Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Students for the Exploration and Development of Space

Episode Date: April 25, 2011

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Hello, podcast listeners. This is Matt, your host for Planetary Radio. Those of you who are new to the show, every once in a while I come up with a special little message for those of you who hear us this way rather than on the radio or satellite radio. This time, as usual, we want to thank you for, first of all, being listeners to the show and participating in any way you can. Maybe you went to the trivia contest. Maybe you still haven't won a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Well, stay tuned because we might be able to tell you how to do that without having to answer a trivia question. But really what this is about is asking for your help.

It is that time of year, I'm afraid, as we get close to the end of the fiscal year for the Planetary Society, when all of us are expected to show that we've pulled our own weight, including the radio show. In fact, there's a goal set for Planetary Radio at the Society, which is still a struggling nonprofit. These are tough times for nonprofits, you know. Not really all that much money, not compared to, oh, I don't know, putting a rocket in orbit, but still a pretty substantial amount for an organization like ours. When this kind of thing happens, we have to look to you folks. Can you find it in your hearts and in your wallets to help out? You cannot believe how

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but somebody who helps to make this show happen every week some of you've already done that thank you so much especially uh those of you and and we hope others who have not gotten to it yet will uh will join them in this appeal once again go to planetary.org slash radio and there's a link there that says make a donation today. Thank you so much. I've taken up enough of your time. Let's get on with today's show. Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, this week on Planetary Radio.

Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Across the United States and in many other countries, there are still college students who are, in the words of my guest today, space geeks. Some of them work and party together as members of a 30-year-old group called SEDS. I'll talk today with their national chairman, Iowa State Senior Rick Hanton. One of the things we'll hear from Rick is about how a certain science guy is still revered by students who grew up watching his TV show. We'll pay a what's up visit to Bruce Betts later today, but first up is Planetary

Society blogger and science and technology coordinator, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, if you don't mind, I'd like to start with this story about Pluto's atmosphere, which I flagged because it looked like it would make for a great conversation. And it certainly looks like it's going to make that visit by New Horizons even more interesting than it might have been. Yeah, you know, astronomers are very interested in Pluto's atmosphere, not just because it's interesting that Pluto has an atmosphere, but also because the atmosphere is what makes Pluto's size so uncertain. So they've been studying it very carefully with various telescopes and spectrometers. And they, you know, wanted to characterize the atmosphere, especially because they were concerned that as Pluto has passed through its perihelion, its closest approach to the sun, they figured the

atmosphere was going to be freezing out onto the surface over time. Well, it turns out that the opposite is true. The atmosphere is actually puffing up and getting thicker over time. And the article that I summarized had to do with the first time detection of carbon monoxide in Pluto's atmosphere. It's not a huge constituent of Pluto's atmosphere. The atmosphere like ours is mostly nitrogen, but there are these minor species. And a previous astronomical survey had tried to find carbon monoxide and failed and said, well, we know there can't be more than this X amount. And it turns out that what was detected this time was twice that amount that they'd previously said was too small. So this is quite a surprising result. It means that Pluto's

atmosphere is changing on a very rapid timescale. And so we can hope that New Horizons is going to see a dwarf planet that's changed very rapidly and might have some new features on its surface. Before we run out of time, let's jump to another story that you posted on April 20th. It is basically about this document about the Voyager flights, historical now PDF that you have posted. That looks like a terrific booklet that you were able to find. But also this invitation to people who may have documents like this sitting on shelves gathering dust to please make these available online. That's right. I just posted this very pretty document full of color pictures

that was printed in 1982 after both Voyagers had passed by Jupiter and Saturn. And you know, this thing, JPL had it printed up after those very successful encounters. And we had stacks of them at the Planetary Society. We couldn't give them away. We had so many. But of course, it was never made available in electronic format. And now that we've moved and gotten rid of all of our copies, and I'm sure that many other people have likewise gotten rid of old junk, what they thought was junk, and now we realize they're not available anymore. So I'm indebted to a reader for scanning this particular document and helping me make it available online. And so I invite people to check their libraries for moldy old documents that they can't find on the internet. And if you have a scanner, please,

