Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Surprising Budget News for Planetary Exploration

Episode Date: February 11, 2014

Good news, for a change! Congress decided to provide $127 million more for planetary science than was requested by the President. Bill Adkins of Adkins Strategies in Washington and the Society’s Director of Advocacy, Casey Dreier say a battle has been won, but the war for science continues. Emily Lakdawalla helps us understand how an eye in the Martian sky helps track Curiosity on the surface. Bill Nye addresses the mastodon in the room, and there’s a new and cool prize for the winner of the What’s Up space trivia contest.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Things are looking up for Planetary Science 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. Kaplan of the Planetary Society, Bill Adkins and Casey Dreyer are a few minutes away from telling us about the recently announced 2014 federal budget that increases, yes, you heard me, increases funding for the robotic exploration of our solar system. First, though, visits with Emily Lakawala and Bill Nye, and later, in our cozy, light-years-wide half-hour, a cool new prize for the winner of the What's Up Space Trivia Contest. Here's the Planetary Society senior editor.

Hey, Emily, welcome back. This blog entry that we're going to talk about is so new. I mean, you posted it moments before we got onto this Skype call, so you're going to have to tell me about it, but I do know that I've already seen some pretty cool shots from high above Mars looking down at what sure appear to be tracks. That's right. This post was actually, I've been working on it for weeks, and it started with an idle question, as a lot of my posts often do, which is,

what is the best high-rise image to use to map Curiosity's progress? Well, it turns out that the answer to that question is about 30 different high-rise images, because Curiosity is a rover that has plans to drive many, many kilometers. And each single high-rise image is about five kilometers across. It has a central color swath that's about one kilometer across. So there are dozens of high-rise photos that cover Curiosity's landing site. And to understand the answer to my question, which is, which one do I need to use if I want to show the right part of the traverse, if I want to show where a certain landmark like, say, Dingo Gap is, I had to write this very lengthy post sorting them all out into

order and figuring out which one Curiosity was going to cross it at which time. It looks like you had a part in assembling this? Oh, yeah. Well, you know, all of this data that's taken by HiRISE, as well as any other camera instrument that's in orbit around Mars, it's all made available to the public quite soon after its acquisition. In the case of HiRISE, it's like three to six months or can put in a little latitude longitude query and it spits out a whole bunch of results. But understanding where those things are on Mars takes a lot of extra work because each swath covers a little tiny, it's like French fries that are stacked on top of a map, trying to figure out which French fry size strip has the particular part of interest in it is a big challenge. But I think I've got it all figured out. So for all of you out there who want to map Curiosity's progress,

this post is the post for you. And it's always fascinating to learn about the ingenious ways that engineers have devised to do something as challenging as taking 25 centimeter per pixel images of the surface of another planet from a spacecraft that's moving at several kilometers per second. Science and technology. She puts it together in this post and many others. Thanks, Emily, very much. Thank you, Matt. She's the science editor for the Planetary Society and our planetary evangelist and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next is Bill Nye, the science guy. Bill,

I know you're on the road. Where do we find you this week? Milwaukee, Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin, I know you're on the road. Where do we find you this week? Milwaukee, Wisconsin. University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee campus. Go Panthers. Very good. And I assume that's because you're going to be talking to them tonight, very likely about the importance of science in human culture. Yes, and I might touch on space exploration as well.

I hope so. If we didn't talk about it, well, really, the elephant, or perhaps better, the mastodon in the room, would be this little event, this debate that attracted a little bit of attention that you took part in last week. And I do want to tell you that a lot of people have come up to me, knowing that I might be talking to you, and asked me to congratulate and or thank you for going into the lion's den there. My thanks to everybody, and thanks for your support. It's important to raise awareness that there is a significant number of people who are essentially anti-science here in the United States, the world's nominally most technically advanced society. You know, we've just got to call attention to it so that voters curtail this sort of activity.

