Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Spectacular Jupiter!

Episode Date: June 7, 2017

Have you seen its stunning image of Jupiter’s south pole? The Juno orbiter is surpassing expectations and delivering surprising science. Scott Bolton, the mission’s Principal Investigator, is back with a thrilling report.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mighty Jupiter as we've never seen it, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Jupiter is under the eye of Juno, and under the spacecraft's other instruments that peer far below that world's madly swirling surface. Juno Principal Investigator Scott Bolton is here to review the amazing science. Bill Nye also joins me for a conversation that stretches from India to William Shatner. Later, Bruce Fetz will try his hand at space opera as we get a random space fact and hear about the night sky. Jason Davis is the Planetary Society's digital editor. Jason, welcome back to the show to talk about this June 2nd news.

Well, you brought it to us on June 2nd in the blog at planetary.org. What is this new development toward getting LightSail 2 into Earth orbit? LightSail's ride to orbit, which is Prox1, it's this little kind of small washing machine sized spacecraft that houses our little CubeSat. Prox1 shipped from its home in Georgia Tech, at Georgia Tech, where it was built, out to Albuquerque, New Mexico. And that's where the Air Force Research Lab is. The Air Force has the primary payload on the rocket,

the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, that we'll be using to get into space. So they also have sponsored PROX-1, this small spacecraft. Light sail goes inside PROX-1. So it's a pretty big milestone to actually ship one of the major pieces of hardware for the launch.

And we're expecting that we'll be following along soon to meet up with them out there. Prox-1, called that because of, you know, like proximate, nearby. I guess when you hear what this spacecraft is hoping to demonstrate, you could understand why the Air Force might just be interested. Yeah, yeah. So Prox-1 stands for, well, proximity operations. And in the space world, proximity operations means kind of moving around another object and examining it. In this case, PROX-1 was designed to kind of demonstrate autonomous proximity operations, meaning it could photograph something near it or look at something near it.

And, yeah, you can see how the Air Force might be interested in that if they wanted to kind of slide up to another satellite and take some pictures of it, for instance. Yeah, well, but with any luck, it means we're going to get some great shots of LightSail 2 that it wouldn't be able to take as a selfie. There is one really charming element I want to leave people with in this, and it's how I mean element I want to leave people with in this, and it's how Prox One got down from the upper floor at the university so that it could be shipped. Yeah. So apparently in this building where Prox One was assembled, there is no elevator. I don't know the backstory on that. I just know that there was no elevator. So it had to come down the stairs. You know, it's a pretty delicate piece of hardware. You can't just pick it up like a suitcase and haul it around. You need to make sure it's on some stabilized cart or piece of equipment.

So the question is, how do you get it down the stairs? So this special moving equipment was brought in by this company called Georgia Rigging. And I have asked for photographs of this and have not been able to get any. And I keep pestering the team, when are you going to send me the pictures of the robot? But apparently this special stair climbing device is able to take the spacecraft down the stairs while keeping it level and get it out the door safely into a FedEx truck. Sounded pretty cool. The age we live in, robots are riding other robots now. Thank you. Thanks so much, Jason. Yeah, thanks, Matt. Jason Davis, he's the digital editor for the Planetary Society

and our embedded correspondent with the LightSail project, and ProxOne is very much a part of that, as you just heard. Bill, there is so much going on, a little bit of a potpourri today, beginning in Asia. That's our style, Matt. That's our style. India, the Indian Space Research Organization, built a rocket so big. How big is it? It's big enough to fly people. It's big enough to fly people. And so, you know, I was in India for the Astronautical Congress several years ago, and it was a classic question from a student. He said, why are we doing this? We have poor people here.

We need food. We need government infrastructure. We need infrastructure run by government. Why are we building rockets? Why do we have a space program? The officials of the Indian Space Research Organization said, because it brings out the best in us, because it advances our society, because it's inspirational. Well, wait, wait, there's more.

