Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Stardust Samples Streak Safely Home

Episode Date: January 16, 2006

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Star Dust streaks back home this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier, and sometimes back to Earth. The Star Dust mission was gloriously completed early on the morning of January 15, when a 100-pound sample return capsule touched down in the Utah desert. We'll have special coverage, along with an introduction to your opportunity to participate through the Stardust at Home Project. All that and our regular visits with Emily and Bruce, too. Stardust tops our space news, naturally, but just as one probe returns home, another is ready to leave.

The New Horizons mission may be on its way to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt by the time you hear this. Our own Bruce Betts is attending the launch at the Kennedy Space Center. We'll get a report from him next week. In the meantime, you can get the latest on both these missions at planetary.org. You'll also find an update on the Mars rover Opportunity, still suffering from a problem with its robotic arm, but taking some great pictures. Speaking of pictures, Emily knows how to catch some of that shy and retiring planet Venus. I'll be back to begin our Stardust coverage in a minute.

Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, if Cassini can take pictures of Titan's surface through its hazy atmosphere, can the same technique be used to image the surface of Venus? Even though Venus possesses a thick, cloudy atmosphere a hundred times more massive than Earth's, the surface can be seen in certain infrared colors. About 20 years ago, astronomer David Allen found that heat radiation from Venus's hot lower atmosphere escapes through so-called spectral windows in the infrared. Allen made this discovery just before the Galileo spacecraft flew by Venus in 1990.

The fortuitous timing of the discovery enabled Galileo's NIMS instrument team to map Venus through these windows. Not only did NIMS see Venus's lower atmosphere, they were able to see right to the surface. Since that time, Venus's surface has been observed using the same technique by ground-based telescopes and even the Cassini spacecraft during its flybys. What does the future hold for seeing Venus' surface? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out.

Did you see it? The Stardust Sample Return Capsule, or SRC, became a literal fireball in the earliest hours of last Sunday morning. Of course, you had to be under a fairly narrow swath of relatively clear skies. That was exactly what Andrew Westfall had in mind when he headed for the middle of nowhere. Andrew Westfall had in mind when he headed for the middle of nowhere. Andrew is a senior fellow and associate director of the Space Sciences Lab at UC Berkeley in California. He's also a key member of the worldwide science team that will examine the tiny bits of comet tail and interstellar dust returned by the wonderfully successful mission. When I called his cell phone, it was a frigid 28 degrees Fahrenheit at 145 in the morning.

Yet Andrew wasn't alone in this mild form of insanity. Out there with him were his wife, his two young daughters, several friends and co-workers, and even his mom, all of them hoping to see the re-entry of the fastest artificial object in history. So we are at the Oasis exit on Highway 80 between Wendover and Wells, Nevada. So we're a bit north of the trajectory. We've pulled off onto a snowy road, and it's really cold out here. I bet. And we've managed to find ourselves a clear patch of sky, which is the biggest patch of sky we've seen in a couple of days. And so we're just hoping that it's going to hold for the next few minutes, long enough for us to be able to see the reentry.

And you said it was snowing there just minutes ago? Yeah, so just five miles up the road it was snowing like a blizzard. So we're hoping that doesn't catch up with us. Hey, Andrew, I don't want to keep you from your cameras there or anything. No, we're all set up. My mom is running the camera. Oh, that's great. Yeah, and so we're just going to take continuous pictures and see what we get.

So right now we're just waiting. Give us a preview. I mean, we're going to talk more at length about this topic of Stardust at Home in the coming weeks, of Stardust at Home in the coming weeks. But tell us a little bit about what this project is going to do and how it's basically going to allow just about anybody who has a computer and an Internet connection to become involved with this project. Yeah, so, you know, what we're going to be doing is bringing, Stardust is going to be bringing back not only the first samples of material from a comet

and the very first samples of material from a planetary body from beyond the moon, but it's also going to be bringing back the very first contemporary interstellar dust grains. So it's also basically getting a sample of the galaxy for the very first time. Nobody has ever had contemporary interstellar dust grain in the lab to study, and we don't even know what the typical interstellar dust grain looks like. So we're really excited about the prospect of getting this first collection of these dust grains. And sorry if I'm not speaking very clearly. It's cold out here. It's quite all right.

