Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: Astronomy Goes Big, with Heidi Hammel

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

The search for biosignatures on hundreds of exoplanets is the top goal for U.S. astronomers. That's the conclusion from the new, once-per-decade report from the National Academy of Sciences: Pathways to Discovery. In it, the field of astrophysics is analyzed and prioritized: establishing the major scientific questions, the tools to answer them, and how to best engage the human talent necessary to enable our continued investigation of the cosmos. Dr. Heidi Hammel, astronomer, Vice-President for Science at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, and Vice President of The Planetary Society joins us to discuss the new results and what it means for the future of astronomy. Discover more here: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/heidi-hammel-astrophysics-decadalSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Hello again everybody. It is

the first Friday in December. Welcome to the last month of the year. This is the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, joined as we are each month by the Senior Space Policy Advisor and Chief Advocate for the Planetary Society. Welcome back, Casey. Hey, Matt. Always happy to be here. I just want to tease a terrific conversation with the distinguished, the esteemed Heidi Hamel.

A conversation that we recorded a few days ago with Heidi that you'll be talking with her. Well, what will you be talking with her about? Well, we just had a seismic event in the world of astrophysics, which was the release of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Math, a U.S. institution that advises Congress and the U.S. government on science issues. Their decadal survey report, this is a once every 10 year report that sets the direction for various fields in space science, in this case, astrophysics, that helps NASA plan for the future, helps Congress decide what to fund, and really represents the consensus approach from the US scientific community about what the big

questions are in astrophysics, and how best to solve them. This is a very, very, I cannot emphasize this enough, very influential report. It just came out a few weeks ago, Heidi and I dive deep down into it. I also have a corresponding article on planetary.org you can reference, into it. I also have a corresponding article on planetary.org you can reference, and it will help you understand what the next 10, actually 20 years of NASA's investments in space-based telescopes are going to be and what we can look forward to coming down the pipeline. So there is your tease for the month. And it also is an introduction to the value delivered to members of the Planetary Society. And hopefully to all of you who might be considering becoming a member, this is a great example of the work that we do to further space science and space exploration.

There's so much more that follows this. We hope that you will take a look at planetary.org slash join and see all the other benefits of becoming a member of the society. But it is, we're a nonprofit and you know what happens with nonprofits at the end of the year. It's time to go to all of you and make our year-end appeal, which toward the middle of this show, you'll be hearing about just for a moment or two from our boss, the CEO, Bill Nye. We hope that whether you're a member or not, that you will see fit to support the great work that the society is doing, which you can do right now. We do offer gift memberships.

And unlike a lot of things, there's no supply chain issues backing those up. So you can give those a great present for the holiday season this year to your fan of space that you know, or potential fan of space that you want to engage. And again, I always like to remind people that this organization, the Planetary Society, lives and dies by its membership. We don't have big corporate donors. We don't have government sponsorship. We exist because of you. Matt and I and all of our colleagues do our jobs because people pay to be members of the society, and we cannot be more thankful for that. Because of that, we can do this great work, and because of the gifts and the donations and the support you give us, we will continue to do so in the next year. So planetary.org to find out both how

to become a member, specifically there, planetary.org slash join. And you can go there to join in on our year-end appeal as well that you'll be hearing about from the Society and certainly on Planetary Radio right up to the end of 2021, a very momentous year. Met is here. Casey, bringing up this conversation with Heidi makes me want to mention that I will be having Heidi back on the weekly Planetary Radio. It'll be our December 15 episode, if all goes well, just one week before the scheduled launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. And joining her will be the JWST Observatory scientist, Mike McElwain, and a principal investigator for one of the instruments on that telescope that's going to inaugurate a new era in space-based astronomy, Rene Doyen, a Canadian scientist who is also very excited

about the launch of this new telescope. Casey, as you know, a slight delay in that launch, but phew, big relief. JWST, we hear, is apparently okay after a little mishap. Yeah, there was a clip that became unclipped unexpectedly, and it caused some vibrations to the spacecraft. They delayed the launch by four days just to check that out. I think absolutely the right call. I mean, we're getting down to the very near moments. It's almost, it's been so abstract, this project for so long, right? This project really began in the very late 1990s, really got kicked up in the early, early 2000s. It's a 20 year or so project.

really got kicked up in the early, early 2000s. It's a 20 year or so project. And we are down to the last few weeks as we record this before launch and it's multi week nail biting, must work deployment procedure that cannot be rescued this time by astronauts the way that the Hubble Space Telescope was. So it's going to be a very exciting holiday season here for a number of people in the astronomy community and at NASA, and all of us watching nervously and hoping everything works. Top price is about $9.7 billion, just the US portion. The Europeans added on their contributions on the order of 700 million euros. The Canadians added around 200 million Canadian dollars of contributions to this.

I wrote this up in an article at planetary.org that we will link to in the show notes. The cost of this mission is arguably the most expensive single scientific platform ever made at the time of launch. Hubble creeps up there over time because it was upgraded five times over the last 30 years. James Webb won't be, but by the time of launch, this will be about a 10 and a half billion dollar project. So this is a big deal if nothing else. Through 20 years of development, it has survived multiple attempts at cancellation. Obviously, it has blown its original budget profile and original schedule. But it survived. And the question is, how did it manage to do that? And I think this brings up this idea of the decadal survey process.

JWST was the top recommendation of the year 2000 decadal survey. The value of this is, again, it shows you the power of these recommendations, is that by creating this as this will address some of the top questions in the astrophysics community, in this case, really studying the very, very early universe, the first stars in the universe. The decadal survey is referred to in this sense as the sword and the shield behind these types of big projects. The sword in the case that it allows the scientific community to like advance forward and coalesce around their big project ideas, and the shield to protect these projects from potential cancellation when they run into trouble. I think there's some really interesting questions about people will say,

well, this is a $10 billion project. Maybe we could have gotten more science doing other missions or different types of science. Could we have done more with this money than James Webb? And I'm not going to sit and defend all the mistakes that happened. There were some serious past mistakes in management, really fundamental engineering mistakes and design issues that happened a long time ago, that did make it cost more than a sense that it quote, unquote, should have. However, at the same time, the way that astronomy works is to answer the questions that we have not yet answered, it kind of by definition needs to do something highly technologically complex, right? Or else we would have answered them by now. And so to push our collecting

abilities of these very, very early universe photons, you start with those big questions and work backwards to the design and to the capabilities of projects like JWST. In this case, this mid infrared spacerared space telescope that needs, because it's looking at basically the warmth levels, it has to be very cold itself so it doesn't block its own signal. It creates the complexity in a sense, right? And then you, of course, have to design it

to launch in a rocket, so you have to fold it up so it fits. All of these things aren't just done for fun. They're done to answer the fundamental science. Kind of has to cost a lot of money sometimes to answer these really profound questions. This is in a way that astronomy is fundamentally different than planetary science. In planetary science, you make one spacecraft to go to a certain place. You probably haven't been there much or haven't been there often or at all.

