infalling dust grains and solar radiation. Scientists have also had a hard time developing computer models

in which the rings actually stick around Saturn for billions of years. The models tend to see the rings spread out over time, with most of the ring material eventually falling into Saturn. So most people think that Saturn's rings are young. They could have formed when a recent catastrophic impact destroyed a medium-sized moon, or perhaps they represent the torn apart core of an orbital interloper, a centaur or a comet. But the rings are massive enough that the comet explanation, although possible, doesn't

seem too likely. There aren't many comets the size of Mimas wandering around the solar system. Some scientists have developed computer models where Saturn's rings remain stable over the age of the solar system, and one group has even suggested that Saturn's darker, more massive B ring is a primordial feature, while the brighter, cleaner A ring is young. How Saturn got its rings is a question that likely won't be answered for a while, unless we're lucky enough to see a new ring system form around a different planet. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org.

And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Got Bruce Batts on the phone. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He's going to tell us what's up in the night sky this fine week. It's been a busy show. Is it a busy sky? It is a busy sky. Well, you know, it's a pretty busy sky.

We've got all those stars hanging out. We're going to talk about one a little bit later on when we talk about trivia contests. We've got in the pre-dawn sky, right as this show is airing, Saturn and Venus very close together in the pre-dawn sky on the 15th. But as most people will be listening to this after that, they will continue to be fairly close together. Saturn will be moving up in the sky relative to Venus. This is over in the east in the pre-dawn sky, brightest star-like object there by far is Venus. But the other bright star-looking thing is Saturn. And Saturn's going to keep getting higher and higher in the sky.

And Venus will be with us a little bit longer, but eventually head downwards. Mars, getting brighter and brighter through the end of the year, is rising in the mid-evening, mid to late evening in the east, and then is very high in the sky in the pre-dawn, looking reddish like a bright star, and it will keep brightening up, and we'll keep you posted on that. And then Jupiter is still the jewel of the evening sky, but not for much longer.

It's getting pretty low in the west. Shortly after sunset, brightest star-like object there is indeed Jupiter. That's kind of how the Chi is caking out. I like that, Dr. Spooner. What else have you got? Well, we also have a random space fact. Hey, did you know? Well, I'm sure you knew.

And some of our very well-informed people out there knew, but some may not. Neil Armstrong, he was an X-15 pilot before he got into flying spacecraft that didn't have wings. Before his Gemini and Apollo days, he was one of the early flyers of the X-15, expanding its flight envelope in the early flights before it got up as high and as fast as it did before. And we'll come back in the new trivia question and return to the glorious X-15. Do you remember those X-15 flights, Matt? Heck yeah.

I loved them. And, you know, I had reason, I won't go into why just now, but I had reason to meet Chuck Yeager, who was not an X-15 pilot, but talked about the difference between those test pilots who flew things like the X-15 and the guys who made the transition to, as Tom Wolfe called them, the spam and the can guys. And Neil Armstrong straddled that. He did both. There weren't a whole lot of guys who did that. No, there sure weren't.

Well, both were pretty exclusive clubs. Yeah, absolutely. We'll come back to that. Meantime, let's talk about the previous trivia contest question. We asked everyone, what is the brightest star in the constellation Cygnus the Swan? And by the way, this is a constellation, a star that can be seen high overhead in the early evening for northern hemisphere viewers. And this bright star makes up part of what's sometimes called the summer triangle. It's almost better to see in the fall.

You've got Vega, a very bright star. You've got Altair. And then we have our winner. And what is that, Matt? Deneb. Lisa, that's how you told me it's pronounced. I thought Deneb. Deneb. Deneb. I still got it how you told me it's pronounced. I thought Deneb. Deneb.

Deneb. I still got it backwards, even though you told me. I could be wrong. These ancient language pronunciations are a little tough for me. Well, they may be ancient, but maybe not as ancient as some of the other names, I guess, that a lot of people provided to us. Aradad and Aradeth, a couple of other ancient names for this very, very bright star. Those other two stars that you mentioned, I guess they, with Deneb, make up what's called the Southern Triangle?

Summer Triangle. Summer Triangle, I'm sorry. Somebody else pointed out, in fact, it was David Rossiter, who is part of the Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association. He said it's near the North American Nebula, beautiful on a dark night in binoculars, he stated parenthetically, and the Pelican Nebula. So I guess a whole lot of stuff going on up there. But this is a really bright star, especially if you're closer to it than 3,200 light years as we are. It is indeed.

It's a bright star for us, but it's ridiculously bright if you get close to it. Yeah, I hope they all have shades in that system. Yeah, the Denebians. To say nothing of the Denebian slime devils, but I guess somebody else said we may not have Deneb to kick around anymore, or the slime devils, because it's going to go supernova any day now, or maybe any million years or so from now, because I guess it's used up its hydrogen. Hmm. Well, you know, it could already be supernova.

That's true. All right. Well, maybe we have 3,200 years to find out. Standard messing with space and time. Is it time to go on to a new question? It is, but first let me tell you that Brett Pantalone, Brett Pantalone of Pittsburgh, North Carolina, he was the one, we had an incredible number of answers this time. I think we had more entries, and everyone was right,

than we have ever had before. So, Brett, you beat out more people than ever before, and we're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Now, tell us. Okay. Well, great job, everyone. And when you submit your answers, go ahead and tell us how you hear us. Where do you listen to our wonderfully soothing and intelligent voices? Or just where you hear us. That would be fine.

And answer this question. voices. Or just where you hear us. That would be fine. And answer this question. Back to the X-15. Who flew both the X-15 and the space shuttle? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. And you too can compete for a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Guess what? You've got until the 22nd of October at 2 p.m. Pacific. Monday the 22nd at 2 p.m. to get us that answer. And we are getting out of here. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about gold, gold, gold. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society,

and apparently there's gold in them there stars. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. We are just over a month away from our fifth anniversary. Stay tuned for more about that little milestone and how you might benefit from it. Have a great week. Thank you.