Now they're going to have their own weather satellite systems and their own navigation systems built by and for Indians. And that is fantastic. I mean, it's really a milestone or a kilometer marker, everybody. And just as a sidelight story today in First Look, Turkey is going to develop a rocket to put satellites in orbit. Everybody's getting in on this game. Because it's exciting and everybody wants so-called space assets, satellites, generally in low Earth orbit that can provide navigation services. And the future, Matt, I believe is internet access in remote locations provided by what we would call low altitude satellites. I mean, there are hundreds of kilometers above us,

but they're much lower than tens of thousands of kilometers. Anyway, the other thing I find amazing is we found an exoplanet that's extremely hot and is tidally locked with its star. And we found it with the KELT, the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope in Arizona. And the astronomers are so diligent and their ability to process signals so sophisticated that they found this exoplanet. Matt, I'm telling you, sooner or later, maybe sooner, we're going to find an exoplanet with methane in its atmosphere and oxygen, and we're going to wonder if there isn't something living there. You just stay tuned, people. And then the last one that is just fantastic to me, William Shatner wants to have a program highlighting young NASA scientists, up-and-coming NASA professionals.

William Shatner wants to have a show. I mean, it's fantastic. This is just a fantastic week in space, Matt. And many more to come. Thank you, Bill. This has been fun. Thank you, Matt. That's Bill Nye.

He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. And you know what Captain Kirk said, our business is risk. I've always wanted to see Jupiter from up close, to stare down at that surface that is not really a surface, skim the great red spot and lose myself among its swirling bands of color and light. But I don't want to get a lethal dose of radiation in minutes, and no one has offered me a ride anyway. Fortunately, we have Juno doing the job for us, with eyes that see or sense far more than our own could. It was just two weeks ago that the Juno team unveiled a rich library of science data gathered by the spacecraft in just its first few months circling the planet. I couldn't wait to get Scott Bolton back with us to talk about these results and more.

Scott is the principal investigator for the Juno mission. We talked via Skype a few days ago. the Juno mission. We talked via Skype a few days ago. He was at home, not far from the headquarters of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. Scott Bolton, thank you so much for returning to Planetary Radio, and congratulations. Holy cow, that is some world you are revealing to us. Yeah, I'm amazed at it myself. I mean, I always thought Jupiter was an amazing planet, but you get close up and personal to it, the images are just stunning. I mean, I'm awed at the beauty of this planet. And you're not alone. I think that that image of the South Pole, albeit a little bit of false color going on there, but that image, and everybody listening

knows the one I'm talking about, that is destined to become one of the great iconic images of our solar system. I have no doubt. Yeah, I agree with you. And you know, the amazing thing is these images are all made by the public. We post these raw data from the imager onto our website, and we're dependent on them to create the pictures. And they made that picture just like all the other ones. It's incredible. I think if somebody had showed you that picture five years ago, nobody would guess that that was Jupiter. Bill Nye on this show last week said it looked like something out of like the world's most expensive kaleidoscope. I agree. It does look like that. And, you know, you watch these things,

people are even putting little videos of the images onto YouTube, the same people that are creating them. Some of them are put to music and you just can watch these things and go on a journey like you're orbiting the planet, like you're on Juno. And it's the beauty, the complexity, this has got to be the most beautiful planet in our solar system. Of course, I love Earth a little bit more because we're here. But wow, that planet is something. I'll say, we're going to come back to the camera because I've spent a little time with JunoCam. I got to hold it, actually, at JPL when I was talking to Candy Hansen on your team. But let's talk about the science, too.