And so just doing anything will get you a lot of new science, right? Even flying by close, just like New Horizons at Pluto, flying by close and taking a bunch of pictures and other measurements revolutionized our understanding of Pluto. In astronomy, you are pushing the boundaries of what you can collect. You're trying to find these new signals to answer these fundamental questions. And so you have to create the technology to gather that information, which will then be used by a large community for decades. That just presents that it kind of pushes the types of projects that happen

in astronomy to these big projects that happen less frequently, but then can provide a huge range of scientific return over the years. And as a consequence, you get very nail-bitey moments of watching the one thing that has to work, launch and deploy and go through this complex sequence. So JWST is this fascinating, I think, output of what, in a sense, is a very beautiful thing that we do in our societies of starting with these profound and fundamental scientific questions about the state and origin of the universe, working backwards from those questions to say, how do we answer them, and then spending the money and time and effort to then answer them.

And you're going to hear an even deeper exploration of this when Casey begins his conversation with Heidi Hamel, who has been at the forefront of much of what you've just heard Casey talking about as a leader in the field as a vice president at Aura, as you will hear when Casey introduces her. Casey, before we go to that interview, just maybe a little bit more about what's happening in Congress with coming up with a budget, a FY22 budget for the United States of America. Looks like we're going to see this get pushed off yet again. One way or another, we're going to have something happen by Friday, December 3rd. We're recording this a little earlier than that, so we don't know exactly what will happen yet. The current spending authority expires on that day. So either Congress has to extend temporarily the current budget

again, which seems at this point likely, or reach some final deal on appropriations and pass all of these fiscal year 2022 budget legislation documents that they have not yet, that we can tell, worked out any compromise between the Senate side and the House side. We are actually asking members and supporters of the Planetary Society, any supporter based in the United States, to write their members of Congress and encourage them to pass the 2022 NASA budget to help get this over the finish line

to show that people are paying attention, that people care about this stuff. And we've made it really easy for you to do so. We have a form at planetary.org slash action dash center. You can also just go to planetary.org and you can find our action center there. And it will make it very easy for you to fill out a quick form, a letter, or edit it yourself to make it your own to send to your member of Congress and your two senators to support NASA's budget for next year. This budget has some very critical developments that will support,

particularly for us, the NEO Surveyor spacecraft that will look for potentially hazardous near-Earth objects. Obviously, very important funding improvements for Artemis to get humans back to the moon, and really important funding development for Mars sample return, which really needs to start amping up spending to try to hit this 2026 sample return launch goal, which is coming up very rapidly. So they need this stuff as soon as possible in order to keep these tight timelines for Mars Sample Return, Artemis and Neo Surveyor. You get that by having a good budget coming through in 2022.

The House and Senate versions have a few slight differences. Overall, they're very good. And we want them to reach that compromise and pass this budget so NASA can get to work and do the best work possible, the most efficient way possible. So if you live in the United States, take a minute and fill out this form at planetary.org slash action dash center, or keep following us to hear more about what happens next month when we will have some more clarity on the issue. So lots of stuff potentially being decided this week. Again, I think the likely outcome is a further delay in the 2022 budget process. Not unusual from what we've seen the last few years. I think the last few years we've

gotten a budget right before Christmas, possible it'll happen again. We hope you will get involved. Casey, let's go ahead and begin that conversation you had a few days ago with Heidi Hamel. And we'll come out on the other end and close out this month's Space Policy Edition. Heidi, welcome to the Space Policy Edition. Thanks for making time today. Delighted to be here, Casey. You are a professional astronomer. You're also vice president of the Planetary Society and a vice president at Aura, the Association for Universities for Research in Astronomy. This is something the decadal survey is, is it too small of a phrase to say that it's

a big deal? What does this mean? What kind of impact is this report to professional astronomers like you? It's a big deal, Casey. Every 10 years, our community gets together, assesses the state of the field scientifically, looks at our suite of capabilities, and assesses where we should be going in the next decade and beyond. And then when they decide what those science priorities are, they then make recommendations on the kinds of tools and capabilities that we need to accomplish that science. This is information that's published in what we call our Decadal Survey Report.

It guides decision-making that goes on at our funding agencies, which are primarily NASA and the National Science Foundation, but also the Department of Energy does astronomical research as well. And so it's a big deal. Over the 60 years that astrophysicists have been doing decadal surveys, our very large programs and missions have arisen because of the consensus we developed during this decadal survey process. Things like the Hubble Space Telescope, the other great observatories, Spitzer and Chandra, the James Webb Space Telescope, all of those were products of prior decadal surveys. So it's a big deal. You raised a point that I was going to mention too, that astrophysics has been the leader, your field has been the leader in creating this type of consensus report to drive the direction of the field. As you said, it goes back through the 1960s or 70s, way before we've seen similar reports in planetary science or earth science,

the other kind of areas at NASA that do these types of reports. Do you have a sense, is this just because astrophysics is always kind of at the verge of what's possible technologically, or that the field, like you build an instrument, it lasts for so long? Do you have any insight on why your field needed this type of guidance? possible technologically or that the field, like you build an instrument that lasts for so long? Do you have any insight on like why your field needed this type of guidance from the beginning of modern astrophysical observations in the mid-20th century? Well, obviously I wasn't around in the 60s and 70s. I was a kid then, so I wasn't party to the discussions on why this happened. I wasn't party to the discussions on why this happened. But I can share that the field of astronomy and astrophysics for a long time was struggling with this dichotomy of most of the telescopes being private, owned by private institutions or private telescopes for specific universities.

