Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Spinoff 2013: Bringing Space Technology Home

Episode Date: May 13, 2014

NASA has just published "Spinoff 2013," the latest of its annual reports on outstanding innovations developed for space that are solving problems and improving lives here on Earth. Technology Transfer Program Executive Daniel Lockney is our guest.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

More space technology is coming your way this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. NASA has just published Spin-Off 2013. It is loaded with marvelous technologies developed for space, some of which are already making lives better down here on the home planet. We'll talk with Daniel Lochne, NASA's Technology Transfer Program Executive. Bill Nye steps aside this week for a glowing report from the Planetary Society's

Director of Advocacy about the just-released House of Representatives proposal for NASA's 2015 budget. Later, Bruce Betts will present another out-of-this-world celebrity random space fact as we give away a Celestron telescope. It begins here and now with Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla, who just a few days ago provided an update on Europe's comet rendezvous mission. Rosetta is so close, you can almost taste it. It's getting very close to the comet after a decade of travel. It's just begun the final phase of matching orbits with this comet

by doing a very small rocket burn just to make sure that its rockets still work well after its long hibernation. And it has to slow down by about a kilometer per second before it finally rendezvous with the comet later this year. That will happen when? Remind us. It'll happen in August, finally. But, you know, it'll be sort of a long approach period. They're already taking images, and we should, I hope, soon be seeing some more images of the comet as the spacecraft slowly creeps up on it.

It's quite different from going into orbit at a planet where there's gravity at a planet that can grab a spacecraft into orbit. This comet's so small, it really has practically negligible gravity. So the spacecraft has to do all the work of slowing down to match orbits with a comet. Long, long journey coming to a climax. We've got time to talk about a little bit more, and I thought maybe you could tell us about this post from our blogging colleague, a guest blogger, Bill Dunford.

Yeah, this is the second time Bill has done one of these posts about a day in the life of solar system exploration, where he looks at a number of different spacecraft that are all gathering scientific data at the same time. He picks a day, and he looks at what the spacecraft have returned from that day. It was the day that Juno flew past Earth. So we have these images, beautiful images of Earth from JunoCam. But then he looked out at Mercury and Mars and saw all these other different things that other spacecraft were observing on the same day. And it really makes you realize how active a period of robotic exploration it is right now, when we have all of these spacecraft traveling all over the solar system,

returning beautiful new images all the time. It's all in the blog at planetary.org. And you will be at ISDC, the International Space Development Conference, a little bit later this week. It's happening again here in L.A. What are you doing there on, is it Friday? Yes, it's on Friday. I'll be on two different panels.

One is a book author talking about my upcoming book on Curiosity due out in 2015. Then later on as a journalist speaking with a bunch of my friends, a bunch of space bloggers on a panel. That should be a really enjoyable conversation. And I will be there on Saturday. I think it's Saturday at 3 p.m. Talking about working and living on Mars with a bunch of people who are young enough that they're still hoping to make it out there, along with Jeff Notkin, the meteorite man. It should be a lot of fun, and people will be hearing that later on this show. If you're hearing this before, well, we'll say Friday the 16th of May, that's when Emily will be speaking.

You might want to learn more. You can do that at isdc.nss.org. That's the International Space Development Conference, and it's coming from our friends at the National Space Society. I'll put that link up on the show page as well at planetary.org slash radio. Emily, thanks again. I'll see you at the ISDC. All right. See you then, Matt.

She's our senior editor and planetary evangelist. Emily Lakdawalla is also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. No Bill Nye this week, but something Bill had a lot to do with as we talk with the Planetary Society's director of advocacy, Casey Dreyer. Casey, welcome back. I don't think the science guy is going to mind your taking his place this week because you just had this fairly amazing several days with him in Washington, D.C. Yeah, Bill Nye and I were just in D.C. I just flew back. He just headed back to New York City. And we met with an all-star lineup of senators and congressional representatives to talk about planetary science. It was a great meeting. And

we also met with people in NASA. It was a fantastic setup. And you know what? I have to say, one of the most positive, interesting set of people asking about planetary exploration that I've seen in Washington in a long time. Not without results. The results coming from work by the Planetary Society, I'd say, and many other people out there over a long period of time that has been in the news in the week that we're speaking. Yeah, so the House has moved forward with their budgeting process. They're running a little bit ahead of the Senate. And the House just put out their bill, which basically gives $1.45 billion for planetary science within NASA for next year.