Bring this home to space exploration, please. Oh, well, as Lyndon Johnson, President of the United States in 1964, remarked, you cannot be first in the world and second in space. So in other words, if the United States wants to maintain its leadership technically around the world, it has to graduate science students who are literate in space science so that we will have space engineers and space scientists to make the rockets and do the exploration of the future. It will be very difficult to get those students if they are brought up at an early age with these fundamental misconceptions about the nature of scientific inquiry, the nature of nature, and how we know

our place in the cosmos, our place in space. And at that facility there in Kentucky, the whole place is set up, $29 million place is set up to mislead people. It's striking. It's really, for me, as I said many times during the debate, as it was called, it's really unsettling. Thank you on my part as well. I look forward to going back to talking more specifically about all the exciting things happening in space and planetary exploration next week, Bill. Thank you, Matt. Let's change the world. And he is. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Coming up next, a couple of other guys who are working to change the world, Casey Dreyer and Bill Atkins, who are doing that from inside the Beltway frequently in Washington, D.C. Casey Dreyer is the Planetary Society's Director of Advocacy. You've heard him on this show many times before. As such, he is frequently in Washington, D.C., usually with my other guest. Bill Adkins is president of Adkins Strategies, LLC. Not too many years ago, he was on the staff of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology. Before that, he was helping to develop spacecraft back when he worked for the Naval Research Lab. And full disclosure here, Bill advises and represents the Planetary Society in the nation's capital.

Casey and Bill, thanks very much for joining us on Planetary Radio. Thanks, Matt. Pleasure to be here. Casey, the real shock here came when you wrote this blog entry back on January 16th that appears to say that space enthusiasts, planetary science people, got very good news out of Washington. Congress passed a budget for the United States, and as part of that budget, they funded NASA at a very good level, higher than most people were expecting. And within NASA's budget, they gave $127 million more to planetary science, the part that explores the solar system, than the president had requested. So we get extra money. We're kind of marching our way back towards this historical level of funding for planetary science that will allow us to go all throughout the solar system. And it also is important because it's the second year in a row now that Congress has provided more money to planetary science than the White House has requested.

And that's a really strong message and a very unusual message in Washington. So we're very happy about this. Yeah, and that point, what Congress has done, in spite of, in some cases, the executive branch, that's something I definitely want to come back to. But first, what does this actually mean in terms of missions and science? So the biggest part of this extra money is $80 million to go to Europa studies, to study a mission to Europa. Now, they got the same thing last year. And this is kind of interesting because NASA officially has no commitment to going to Europa. The White

House has not bought into it. There's no metal being cut or anything. But then NASA has tens of millions of dollars to study the problem. So they've been putting together this concept that they call the Europa Clipper. They do trajectory analysis. They're working on instrumentation packages. They're working this very high level design for a mission that does not yet exist. So that's a big part of this extra money. And that's important because when NASA does eventually come around and embrace this Europa mission, they'll have a lot of this early planning stuff taken care of and they can really jump and start on the main mission really quickly. The other big part is funding for Mars 2020 has kicked up a little bit, so they keep that

project healthy and then also a commitment to these smaller missions they call Discovery Class missions, which NASA wants to send out ideally every two years but has not been able to keep up with that pace recently. So good news for missions still to come. up with that pace recently. So good news for missions still to come. Is this also good news for missions that are out there now and need to continue, or many people feel should continue? I'm thinking in particular of Cassini out at Saturn. No mission was too endangered this year. The language actually does specify that Messenger around Mercury will continue for the year. So that was a good extra little bit of news.

Cassini is really in danger starting in 2015, and that's where we're going to be really paying attention to the president's next budget request. Bill, let's talk about this process a little bit and how this works or sometimes doesn't work very well in D.C. I mean, after all, this budget that has just been approved, this is the 2014 budget, right? Which supposedly should have been in place months ago. Yes, the fiscal year, the federal government's fiscal year starts in October. And the final agreement on the spending bills in this, what they call an omnibus, which includes spending for all the government agencies, including NASA and everything else, was only finalized a few weeks ago. So we're about a third of the way through the fiscal year. So it is late in being enacted.

Up until that point, agencies were operating under a stopgap measure called a continuing resolution, which essentially says continue based on spending levels in the last fiscal year. based on spending levels in the last fiscal year. And I just want to echo what Casey is saying about the good news and surprise that NASA as a whole received such a strong budget compared to expectations. NASA as a whole was only cut less than half a percent. People in Washington, I don't think you could have found anybody in town who thought NASA would get funded as well as it did.

