Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Spaceward Bound: Chris McKay Leads Scientists and Teachers in the Mojave Desert

Episode Date: April 16, 2007

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Transcription by CastingWords This is the last video's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. This time, that final frontier is at the end of a gravel road in California's Mojave Desert. That's where I spent a day with planetary scientist Chris McKay and the 90 participants in this year's Spaceward Bound program. We'll give you a taste of their adventure in science and learn how this NASA-supported project helps to prepare the space scientists, engineers, and astronauts that are now in America's middle and high school classrooms. We'll also have our usual visits with Emily Lakdawalla for Q&A and with Bruce Betts for this week's What's Up.

We need to apologize to some of you before we get to this week's space headlines. Those of you who catch our podcast may be hearing us for the first time in a couple of weeks. No, we weren't on vacation, but we did have trouble with our server. If you'd like to catch up, you'll find our April 2nd and 9th shows in the archive at planetary.org slash radio. I suppose some apologies are also being heard at NASA this week. The space agency announced that the loss of Mars Global Surveyor last fall was due in large part to human error rather than old age. Emily has posted a comprehensive story at planetary.org.

While you're there, you can also read about the first-ever discovery of water in a planet's atmosphere. Wait, make that an extrasolar planet. It's called HD 209458 b. Amazing, isn't it, that we're able to learn so much about places that are still too many light-years away to see directly? The European Space Agency's Venus Express has reached its one-year anniversary orbiting Second Rock. The probe has sent back an enormous amount of data, including spectacular images. And NASA has announced extension of its contract with the Russian Federal Space Agency for support of the International Space Station. Humans and cargo will continue to ride Russian vehicles at least into 2011.

Time to hear from Emily. I'll be right back with Chris McKay in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, is it theoretically possible that there is a planet between the Sun and Mercury? Late in the 19th century, scientists theorized that there was another planet orbiting closer to the Sun than Mercury. This extra planet, which they named Vulcan, was required to explain puzzling perturbations in Mercury's orbit. But in 1905, Albert Einstein published his paper on special relativity, and this new theory explained all the characteristics of Mercury's orbit without having to resort to an additional undetected planet.

However, mathematical models of the physics of the solar system do suggest that it's theoretically possible for there to be small asteroids orbiting in the space between the Sun and Mercury. These objects have been named vulcanoids, yet no one has ever seen one. Because they orbit so close to the Sun and are very small and very dark, it has been impossible so far for astronomers to spot them from Earth. So how can we find out anything about them? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out.

Southern Californians know it as the road to Las Vegas. And as they head for Sin City on Interstate 15, they may wonder about the turnoff toward Zizek's Road, just south of Baker. Take that turnoff and you find the pavement soon ends. You still have four miles of gravel before you reach the California State University's Desert Research Station at the side of a dry lake bed. Last March, this former resort became home to 90 visitors from throughout the United States and beyond. The majority were middle school and high school science teachers. They came to do real science, working with some of the world's best biologists, geologists, and others for nearly a week, brought together as part of NASA's Spaceward Bound program.

Their leader was Chris McKay, the agency's program scientist for the Robotic Lunar Exploration Program, and a frequent visitor to some of our planet's most extreme environments, where we are learning what we'll need to know if we are ever to recognize life on Mars and elsewhere in the universe. Beautiful place, good science, great people. Somebody could get addicted to this kind of thing. Yeah, I think we are. This is a great idea. We've been doing field expeditions to remote Mars-like environments for many years.

Starting a couple years ago, we started involving teachers, bringing them along. We didn't change what we were doing at all. We just incorporated the teachers. So this is teachers involved in real scientific exploration. They get to see science being made. You get to see collaborations and field interactions just as we would in our normal expeditions. And they love it. And they integrate themselves into our teams. They do great work. The scientists love the teachers. The teachers

love what we're doing. It looks like it's a really, really a lot of fun and it's working. I love how the researchers who were just giving reports inside, they were saying, and if you, you know, if you help me collect data or if you were with me in the lab, make sure I get your name. Some of these folks may show up in a journal somewhere. Of course, yeah, they've been helping us directly in the field. So this is real research doing real science in the field, and the teachers are being recruited as if they were graduate students or postdocs and being brought into the activity.