I read, well, I can't remember the exact number, over 30 papers already based on your data? Actually, it's more than that. 44 papers were published simultaneously in a scientific journal, plus two articles in the journal Science itself. And there's more coming. I mean, some of them couldn't get done in time for that special issue, so they'll be added later online. So we're sitting there probably above 50 papers all at once. You haven't even been orbiting the planet for a year. We haven't been orbiting for a year. And more importantly, it takes a while to write a paper and get it through the system. So those papers, those 50 papers or so, are all based on the first two flyby close passes of Jupiter. We have all this data after that,

that we're still going through and getting ready to publish again. I remember even after the first pass, we talked at a conference and there were surprises just out of that, right from the start, like about the storms that you saw. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lesson here. You know, this is why we explore. But when you get to a new vantage point and you put on some new kinds of instruments that you haven't flown before, the discoveries are unbounding. I mean, they just come. And, of course, this is why we explore.

We've never been this close to a giant planet before. And when you get up really close with sensitive instruments, you see things that you didn't expect. You couldn't even imagine. It is the great truth of all planetary science missions. There will be surprises. Let's talk about some of what you're already learning. Begin with those famous belts or bands that I can even see with my little telescope from Earth. Yeah, they're gorgeous. And you can see that when we look at the visible light images. So we have this special instrument on board that looks through the clouds for the first time. It can see a few hundred kilometers down.

So when you look underneath the belts, I mean, I think most scientists thought we would see hints of the zones and belts at every latitude, even deep, and we don't. It seems to be replaced with a different structure. I don't think anybody fully understands it. Nobody expected that. There were a lot of surprises. There's a big equatorial band that seems to go as deep as we can see. And it's just a narrow strip right near the equator. And it's warmer and has more ammonia than anything else around it. You know, that was a real surprise to us that there's instead of the zones and belts, like you would have thought, you see this completely different structure. And you go really deep before the ammonia really peaks out.

It keeps increasing all the way down as far as we can see. For all as we know, it may even go deeper. When you say very deep, how far below the tops of those clouds is Juno letting us look? Juno looks down about what we measure it in pressure. So it's about 1,000 bars pressure. And, of course, one bar of pressure is what we feel we measure it in pressure. So it's about a thousand bars pressure. And of course, one bar of pressure is what we feel on the earth at sea level. That's our atmosphere pushing down at sea level. That's a few hundred kilometers down into Jupiter, which is, you know, well below the cloud tops. And so the naive assumption that people have made for decades

is that once you drop below the cloud tops and the sunlight is basically shaded out, right, you can't get the sunlight in there, that Jupiter would just be uniform, kind of boring. Everything would be mixed up. That wasn't true. Not only are there features down there, but it's variable as a function of latitude, and it appears to be very variable, independent of the zone and belt structure. I mean, it's variable, but it doesn't seem to be tying itself to the zones and belts. This is an incredibly complex world. It is. I think actually it's representative of maybe all giant planets. You know, we just haven't gotten that close to one of them before. And so this is our first example of looking in deep and getting really close to one.

Maybe they're all like this. And we just have to rethink how do these giant planets work? You know, and in hindsight, I always scratch my head and I think, well, why did we think it would be all uniform? I was going to make this point later on, but since you brought it up, most of the planets we found, largely because of our own limitations about what we can see so far, most of the planets we found elsewhere in the galaxy are more like Jupiter than they are like Earth. So we're learning about stuff all over, aren't we? Oh, yeah. Jupiter is definitely our example of giant planets, and they're all over the place. Some of them are a lot bigger than

Jupiter. And so this is a mainstay in the universe and in the galaxy. And we need to understand planets in general. And giant planets are their own beast. And there's similarities that people wouldn't have expected between Earth and Jupiter. I can't say that we understand it, but this equatorial band around Jupiter that goes really deep looks a little bit like our tropical band. Now, we have an explanation for our tropical band that doesn't really work for Jupiter, and that is that we think that the circulation comes down and hits a surface, whether it be ground or land or sea, and so the atmosphere kind of has a return flow, and you get this equatorial tropical band. We wouldn't have thought Jupiter would have that because there is no sea or land underneath. It's fluid all the way down, but there it is. So maybe that's the general nature of atmospheres and we thought it was just Earth. If we go way down, down below where Juno can see anyway, one of the great mysteries