So anyway, the problem that we have, the challenge is before we can even start analyzing these things, we're going to have to find them in the Stardust Collector. And the particles are tiny, and they make very tiny little tracks in the aerogel when they enter the aerogel. And in order to be able to see them at all, we have to be able to image them in a high-magnification microscope. to image them in a high-magnification microscope. And the problem, the challenge is that the area that they're distributed over is huge. It's vast on the scale of these particles. And so we have to look through more than a million fields of view in a microscope to be able to find these particles.

And that's just way beyond the resources of any research group. And so this is really a project born out of desperation, frankly. We just need the help to be able to find these things at all. And so what we're going to do is collect digital images of the Stardust Interstellar Collector in Houston in the Cosmic Dust Lab, and then we're going to be distributing those images via a virtual microscope, which can run on people's laptops or computers, and through just their regular web browser. So you don't need to download any special software. You can just use any regular web browser like Netscape or Internet Explorer.

As I understand, you were able to literally just go up the hall to your colleagues at the Space Sciences Laboratory who run SETI at Home. Yeah, that's right. We got the idea for doing this from our colleagues down the hall. As you say, the SETI at Home people are just down the hall from us at the Space Sciences Lab at Berkeley. Just an enormously successful project. It's the biggest computer in the world, 5 million users and more than 2 million CPU years of computing time. Startup to Home is going to be different, of course. It's not using spare time on people's computers. It's actually using people's eyes.

Yeah, people actually become part of the computer. Absolutely. And you know, this isn't just a publicity stunt. This is really critical to the success of the project. So we're really hoping that we're going to get people to realize that this is really fun. I mean, it's just we've been having a lot of fun doing this. And, of course, people can learn more about the project at planetary.org on the web. That's right. You're getting close now, maybe a couple of minutes away from the opening of this window where you're hoping. I think that's right.

Yeah, that's right. And I'm scanning the skies now, looking for something to move in the sky and unfortunately our window, our clear sky window is closing down just a little bit. But it is... We still have a clear view of the sky

and enough that I think we should be able to see it. Just hanging out and waiting and going to see what happens. Now I'm standing next to my daughter Teresa who is keeping a a close eye on this too theresa you want to say hi no she's too cold no no i guess she's not she's sitting on the hood of the car in her sleeping bag along with her little sister laura and probably just a bit warmer than you are uh just a little bit that's right that's right, that's right. As I understand it, there really is not much more, you're not expecting anyway,

much more than a handful of these tiny particles. That's right, just a few dozen. We estimate, well, it's not our estimate, actually, it's an estimate made by Marcus Landgraf, that we should see something like 45 of these interstellar dust particles. So it's a very precious set of dust grains, and we are going to have to be incredibly careful with them before we do anything with them. They're really a unique set of samples. Excuse me just a minute. Sure. Why don't you go ahead and start the pictures.

Yeah, no, this is fine. Why don't you just start here. Yeah, all right. So, I'm sorry. That's quite all right. No, break away whenever you need to, and we'll just listen in. As we're now approaching 156, which is roughly when you're hoping to see this capsule streak across the sky. Yeah. Faster than any other man-made object has ever returned to Earth.

Yeah, and we're looking. We don't see it yet, but we're scanning. And even though this thing is closed down quite a lot, it's still a lot bigger than any clear space of sky that we've seen today. So we feel very lucky that we're getting anything at all. Well, we're going to hang in there with you for a few more minutes at least. Tell us, you will also be working with these particles once they are found, with the help of who knows how many thousands or tens of thousands of people? Yeah, that's right.

We're going to be working down in Houston with my colleague Christopher Sneed, That's right. We're going to be working down in Houston with my colleague Christopher Sneed, preparing samples for the community along with other people from other institutions like Lawrence Livermore National Lab. And so it's going to be a big effort preparing all these samples in various forms for all the various kinds of analytical techniques that are going to be applied to the cometary grains. analytical techniques that are going to be applied to the cometary grains. The interstellar dust grains are going to be, that's going to be, oh, oh, oh, wow, there it goes. Whoa. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.

Oh, my God, it's spectacular. There's a bright luminous trail behind it. It's kind of a yellowish color, and it's slewing across the sky. It's about to go behind a cloud. And there it went behind a cloud. Now we can't see it, but we still see the luminous trail behind it. And now if we look further downstream, we may not see it again. It depends on whether there are any holes in the cloud downstream of where we are.