I would love the donation of your time to scan a few of those pages and send them on to me. Emily is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. She joins us every week here on Planetary Radio. Thanks very much, Emily. Thank you, Matt. I also want to point out an Earth Day entry that is April 22nd from the executive

director of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, where Bill tells us about how he rode his bike into Washington, where he grew up, to celebrate the very first Earth Day. Speaking of Bill. Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, executive director of the Planetary Society. And this week is the penultimate, the second to last space shuttle flight. Now, many people think of this as the end of human space exploration, but oh no, my friends, this is the beginning. Once this spacecraft is retired, we can move forward. We'll have more dollars and euros and yen and yuan and so on to invest to send people farther and deeper into space. And speaking of which, this shuttle flight is going to carry the life, the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment. This is a

kooky little idea from the Planetary Society. We have freeze-dried, special, very well understood microbes, and the cutest little water bears, the tardigrades, these very, very small animals that live in moss. Well, they live all over the world in different forms, but they're going to get a ride on the second to last space shuttle flight and get a little zero gravity, a little bit of extra radiation that you get in low Earth orbit, and will be the beginning of our test to see if living things can travel from one planet to another. In November, we're going to send the same style of microbes, another life module, from here to the moon of Mars, Phobos, and back. And we'll see if living things can make the trip. So this weekend,

along with all the other excitement, the president will be there, the pilot is Mark Kelly, husband of Representative Giffords. But along with all that is the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment. And if you're a Planetary Society member, you're a supporter of this. It's a thing where people around the world just wonder about this crazy hypothesis. Can living things get from one planet to another? This shuttle will be retired. And while it's being retired, people are coming out of the aluminum work, if I may, to support these shuttles. Like, oh, the shuttles are retiring. We want one in our city. We want one in our city. It shows you that the worldwide love of human spaceflight is still there. We just need to harness it and go farther and deeper

into space to more exciting destinations. And we will make discoveries that will, dare I say it, change the world. I've got to fly. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. What do you do if you're a college student who'd rather go to Mars than another frat party? Well, if you're lucky, your campus has a chapter of an organization called SEDS. Students for the Exploration and Development of Space was begun in the early 80s when a lot of people were worried about whether the final frontier was still a national priority. Rick Hanton is the current chair of SEDS USA.

The Iowa State computer engineering major joined me a few days ago for a conversation about what SEDS does and how students can get involved or start their own chapter. Our Skype connection wasn't the best, but I think you'll be able to hear his enthusiasm not just for the organization,

but for a goal many of us who are long past college still share. Rick, thanks very much for joining us on Planetary Radio. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. We're happy to have you. It's an inspiring organization. I wish it had been around when I was in the middle of my college career, which you are finishing up at least your bachelor's degree. Yep, I'm finishing up my bachelor's here at Iowa State University right now in computer engineering. Well, congratulations in advance for that. How long have you been involved with SEDS? Well, it's been kind of a growing process over time.

Back when I was just a freshman, I came in and I was interested in a lot of different groups here on campus. We have a lot of different active campus groups, one of which was the Iowa State Space Society, which had a year or two before become a chapter of SEDS USA and was formerly a chapter of the National Space Society. I started working with them and eventually managed to land myself in their very not well-attended meeting to set up the new people that would be running the group for the next year. And so I managed to become an officer with the group and eventually worked my way up to basically running the group, being the president of the group, and eventually kind of climbed the ladder up into SEDS USA, which I was the director of expansion

for SEDS USA for the last two years before I became chairman. And then this past year, since November, I've been the chairman of SEDS USA. That's a nice record of advancement. Is SEDS entirely a student organization, student-run, and students are members? Yeah, SEDS definitely prides itself on being an organization that was started by students and has been run basically only by students for the last 30 years. How many chapters are there? Do you know offhand across the U.S.? And then, you know, you're the head of SEDS USA, so I guess there are chapters overseas. Right. Currently, the last time I saw it, there's 29 chapters right now, or at least this year, in the U.S.

And I know of at least two, I believe, that should be coming online within probably the next month. Back in the original heyday of SEDS, back in the 1980s, when I think there was a lot of... SEDS kind of started from all this feeling that the United States wasn't doing anything in the space sector. And there's also a number of groups overseas, although each country basically manages its own self. There's no real global SEDS board or anything at the moment.