And at the same time, to have planetary science increased nearly or more than 10 percent at the same time is really good news. So NASA is off and running for the fiscal year. And this really did come out of Congress, right? I mean, did this go beyond what the executive branch run by the president had requested? For NASA as a whole, it's slightly less than the president requested for fiscal year 2014. For planetary science specifically, it is indeed $127 million more than they requested. But keep in mind that a couple of years ago, the administration's request for planetary science was severely cut. years ago, the administration's request for planetary science was severely cut. So we're kind of making our way back to where planetary science is funded, a little closer to where the decadal survey and the scientific community had reached a consensus. There is clearly a great

deal of give and take here as this kind of work goes forward in DC. Is this fairly common? I mean, is this just the way things work? Well, things have not been working terribly well in Washington the last several years. I've heard that. I've heard that. So they're consistently inconsistent. And getting together, having Congress come together on an omnibus spending package and come to agreement on overall budget levels for fiscal year 14 and 15 is a small but very important accomplishment in moving forward. The last several years have been very turbulent, and having an actual regular spending bill that has funding for agencies is very welcome. That's Bill Adkins. He and Casey Dreyer will return with more on the 2014 NASA budget. This is Planetary Radio.

Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds.

Your name carried to an asteroid. How cool is that? You, your family, your friends, your cat, we're inviting everyone to travel along on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu. All the details are at planetary.org slash b-e-n-n-u. You can submit your name and then print your beautiful certificate. That's planetary.org slash Bennu. 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.

Congress approved the 2014 discretionary spending budget in mid-January. Planetary Science Director of Advocacy Casey Dreyer and Bill Adkins of Adkins Strategies are walking us through the tiny piece of that more than $1 trillion that is set aside for NASA, and the even tinier bit for planetary science. Casey, I've heard you make the point before with folks who may be perhaps a little bit too ready to criticize NASA itself, that NASA is just one agency in the executive branch, and it really doesn't have a whole lot of choice but to do what the president and Congress tell it to do, right? Yeah, that's a big part of it.

I mean, NASA just can't unilaterally decide to go to Mars, or if they did, it wouldn't last very long. NASA is run by presidential appointees, political appointees. Congress approves NASA's policy through the NASA authorization bills and also through the yearly funding bills. And so NASA can ask and cajole and plead and do whatever, but they can't necessarily do what they want to do. It's this balancing act between Congress and between the White House. And you're seeing that really play out right now with the asteroid retrieval mission. The White House wants to do this mission, and the Congress isn't too hot on it. And so NASA's kind of trying to figure out how to make it happen.

So they're really, it's this kind of balance of power about what they can and can't do. And that's why the society goes to D.C. to try to talk to everybody, because so many people have to be on board on the same page in order to kind of make this change happen. And so it's this important kind of discussion that needs to happen in many different parts of government, and it's not as simple as saying that NASA can just choose or not to choose to do one program or another. So, Bill, I want to ask, was that your dog trying to provide some consultation there?

She said to increase funding for planetary science at UNM-15. Good for her. We'll make her a canine member of the Planetary Society. As you were starting to say earlier, Casey, I mean, now, I guess the attention shifts to the 2015 budget. What are the steps toward that? Bill, maybe you can expand on that. The fiscal year 15 budget is scheduled to be submitted to Congress next month in March. And from that point on, the various committees that have jurisdiction over NASA will hold hearings, review the budget, and they'll begin to mark up their bills. So the appropriations bill will provide spending for NASA, and we'll have to see how well they receive NASA's appropriation request. and we'll have to see how well they receive NASA's appropriation request.

And we also have the NASA authorization bill, which is headed probably to the floor in the House and Senate later this year, and that's an important policy bill as well. So it'll be an exciting year to set policy on NASA and to provide funding. And I'm sure an exciting year for people working in advocacy in this area like you, Casey. I want you to be able to describe for folks this event that is taking place in less than two weeks, which provides an opportunity for other folks to become advocates. The Planetary Society is part of this grand space exploration alliance, and we kind of partner up with the Mars Society and Explore Mars and the National Space Society,

partner up with the Mars Society and Explore Mars and the National Space Society. And we get together and we rally our members to do what's called a legislative blitz. What we want to do is do as many meetings as we can around the U.S. Capitol in two days. And so far, we have almost 100 meetings scheduled. We're going to be going around talking about public support for space, for space exploration, for humans in space, for space science. It's this really great way to say that the public supports this. And it's easy sometimes for this issue to not really get into the awareness of a lot of representatives, even though it's just so important to our technology and our science and the future of the country, that it's we need to do this. We need to the future of the country that it's we need