There was a period of time where there was a great debate going on about whether or not we should have public facilities, public telescopes for the broad community to use. I think that in part, this development of the decadal survey was in response to this debate about whether it was a good thing to have public facilities or not. And if we were going to have public facilities, how are we going to decide what they should be? And to do that effectively, there needed to be a consensus discussion amongst the astronomical leadership. That has evolved into this more formalized process of not just astronomical leadership, but all in the astronomical community who believe they have something to contribute, writing white papers and participating in this consensus discussion. And I think it was extraordinarily successful.

of that success, I think that is why we saw other parts of NASA and other groups start to pick up this structure of doing a decadal survey and making plans this way. You listed through these amazing scientific instruments that we have because of previous decadal surveys, the Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, James Webb, which is about to launch as we record this. And you get a sense where you realize how important this final recommendation really is. You're really directing, or the community is, the next 10 to 20 to 30 years, if not longer, of your field based on what rises to the top out of this, as you say, consensus-driven process. There's a huge committee of people involved in writing this report. There's a steering committee, smaller committees in various scientific topic areas. But then anyone could submit their opinion, right, whether on science

or an approach or kind of framing. You and I wrote a paper for the Planetary Society urging the committee to think big, I think was the name of that paper. You were also, I believe, I lost count after six, but something like a dozen other papers talking about various aspects of this. Let's look at what came out of this process then, right? This was a multi-year process, obviously delayed because of the COVID pandemic, finally came out November 4th. Let's just state right away, what are the biggest headline recommendations from this report that are going to be driving astrophysics in the next couple decades? Let me take a little bit of a step back and explain what the framing of the report is

before we jump to the headlines. Because people sometimes miss the fact that this report is a comprehensive report, not only of the headline, Next Future, but about the state of our profession and our community. And this particular report, which was a beautifully crafted report, I have to say, it laid out a sort of a pathway. They called this Pathways to Discovery. They have a figure that shows the path. And the path is based on the foundations, which includes people and research, diversity and equity and sustainability. It moves through to the frontiers. And then from the frontiers, the science that emerges from the frontiers. So they define the science that they want to accomplish. They say, what frontier tools do we need to do that science? And then how do we sustain our community so that we can take advantage of those frontier tools? I'm going to tell you some headlines, but those headlines are only one tiny piece of this very large picture of where astronomy and astrophysics stands right in this

moment of time. So what are the headlines? The headlines, they come in sort of two flavors. One is the space-based activities that we do, funded by NASA. And the other is the ground-based activities, funded primarily by the National Science Foundation, NSF, and the Department of Energy, DOE, to some limited extent. So let's talk about space. What this decadal survey said is that we have three priority science areas for the future. One of those is worlds and suns in context. This is looking at all of the thousands of exoplanets that we have now discovered throughout our neighborhood of the galaxy. They identify a particular case, pathways to habitable worlds.

And they say, how do we in our local neighborhood assess what worlds are habitable? And to do that, what tools do we need? compressed atmospheres of at least 25 Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of sun-like stars. That's the recommendation. So they don't say build Louvre, which was one of a study that NASA did, and they don't say don't build Havix, which was a different study. They say, we're not going to tell you what the architecture is, but we're going to tell you what this thing needs to do. And based on the studies that NASA has already done, it's clear that this space telescope will probably have to be at least six meters in aperture. For reference, Hubble is only two meters in aperture. For reference, Hubble is only two meters in aperture. So we're talking about a telescope that is much larger than Hubble, and it needs to be operating in the same

wavelength regime as Hubble, the UV optical infrared. And that's important because, of course, James Webb, which is a six meter class telescope, that is operating in the near and mid infrared. So Webb can't do the science that I just outlined, looking at for habitability on 25 Earth-like planets around sun-like stars, can't do it. That's why this new telescope is needed. And so that's the headline. And they also say, oh, and by the way, this telescope also must be capable of doing terrific revolutionary astrophysics as well. And they are very clear what astrophysics they want it to do. Another science theme, in addition to worlds and suns in context, is what they call cosmic ecosystems. And this is really talking about trying to understand

the context in which galaxies and from the galaxies, stars and planets form out of dust and gas in the universe, really looking at the drivers of galaxy growth throughout the universe. How do we get galaxies? And from that, how do we get the stars and planets in our galaxies? To do that, you need the same telescope. You need a very large UV optical infrared telescope. For space, that's the big headline. There are secondary headlines that are equally important to us as a community on the space side. Definitely want to be looking at a line of great observatories, not just one telescope, but a series of telescopes, preferably a collection of telescopes that operate together

in space that are multi-wavelength. Yeah. Which is referencing the Great Observatory program or what NASA had already did in the 80s and 90s, right? So that's a callback in a sense. It's almost like an upgraded version of the Great Observatories that gave us Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra. Yeah, that's exactly right. In fact, we call it like the new Great Observatories. Our Great Observatories have been just absolutely fundamental for

changing our understanding of the universe. And the current new great, the current great observatories, of course, Hubble is like the mainstay. The greatest. You know, I'm biased. I'm an optical astronomer, so of course I'm biased. The Chandra X-ray telescope, it has been, you know, the leader in X-ray observatories as well. And Spitzer Space Telescope was a really wonderful infrared telescope. But Spitzer is basically limping along. It can't really do much of its mission anymore. Chandra has been having some health scares. And I'm sure people are aware that Hubble itself has been having some health scares recently with communication issues and things like that.

And I don't want to forget there's also the Compton Observatory, Gamma Ray Observatory. So there are other parts of this great observatory program. It's time for a new generation. We've been using Hubble for 30 years, and it's still incredibly productive. And it's still incredibly productive. But we have identified new questions and new problems that are just you can't answer them with Hubble. You need to have a larger telescope. viewing the universe through these different pieces of the electromagnetic spectrum, right? And we just can't emphasize that enough. This is why James Webb is designed to answer a very different set of scientific questions than this super Hubble kind of proposal that they're putting in there, right? That you're taking these scientific questions, working backwards and saying, how do we answer

them using various windows into the electromagnetic spectrum or the size of things or the number of planets we need to find? And that all drives ultimately why we come to those, right? It's not just like the astrophysics community is saying like, what's the biggest, coolest space telescope we can spend money on? That all falls out of the big questions that we're trying to answer. Yeah. That's exactly right. And that's why I was trying to be very clear that what the decadal said was not build. They didn't say, go build a super giant space telescope bigger than Hubble. They said, here's the science question. We want you to characterize 25 Earth-like planets around sun-like stars. You've got to do that many to really be sure that if you're detecting what you think are signs of potential habitability or potential biological activity, you have enough information to make a definitive answer about that.