I know that you were hoping to discover more about is what's down at the center, at the core of this planet. You already mentioned the metallic hydrogen that Bill Nye brought up last week. Is Juno beginning to give us clues about what's down at the center of Jupiter. Absolutely. I mean, you say, you know, how far does Juno see? Well, we see in different ways, and it's not the way our eyes work, right? The microwave looks into the deep atmosphere, but we measure the gravity field, which looks all the way down. We were really thinking there were two different possibilities. One was Jupiter had a compact core of heavy elements, sort of a rocky core in the middle of it, like an earth, maybe one to 10 earth masses in the middle. And the other was there was

nothing. It was just gas all the way down. It turns out neither are true. Our data is not consistent with a compact core. It doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it looks like there's some sort of a fuzzy core instead, something that's distributed that's much larger than a compact thing, maybe half the size of the planet. And that was totally unexpected. And there's motions. We see the gravity field seems to be consistent with very deep motions or zonal winds going around. And I don't think that was expected either. There are really no models that currently explain this data. And there's almost a theme here because the magnetic field sees the same

thing. You mentioned the metallic hydrogen. That's where we think the magnetic field is created or just above that layer. And we see very, very narrow features in the magnetic field on a couple of these close passes. Some passes don't have it, which means that this field may be being created very close to the surface compared to what we thought. Generally, the metallic hydrogen is thought to be created about two megabars down in pressure. The core or the center of Jupiter would be 40 megabars. And all of those look different than we thought. It looks like there's motions going on. So at all levels, there's winds, motions, convection.

Things are moving around, churning around inside of Jupiter. It's not as simple as we thought. I don't want to stretch this analogy or metaphor too far because we don't think Jupiter is actually a living thing. But when you look at all these dynamic processes going on in this big world, do you ever start to think of it as a living thing? I think it is sort of like that. I mean, I look at the earth that way too, sort of like a living organism. It's evolving, it's changing, it's very complex. I mean, I don't know if it's alive in the way that we define something's alive and reproduces and et cetera like that.

But it is like a living organism in the sense that it's sensitive and can be affected by things and very complex. And Jupiter is certainly that way. I mean, all you got to do is look at the atmosphere and how it varies and how all these incredible dynamics are going on to realize that it really is like a living thing. And inside, it must be that way too. Back to the magnetic field because, as you said, you're getting surprises there too. It also is more complicated than anybody thought.

Absolutely, it's more complicated. And this theme that things are more complicated and very variable, even though it was unexpected, we actually designed for it. So one of the great outcomes of the first two flybys in these papers is that we have the right tool. We may have learned a lot of things about Jupiter and discovered that it wasn't like we thought and we don't have all the answers yet. But we've also verified and confirmed that Juno is the right tool to figure this out. We have the right kind of instruments and we have the right kind of orbit. And if we just finish the mapping, you know, the key is going to be seeing how variable it is as a function of longitude. Every time we come close past, we go by a different longitude and we slowly map out the

whole planet. And that's what's going to reveal to us how it's really working. Are you at all concerned about getting all the science that you want to get from this mission with this, you know, longer orbital period than you were originally hoping for? I'm not concerned about the longer orbit per se, because the science still works. I mean, I think the discoveries we've made already shows that the measurements can be made with this long orbit just as well as it could have with a short orbit. And the radiation will be a little bit less in the longer orbit, it turns out. But there's always a concern that as we go around, and this was true with any orbit, that eventually the radiation is going to get us. It go through, it gets worse each orbit

a little bit. That's how Juno is designed. I always keep my fingers crossed. It's always very tense every time we get close to the planet. We basically come screaming by, right, for two hours every 53 days. And we're designed that way on purpose. You can't get close to this planet for very long without dying. And so we come in over the poles and we screen past it and try to get whatever measurements we can at that location and then get out of there as fast as you can. That technique works, but we all know that eventually, even with that dive bomber mentality, we're going to get burned. It's sort of a race. There's a fuse lit. How many of these can we get through before something fails?