to do this. We need to make a presence. And that's what we're doing with the Space Exploration Alliance. And that's what we're doing in Washington, D.C. at the end of February. And we've had a great response to this. And actually, we're full up. We are sold out of our spaces of people we can handle. And next year, we're going to have to try an even bigger venue to handle all the people, to train them how to speak to Congress, to send them around on their missions to represent space. So it's a very exciting opportunity. you know, an office right there in the Capitol. How important are these advocacy efforts? How important is it that Congress people and their staffs hear from the people who are on various sides of issues? It's very important. You know, we have 535 members in Congress, 100 in the Senate and 435 in the House. And they all represent people from their districts and states. And they often listen very

closely to their constituents. And it is effective. I think that the advocacy activities that the Planetary Society and other groups have done over the last several years has had a tangible effect. And I think that's why we're seeing the numbers for the budgets going up and the awareness for planetary science increasing. Planetary science is a great topic. Everybody's interested in it. There's still budget challenges ahead, but the advocacy is important. As they say, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. So it's important that the community continue. Casey, let's finish by letting people know, how can they stay aware of further developments in this area and maybe how they can get involved?

Gee, Matt, I'm so happy you asked that question. I just happen to have a recommendation. If people want to follow all this information, they can go to planetary.org.sos. That means Save Our Science. That gives all the current details about where we are in the budgeting process, the latest news about what's happening in space policy, and ways that they can find ways to participate in the whole process. So it's a very rich part of our website.

Gentlemen, Casey, I'm sure I will be talking to you again. You'll be giving us periodic updates here on Planetary Radio. Bill, I still very much look forward to having a longer conversation with you sometime just about how the process works. We talk so often with scientists and engineers and astronauts and the like, and I think if anybody's really doing the rocket science, it may be guys like you. I welcome a discussion. Thanks so much. We've been talking with Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Advocacy, and with Bill Adkins,

the President of Adkins Strategies, LLC, formerly of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology. And he does advise and represent the Planetary Society there within the Beltway, as they say, the nation's capital, Washington, D.C. Somebody else who used to actually spend a lot of time there back when he worked for NASA HQ, that's Bruce Betts, and he'll be up next to tell us about the night sky in What's Up. It is time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. That means we're talking to Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society,

who will tell us about the night sky and much more. And we'll give away a T-shirt and get ready to give away some really cool posters. Hey, welcome back. Hey, good to be back. Tell us about the night sky, and then eventually I will tell people about these posters. Okay, sounds good. We've got, well, Mercury getting tough already, dropping, but still might catch it very low in the west shortly after sunset. But Jupiter, super easy all night, high in the east in the early evening,

looking super bright. If you catch this show right after it comes out, it's near the moon on February 11th. We've got Mars coming up in the east in the middle of the night, Saturn high in the pre-dawn east, and also super bright Venus now in the pre-dawn east. All five naked-eye planets up there, although Mercury dropping away. Hey, before we go on, how was your first class? It was excellent. I think it went quite well. If people missed it, they can catch it at planetary.org slash Betts class or come check out the next class. But it was good. We had good participation and it seemed to go well.

And I've got a special guest this coming Wednesday the 12th. You might know him, Matt Kaplan. Oh, he's great. He is. We're going to record Planetary Radio on air. You can see it. You can see the magic happen on TV. Planetary Radio with pictures.

And not in front of an audience. Well, a virtual audience, I guess. It'll be fun. This is the class, of course, that Bruce teaches for Cal State Dominguez Hills, which is excellent. Introduction to Planetary Science and Astronomy Physics 195. On to This Week in space history. Happy birthday to regular listener Galileo Galileo. Happy 450th birthday this week.

Grazie. There he was. He just said thanks. Well, we brought it to't designed as a lander. But they landed and hung out for a couple weeks before shutting down. They did a solar system fist bump. All right. On to random Space Fact. Now, I can't place the tune. It's familiar.