But, wow. Okay, and we're going to keep our ears open for the sonic boom. We're in a place where we should be able to see it. What's that? I wasn't watching the time, but I think it should be in about three minutes after this. We'll try to keep quiet around then. And that was just about 157 and a half, I think, that you went wild there. Maybe, Matt, if you could watch the time for us, that would be great.

Yeah, you're coming up on one minute here. So a real fireball, huh? That was amazing. Yeah. That was amazing. Okay, now I'm keeping an eye out for downstream, but I'm not too optimistic. I don't see too many holes down there. Oh, let's go.

I'm Bill Wilcox. I designed the heat shield. Oh, okay. All right. All right. Just by coincidence, Bill Wilcox, who designed the heat shield, is right here. Oh, okay. All right. I'm a little bit startled. I had that. Just by coincidence, Bill Wilcox, who designed the heat shield, is right here. Oh, no kidding.

We're on the phone with Planetary Radio. Do you want to say something? Oh. The Planetary Society. Hang on just a second. Hi. It looked great. And it was trailing.

You heard the descriptions. It went over. And we're waiting for the sonic boom. Yeah, which we think, Bill, may be only about a minute away. Bill, that's pretty good getting to see your handiwork as it actually does its job of protecting those samples. Hi, Matt. Yeah, hi. Andrew?

Yeah, so we're listening now. We're trying to be quiet to listen to the sonic boom. Yeah, it should be right about now. That was it. We heard it. Oh, we didn't catch it on the phone. No, I'm not too surprised. This is not a very great cell phone. But, yeah, it sounded like distant thunder. When we return, we'll hear a bit more from Andrew Westfall of Berkeley Space Sciences Lab,

along with the actual touchdown of the Stardust Sample Return Capsule, and the thoughts of the mission's principal investigator, Don Brownlee. Stay with us. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets.

We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail. We didn't just build it. We attempted to put that first solar sail in orbit, and we're going to try again. You can read about all our exciting projects and get the latest space exploration news in-depth at the Society's exciting and informative website, planetary.org.

You can also preview our full-color magazine, The Planetary Report. It's just one of our many member benefits. Want to learn more? Call us at 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. 6387, The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. This is Planetary Radio's special coverage of the return of Stardust from Comet VIL-2. We heard Stardust scientist Andrew Westfall and his merry band reacting to the brilliant fireball re-entry of the sample return capsule as it headed for touchdown at the Dugway Proving Grounds in the Utah desert.

Just minutes later, NASA commentators confirmed opening of the main parachute. Here's a highly compressed replay of that event and the actual touchdown a few minutes after 2 a.m. on Sunday, January 15. We have confirmation of a main chute. Confirmation. Confirmation. Okay. All stations a main chute. Confirmation. Confirmation. Okay. All stations, main chute is open.

We're coming down slowly. All stations, we have touchdown. Touchdown. I'll take them. We have touchdown. Standing in the middle of nowhere just off Interstate 80, Andrew had no direct access to NASA's mission reports. Gathering his freezing group around a cell phone, he was able to hear the coverage relayed from my computer, safe and warm in Southern California. After helicopter crews at Dugway found and secured the capsule, I checked in with Andrew one last time.

Hey, Matt. Hey, listen, congratulations. Wow, this is really exciting. Fantastic, fantastic. I'm very happy to be able to relay this to you out there in the middle of the desert. Right, right. Well, thank you so much for doing it. It's so exciting to be able to hear it, you know, out here in the middle of nowhere. Listen, I'll take you back there in just a moment, but listen, for you, what happens

next? Well, what we're going to do is I'm going to be flying out of Salt Lake City, direct to Houston, and then the hard work begins of preparing all these samples for distribution to the community and getting the interstellar tray ready for scanning for the Stardust at Home project. Fantastic. All right. Well, we will definitely check back with you and get a few more details about Stardust

at Home in the coming weeks, Andrew, but we hope that those next steps go perfectly. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thank you. We'll give the last word to Stardust Principal Investigator Don Brownlee, a former guest of Planetary Radio. Don participated in a media briefing at the Dugway Proving Grounds less than four hours after the touchdown of the Stardust capsule.

It was an emotional moment and a triumph that he attempted to put in both personal and scientific perspective. It's hard to describe what it feels like to be at this point of the mission. We traveled almost 3 billion miles in space. We visited a comet, grabbed a piece of it, and it landed here this morning. It's an incredible thrill. It's very emotional. That's the first time I've seen a picture of the capsule sitting out in the mud. And I almost got a tear to my eye.