So far, all of our shielding is holding up. It's a little bit like Star Trek, which the shields are still holding. Shields at 60%, sir. Well, I'd say we're at 90%, 95% still. But we know they're going to go down quickly at the end, especially after the second half of the mission. So we're going to approach on July 7th the seventh pass. July 11th, I'm sorry. We'll go by the seventh pass.

What's special about that one is we're going to go right over the Great Red Spot. And so for the first time, we're going to see that up close and personal. And everybody on my team is dying to know what does it look like and how deep are the roots to that great storm. Well, I imagine the images that we get close up from the Great Red Spot are just going to blow us all away. And by the time we get through the 16th pass, we're going to start going through much more severe places. So sometime next year, it'll get even more tense. That's Scott Bolton, leader of the Juno mission, now orbiting Jupiter.

Scott has much more to share after the break. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, Planetary Radio listeners. The Planetary Society now has an official online store. We've teamed up with Chop Shop, known for their space mission posters, to bring you space-inspired art and merchandise. You can find exclusive Planetary Society t-shirts, posters, and more. Visit planetly.com to learn more. That's planet.ly forward slash space shop.

forward slash space shop. Where did we come from? Are we alone in the cosmos? These are the questions at the core of our existence. And the secrets of the universe are out there, waiting to be discovered. But to find them, we have to go into space. We have to explore.

This endeavor unites us. Space exploration truly brings out the best in us. Encouraging people from all walks of life to work together to achieve a common goal. To know the cosmos and our place within it. This is why the Planetary Society exists. Our mission is to give you the power to advance space science and exploration. With your support, we sponsor innovative space technologies, inspire curious minds, and advocate for our future in space. We are the Planetary Society. Join us. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan with my guest, Juno Principal Investigator Scott Bolton. Scott shared something else with me that he's very proud of. Among the citizen scientists who are working with JunoCam images of Jupiter are a few individuals who've

created movies. Scott is particularly impressed by one spectacular flyover animation made by Sean Dorn. It's on YouTube. We've got the direct link on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. I got to think that nobody is watching this mission or the health of your spacecraft more carefully than the people who are planning the Europa Clipper mission for some years from now. Have you had any contact from them? They have to be pleased by what they've seen of what Juno has accomplished and how it's holding up. Absolutely. I mean, we're working very closely with them. I worked closely with them when we were first conceiving of that mission, as well as the European JUICE mission.

They're both sort of based off of Juno's design. They've got their own challenges. They go through a different kind of radiation, a different amount, but the designs of the spacecraft are very similar. And so they're watching us closely, and we're promising to feed them information of how we're doing. One of the big questions is, how do the solar panels hold up? How are the instruments hold up as the radiation accumulates? Of course, we won't get that for a while, but so far it looks really good and promising for them. What other science that Juno is delivering would you want to bring up before we, before we close this conversation? Sure. So, so one of the unique things that Juno has is because we go over the poles, we have quite a few instruments that are designed to look at the aurora of Jupiter, northern and southern lights, and to study the magnetosphere and how it really works and compare it to the Earth and compare it to Saturn.

Some of our science from that is just as puzzling and surprising as the interior and the deep atmosphere. We went by a couple of times over the poles. The aurora are incredibly beautiful, but we don't see what we expected. In fact, we see a bunch of particles, electrons coming out of the planet, not necessarily the ones going in. And so it may work very differently than the way the Earth's aurora work. And I think a lot of scientists assume that, at least in part, it would sort of mirror the Earth. One is we see these particles coming out, so they're getting pulled out of the atmosphere, and as they get pulled out,