This is great. This is $170 million more than the president requested, and also very, very close to the Planetary Society's goal of $1.5 billion per year, which we think is required for a healthy program. So very exciting news coming out of the House. Now, we're going to have a longer conversation about this that people will be able to find if they choose to on the website, planetary.org slash radio. I'll link to it from the page for this radio show, and I suspect there may be other places

to find it as well. Give us just a few of the highlights in the minute or two that we have left. So the House provides extra money for Mars, which includes money to operate the Opportunity rover on the surface, which is great because that was not funded next year by the president's budget. It gives $100 million for a Europa mission development and another 18 million for Europa technology development to drill through and manage things on the surface of Europa for looking in the future. We have increased funding for the small class discovery mission program, trying to get back

to a cadence, what they call launching new missions every two years instead of right now, every five, every part of the budget basically went up, which is, I'm just not used to saying that these days. And this is, again, this is from the House of Representatives that is not known for casually giving more money to programs in the government. This is a very strong statement of support from the House for what NASA is doing. And I think it's very exciting. And something that I should emphasize is just the first step in this whole budgeting process, the Senate still needs to act. And again, the House and the Senate then need to reconcile any differences that they have in these areas, and then pass a full budget sometime before September, or the end of September. So

we're very excited with what we're seeing. It is not set in stone that this is going to happen, but one of the best first steps that I've seen in a long time. People can learn more in your blog, among other places, also at planetary.org. That's absolutely true, planetary.org slash SOS. We also, it's linked to off of the homepage. Be a space advocate is the section on the homepage on their menu to look for. I run down all the policy issues and I'm keeping everyone up to date on what's happening in the House, Senate, and NASA side of things as we move forward to try to fund planetary exploration. And SOS, that is Save Our Science. You heard it from Casey Dreyer of the Planetary Society's Director of Advocacy,

who has only just returned from Washington, where he spent some time on the Hill and other places with Bill Nye. I will be right back with our guest for this week, somebody else who lives there at NASA headquarters not too far from the Hill, to talk about spinoffs. Spinoffs. They are something the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been doing right from its creation. But it wasn't until a few years later that they started generating much attention. But it wasn't until a few years later that they started generating much attention.

These inventions, technologies, software tools, and processes are celebrated annually with the publication of a slick book that now has even greater exposure online. I called on Daniel Lockney to give us a taste of the brand new spin-off 2013. His charge as NASA's Technology Transfer Program Executive is to make sure these innovations get into the hands of companies and other organizations that need them. Dan, it is a pleasure to welcome you back to Planetary Radio. It has been too long, but it's a good occasion for this, since I can congratulate

you on the publication of yet another year's worth of space spin-offs, another warehouse full of advancements available to all of humanity from space development. Welcome back. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. I have looked through it online. Can you still get the paper version of a spinoff, which I have a shelf full of? Yeah, actually, we still do print some paper copies, fewer than we used to.

People still like the physical paper book, 200 plus pages. It's a nice coffee table book, and it lands on your desk with a nice bud. But we do also, you know, we have a spinoff iPad app. We've got the shortened brochure version of it. We've got a PDF version, an HTML version, searchable database, and we're making this available in just about all the ways anyone could want. And they can find, our listeners can find all this stuff at spinoff.nasa.gov, although I suspect it sounds like you're also in the iTunes store for people with iPads. That's correct. I spent a good deal of time with that summary, which is beautifully produced. I really enjoyed reading it. I came up with my favorites from these seven different areas that space spinoffs are benefiting. But I'm wondering if you'd like to pick a few, not necessarily your favorites,

but ones that you think demonstrate just how useful these spinoff technologies are and how diverse they are. Absolutely. As you mentioned, they cover a wide range of subject areas. You know, we find that our technologies aren't only space advances, but they improve our ground and air transportation, public safety devices, medical protocols and devices, new materials, advanced manufacturing techniques, a lot of different software programs that have numerous industrial and commercial applications. They're all over the place. It's a wide and varied portfolio. Favorites is difficult. It's like asking a mother to choose a favorite child. Yeah. But a couple that I think are particularly great out of this year's book,