And to my view, that's a real important aspect of what we're doing, which is we are doing actual science. We're here trying to make discoveries, trying to publish papers, trying to make insights into life in extreme environments as relevant to the exploration of Mars. And that's what we want the teachers to take away with them. to the exploration of Mars. And that's what we want the teachers to take away with them. We want them to realize that they participated in this, capture it, and then get it across to their kids somehow and inspire their kids to be doing this in the future.

I was soon in a van with two of those teachers. Roger Spears teaches in Craig, Colorado, while Doug Porter is from Cincinnati, Ohio. We were on a dirt road headed even deeper into the desert. Tell me guys, are your students following along online? They will be. We're on spring break right now, which worked out good for me coming out here. But as soon as I get back, all the webcasts and the different things we've done will be online for us to go through and let them see it. How about in your case? In our case, our spring break was last week,

so I left all the information about the webcasts that we did yesterday, and hopefully there was a number of them that tuned in. Not only did I tell my students, but also a lot of my colleagues and administrators and tried to get the word out of what we were doing. You got your last night here tonight. I mean, my impression is that it's become, if not a family, at least a pretty tight community. Oh, yeah. We've made all kinds of new connections and new friends, people that we'll stay in contact

with and share ideas with. So that's another really good part of this is you just get to know so many people and make so many new connections. Is that the social side of it? Is it important for you as well? Oh, I think so. It re-energizes you especially, knowing that there's other people just like us

that are interested in many of the same things. Our van came to a stop only after rattling our brains for a few more miles. Roger, Doug, and I were happy to get out and gather around Loren Fletcher, an engineer scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, where he works with Chris McKay. Loren told us about the jumbled ridge of black rock we had parked next to and our mission for the next couple of hours.

Today we are at the SEMA lava flows in the Mojave National Preserve. Now, there's a series of flows where the first ones that you can see in the northeast side of the valley towards I-15 are in the 3- to 5-million-year-old range. And then there's this series that we're at right now that start at 500,000 and then the next one right almost on top of it is at 120,000 years, and then a little bit farther to the southwest is the youngest one which is in that 10 to 20,000 year old range. What are you looking for out here? Well today what we're trying to do is

we're doing a microbiology and an organic soil matter analysis of each of these flows the 500 the 120 and the 10 and we're comparing what is the organic environment on top of and next to each one of these flows. Our research plan is to take soil samples from three different points along the length of the volcanic flow, both on top of the flow as well as next to the flow, and then each individual location, we're going to take a little bit of soil from three different points very close to it and then mix that together in one bag. So I have this sterile scoop, which I open up the bag carefully.

And with one end, I'm going to hold it with my hand without touching the scoop area. Touch only the handle. And pull it out of the bag. And then I can just scoop up, you know, some of the sand from here. And then we're just going to go ahead and try and get it as best we can. You got a GPS unit. We record every location that we're at because we want to actually be able to get back to it in the event that something interesting comes up. Yeah.

And then the advent of the GPS was a wonderful thing because before people would take notes, okay, mile 300.9 at this road, get off, go sort of like those pirate directions, three steps to the right from this palm tree, and you hop four times like a bunny to the left, and then there's your spot. The GPS has really solved that problem. It's really kind of a wonderful thing. If I start sounding like Groucho Marx, we've got to take science very seriously here. We can't have much fun.

Oh, yeah, we never laugh on this show. No laughs, no laughs allowed. The samples collected from the desert would end up back in one of the labs at the research center where other teachers were picking up new skills. And today I did a 0.5 gram sample of 15E and 17A. So we're going to run these five, plus we're going to run our ladder. So what we'll do, and I think Paula's going to show you guys how to do this, is you're going to measure out

18 microliters of these sample DNAs we just did. And it's kind of cool because there's this little hole and you have to mix the DNA in the loading buffer and then take it up in your pipe batter and hold it very carefully and get it in the hole and release it. Otherwise, you can poke it through the gel or you can just let it release outside the gel. And we've all made these mistakes. It's nothing new.