There has been in the past, though. So SEDS probably got its start at about the time that the Planetary Society was getting underway back in the 80s with the same feeling in mind. Now, a lot of people say that we're kind of in the same boat that you were talking about, why things got started back in the 80s, that the United States is not doing enough in space. And I will say, maybe that only applies to humans in space. What do you think? You know, there are a lot of things, I think, going on in the space sector today. But we are in definitely the same place. I think we hit around 1980.

I believe, if I'm right, both of our organizations were formed in the same year. But yeah, we're kind of in the same place where it's like, where do we go from here? Obviously, there is a lot of robotic missions around. And so those are really, really wonderful. But yeah, in human spaceflight, it's definitely kind of a transition time, right, with the space shuttle completing its mission and a lot of different new things possibly coming online. We'll see what happens. You know, regular listeners to this program heard our show from a SpaceUp conference that was done, an unconference down in San Diego recently, and I would be surprised if a lot of the young people there are not also SEDS members.

Is this something that is part of the SEDS mission, this whole idea of new space and commercial space development? Well, it's kind of one of the things we definitely talk about a lot in SEDS. On the other hand, it's something we kind of struggle with a little bit because SEDS really encompasses a lot of different students. And while a good proportion, maybe a majority of them, are really, really excited about commercial space ventures and some of the new companies, the SpaceX's, Blue Origin, and all those other companies coming out with interesting new vehicles and needing engineers and needing scientists.

They think that's great. But then there's also kind of contingents of SEDs that aren't always so thrilled with some of the new arrivals of new companies on the scene and think that NASA should be really the prevalent explorer of space. That's interesting. It sounds like within the organization, you've got the same kind of dichotomy that the rest of us are dealing with. Is there a typical SEDs member? I don't know if there's really a typical SEDS member? I don't know if I, I don't know if there's really a typical SEDS member, basically because as kind of a pyramid type organization, you know, we're

really at the SEDS USA level, our goal is basically just to keep the chapters together, work together, do joint major projects. But each chapter kind of has its own little feel and different projects that they like to work on. Some of them are very into doing astronomy things and others are very into doing lots and lots of outreach or getting their hands dirty in some amateur rocketry. Our mission is really to support all of that and to get the public involved. And so that's due at the national level? Well, at the national level, basically, you know, our whole job is to tie everything together and to work with other organizations like the Planetary Society and help our members put together a great conference each year, that kind of for the next year or two is to actually provide more funding and more initiatives and stuff from the national side of SEDS just to help out our chapters,

which generally get their funding from the university or from sponsors or from their state's space grant organization. That's Rick Hanton, chair of SEDS USA, Students for the Exploration and development of space. Our conversation will continue in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration

and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us.

You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. I really do wish SEDS had been around when I was in college.

The current National Chair of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space is Rick Hanton, and he's my guest on today's show. Rick is a graduating senior in computer engineering at Iowa State University. He has already told us what the organization has been up to since it was formed 30 years ago. The SED's mission is actually not so different than that of many other space interest organizations, and it has worked with many of them. You've mentioned working with Planetary Society a couple of times. Of course, that's the organization that produces this program, so I don't want to sound too self-serving here, but is that some kind of new relationship or partnership?

Yeah, that's a new partnership. We were talking recently with the Planetary Society folks and actually with Bill Nye the other day, and you wouldn't believe how excited the board of SEDS USA was to talk with Bill. And actually, now that Bill hopefully will be opening our conferences here. Oh, that's great. I didn't know that. That's terrific. I don't know how much you realize this, or some people realize this, but Bill's definitely quite the science celebrity among folks my age. I have been with him on at least a couple of college campuses.

Yeah, okay. You'd see that. You are his demographic, and it was a guy who must have been in his late 20s and was curious why people kept on running up to this Bill guy in a blue suit. It's like, you know, it's definitely this age demographic. Yeah, really. I'm glad I got into it while he was doing the show. In the past, SEDS has had partnerships with a decent number of other organizations.

Some we have really tight and close partnerships with, some not so much. But in the past, we've worked a lot with the National Space Society and the International Space University, both of which we have very good ties with, especially, I guess, ISU, because our founders, Peter Diamandis, Bob Richards, Todd Hawley, also founded that organization. Yeah, and we have Peter Diamandis, who hopefully our audience recognizes that name right up front from the XPRIZE Foundation and lots of other things that he has going on. I don't know how he juggles it all, frankly. Yeah. So we work with NSS, ISU, the Space Frontier Foundation, the American Astronautical Society to some extent, and Yuri's Night, which for a number of years we actually hosted the Yuri's Night website until they kind of moved off and did their own thing.