they're lighting up the aurora. But another fundamental thing was that the way aurora are created is charged particles come into the atmosphere. This works on the Earth as well. In the case of the Earth, they come off of the solar wind, but they tread up and they go into the atmosphere through the magnetic field lines and they collide with the atmospheric particles and make light. At Jupiter, it's the same process basically, although in some sense, some of them are coming out rather than going in. But the other thing that's interesting is, is that the currents, we measure something called the current density of these particles as they go in. So they're being driven in by a current. And on Earth, it's almost like you've got some pretty fat cables that are carrying the current. On Jupiter, it seems to be the

opposite. The current density is much lower than at the Earth. And it's almost as if instead of a big fat cable or wire going in, you've got a whole bunch of filaments that are near each other, but they're all individual. That's a fundamental difference that I'm not sure we were expecting or do we completely understand. But it does seem to work very differently than the Earth or Saturn. Surprise after surprise. What are the remaining mysteries that you hope Juno will shed light on before it succumbs to how tough it is to live near that planet? Well, we still want to map out the magnetic field and understand how that's really being created. What we've learned so far is that Jupiter doesn't work the way we thought,

that the interior is different, the core is different, but we don't have the answers of how it really is. And so the rest of the mission, we really want to go to get to those answers, definitively say something about the core and the structure and how the motions are working inside the planet. How has it evolved? How did it form? And we're still waiting to really make the key measurements and the analysis that tied to the water abundance, which is a very important question as to how much water is in Jupiter. But already we can see that there's a lot of basic puzzles and knowledge that

we've gained. And one of the biggest things is just that the planet is so variable, even in the upper atmosphere, than anybody expected. I mean, we've been puzzled about why the Galileo probe results back a couple of decades ago looked the way they did. And people thought, well, we should have stuck in more probes. And we got unlucky and went into one spot. And I think one of the things we're learning is that even if we put in three probes, you probably would have got three different answers. And I'm not sure you could interpret it. Wow. So we have to rethink how we're going to explore these giant planets.

Sending in probes may not be the best way to try to understand them because they're very variable. them because they're very variable. And I feel particularly humble about this because more than 10 years ago, I wrote a paper that sort of outlined the way to explore Saturn with a probe. And the assumption was that, you know, when I drop below the atmosphere clouds, everything's going to be well mixed. And I have to admit I'm wrong. It's the blind man and the elephant again. To finish, let's go back to where we started, and that's the citizen science angle in this show, JunoCam primarily. You know, when I talked to Candy Hanson,

she told me how it took you a while to convince her to come in and be in charge of that camera. And then she added how thrilled she is now with what that camera is delivering and the participation that you're getting. Yeah. Candy and I go way back. We're friends for a long time. We both worked on Cassini and different missions together.

And so when we were putting together Juno, I went to her and said, you know, how about participating and working on this? And she's like, no. And I said, look, I want to put a camera on board. I don't know how to run those. You do. Come on. We'll make great pictures. And she's like, no, I'm busy. I'm really busy. I want to work on Mars. I want to work on this. And I said, and I just kept, you know, I was relentless and just kept pushing. That's the word she used. And eventually she caved. And then I said, you know, hey, I have this idea where, you know, all the pictures are just going to go to the public and they'll make them. Can you make that happen? And she's like, well, you know, that sounds like a great idea. Let's see how we would do that. Of course, she's done a fantastic

job. So now she's just excited and I can tell. And her science, you know, historically has been satellite science. She looks at the moons of these planets and Mars and rocky type things. And so that's why it was an uphill battle convincing her. She's like, well, you know, I don't study Jupiter's atmosphere that much. I said, but this mission is really important. Come on. And you're going to become an expert in that. You know, how hard can that be? Come on.