You know, we did this mission to collect the most primitive materials we could in the solar system. I mean, we went to a comet that formed at the edge of the solar system. It's the same class of body as the planet Pluto, except it was smaller and it was well preserved. It formed far from the sun under very cold conditions. And we're confident

that it was made out of the initial building blocks of our solar system. We have always stressed in this mission that we are stardust because our planet and even ourselves have a direct relation to the planet particles we brought back this morning.

But I have to say, the most spectacular part of this entire mission for me was five minutes before it went out, a couple of us rascal people that didn't really have to do any real work on this snuck out and ran outside with a bunch of bright lights. We ran down to the end of the fence and asked the guard, can we go out in that field? And he said, no. And so we went down the road a little bit further. And then I saw something up there.

I thought, there's Mars. But I knew Mars wasn't up there. It wasn't I thought, there's Mars. But I knew Mars wasn't up there. It wasn't the right part of the sky. It looked like Mars. And it got brighter and brighter and brighter. And even though it was coming down from space, in our view from the ground, it was actually climbing in the sky. I love meteors, but normally when you see a meteor, it's a flash in the sky.

It lasts about a second or so. And then you have to say, gee, that was fantastic, but what did I see? But this thing lasted about a half a minute, this bright, luminous, climbing thing with this glowing trail behind it. It's ironic that you have a comet mission that ends producing a comet. Inside this thing is our treasure, our sample of the edge of the solar system that truly contains stardust, building blocks of the solar system. And it's in this little 32-inch capsule, which is being heated to thousands of degrees on the outside, coming through the atmosphere at 29,000 miles an hour, and then lands in this wonderful place, the Dugway Pruitt Ground Utah Trust and Training Range

in the Great Salt Lake Desert. It was a real thrill. So these samples will go to Houston. We have over about 150 people around the world that will be doing the preliminary analysis using a wide variety of techniques, using these very, very special samples. It's just a real thrill. I have to remind you that this is a sample return mission. Sample return missions are quite different than other kinds of space missions because you bring it home.

And much of the science of this mission hasn't been done yet. It's going to be done in laboratories all over the world, doing things you really can't do in space. And at least from my view, the most interesting thing about comets is that they are libraries that have stored the records of our formation, but they've stored it in very tiny little samples you have to study at very fine scale, which requires huge instruments like electron microscopes and even shopping center-sized instruments. Over the coming weeks, months, and years, I hope you'll be hearing a lot about this. And I fully expect that textbooks in the future will have a lot of new information

about the formation of our solar system from these samples that landed here this morning in Utah. Don Brownlee, principal investigator for the Stardust mission, after the successful return to Earth of the sample return capsule. I'll return with Bruce Betts and this week's edition of What's Up, right after Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. In 1990, the Galileo spacecraft performed the first orbital imaging of Venus' surface in infrared wavelengths using instruments designed for observing Jupiter. This April, the European Space Agency's Venus Express spacecraft will arrive at Venus

with an instrument specifically designed to penetrate Venus's thick atmosphere. The VERDIS instrument can slice the light from Venus so finely that it will effectively be able to see to any depth within Venus's atmosphere, from its upper to its lower reaches, and all the way down to the surface. In fact, VERDIS could even catch volcanoes on Venus in the act of erupting by imaging the thermal hot spots they produce. If there is such a thing as an active eruption on Venus. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org.

And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. We are joined by the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, Dr. Bruce Betts. And he and I have something deeply in common today. We're both sick. Different diseases, though. Yeah, I don't know. You seem to be more on the road to recovery, so I think I'm sicker than you are.

No, I am definitely sicker than you are. Are you serious? Do you still have a fever? Because I don't have a fever. Uh, sure. Yeah, you're such a liar. Let me feel your forehead. Get away from me. All right, what do you have for us? All right, I'm fine. Speaking of red thermometers, Mars is shining reddish high in the south during the evening. It continues to shrink and fade off into the distance as the Earth pulls away from it in our relative orbits. Jupiter is the really bright-looking star-like object shining in the southeast before and during dawn. And Saturn is rising. Saturn's really nice right now. It's rising in the east-northeast right around sunset.