Either my singing's bad, which is undoubtedly true, or you haven't been watching the world's largest sporting event going on right now. I knew it was familiar. The Olympic theme. By the way, nice job on the snowboard. Thank you. Thank you. I worked long and hard. Speaking of Olympics, the Olympic torch for the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games flew to the International Space Station and back in November of 2013. And even went outside the spacecraft on a spacewalk. Can you explain that to me? and even went outside the spacecraft on a spacewalk.

Can you explain that to me? I was wondering about this. Since air is a fairly precious commodity on the International Space Station. They didn't light it. Oh, my God. There we go. Now let's go on to the trivia contest. And I asked you, what three rovers have roved the farthest on bodies other than Earth? How did we do, Matt?

Virtually everybody got this, though there was some disagreement about which of these went the furthest on bodies other than Earth. How'd we do, Matt? Virtually everybody got this, though there was some disagreement about which of these went the furthest. It wasn't... That's why I asked for the top three, so we avoided that. Smart move. And I guess this race is still being run. Not that it's the Olympics, but Apollo 17, definitely a bronze medal for this.

But the other two, Lunokhod 2 on the moon and Opportunity. It looks like what? Opportunity, if it's not there yet, it will be very soon? Yeah, it should be taken over. The trick is we know Apollo 17 quite well, an Opportunity past Apollo 17 lunar rover at a little under 36 kilometers. The trick is Lunokhod 2 because it turns out their odometer wasn't set quite right. So people thought it was less than apparently it is. Both Russian and American scientists using lunar reconnaissance orbiter data

working to watch the tracks and figure out exactly how far it went. But it looks like it was like 3 or 4 kilometers, 5 kilometers more than what had originally been reported. So around 42 kilometers. But Opportunity's getting there. And if it doesn't kick off, definitely Opportunity will be number one, Lunokhod number, Lunokhod two, number two, and Apollo 17 rover number three. Paul McEwen was our winner. Cleveland, Ohio is where he hails from, and he won himself the new, the new beautiful Planetary Radio t-shirt. I do want to mention Randy bought him up in Ontario because he got it right.

But he also said, personally, though, I would vote for either the Chariot from Lost in Space or the Land Ram from the original Battlestar Galactica. He says, OK, I'm geeking out. Yeah, you think, Randy? Battlestar Galactica. He says, okay, I'm geeking out. Yeah, you think, Randy? Let's just make the general statement now. If I ask for things, if I'm unclear,

I'm looking for non-fictional things. Sometimes we ask those fictional questions, mostly for Matt and Randy. Thank you very much on Randy's behalf. Okay, what's next? Because this week, when you're there in my class, we're going to talk about how we explore planets, including the joys of using different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Here's a hopefully kind of easy one,

or at least would be after you watch my class if it's not already. What region in the electromagnetic spectrum is between the ultraviolet and gamma rays? I know this one. Yes. I could pass the class. Don't say it. Yeah, that's all I require. Not. All right, everybody, go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Get us your entry. What are they competing for this week, Matt? And when do they need to have their entries in by? You know what? I'm going to change this because the show's coming out a little bit later than it used to. Let's say from now on tuesday that'll be tuesday the 18th at 2 p.m pacific time okay have you thought this through i'm nuts i'm just nuts we're giving them away what are we giving away he asked

i don't know what are we giving away tell me you know our good friends at chop shop thomas roemer he's the principal there the main designer the big cheese uh i don't think he's done anything with cheese designs but he did do beyond earth and beyond earth you may have seen it on t-shirts sweatshirts well this is the poster of beyond earth it is a letterpress print which is really high quality it's a 19 inch by 25 inch print and it is great you've've seen this, right, Bruce? This is the one with the spacecraft kind of like white silhouettes, negative silhouettes, against a black background of the solar system. It is beautiful. I have indeed, showing their relative scale to distance from the sun of different spacecraft.

Yeah, and you can play Guess the Spacecraft. See how many you can name. It's really quite a beautiful poster, And we're going to give it to whoever gets chosen by random.org and has the answer right when we open this up on the 18th. Oh, and if you want to take a look at it, go to chopshopstore.com and you can look at the whole lineup of cool stuff that Thomas and colleagues have there. Okay, we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about why those Olympic athletes are told to bite their medals, particularly the gold ones.

I mean, it's not that hard a medal. Maybe it tastes good. I don't know. I guess I'll never know. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here on What's Up. And he's a gold medal winner in my book.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the winning members of the Society. Clear skies. Music Music Music Music