And that was a theme among many of my team members. Steve Levin, who's the project scientist, when I first went to him, he's like, no, I'm busy. I think a lot of people are ready to apologize for their resistance now. Remind me of when you first started pushing for this mission. I kind of got some of the ideas that went into Juno when Cassini was flying by Jupiter. So when Cassini was on its way out to Saturn, Candy and I were actually both working on the mission at the time. And we wanted to turn on the instruments as we flew by Jupiter because we thought, well, we should be able to make some good measurements. And the project and NASA were like,

oh, that's not in the budget. We don't have anything. And Katie and I were like, we got to get this. This is a resource. We got to turn it on as we go by Jupiter. And so we ended up being in charge of sort of organizing that whole plan and advocating for it. And we held workshops to try to define what could be done by Cassini that was important as we went by Jupiter. And one of the instruments on Cassini was a radar instrument that was really intended to look through the atmosphere of Titan and map out what Titan was like at Saturn. It had what we call a radiometer mode. So radar is an active instrument. You send a signal down, it bounces off, and you look at the bounce. And radiometer mode just sort of listens only. It doesn't send a signal.

So they had this mode on there that Mike Janssen and Dewey Mulliman at Caltech had helped put on there. And I said, let's use that to map out Jupiter's radiation belts. And that really gave me the idea of what could be done if you had a much more elaborate version of that and you went over the poles of Jupiter. And then there were other people that were looking at what we could do with the gravity and the magnetic field and sort of just put it all together. So that was around the year 2000 or so. The flyby was December of 2000. So thank goodness, Scott, you hung in there and kept the pressure up to make this mission happen because now we are reaping the rich results. There is still plenty of opportunity for people to get involved with JunoCam, right?

Oh, absolutely. We post the images. We hope more people will get involved. And I think how spectacular they are now is only going to raise that interest. Anybody, whole classrooms can get in. They can do something that just takes a little bit of time. Like they can help vote where we point the cameras. Or they could go in and make their own images. And those takes a little bit of time, like they could help vote where we point the cameras, or they could go in and make their own images.

And those take a little bit more time, but you can invest whatever you wish and get involved with the project. We're so happy with the involvement. We're including some of these people in publications. They're becoming scientists in their own right. And a lot of people are just expressing themselves making images that are more art than science. And I welcome it all. It's incredible. There is so much to be thankful for about this mission. And you are the PI. So most of the gratitude goes to you. Although I know you have a terrific team backing you up. Thank you and best of luck as you continue to gather terrific science and beautiful images from our solar system's biggest world, one that still has lots of mysteries left to solve. Um, and, and it's a large team of people that even helped think of the ideas, put together how it would work.

I mean, I, it wasn't a one man show in any way. I'm very thankful for everybody that got involved and it never would have been possible if it was just restricted to the ideas I had that, that wouldn't have worked. I had to be corrected many times. Well said, Scott. Thank you. And someday, next time we talk face-to-face, you've got a story about Carl Sagan that I hope you'll tell us. I'm happy to share that.

He was a big influence in my life. I met him when I was pretty young. And it is an interesting story because we were both doing something a little bit malicious. Not malicious, but mischievous, I should say. That is a great teaser. I hope we can get you back on soon. Thanks again, and keep it up. All right.

Thank you very much for having me. That's Scott Bolton. He is the principal investigator for the Juno mission, working out of the Southwest Research Institute with a bunch of other partners, including the Marshall Space Flight Center, Lockheed Martin, and JPL, the Jet Propulsion Lab, where the Juno mission is managed. On now, as always, to the What's Up segment with our friend Bruce Betts. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society and joins us every week to talk about all this cool stuff that's going on,

not just up in the sky, but space history and the like. And I don't really care for opera, but that's going to figure into today's show. Surprise to me. Oh, just wait. Wait till you hear the answer to the, or at least part of the answer to the trivia contest. Oh, I thought it was a request for random space fact. Okay. You can go operatic if you want.