It's below Castor and Pollux, the stars in Gemini. So in the early evening, it will be high in the east and is always a great telescope object to see those rings and maybe even some of its moons, especially Titan, the big one. Oh, this could hurt. Random space fact. Okay, all right, you're sicker than me. The Stardust spacecraft, which is the fastest reentering object ever made by humans.

So the fastest object to hit Earth made by humans. How fast, you ask? 28,860 miles per hour is its speed when it hits the top of the atmosphere. That's about 12.9 kilometers per second. No wonder it made such a pretty sight. Well, sure. That's incredible. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now, meteors, some of them are frequently much faster than that. But usually they're little specks of dust and sand, not spacecraft. Hard to believe a little bugger could live through this, but there you go. Now, we asked you a little bit of a tricky-to-phrase question. How close is Earth's perihelion in AU? Remember, AU is an astronomical unit, or the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. Well, Earth's orbit, although not very elliptical, is a little bit elliptical. And so how close is Earth's perihelion in AU?

And give it to us in two decimal places. How'd we do, Max? We just passed perihelion recently. A whole bunch of people. Yeah, happy perihelion, by the way. Happy perihelion to you as well. A lot of people came up with it. Some really had to search.

Our winner this week, I think it's a first-time winner. He is a first-time winner, Reverend Brent Livingood. I don't know if it's livingood or livinggood. We'll go with livinggood. But the reverend has been entering the contest for a while, and his name came up this time. And he came up with.98,.98 of an AU at perihelion. That is correct. So just a hair under 93 million.

We had a few people who didn't get it. They gave us the perihelion in miles or kilometers, but you did very specifically say in AU, and so 98% of an AU. Yes, I think it's more instructional because you compare it to the average distance, so you get an idea of how much, how elliptical the orbit really is. Well, Reverend Brent, we're going to get a Planetary Radio t-shirt out to you in the mail. Thank you very much for entering and

supporting the show, and the rest of you, keep at it. Keep trying. We're going to get around to everybody eventually. We're trying. I think we should give a new prize away this week. Oh, why don't we? Yeah. Can we do that? I think you should fix an inner for people.

Okay. I'll be your second. Yeah. I don't know if they want to be touching it. Instead, we give them one of our brand new Explorer's Guide to Mars posters. Oh, those are very cool. Let's do that. Very cool.

You've got a beautiful map of Mars in the middle and then surrounding it on the poster, all sorts of clever and wonderful information and pictures about Mars exploration. This is like a second edition of this poster, isn't it? This is actually the third edition. Third edition. And I've been involved with the last two, these last couple, and this is my favorite. Excellent. Okay.

Then that's what we'll give away to someone who correctly answers this question. And then is randomly selected as the winner. It's a little hard to phrase, so bear with me. Which planet in our solar system has the second highest gravity at its surface? Or in the case of the gas giants, the gravity at, say, one bar of pressure. So roughly one atmosphere, Earth's atmosphere. Okay, equivalent to sea level on Earth. Yeah.

Okay, got it. Yeah, so that's trickyness goes pesky, gas giants. So which planet has the second highest? I'll tell you, Jupiter has the highest. What's the second highest? And where this gets a little screwy is that, remember, gravity is a function of both distance and also mass. And so it ties into the density of the planet and things like that.

So it's not entirely obvious because the big planets, you get farther away and the gravity is less. But they have more mass, the gravity is more. So who's going to win? You tell us. Tell them how to win. Well, get the right answer. But besides that, go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter and how to email right answer. But besides that, go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter and how to email your answer

and win the fabulous Explorer's Guide to Mars poster that is a beautiful addition to any wall. You're going to want to get that to us by the 23rd, Monday, January 23 at 2 p.m. that specific time. And we'll make sure that your entry is one of those from which we select next week's winner. That is, if you have the correct answer. Next time we talk to Bruce, you should be at the Kennedy Space Center and join the launch

of New Horizon, a mission in which the Planetary Society has had a significant and continuing role. It's true. We've been supporting it and saved it from cancellation many times. Well, I should say we played a significant role in saving it from cancellation. So we're excited about it. Say goodnight, Bruce. Goodnight, Bruce.

Everybody go out there, look at the night sky, and think about your favorite cold medicine. Thank you, and goodnight. Got one word for you. NyQuil. Do they have to sponsor now? He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. When he's not at home in bed sick and doing that, he's here with us for What's Up.

Thanks for joining us. We'll be back next week to report on the New Horizons mission to Pluto. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.