But it's still kind of the same. It's actually a decent number, if not maybe 50% or something, of the planning crew at Yuri's Night that are former SEDS or current SEDS members. Yeah, you know, I got involved with the SEDS chapter at Caltech when it started putting Yuri's Night together and did the webinar. I forgot that SEDS had sponsored or hosted the website in those early years of Yuri's Night celebration. Did you guys have a big time a couple of weeks ago? Yeah, we actually, it was all kind of different chapters having their own Yuri's Night celebrations, but I think a lot of chapters had really great get-togethers for Yuri's Night. Last year I got a bunch of them to throw up

some pictures and stuff on our website, so hopefully I can do that again. But I know here at Iowa we had a really great turnout. We brought in some pizza and some buffalo wild wings and had our aerospace department chair talk about his experiences, which were actually quite impressive, and did a few other things like launching some high-altitude sounding balloons and stuff like that. Oh, cool.

It was really great, yeah. I faintly remember the college students have an idea of how to have a good time and party hard. the college students have an idea of how to have a good time and party hard. How much of SEDS is just the chance to get together with like-minded people who believe that we still have a destiny in space? I think that's a big part of it. I guess for my, I probably have a little bit different perspective than some SEDS students and some of the younger members of SEDS because kind of as getting into chair and things I did before that, I've been to the last, I think, four of our national Space Vision conferences. And that is especially like a big part of SEDS is trying to get yourself to Space Vision because it's really great because you can, you know, you meet all these people, some of whom are just

amazing folks who are thinking the exact same things as you, and form these cross-country friendships that definitely last a long time. So now it's great because I know people who, I don't necessarily work there, but I know people who are working at SpaceX and Blue Origin, and one of my good friends is working at Armadillo Aerospace. And so it's really cool to know all these people and be able to chat with them about what we all think that the United States and the world should be doing up in space. We are just about out of time. Hopefully we've got a few people out there, maybe some freshmen, who are hearing this and maybe don't even have a chapter on their campus. What should they do?

How can they find out more and maybe even interest some other folks in starting a chapter? Well, I guess the first thing to do is to gauge some interest. If a person and their friends want to get together and form a chapter. Actually, one of the things we've done a little bit over the last couple of years is we've enticed a few AIAA chapters, which many universities have, to be AIAA slash SEDS chapters. So we've got a group up in Wisconsin that is like that and actually won our prize for being one of the best new chapters last year. You know, any chapter that's interested or any group that's interested,

a person that's interested actually, can just go to our website at SEDS.org and check out kind of all the information we have there. I know over the past couple years, if you dig around on the site, I've kind of put together a little bit of a work through of exactly how you go about starting a chapter step by step. Another easy way is just to contact our director of chapter expansion at expansion at seds.org. Excellent. And she'll definitely help out. Easy enough website. We'll put up a link to it,

of course, but it is just seds, S-E-D-S dot org. Only got a couple of seconds left. What's next in your life? Next in my life? Well, for the summer at least and possibly into the future, I'll be working out at Rockwell Collins Company out in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which is going to be a little bit of fun because my boss is also a big space geek like me. And so he's been having a lot of great space programs that he's trying to work on, such as a program for Boeing and their CST-100. So that'll be a lot of fun. Rick, it's been fun talking to you, too.

Good luck with that. Good luck with your career. And I hope that we'll be talking to you again someday as one of the people that's helping us reach that destiny in space that I was talking about. Great. Well, it's been great to talk with you too, Matt. Rick Anton is the chairman of SEDS USA. SEDS is the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. He is a graduating senior in computer engineering at Iowa State University here in the USA. We're going to move on to What's Up with our friend Bruce Betts in just a moment or two here. Stay tuned. Back in Bruce Betts' office for this week's edition of

What's Up. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. I got a question for you to begin with. Are you going to the launch, which is just a few days away as we speak? I am indeed. I hate you so much. Don't cry, man. It's just embarrassing. I can't believe this. And why am I staying?

I can't go to see the launch for the Planetary Society because I have to stay here for the Planetary Society. So I'll miss things here while I'm catching things there. Now I was also dead wrong about something I said last week. I said that the shuttle life organisms were already loaded on Space Shuttle Endeavor. They're not.