That's what they are recommending. The tool you need is the super Hubble, right? Yeah. Well, and that's also why you need is the super, super Hubble, right? Yeah. Well, that's also why you can't just build a second Hubble, right? I mean, that's like when people say, why do we need something as expensive as James Webb as opposed to just building another Hubble, for example? Well, you build another Hubble, you can still only answer the types of questions Hubble is currently answering.

You can just do more of it. Your bandwidth would expand, but your fundamental limits, your physical limits are the same. This is why we don't just repeat in the physics community, why you just don't repeat what you've done before. You need new tools designed specifically to answer the progress of the science, to recognize and acknowledge the progress of the scientific theory and observations that have been happening. Exactly. Let's jump a little bit to the ground-based side. What they said on the ground-based side is following the same scientific themes about new worlds and suns in context and the pathways to habitable worlds, we know from our work with exoplanets that it's actually easier to find exoplanets around cooler, fainter stars, because the star itself is just fainter,

and so the relative brightness of the planet is better, more amenable for detection. So one of the recommendations is to study a suitable sample of Earth-like planets around these cool, faint red stars, these red dwarfs, M-type stars, again, to look for the signs of habitability. These kinds of worlds are a little more challenging because the stars themselves are cooler. That means that the habitable zone where water can be liquid is closer to the star. are more active than G-stars like our sun. And so, you know, there's more radiation flares from them and that might pose a problem. But nevertheless, it's a whole nother class of habitable planets that are totally worth exploring.

And the tool that you need to do that is actually large ground-based telescopes, these 30-meter class telescopes that are being explored by different consortia here in the United States. And that is their top recommendation, is, again, to try to study these class of planets around these M-type stars. That's the science recommendation. And the tool that you need is an extremely large telescope, of which we have two in development in the United States. One is the giant Magellan telescope. The other is the 30-meter telescope. My organization, Aura, the organization I am the vice president of science for, we operate what is called the National Optical Infrared Laboratory for Astronomy for the National Science Foundation. The short name for that is Noir Lab.

Noir Lab has been crafting what we call the USELT program, United States Extremely Large Telescope Program. One of these telescopes would be situated in the southern hemisphere and the other in the northern hemisphere, which gives us all sky access. That was the recommendation of the decadal, if we're going to characterize this type of planet around this type of star, we need this USELT program to move forward. And so that was the headline for that. It's pretty exciting. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's just remarkable to me thinking how much of this report is focused on not just exoplanets, but seeking out essentially biosignatures, right? That's ultimately what's driving this on habitable, potentially habitable exoplanets,

earth-sized ones. The report points out it's only been, what, 25, 30 years since we had the first confirmation of any exoplanet at all? And how rapidly that has come to dominate or grow into the field where we're now setting these science questions that will drive literally tens of billions of dollars of investments over the next 20 years to seek these out planetary exploration with statistically significant results right like number you can go to you're not just stuck in a sense with our own solar system. You can survey hundreds to thousands of other solar systems to see what's out there. Yeah, but I want to be ecumenical about this

and point out that the exoplanet case is really robust and it's really exciting, but it isn't the only science case. It's one of the three science cases. And there have been other really remarkable discoveries in the past. Like LIGO. Yeah. Gravitational. Exactly. And the second one of the other science areas is called new messengers and new physics. And that word messenger refers to the different ways we can learn about the universe. You know, we talk a lot about light all the time, right? We talk about optical light and infrared light and even at the

extremes, you know, x-rays or radio at the other end. That's all light though. What the revolution that's occurred in astrophysics in the last decade has been the use of gravitational waves as a whole new type of messenger to explore the universe, to explore black holes, and to look at neutron stars and learn about the size distributions of these objects. We had no way of doing some of this work until LIGO became operational. And another tool that we have is particle physics, things like neutrinos coming from the sun and cosmic rays. These are other types of messengers that are not light. Pulling all of those new messengers together is really crafting a whole new way of sensing the universe. They had a really lovely example in the decadal survey. They said something like, as human beings, we use all of our senses, whether it is sight or hearing or taste or touch. With this new messengers,

we are opening up our ways of exploring the universe beyond just light. We're not just using our eyes anymore. We're using our eyes and our ears and touch effectively. And what do you need to really advance that? Well, you need to, of course, upgrade the sensitivities of these

gravitational wave detectors. You also need to improve your high energy neutrino observatories, these things like Kamiokand and IceCube and all these other different kinds of particle detector observatories. But you also need to be able to find the optical counterparts to these things like you've got a gravitational wave from the combination of two black holes you want to be able to see where that is and see where it is in relation to the other galaxy that it might be a host in to do that uh these things are typically really faint. So you know what you need? You need a super giant large space telescope.

On the order of six meters or so, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Or you need your US ELT program because you don't know what hemisphere that this gravitational wave is going to be emanating in. All of these new fields, they all point us kind of in the same direction, but it is for a breadth of science. It isn't just exoplanets. It is what is the nature of dark matter? What is the nature of dark energy? How do we understand how galaxies

evolve over the age of the universe? We've answered those questions to the extent possible with the tools that we have, and now we know where we need to move forward. That's what really struck me, and thank you for making that point. And when you talk about the idea of senses, of how we're able to sense in our own experience and mapping that onto astronomy, it's not just that we have these senses, right? It's that we're integrating all of those feeds into one moment of experience, right? To give us a fuller way to interpret the world around us. And that was something I was struck with over and over again in this report is that data processing and dynamic ability to

kind of rapidly move and slew into position and look for where things are happening, we're able to create, and if this is followed through, we're creating this multi-sensory apparatus, in a sense, global apparatus that can integrate across multiple domains of information, of multiple messages, he said, to create a more comprehensive picture by looking at light, to create a more comprehensive picture by looking at light, by looking at gravitational waves, by looking at neutrino and other particle detections, to piece the full physics of what we're seeing all together. And that was just really exciting. And, you know, I don't often say that reading a 700-page report can be joyous in a sense, but

these are particularly ones that come out like this. And I really recommend chapter two for those who are interested in reading this really runs down of here's what we know and here's where the big unknowns are. They're basically defining out these big science questions. There's something still so beautiful and optimistic about that to me that ultimately behind all of our debates about funding and politics and programmatic balance and interest groups kind of vying against each other, at the end of the day, we're really starting from this really beautiful notion of trying to better understand the natural world in which we inhabit. And that we're able to, to a large degree, find some sort of consensus about what are these the biggest and most important questions. Not every field or not every activity that we do in space has that