But first, tell us about the night sky. Jupiter up in the evening, high in the south, looking really bright. We've also got Saturn rise already up in the early evening in the east looking yellowish and on June 9th the moon will be hanging out really close to Saturn making for a lovely image and the pre-dawn sky it's Venus dominating low in the east in the pre-dawn looking like a super bright star we move on to this week in space history. It was 2010 that Hayabusa, the Japanese mission, finished off the first successful asteroid sample return mission, returning a small amount of samples from the asteroid Itokawa. Troubled mission, and hopefully Hayabusa 2 that we talked about last

week is doing better. Yeah, I mean, Hayabusa was impressive that they had major problems and they still pulled out a scientific victory. All right, we move on to a random space fact, a random space fact. All right, it was what it was. So the solar wind, which is a stream of charged particles coming out from the sun, is actually very weak in terms of pressure compared to the wind on Earth, though it's much, much, much, much faster. So solar wind has typical speeds of two to three million kilometers per hour, but it ends up in terms of pressure being about a thousand times weaker because there's very little of it in terms of material, only about a hundred particles on average per cubic inch. So it's a good thing light sail runs on light, not particles.

It does. It does. It has a small influence from solar wind. But just to confuse everyone, when we talk about solar sailing, we are not sailing on the solar wind. We're sailing on light pressure. All righty, we move on to the trivia question. I asked you, what is the name of the U.S. mission that plans to slam a spacecraft into an asteroid in the 2020s as a kinetic impactor demonstration mission? How do we do? Some confusion this time because the mission you had in mind was at least intended and might still end up being part of sort of a dual mission, was at least intended and might still end up being part of sort of a dual mission, which I will let you explain after we mention that Random.org chose Sam Glick, or Samantha Glick, a first-time winner, I think, of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

She said the DART, Double Asteroid Redirection Test, kind of goes along with AIDA, try to redirect an asteroid. Did she get this right? She did. DART is indeed the U.S. mission that actually will be the impactor that slams into one asteroid of a binary pair. And then by looking at the change in the orbital period of that asteroid around the parent asteroid, they can determine how much effect they had and understand the kinetic impact process better so that we're better prepared someday when we need to deflect a dangerous asteroid. DART is supposed to be part of a two-mission overarching mission called AIDA. I get it, opera.

It's some kind of opera's thing, right, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And the European Space Agency was to provide AIM, which would be an observation spacecraft that did not receive funding. But hopefully, hopefully it will come back and still do it. But they were designed as independent missions that are just better if you do both of them. AIDA is Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment, and we heard that from all sorts of people. Eric O'Day in Medford, Massachusetts says, NASA has got to have some of the world's top minds in ACRO, Acronym Curation and Ratification Office.

Yes, yes. There's a heavy-duty training program. There are programs for graduate students, postdocs, all the way up. Sam, you won yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt, now available also in women's styles, and the 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account from that worldwide non-profit network of telescopes. Have fun looking around the cosmos. Here is, I think, the best comment we got from Torsten Zimmer in Germany. Aida, a true space opera that will break your dart. And from Mel Powell

in Sherman Oaks, California, not far away, I hope the asteroid isn't made of rubber. I'd hate to see the spacecraft just bounce off the thing. And finally, this thoughtful one from Kevin Kimball in Rockledge, Florida. Is NASA going to get sued on this one like it did with Deep Impact? I had forgotten about that. In 2005, NASA was sued by a Russian astrologer for messing up the harmony of the universe. How'd that work out? Not real well for the astrologer, but she should have seen it coming, right?

Ah, good one! Thank you for that. We're ready to move on. Sticking with asteroids and going back to Hayabusa, what class or group of meteorites matches the average composition of samples returned from the asteroid Itokawa by the Hayabusa mission? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You've got until the 14th. That'd be June 14 at 8 a.m. Pacific time. That'd be June 14 at 8 a.m. Pacific time. To get us the answer, get yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt,

a 200-point itelescope.net account, and we'll throw in a Planetary Radio sticker. They're pretty cool, little black stickers with our old logo. So, we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about what opera you would most like to perform in. Thank you, and good night. That's Bruce Pavarotti Betts, as we call

him around here, or never do actually. La la la la la. You warm up there in the background. He is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in

Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its jovial members. Danielle Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.