The hands-on experiences went hand-in-hand with lectures provided by Chris McKay and the other scientists who had joined the spaceward-bound teachers. Using molecular methods, if we find something that looks like an Earth organism, we can still tell how long ago it must have left Earth. So if it was transported to Mars by a rock that blasted off Earth during the CT boundary impact, we can actually detect that if it was proliferating on Mars since then. Because using the molecular clock techniques when you look at the evolution

because that organism will keep evolving. So we will be able to tell that that organism didn't have any communication with organisms on Earth for the last 65 million years. Yes? If it stays as four for 65 million years, I'll be very impressed. That's true. That's true. That's why I said you had to be reproducing. Now, even more interesting, of course, would be we go to Mars and we find life, and it's not even on our tree of life. It doesn't even have DNA. It's really alien.

Then we'll know it didn't come from Earth. That's the case I'm hoping for. come from Earth. That's the case I'm hoping for. And then the question is, how do we develop an activity that students could do that illustrates those same points that could be done in parallel

as MSL is doing its thing on Mars in 2010? They could be doing the same thing, maybe even out here in the Mojave. Imagine a field trip out here, they go to the stromatolite site or they go to the lava flow site and they do those same steps with some sort of handheld instruments

or simplified versions that are still interesting and useful. So what I want to do in the last 20 minutes now before we break before dinner is just brainstorm how we could do that. the last 20 minutes now before we break before dinner is just brainstorm what that uh what how we could do that yeah i suggest an led and a set of colored glasses and you've got a spectrometer we'll continue our day with nasa's spaceward bound program in california's mojave desert

including a closing comment from planetary scientist ch McKay when Planetary Radio continues. 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 new worlds welcome back to a special edition of planetary radio i'm matt caplan we're looking back at nasa's week-long spaceward bound program held last march deep in the mojave desert between los angeles and las vegas 90 people most of the middle and high school science teachers came to this place of magnificent desolation to conduct real science and share their experience with their students back home via webcasts, blogs, and other tools. Dan Ray teaches 7th and 8th grade science in central Indiana.

As we talked, a small bear kept an eye on us. As we talked, a small bear kept an eye on us. Actually, that bear was Mrs. Chippy, a teddy bear who accompanied one of Dan's colleagues on a NASA mission to the Arctic and was authoring her own science blog during Dan's week in the Mojave. You'll find a link at planetary.org slash radio where we have other information about the Spaceward Bound program. One day we got to work with the robot that has been a big point of interest. And so I actually put their assignment up. I had them Google a search of space robots and find out what NASA is doing with space robots and ask them some specific questions about the rovers on Mars and just had them

do some Internet research and answer some questions. So they were doing something directly related to what I was doing while I was here. What else does this mean to you as a teacher and especially to your kids? I mean, what will you be able to bring back to them? Well, first of all, you come out of here with so many ideas that it's almost impossible to get them all to line up and be still long enough to get your brain around them. But you take back an awful lot of enthusiasm. You have resources, people that you can contact when you have questions,

other teachers and educators and the ideas that they develop. And it's a real sharing kind of a community here. So we all go home with a lot of enthusiasm, with our own little different perspective on what we've done here, and we start putting together new ideas and new lessons. And then over the next several months, and especially over the summer, we'll share those with each other and basically have a whole fresh look at most of what we try to cover in our curriculum. That rover Dan Ray just mentioned was in the care of roboticist Maite Trujillo.

care of roboticist Maite Trujillo. You brought it to a cave today and that there's potential for using rovers like this to explore caves, perhaps on Mars. Yes, exactly. We did a couple of days ago, we took the rover inside of the cave and the idea was to use the rover so that it will take measurements in areas where people cannot easily access them. It was the last evening everyone would be together in the desert. Time for the research teams to make presentations and take questions from their new colleagues

and friends. Some of them would be leaving right after dinner. So this was Chris McKay's last chance to speak to the entire group. It was really inspiring. It was really great to be out in the field and be interacting with you all, scientists, teachers alike, and I thought it was real useful. And thanks to the little kids for adding comic relief. Well, thanks, everybody.