to create unification. So it's just a really wonderful, it's just really exciting just to be reminded about how much we've learned and how much then we can continue to learn if we have these tools. You're absolutely right. You know, there's another aspect of this that I think is really exciting. They talk about this a lot in this decadal survey. One of the things that was recommended in the last decadal survey, 10 years ago, was the development of these new types of telescope that are survey telescopes, broad area telescopes. One of them is the Vera Rubin Observatory, which is under construction

in Chile and is just a year or two away from starting its full survey of the southern sky every three days for 10 years. And it's going to be a remarkable, remarkable new tool for understanding the dynamic nature of our sky. And another outcome from the last decadal survey, it was called WFIRST in that survey, It was called WFIRST in that survey, but has now been renamed the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. And it is a Hubble-class telescope, except instead of being a small field of view, it is a Hubble-class wide field of view. It will be working in concert with Ruben. It's in development right now, but it will be launched during our next decade. And when Ruben and Roman are working together on Sky, we're going to be entering a completely new realm of astronomy. We are going to be doing what we call time domain astronomy, getting tons of data and looking at things that change.

And some of those things, we know what they are. Like for us at the Planetary Society, we're very excited about the number of near-Earth objects that will be discovered through the power of these telescopes. But there are going to be many things that we find out there in the universe flashing or doing something weird in terms of their brightness, and we aren't going to know what they are. Following up on that and understanding this time domain, it's a whole new realm of astronomy. It's not often in your field that you know you're on the cusp of a revolution and and we are this decadal survey recognizes that and and kind of gives us a little bit of a warning all of us who

are old school people like me who are old school astronomers who've been doing astronomy for you know 20 30 years we're not ready for that we're not ready for the onslaught of data that we're about to have in our field. It's going to be yet another new way of doing business. And there's a lot of information in this decadal about data archiving, data management, curation of data, and building tools that allow most astronomers to get in there and work with this new regime of astronomical data. And that's a whole new frontier. It's not really a new tool. It's not a new telescope. But it is equally exciting to be this whole new way of thinking about the sky. Astronomer Heidi Hamel with my colleague Casey Dreyer. They'll be right back after this message from the boss.

Hi, everybody. It's Bill. 2021 has brought so many thrilling advances in space exploration. Because of you, the Planetary Society has had a big impact on key missions like the Perseverance landing on Mars, including the microphone we've championed for years. Our extended LightSail 2 mission is helping NASA prepare three solar sail projects of its own. Now it's time to make 2022 even more successful. We've captured the world's attention, but there's so much more work to be done. When you invest in the Planetary Fund today, your donation will be matched up to $100,000 thanks to a generous

member. Every dollar you give will go twice as far as we explore the worlds of our solar system and beyond. Defend Earth from the impact of an asteroid or comet and find life beyond Earth by making the search a space exploration priority. Will you help us launch into a new year? Please donate today. Visit planetary.org slash planetary fund. Thank you for your generous support. This time domain approach to observation, which really in a sense is a function of the growth of data storage and processing capability, enabling suddenly your capability to collect and retain. We're talking about terabytes, not petabytes of data coming in, petabytes of data. We all exist in the time domain, but so much of our limitations in terms of scientific

observation are functions of these snapshots, right? What you're able to see once and then you have to share all this observation time with other people or limitations about how you're able to observe or store that data. Not to mention, you know, just the computing. We're seeing real, I think, integration of the computing revolution into observation through these big survey programs coming up. And you're right. I mean, I think that's what's so fascinating to me is that we're seeing these consequences being reflected now through policy and then all the kind of messy aspects of that, right, of making sure it's not just enough to collect all this data. It has to it's nothing if people don't access it. Right. And it's nothing, of course, if you don't have scientists to look through it and analyze the science. And so that kind of brings me to this, there's this whole other aspect I just want to touch on a little bit, a really nice section talking about, as you kind of brought this up earlier, these foundational important aspects of the field, which is the people who actually do the science. And we have a section on workforce

and diversity and making sure that the people who are astronomers represent and are pulled from all walks of life, essentially, to make sure we have the best minds available through all of humanity, able and capable of participating in these really exciting fields. So is there any kind of reactions or thoughts you had to that aspect and how they framed the workforce and inclusion perspectives. Yeah, they put a tremendous amount of thought into this aspect of the people who do astronomy. There's so much detail that it would take us hours to get through it. For listeners' perspectives, you know, they really leave no stone unturned. They look at the demographics, the current demographics. They look at the trends in the demographics.

They compare the demographics of our field with other fields and with the population at large. They're really very frank. At one point, they say, you know, basically our diversity is abysmal. Abysmal was the word. I'm very honest about that. We have a lot of work to do in our field. We have made strides in bringing in white women such as myself, but there are women of color. There are men of color. There are people, different genders, different, all sorts of, you know, people with disabilities. We have so much work we have to do. And they lay out ideas and pathways for some of this to take place. It's not going to be easy. It's not going to turn on a dime.

But what I can share is that this is representative of our field trying to work on these issues and trying to identify pathways so that we can become a more diverse field, a more inclusive field, and more equitable field. All of those things are important. There's a couple of really fascinating charts. One I want to absolutely talk about, but one that just to your point shows the growth of women participation in PhDs and undergraduates. And it's still not parity, but it's change can happen, right? It showed that, you know, there's has been improvement, which gives ultimately some optimism, right? That being aware of the problem and then working to make it draw this talent and to maintain this talent in the field can happen. But it starts with acknowledging the problems.

I thought that was a really fascinating and really self-reflective and, as you said, a very kind of honest assessment of what the issue was. And then there's all sorts of changes you can start to make. And I just want to mention this because this probably struck me as one of the most amazing charts that I've seen in a while in science, not a budget chart. I think, you know, the one I may be talking about is the percentage of first time PIs by observing cycle looking at Hubble data or not Hubble data, people proposing time on the Hubble. People getting time. Getting time. Yeah. Proposing and getting and getting time, winning time on the Hubble Space Telescope, PIs being the principal investigators. And Hubble changed the process for selecting who is a principal investigator, whose proposals get selected for time on the Hubble, changed a few years ago, right? They went to what's called double blind.