They are not. They are not. In fact, they are here saying their goodbyes with us right now. They're see you laters. There they are. It's amazing. They're a little vile. Sunning. Okay, they're not sunning themselves there. They're sealed up in their sample tubes. They're ready to head off to Florida, but they actually load these biological experiments quite late in the game. So I'll be going down for the loading uh of the our sample tubes into the wells of the commercial payload the crest payload that we're part of you you do a good job there on

our behalf i will try well while i'm there i'll look up in the night sky and uh in the evening sky saturn up in the east yellowish looking great with the telescope particularly if you look later in the evening when it's higher up uh overhead the pre-dawn sky, craziness, craziness in the next month and a half. It's still right on the edge of early. So you have to catch it's really close before dawn, eastern horizon. But if you can't see what I'm going to tell you about now, keep looking over the next few weeks, because all through May, four planets. So we go from Saturn being pretty much the only thing visible, four planets just in the pre-dawn sky, plus Saturn. We've got Venus, which should definitely be visible low on the horizon, super bright.

And then Jupiter, a little less bright, but still really, really bright. And then the other thing that's not as bright, that's whitish, is Mercury. And then Mars, red reddish all crazy doing some close conjunctions with each other i'll keep you posted over the coming weeks you can even throw in a crescent moon on april 30th and may 1st hiding in the in that group low on the eastern horizon uh shortly before dawn not to be missed don miss it. Although you've got the next few weeks to check it out. We move on to this week in space history. Bit of a slow space week as things go.

Still some interesting stuff. One big thing, Hubble Space Telescope was deployed in 1990. 21 years. Surely you're counting wrong. Yeah, that's weird. Sure, make me think about it. Also, a planetary geologist for whom our gene shoemaker Neo grants, near-Earth object grants are named after he was born in 1928 this week.

So some good things. We move on to, well, I'm actually here. I've got the microphone. Yeah, go for it. Gosh, there's so much pressure. Maybe I can do something really quiet. Random space fact!

A little percussive thing on the end there made it. Okay. Endeavor I'll be going to the launch of Space Shuttle Endeavor. Shut up! It's the 25th launch of endeavor that you have not seen just thought i'd point that out but the last thank you thank you the last however it will be coming out you can visit it on the ground since it will be displayed at the california science center after its career is over and And I surely will, and the tears will flow.

Oh, gosh, I hope I'm not there. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. And I ask you, who was the first American general officer, so an officer who was some type of general, when he flew in space? And how did we do, Matt? There were a variety of answers to this and a big response, but most people did get it. It was Thomas Stafford, who was, when he flew on Apollo Soyuz 1975, a one-star general, which I take it as a brigadier general, right? Yes, a brigadier general.

I believe he retired as a lieutenant general, a three-star. But he was a busy guy up there, as a lot of people pointed out, including Chet Twarog. That was just the last of his fights. He was the pilot for Gemini 6. He was the commander of Gemini 9. He was the commander of Apollo 10, which I don't know if he was a general at that point. But by 1975, yeah. Yeah, most of them.

A lot of them end up generals, or at least of that era, but very few flew as generals. Now, we did have one other good guess from Torsten Zimmer, but incorrect because we were looking for an American, and that was General Grievous. Good point. But yeah, yeah, that whole American thing. That's why I specified American, so people wouldn't get confused and call out General Grievous. He wouldn't have qualified as an American astronaut anyway because of the whole asthma thing. It's true. He might have been too tall also.

And I don't know if there's an arms limitation. They've all had two arms, but I don't know if they prohibit four. Anyway, we move on to uh our next trivia contest when apollo 11 came back from the moon kind of a kind of a big deal and people were there to greet the astronauts on the uss hornet which i know we've talked about before and president richard nixon was there also there was the father of a future American presidential candidate. Who was he who was on board the Hornet when Apollo 11 came back? The father of a future American presidential candidate.

Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. Wow. You have until Tuesday, May 3rd. Amazing, isn't it? It'll already be May before we answer this. Tuesday, May 3rd at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us the answer to this one and win yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about what you would put in a tiny little sample tube that you'd fly to space and back. Me! You know, there's one more launch after this one. I'm going to go on a diet right now. Did you say thank you and good night? No, thank you and good night. There it is.

He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Clear skies and Godspeed, Endeavor.