Thank you. Well, thanks, everybody. As the dinner bell sounded, project leader Chris McKay and I stood in the magnificent Mojave twilight on the edge of the dry lake bed. We still have so much to learn about life on Earth, and particularly life on Earth in extreme environments. Exactly. Extreme environments have been understudied. And, in fact, the motivation of studying them for planetary purposes, because of Mars and Europa and so on, has really opened up a lot of questions that on Earth people just haven't been interested in asking,

like finding the place on Earth with the least amount of life. Well, who's interested in that? Well, planetary scientists are interested in that. So we've been the ones that have been exploring the driest deserts in the world and the places where life is on its very, very edge. Why is NASA supporting a program like this with teachers? Well, the funding for this program right now comes from the ESMD, the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. And basically the argument for them supporting it is that we are building rockets and crew vehicles

that are going to take astronauts to the moon and Mars beginning in 2015 and going on. So let's imagine a group of astronauts landing on the moon in 2020 and a group of astronauts landing on Mars in 2025 and ask, where are those astronauts today? Well, the answer is they're in the classroom of these teachers. They're in middle school and below. These teachers are the ones that are going to inspire those students to become the astronauts that are going to drive the hardware that we're now building. And it's sort of like the driver's wanted sign.

We need to start training the drivers of these spacecraft and rockets and inspiring them and to have them understand that we're going to the moon and Mars to do great things, great things in field exploration. And so we think that the kind of field exploration we're doing is a motivating factor, and if they can get hooked in doing this kind of science, they'll see naturally why going to the moon and Mars is important and useful and why humans going to the moon and Mars is going to give us a scientific and cultural harvest that's going to be really enormous.

Chris, thanks so much. You're having a great time, aren't you? Yeah, I love it. This is where I want to be. To heck with being in the office. It's twilight now at the Desert Studies Center on the edge of the dry lake bed, out at the end of Zizek's Road. Everybody's inside, about to enjoy their last dinner together before they head home to share what they've learned here in this oasis of science.

I'll be headed home, too, pretty soon. But I'll be right back with this week's edition of What's Up? and Bruce Betts after this return visit by Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. It's possible that there are asteroids orbiting in the space between Mercury and the Sun, but so far they have eluded astronomers. These objects, named vulcanoids, would be very small and very dark and very close to the Sun. In order to spot them, astronomers have to point their telescopes nearly at the horizon just after sunset or just before sunrise, terrible conditions for viewing faint objects.

But the very fact that no vulcanoids have yet been observed does actually tell us something about them, if they exist. Telescopes could have spotted objects that were more than a few tens of kilometers long, so we know that vulcanoids must be smaller than that. And the region of space between the Sun and Mercury is not wide, so there can't be more than a few dozen or couple hundred of them, or else they'd collide with each other and obliterate each other until that small number was reached. Unfortunately, it's probably not going to be possible

to spot these things from Earth's surface. In order to find vulcanoids, we need a telescope to fly above Earth's atmosphere, a telescope that can use the bulk of the Earth, or maybe the Moon, to block out the Sun and search the space near it. Until then, we won't know whether or not these elusive objects actually exist. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio.

It's time for What's Up? With Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He's going to tell us about the night sky and things with Z, actually astronauts with Zs in them. And that's not the first person to sleep in space, which I think was one of your trivia questions once. Yes, yes, it was. Okay. Yes, I'm sorry I didn't think ahead.

I could have made the entire episode alliteration with Zs using all those Z words. Now I'm trying to think of some clever Z thing to say, but I'm not. Yeah, I can see that. You saw the wheels turning. Yeah, exactly. My eyes rolled up in my head. Well, let's go through this in a zippy kind of a way. Okay.