I'll let you explain it, and we can talk about this dramatic change in the types of people getting time on the Hubble. Yeah, a number of years ago, Hubble has been operational long enough, 30 years, and has enough people proposing every year, thousands of astronomers, that we can pull out meaningful statistics. What we noticed is that women just weren't getting as much time as men in proportion to how many proposed. And any single year, it was just barely within the noise. And you would say, oh, it's not statistically significant. But we brought in social scientists and they evaluated the data and said, you know, when you look at this in the aggregate, this is statistically significant. So what can you do to change that? And when I say we, I'm using that word to refer to the Space Telescope Science Institute, which full disclosure is managed by Aura, the company that I'm the vice president of science for. And so I was personally involved in a lot of the development of this process. So when I use we, I'm using it

literally. I was part of this process. How can you change that? Well, we tried many things. The Institute, first they said, well, we'll go to initials. That people won't know you won't know it's suzy or or sam it's just s well that didn't work because everybody knows people's last names anyway so then they said okay well we'll do initials and we'll put all the names on the second page and so it's not on the front page that didn't work either we went through many different iterations, none of it worked. And we finally came to believe that we had to go what we call full dual anonymous. By dual anonymous, it means that the people who are evaluating those proposals do not know at all who is doing the proposing. And so there's no names on the proposals they're just like the number and you might say

well how when you when they read the proposal they'll be able to figure it out right because someone will say well I used my code no we had to teach the proposers how to write proposals that were anonymous so you didn't refer to my work or my theory. You would say X, Y, Z's theory of this or that, even if X, Y, Z was you, right? That took a lot of preparation and planning and training. So the proposals became completely anonymous and there was huge pushback. People did not like this idea at all. They said, you have to know who the scientist is. this idea at all they said you have to know who the scientist is um and we used as our inspiration the dual anonymous orchestra rehearse uh yeah options right where right where they perform behind a curtain or something like that so they don't see at first they perform behind a curtain and it didn't it didn't make any difference And some clever person realized that the judges could hear the footsteps of the people walking up to behind the curtain. And they could hear when it was a woman's footsteps versus a man's footsteps because women's shoes tend to sound different than men's shoes. High heels have a sort of click-clack sound and others don't.

So they carpeted it, the walkways. That is when it changed. That was our inspiration. And like I said, it was not well-received, but we went anyway and said, well, we're going to do it. We were doing it primarily to try to change the gender dynamics because that was something that was easy to track, right? But once we went to this full dual anonymous where people had no idea who was writing these things, you know, you don't know who's reviewing them either. That's why it's dual. There's two sides to it. What we found, and this is a chart you're referring to that was in the Decadal Survey, not only did it probably start to change the dynamics of gender? I'm saying probably because there's some

murkiness there. What was not murky was the chart you're referring to, where we saw that suddenly unique observers who had never gotten time on Hubble before, suddenly were getting time on Hubble. It's sort of as if in the past, it was only like sort of the same groups. Oh, they're from this school. I know they're a good group, but you know, give them the time. I've never heard of these people. Don't give them the time. Suddenly those I've never heard of peoples turns out they can write darn good proposals, proposing darn good science. And they were suddenly getting time. Now it is diversifying the field of people who are using these tools. It was a really very successful program, and we're now broadening it to all of our

observatories that we operate on the ground. I know that other observatories around the world have adopted it. NASA is starting to adopt this for some of its programs as well. Because despite astronomers and scientists saying you can't possibly, you have to know who the scientist is, you know what? It turns out you don't. You really don't. This chart's figure 313 for anyone keeping track at home. You see over the course of three observing cycle proposal cycles, an increase of roughly a factor of six of first time participants getting time on the Hubble Space Telescope. And it's just so dramatic. And it just shows you how, whether consciously or not, people were reacting to reputation, which is a very self-reinforcing loop, obviously, right?

People who have good reputation can more easily get time on the Hubble, can publish more papers, can get that high profile science, and it closes off, you know, time on the Hubble is a fixed quantity, right? You only have so many seconds in the day to observe things. And so you can see small, thoughtful changes like this,

though it sounds like not easily implemented, can have huge consequences for this concept of equity of giving more access based on the ideal of the field right that the the best ideas should be given credence and opportunity and i want to be fair to my fellow astronomers i don't think any of this bias that was creeping in was conscious bias. We've always in astronomy and in our processes tried to be as fair as possible. But I think a lot of this is unconscious bias. It's not that people want to be biased. It's that our human brains work in a biased way and we can't turn that off. It's really hard to turn that off because it's ingrained in the way humans make decisions.

And so by taking the bias triggers, just removing them, That's really the only way we can prevent our lizard brains from taking over and introducing these biases that are ingrained in us from just our own cultural upbringing. It's a really important thing to do. We've talked about big picture goals coming up in science, talked about some of the ground-based calls that they're recommending, the big areas of interest, the fundamentals of workforce investment and making sure you have the people to do this kind of work. I want to end this discussion by talking a little bit about the time frame. To me, that was perhaps the most contentious or should be, in a sense, a little bit of an unusual departure departure let's say for

the decadal survey because instead of saying in the next 10 years the next which is ostensibly what the responsibility of this report is saying this is what we should do they say the next 10 years we should put in significant basic investment in studying how to build these future space telescopes. And then once we feel comfortable starting in the 2030s, then we start to build them with the goal of launching this six meter-ish super Hubble type of mission in the 2040s. So suddenly we're on a scale of 20, 25 years. How do you approach something like that? Is this just the reality of where we are in astrophysics, that things just extend beyond the scope of decadal surveys? Is that fair to the next decadal survey? How do you see this fitting in in terms of timeline? Because

this is extraordinarily long for people to wait for this. Yeah, you're right about that. I'll share that there has been a lot of discussion over the past 20 years about this very topic. People are like, Webb was delayed over and over and over again. I'm like, yeah, and Hubble was too. And just about any large facility that we've wanted to build, you know, you and I talk about planetary, you know, Mars, Mars missions get delayed as well. I think that this decadal survey, more so than some in the past, was really trying to be pragmatic about how long major missions and major facilities truly take to build and not have just a, you know, a fantasy. Oh, we can do this in 10 years. You know, likewise with the cost.