one of them is a handheld sensor for medical diagnostics. It's a little battery-powered device. It has a couple different NASA technology improvements in it, advancements, some in microfluid handling, some in its reusable nature, and then also in the number of tests that this device is able to do off of a single blood sample. So it's about the size of a cell phone. It takes a little drop of blood, and it can analyze for dozens of different biomarkers, providing health indications, illness diagnostics, and just about you name it, we can program this thing to look for it. If it's in your blood, we can find it. I would have said it was about the size of a Star Trek tricorder,

which it seems to be a step toward. That's the obvious big leap here, that we do have a small handheld tricorder-esque device that can do a handful of different medical diagnostics. It is yet another example of science fiction informing the future. It is essentially the tricorder. So what's another one of these that you like? And again, people can see pictures of all of these in the summary at spinoff.nasa.gov. of these in the summary at spinoff.nasa.gov. Another one that I'm particularly keen on is a biofeedback device that we developed a few years back for monitoring brainwaves to assess levels of attention.

It was designed at our Langley Research Center, which does a lot of advanced aeronautics work. The problem we were trying to solve, like in the first one, we're obviously doing medical diagnostics for astronauts in space when you don't have access to a full hospital lab. The problem we're trying to solve with this cognitive assessment tool was the levels of cockpit automation that were appropriate to apply before a pilot would lose focus and attention. We can automate much and many different of the features of flying, but if you take too much away from the pilot, then they could get bored, distracted, fall asleep, or take a walk, read a magazine, and entirely ignore the whole flying of the plane thing that they're supposed to be doing. So we wanted to get the right balance of automation, taking mundane tasks away, but not too many. So we developed a simple biofeedback device that we would strap onto the head of a pilot

and then test them on the ground with video games. We found in the next couple of years that that was useful for training children with ADHD, attention deficit disorder, to focus and concentrate, that we could use this same biofeedback to inform pictures on a screen so that in order to play a video game successfully, the kid had to concentrate. It monitors whether you're paying attention or not. And if you're not paying attention, bad things happen on the screen. And if you are paying attention, good things happen on the screen. And I had one of those helmets for a brief period, not because I'm distracted, but because I was interested in it. And the company sent me one to play with for a while. So people would come by the office and I'd have my, look like a bicycle helmet on. If you're sitting at my desk staring at the

screen, what are you doing? I'm concentrating. That was a few years ago, the company that we were working with developed this device called Play Attention. Pay attention, but play. They've since advanced it even more. And now you don't have to wear the bicycle helmet while you're working with developed this device called Play Attention. Pay attention, but play. They've since advanced it even more. And now you don't have to wear the bicycle helmet while you're sitting at your desk. There's a simple arm strap. And it can be used for all types of other attention training. You know, athletes can use it. Anyone who would want to focus and train their brain to be a little bit sharper and not be easily distracted. I should get one of those just for doing interviews like this. We and not be easily distracted. I should get one of those just for doing interviews like this.

We could both be wearing them. Well, you've got one, or at least you had one. I think we've got time for one more. You want to pick out another one of these out of the 41 that are highlighted this year? There's a neat one, a wind turbine that we developed for application on Mars. We don't have them on Mars, but the technologies that we started looking at for that type of atmosphere and that type of environment where you've got temperature swings,

you've got limited access to the device, and this is for energy production. You can't just send a crew up a ladder to go fix this thing if you're out on Mars. You need something that will work in a really harsh circumstance, really nasty conditions, and then work reliably. And if you do, for some reason, have to get up and work on it, it's got to be real simple to operate. And one thing they do have on Mars is wind. Absolutely. So there's wind, and we can harness it for power generation.