Venus, Venus, Venus, V, that's near Z. Venus dominating that evening sky, skies, skies. Skies. Venus dominating the early evening off there in the west, looking like the brightest star in the sky. Saturn in the early evening as well, pretty high overhead. After sunset in the early evening, as I mentioned last week, on April 24th, if you get confused which one's Venus,

go out there April 24th or even April 25th, and you'll be able to see it very close to the moon on both nights. You can also, in the pre-dawn, see Jupiter very high up in the sky looking like a really bright star, and Mars looking like not so bright star over there in the pre-dawn eastern sky. All right, on to this week in space history. 35 years ago, Matt, 35 years ago. Anything with a 35 in the last few years usually means Apollo.

Apollo 16 landed on the moon, going to a highlands location, those bright areas of the moon, giving us some neat science, neat rocks. And in 1970 this week, Apollo 13 crew returned safely to Earth after their harrowing journey. Hell of a story. Great movie, too. Indeed. You know, we did forget to mention something last week. It was Yuri's night, April 12th. Okay, that's true. So an anniversary of the first flight of a human in space, Yuri Gagarin. That's just to make sure that our Russian friends don't

write to us immediately and tell us, hey, you know what you forgot again? Because I think we forgot it last year as well. Next year. No, we didn't. We did not? No. Oh, all right.

Well, maybe the year before that. No. The year before that. No. Just this year. We were doing it, yes, just this year. Okay. Yeah.

We did it even before we started the show. I would let people know just from my balcony. Never has been forgotten. You better go on. Yeah, that'd be good. On to Random Space Fact! Little Day the Earth Stood. No, not Day the Earth Stood.

Still Forbidden Planet action there. Little Theremin action. All right not Day the Earth Stood. Still forbidden planet action there. Little theremin action. All right. On to the actual fact. Like, we had a, we're going to talk about Neptune's rings. And you may remember this, but Neptune's rings, when they were first discovered in stellar occultations from Earth, so when stars passed behind and dimmed, they didn't look like they went all the way around the planet. They looked like ring arcs.

I got the term ring arcs, and it wasn't until Voyager 2 then flew by not that long after that it looked back and realized they are complete rings, but they're all clumpy and weird and twisted and psycho. Well, everything but the psycho. There you go. Let's go on to trivia. Well, everything but the psycho. There you go.

Let's go on to trivia. And we asked you in our glorious April Fool's show, who was the first person in orbit with the letter Z in their name? How did we do, Matt? We had quite a diversity of responses this time around. And there were a lot of people, like our winner, who pointed out that if we count nicknames, that it's really easy to come up with this, because not only does he have one Z, he has two.

Oh, bonus points. Buzz Aldrin. Buzz Aldrin, November 11, 1966, on Gemini 12, and then, of course, went on to fly up there and leave some footprints with Neil Armstrong. Now, there were also people who said, okay, if you're not counting nicknames, how about Paul Weitz, who flew on Skylab in 1973? In fact, our winner said both, John Lees. John Lees from Moorpark, California.

We just had him just recently, he won. But, hey, you know, that's what happens when you have a random number generator. Random number generator. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, and into that random number generator went everyone who gave us either of those answers, for fairness. But I will point out that Buzz has made that his official name. So it's legal now.

It is legal. It is not just a nickname. He is Buzz. You doesn't legal now. It is legal. It is not just a nickname. He is Buzz. You doesn't have to call him Edwin. Yeah, I wouldn't do that. No. Yeah, you only do that once. I'm kidding. Totally making it up. You only tell

him that he didn't really go to the moon once, too, apparently. That's good for Buzz. Okay. All right, let's go on. How about we give you another trivia contest that contest that doesn't involve astronauts this time around, but instead involves the European space mission Rosetta, which is on its very long flight, headed for a comet for its main purpose. It just flew by Mars recently.

But it's also scheduled to go by two asteroids. As of now, which two asteroids is Rosetta scheduled to fly by? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to get us your entry, and compete to be entered into the random number generator. We promise it won't hurt. I spit you right out. You've got until Monday, April 23 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that entry. All right, everybody, go out there looking up at the night sky and think about balloons

and whether there are any up there that you're not seeing right now. Thank you, and good night. I certainly hope so. I hope there are always balloons up there, whether I can see them or not, because they're so pretty. Bruce Betts is the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up? Balloons. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California.

Have a great week, everyone. Thank you.