They didn't say something like, we want to build a super Hubble and we want to do it for $3 billion. It's like, well, you can't do that, right? I mean, that was sort of the whole issue with Webb when it was first proposed decades ago. The initial price point that was given was known to be fictitious at the time. And we've been dealing with the fallout from that ever since, right? So I think they were trying to be really honest and pragmatic about how long things take. They do take this long. Does that mean we should only do a decadal survey once every 30 years? I think the answer is no,

only do a decadal survey once every 30 years? I think the answer is no, because things change. I mean, look at the revolution that we were talking about of exoplanets. We wouldn't want to put that off 25 years before we think about the next step. Really, what we are doing now, I think, is trying to understand how these things fit together over the multi-decadal time scale and making sure that we're identifying for ourselves now scientific goals that will stand the test of that time. We did this correctly with web. People will fuss about how long it's taken to get web to the launch pad where it is now literally but i will share with you as one of the scientists working on that program the program i proposed for it 20 years ago stands today i mean there's no other tool that can do it because we said this is the

tool we need to do this science and we didn't say, build a bigger telescope and we'll figure out what to do. In the end, it was, no, we want to do this science. This is the tool we need. If it takes you 20 years to build it, it does, but that's how long it takes. It was very pragmatic. And I appreciated that. I thought that was realistic. We always assess our decadals five years in. They talk about that in our decadals five years in. They talk about that in this decadal, and they had some specific things that they talked that should be happening at the five-year mark. Have you made progress on this technology maturation to the point that you're ready to move?

Also, if I look at the profiles they give, this is funding as a function of year, it looks to me like there might be opportunities to try to bring some of this information, some of this development forward into more current times and maybe get these things off the ground a little sooner. I would also like to see some of those other telescopes, not just the Super Hubble, but also the X-ray telescope and the far infrared telescope. I would love to see them brought forward so that we could fly all these things together because that's where the true power of the science is. It's all funding limited.

And so if we can make the case that this is absolutely terrific science, it'll position the United States at the forefront of space and ground-based observatory. We hope that we can convince our stakeholders that fund us that maybe they do want to make these investments and maybe invest robustly to make sure that this science happens in a timely fashion. You know, I'll tell you, Casey, having worked on Webb for over 20 years, I know how long these things take. And I think that one of the things astronomers are pretty good at doing is recognizing that the tools they are building are not necessarily for them, particularly on the large scale. They are building tools for

the next generation. And they've always done that. Back in 1990, when they launched the Hubble Space Telescope, some of the people who were working on it, they were not even around anymore. And when I got to use it as a young scientist in 1994, I was like, this is amazing. This telescope is incredible. You know, I had nothing to do with building that telescope. It was built for me by the previous generations. That same with Webb. I mean, I'm at a stage now where I'm not actually doing much observational astronomy because I'm more managing things. But there's a whole suite of young people who are going to be using Webb when it launches, you know, and when we start getting data back next year. We're not building these telescopes for us.

We're building them for the next generation. Astronomers are good about thinking that way. They're just like, yeah, it's not for me. Scientific great-grandchildren. More than anyone else, maybe a geologist, you get cosmic timescale is built into astronomy, to your field, right? You kind of into it. You're right. I mean, it's interesting, this word pragmatic. And I think that's an important reminder for someone listening to this who's not an astronomer or involved in this, that this report

doesn't itself happen in a vacuum, so to speak, right? They're aware that they're making recommendations to the U.S. system. And with all of the attendant positives and negatives of that, of uncertainty and annual funding cycles and domestic spending limits and so forth and so on, there's an awareness by the people making this about what they're making recommendations to. That acknowledgement, I think, in a sense also is just very, they had a hard hand dealt to them because of the delays of Webb, which then delayed the Roman Space Telescope. Roman is now not scheduled to launch, then plus COVID, until 2027, late in the game of this decadal.

So how much, there's just no room in the funding line. I think Roman's going to be occupying, give or take, about half a billion dollars a year for the next four years. Just some fundamental acknowledgement that astrophysics is not going to see a tripling of its budget anytime that dramatically, that quickly. They almost had to take a gap decade realistically before they could really start moving on the next mission. This is not just them making this up.

This is recommendation after recommendation after recommendation of how you build complex space missions. You put your money in early, figuring out where your problems are going to be. So you're not frantically trying to solve those while you're maintaining this standing army of hundreds or thousands of other highly paid, expensive engineers trying to build the rest of the system at the same time. And so it does make sense to me that you put in, I think they recommended on the order of 800 million over the next 10 years on technology development, basically. I'd say phase A in that parlance work on the super Hubble.

My worry is, in terms of the politics of it, is even though programs like James Webb and Roman have been delayed and go over budget, because they're tied to a thing, right, because they're tied to that single project, ultimately, they're able to kind of pull it out. I think just politically, people latch on to, we were talking about our lizard brains earlier, I think our lizard brains latch on to things and objects and coherent ideas, like single entities. And I worry that 10 years of technology development without a coherent mission, you know, it's a little iffy on this, but without a real mission at the end of it is somewhat of a political risk. How do you ensure that that tech money shows up when you need it versus being thrown to the more immediate needs of Roman or Webb or whatever mission at the time that needs it in the midst of its development. So that's my concern. And I think that's almost the challenge for the community to really be tying this.

This isn't just tech development for its own sake. This is really on ramping to this next step of astronomy. I share your concern. concern. And part of what will be happening over the next couple of years is being very thoughtful about technology development funding and making sure that it is being used in the ways to achieve the goals that we need to advance. This is something that we talk about a lot right now. to advance. This is something that we talk about a lot right now. We're all processing this decadal survey in our heads and trying to understand what its implications are. But this issue that you raise of making sure that the funding is used appropriately in the right timescales for the right things to achieve the goal you want, that is a really important aspect of this decadal survey. This decadal survey,

it's a science document, right? The way we deal with this is by focusing on those science goals all the time. And so when they're going through the trade studies, they're going to be asking, will this help us achieve this science goal? And, you know, if it does, that's good. If it doesn't, then we let it go. That's the best way to proceed. And, you know, people who ask, why did Webb take so long? Couldn't you just have made it smaller and less complicated? And, you know, the answer is, we were trying to devise a tool that could see the first galaxies in the universe. That was the goal. We had to make the telescope able to do that. And if we made it smaller, we couldn't. Or if we made it less sensitive, we couldn't. Or if we took

off certain instruments, we couldn't achieve that science goal. That's why the decadal lays out this science goal for us. You know, we want to characterize habitability. We want to be able to understand the drivers of galaxy growth. We want to be able to unveil the nature of dark energy and dark matter. Those are the goals and the tools have to achieve those goals. And we put those in front of us. And that is what allows us to get through this complex issue of funding and timing and which trade studies do you do? You've just got to keep your eye on the science goal. And that you're right. That's what we talked about right at the beginning of this conversation,

that you start with the science and you work backwards to define your requirements of the instrument, then you build, as you were just saying. To note real quick here at the end, there were some very rough, I'd say, early estimates about what it would cost to build this super Hubble. That's my nomenclature. And then some of the other two big recommendations in infrared and X-ray. And they estimated around $11 billion for the big one and then $3 to $5 billion for the two other ones. You mentioned James Webb and the complexity. We're talking about a different level of complexity in some way for this potential mission, right?