harnesses for power generation. That same environment, not the same same environment we have on Mars, but those same conditions of remote temperature swings, nasty areas that you don't necessarily want to be out working on things in, those exist here on Earth too. South Pole, for example, and some other remote regions of the world. We've since spun this off to a company called Northern Power Systems out of Vermont, and they make these Mars-based wind turbines, but for places here on Earth, extreme environments, harsh conditions. So there's hundreds of these all around the world now, these Mars-designed wind turbines. Simplified maintenance needs, minimizing operational costs,

and just neat to think that these were designed for Mars, and now they're popping up all around the world. And I immediately thought, when I read this description, of the advantages this might give to isolated villages in the third world. But there is a yet another one, maybe a couple more that I want to mention at the risk of going slightly long with our conversation here. And I was blown away by this because a lot of us know that one of the dangers or one of the difficulties in dealing with diseases that perhaps are easily dealt with in places where you can get refrigerated vaccines out where they're needed is getting that vaccine that has to stay cold out to very isolated places. And you've got this guy,

a former Johnson Space Center engineer, who has developed a solar-powered ice chest, basically. That one's pretty exciting. You pretty much described it perfectly, but it's a solar-powered refrigerator. It's been used all around the world for storage of vaccines. Out of that same lab, we also developed a portable hyperbaric chamber that can be used for emergency burn relief shelters. Same concept that you can take NASA technologies into remote areas.

We've got the same challenges where you face, where you have little power access, you need something that's reliable and can be set up quickly. We've got a lot of those same challenges in space. We've got things like portable hyperbaric chamber, we've got the solar powered refrigerator, and we have a lot of other advances in telemedicine, ground-based satellite receivers that are quick and inflatable, like a

big balloon that you pop up that can serve as an antenna for communications. A lot of the challenges that we have for space environments translate well to remote areas of our planet. NASA's Daniel Lockney will return in a minute to tell us more about Spinoff 2013. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website.

Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Your name carried to an asteroid. How cool is that? You, your family, your friends, your cat, Welcome back to Planetary Society members, your name is already on the list. The Planetary Society, we're your place in space.

Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Want to see some very cool stuff? And I don't just mean that solar-powered refrigerator. Take a look at NASA's brand new spin-off 2013. We're talking about this paper and online publication with the agency's Technology Transfer Program Executive. There's another innovation that I wanted to discuss with Daniel Lockney. It's helping at least one private company bring stuff home from low Earth orbit.

Long before it became known to me as a celebrated spinoff, as it is in this year's Spinoff 2013 publication, a couple of years ago, I think, I was at SpaceX here in California being shown around, and there was the first Dragon capsule to come back from space with its somewhat charred heat shield. I was told, yeah, this is NASA technology. We took it, we modified it a little bit, but it's basically this, is it pica or pica? I've heard both. I could give you a better answer on that. Phenolic impregnated carbon ablator. Pica, pica, and it's the heat shield that we developed, a super lightweight material withstands the high temperatures of the re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. That's an exciting area for us. Not the heat shield in

specific, but the opportunity to assist this emerging commercial space industry with our technologies. For the longest time, and the longest time, I mean, since 1958 when NASA was started, we've had this push to get our technologies out to industry, to find practical secondary uses for the space-based, mission-based technologies. And that's written into our original space act that they created the agency. We found that there are analogs to a lot of the challenges that we find for space applications. You know, high temperature, high stress materials, confined application in industrial work or manufacturing,

power regeneration, life support systems that we developed for our spacecraft, for human spaceflight, you know, have applications here on Earth for medicine and environmental remediation in general. But there hasn't been, prior to the past couple of years, an actual space industry, a commercial space industry that could directly benefit from the very specific work that we do for space application. So it's exciting for us from a technology transfer perspective to be able to work with companies like SpaceX and show them what we've learned in 50-plus years of space exploration and actually give them the technologies that they need to be successful. Yeah, it's working for them.

In this edition of Spinoff, Spinoff 2013, there is this section called Spinoffs of Tomorrow. Tell us what this is about. We're combining the broad reach of the spinoff interest. People want to know that their tax dollars have benefited them. They want to know how space technology is coming back down to Earth. And we've had this broad reach with that publication and with the general interest. So we're piggybacking on that by letting people know what technologies we currently have that are available for them to use. And that's either through licensing or software.

We'll just give it away. Sharing of expertise and use of our facilities. You know, every year we put this book out, and it's got dozens of examples of how NASA has benefited specific industries and specific companies. We want to make sure that the general public and industry at large know that we're still doing this, we're still in the business of technology transfer, and we still have some great technologies that are available for industrial applications. These range from high-temperature resins that have application in jet engine fan casings to vibration dampening technologies that we developed for keeping spacecraft on the launch pad from vibrating too much and causing catastrophic damage to the vehicle

that have now very definite application in buildings. Very similar to a rocket, you've got a large tower, and you don't want that shaking either, say, in the event of an earthquake or a high wind. The same technology we've developed for keeping our rockets from shaking too much can be applied to architectural applications. We've got image cleanup technology, filters that will take fuzzy images and make them clearer using algorithms or we've even developed specific camera technology. The cell phone camera, the camera in your iPhone or Blackberry was developed by

NASA a few years ago out of the Jet Propulsion Lab. The guy who invented that is in the National Inventors Hall of Fame. So we've got a whole range of different technologies that are available for people to use still, and we're trying to let them know that that's still something that's out there for them. So if I read about these, and I'm, I wish, an entrepreneur with a startup, and I see something that is exactly what I need, what do I do? How do I contact you? Each technology comes from one of our NASA field centers. In any write-up about one of our technologies, we also put contact information. And we have a staff of people who are ready, willing, and able to answer any questions, to give you a test drive of the technology, to send you some papers about it, to make sure that

you've got all the information you need and see if the solution that we found for our mission use can also be a solution for your application. We've got staffs who are standing by their email and telephone and eager to get this stuff into the hands of industry. We also, just very recently, about two weeks ago, launched our first ever NASA software catalog. And we collected over a thousand different pieces of code. These are discrete programs that have specific applications. And we wrote up descriptions of them. We categorized them by application type. It's not all rocket science. We've got business tools. We've got fluid dynamics analysis software, which is useful for design of just about anything. We've got design software.

We've got scheduling software. We have all types of things that have clear and secondary application potential. So we wrote all this up, and we put it on technology.nasa.gov, which is our tech transfer portal. We've got print copies of it. We've got a PDF version of it. We've got a searchable database with all the software in it. I'll underscore this point. Software is free. We will give this software to people who need it. We've got a thousand different codes, and that number is growing every day, and we're happy to share with you. Dan, I have kept you for a long time. I really

need to let you get back to transferring technology. Thank you so much for joining us. I haven't missed anything, have I? No, and thank you for not mentioning Tang. Oh, yeah, we forgave you for that a long time ago. Don't worry about that. Thank you for taking the time. It's always exciting to hear about these things that are coming out of NASA as a byproduct of opening up the universe. Thank you so much, Dan Lockney. Thank you. My pleasure. Daniel Lockney is the Technology Transfer Program Executive at NASA Headquarters. And as such, his office has just released Spinoff 2013. You can find it once again at spinoff.nasa.gov or on the iTunes App Store. It sounds like NASA has its own App Store.

Now you can pick up some software as well. We'll put all these links, including technology.nasa.gov. Easy enough to remember, but if you forget, it'll be on the show page that you can find at planetary.org slash radio. We're going to talk to another innovative guy. That's Bruce Betts. He's, well, he was the director of projects. Now he's the director of science and technology for the Planetary Society. That'll be this week's edition of What's Up. It's What's Up on Planetary Radio. Time to give away a Celestron telescope. And to help us do that, here is the director of almost had to catch myself science and technology at the Planetary Society Bruce Betts welcome they changed my title again it's just director of awesomeness that was always

the subtitle I thought but okay I'm kidding all right you want to hear what's up the night sky uh yeah that comes under the science portion of your job right yes yes it does just a whole host of planets we're even adding one All right. You want to hear what's up in the night sky? Yeah. That comes under the science portion of your job, right? Yes, yes, it does. Just a whole host of planets. We're even adding one. I decided to just add one in the evening sky. I'm calling it Mercury, and it will be low, very low in the west. So still tricky right now, but getting a little higher up and easier over the coming days.

And that will be very low in the west shortly after sunset, far below Jupiter, which is super bright over in the west. And then we've got Mars high in the south, looking reddish and getting dimmer as it gets farther away from Earth. And Saturn at about its right, just past opposition, so close to its closest point to Earth for the year, and Saturn is farther over to the east. It's glorious, and if you sleep through the evening, you can be up in the pre-dawn and check out Venus super bright low in the east. We'll discuss it a little more next week, but there's a possible meteor shower, meteor storm on May 24th as Earth crosses through the debris from the small comet P-209 linear. But the predictions are highly variable from mediocre to unbelievable storm. So we'll talk a little bit more about that next week.