It's not because it's not in the mid infrared. You don't need to keep it as cold. So you don't need that very big sun shield. The potential availability of super heavy lift launch vehicles, you know, something like Starship with these massive, something like a nine meter fairing. Would you even have to fold up a telescope like Webb? You know, and that's a big, the big aspects of complexity that made Webb expensive and difficult to work with, folding it up, everything, may not have the same level of constraints in the future. And so that gives me, you know, there may be more nuance to these ultimate numbers that, as you said, putting in this tech development now and then seeing where the launch, the world of launch is and reliability is by 2030, you may actually have a lot more options

in trade space to build something that can just be big on the ground and then doesn't have to origami itself out in space. And perhaps that keeps things more in line with what's affordable. So I think there's lots of, there's this whole other intersection of this developing space field in terms of infrastructure and launch and communications that will play into this in the future as well. And that's where this study, I think, also benefits from, of seeing that. Yeah, that's right. And also, you know, even internal to the astronomy field, the technology continues to develop. And things like working with arrays of segmented mirrors now so that we don't have to have a single monolithic mirror like Hubble that can have an array of mirrors

and do what we call wavefront sensing across that and then have the flexibility to be adjusting things on the fly. I mean, like we will be doing for web, but maybe we don't need to fold it up. So maybe it'll be easier to get it working. All of these things are things that are hot fields right now. People are really very interested in how they're evolving so quickly. Yeah, there's just a lot of promise right now it's a pretty exciting time to be an astronomer right now a lot of things are happening it's a cool time it really is and i'll end uh if

you'll forgive me the indulgence of quoting from the paper you and i wrote together along with colleagues on the board of directors at the society and i'll let you react to this line that that we wrote our title of the paper we submitted was Thinking Big. And we say that, quote, the threads of exoplanet discovery, advances in understanding of planetary habitability, and advances in launch vehicle development have come together and point toward a monumental goal,

enabling the search for life at a large scale with discoveries possible in a single generation. So that's what we submitted to the survey report. How do you feel that line stands up and what ultimately came out? I think they heard us. They listened. You know, that word single generation is important here. It goes back to what you and I were talking about. It may not be me or you or people our age, but it could very well be some kid right now in whatever town you pick.

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, you know, Ames, Iowa, Billings, pick your favorite city. It could be some kid there who listens to this podcast, who gets excited about this, who goes into the field. They could be the one. There's a kid today somewhere in the United States who could be the young person who finds that first spectrum with this telescope 20 years from now and finds evidence for life elsewhere. It's real. It's within our grasp. I get almost to the point where I can't verbalize how exciting that is. But that's where we are, people. We're at the edge now where we can build the tools that we've dreamed about for millennia to answer this question, are we alone in the universe?

We can do it. That's a great point. To end on, Dr. Heidi Hamel, Vice President of Science at Aura and at the Planetary Society, thank you so much for making time for us today. Really enjoyed having you on. It's been a pleasure. Casey, great conversation. There's so many things caught my interest, one of them being something you also addressed as you were opening this month's show. So this is an example of working backward from figuring out, okay, here's what we want to know, what kind of instrument is going to deliver the data that's going to help us answer that question? Yeah, I think it's a really important, subtle, but really important point, right? And this is what is fundamentally different between areas like commercial spaceflight

and human spaceflight. The scientific questions create a convergence, right? Eventually, enough scientists will agree on what the major unknowns in the field are and how important they are. That creates this external pressure for people to agree on what the big ideas are. And then that gives you the guidelines of what to do next. Absent those guidelines, absent those restrictions, it's really hard to create consensus about where to invest your money and where to invest your time and resources in the near term. So the scientific process, and this is something, again, I think that really has only existed in terms of federal investment in the United States less than 100 years, right? This is still

a relatively new idea. And it's just profound and very successful when you think about it. But again, it's what really separates, you know, commercial spaceflight works kind of the opposite ways. It's like, what can we do that then is useful to people? Human spaceflight is where should we go that we think we can pull off but space science is the only part of the space activities that we do where we start with the fundamental goals first and then from there use that to define our program and this is why i think space science is so successful and has been so successful for so long and again it shows you that power of understanding what the questions, I always think of Douglas Adams is, you know, what's the meaning of life, the universe and

everything? Well, you can get the answer. But defining the question can sometimes, yeah, the question can be really hard to figure out first, right? Once you have the questions, that just gives you then so much that gives you the pathway to the answer. So it's a really important process. And I'm glad you picked up on that, because it's one of the things that I've realized, again, this process that we've created of defining science and promoting science for the sake of science, is this powerful way of building consensus and helping people work together in cooperative and peaceful ways. By the way, Casey, speaking of life, the universe and everything, the answer, 42, is also the number of years that Jim Green, the NASA chief scientist, will have worked for NASA, the space agency, when he retires early next year. And this is all a plug for the weekly Planetary Radio, our December 1st episode, which featured Jim Green and Mary Wojtek, the head of the astrobiology program at NASA, in what I think was the best astrobiology discussion ever on Planetary Radio. And we'll talk with Jim more about the time he retires early next year.

To close out, of course, we direct you to planetary.org to learn much more, including the analysis of the JWST budget over the years, all the spending on this grand project that was assembled by my colleague, Casey Dreyer. And it is also where you can go to planetary.org slash join and become one of us, a member of the Planetary Society or planetary.org slash give. You don't have to be a member to support our work. If you go to planetary.org slash give and just look for the Planetary Fund, that will get you in on our big end of the year fundraising push so that we can keep enabling Casey and all of his colleagues, my colleagues, to do the good work we do on your behalf as fans of space science and space exploration. With that, Casey, unless you have anything to add, we'll close out the December

2021 Planetary Radio. And I'll just wish you happy holidays and a wonderful new year. And we'll talk on the first Friday in January, I hope. I hope so too, Matt. We'll see you next year and happy holidays. And thank you everyone so much for listening this year. And hopefully next year will be better on the upswing. Or if it's been a great year for you, continues to be better. Hear, hear. Thank you, Casey. And thank you all of you for joining us once again here for the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan at Astro.