That's May 24th. When you say unbelievable, you mean unbelievably great? Awesome. Okay. Fingers crossed. Great is always unbelievable for me. All right. On to this week in space history.

It was 45 years ago in 1969 that Apollo 11, sorry, wrong one, Apollo 10, the practice rehearsal for Apollo 11, Apollo 10 was launched 45 years ago. Four years later in 1973, this week, Skylab was launched, the first U.S. space station in orbit. So you know who I got to talk to and will probably be on next week's show briefly? Who? Gene Cernan. That's really cool. Yeah.

Random space fact? I did not. I didn't think of it. I actually, well, we'll leave people in suspense, but you will hear a few minutes of Gene Cernan in our coverage of Space Fest. But you do have an astronaut doing random space facts. Oh, I do indeed. Then please share.

How about this one? Hey, that was cool. Thank you, Tom Jones, astronaut extraordinaire, for sharing. Yeah, he's a good guy, good friend. He certainly is. Talking about astronauts, I've got another Alan Shepard random space fact. I find it fascinating that he flew the first ever Mercury flight, first American in space, and then his flight status was interrupted for several years,

making him miss out on the Gemini program completely due to Meniere's disease, an inner ear disease that was surgically corrected before he went to the moon in the Apollo program. Very fortunate guy. corrected before he went to the moon in the Apollo program. Very fortunate guy. I remember that was one of the most dramatic human stories from that era, the Apollo era. And it's just terrific that he was able to go. All right.

Now to our trivia contest and following up on your charming discussion with Mike Rowe, the host of Dirty Jobs, among other things, I asked our listeners, in your opinion, what is the dirtiest job in the space program human or robotic how'd we do that i mean i know how we did i saw the answers i've shared them all with you really showbiz um we got a whole lot as people might guess of cleaning the space toilet on the iss or the shuttle, I suppose, since they didn't have a toilet in Apollo. Let's not go there. So we got a bunch of those, and we got a bunch of people who said, and this is kind of interesting, whoever has to work with Congress to try and get money for NASA.

So I noticed a theme. There seemed to be two themes running through our question. One was fecal matter, and one was Congress. I'm not sure what to draw from that. We did get one robotic-related one, and that was from Bjorn Getta in Sweden, who said he definitely thinks it's the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is always being asked to spy on everybody down on the surface. Who'd we say won, Matt? Here's our winner. It's Jason Goldstein, or Goldsteinstein out of Baltimore, Maryland. And you know why he won?

I think we both agreed on this. He made us laugh with the first of these, but he's also a triple threat. He said, as a father of five, I would guess the dirtiest job at NASA is whoever has to clean up the bathrooms at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center after a field trip by a bunch of kindergarten classes. Yeah, I laughed out loud. He also knew, though, that Mike Rowe did one of his dirty job segments at the Kennedy Space Center. He was lubricating the crawler transporter, that monster tractor. That was an interesting and good segment. I enjoyed it.

Just as sort of an extra credit, he did mention dealing with politicians in Washington. So, Jason, you have won yourself that Celestron Cosmos Edition First Scope. It's a terrific little telescope. And we're going to send it your way. And our thanks once again to our friends at Celestron who support us with this kind of stuff on a regular basis. Yes, thank you very much. We move on to the next trivia contest. And keeping now an astronaut theme, who is the only Apollo astronaut who successfully became a U.S. Senator, a U.S. Senator? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Get us your

entry. By May 20th, Tuesdayuesday may 20th at 8 a.m pacific time and i bet you would like to know what we're going to give away i do i do and so does everyone else it's a planetary radio t-shirt i got a lot of compliments on the new design walking around space fest last weekend okay we're done all right everybody go out there look up in the night sky and think about your favorite kind of ice. Thank you, and good night. My favorite kind of ice, that would be the kind that we need to fly over on Europa and sniff what's coming up through it. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology, caught myself again,

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 the Apollo-loving members of the Society. Clear skies.