Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The case for saving VERITAS

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

NASA's VERITAS mission to Venus is currently on an indefinite hold. Darby Dyar, Deputy Principal Investigator for the mission, joins Planetary Radio to share the human story behind the spacecraft. She provides an insightful overview of the mission's background, its intended scientific contributions, and how listeners can help advocate for the mission. Then Bruce Betts guides us through upcoming night sky events and looks forward to asteroid Apophis' close flyby of Earth in 2029. Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2023-the-case-for-saving-veritasSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Making the case for saving Veritas, this week on Planetary Radio. I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. This week we have a very special guest. Darby Dyer, the Deputy Principal Investigator on NASA's VERITAS mission to Venus, which is now on an indefinite hold. Darby will share the story behind the spacecraft, the foundational science that it hopes to achieve, and how you can help save the mission. Then we'll kick it over to Bruce Betts for What's Up. He'll let you know what to spot in the upcoming night sky, take a look back at this week in space history, and we'll wrap up with our space trivia contest.

But first, it's time for some space news. Environmental groups are suing the United States Federal Aviation Administration over SpaceX's Starship launch. The lawsuit argues that the FAA failed to fully assess the environmental impacts of the Starship launches from Boca Chica, Texas. It cites as an example the April 20th launch that scattered debris over Boca Chica State Park. The launch created plumes of material that spread 10 kilometers or six miles and caused a 3.5 acre wildfire. SpaceX says that it's taking measures to prevent similar debris in future launches. Our Chief of Space Policy, Casey Dreyer, discussed this turn of events with environmental expert Eric Roche

in our most recent Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio, which came out on May 5th. If you're a fan of the beloved Voyager spacecrafts, we've got some great news. Voyager 2's lifespan has been extended thanks to engineering ingenuity. The spacecraft launched in 1977 and is now in interstellar space. It has very limited battery power remaining and was facing possible shutdown, but mission engineers found a way to reroute power to science instruments from a non-essential voltage regulator.

This could potentially extend the spacecraft's lifespan by three years, to 2026. Meanwhile, back on Earth. Plutonium, which powers missions like Voyager, is in short supply. Missions that travel far from the Sun need nuclear power rather than solar power to operate. But the particular isotope that these generators use, which is plutonium-238, is very difficult to produce. Only about 1.5 kilograms, or 3.3 pounds, of plutonium-238 is produced in the United States each year.

And this won't be enough to power all of the planetary science missions planned for the next decade. NASA is developing more efficient power technologies, but the agency has had to scale back on these efforts due to budget cuts. It's a conundrum. And what happens when you combine a global pandemic, growing competition from the private sector, and a never-before-seen mission? In the case of NASA's Psyche mission, you get a delay. When Psyche missed its launch date in 2022, it set off a chain reaction of delays and cost overruns on other missions led by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, including the

indefinite hold on the Veritas mission, which we'll be discussing shortly. Lori Leshin, who took over as JPL director around the time that this was all happening, shared her insights with us on the myriad causes that contributed to the situation and what she's trying to do to right the ship. You can read that interview and get more information on all of these stories in the May 5th edition of the Planetary Society's weekly newsletter, The Downlink. You can read it or subscribe to have it sent to your inbox for free every Friday at planetary.org slash downlink. Now, you may have noticed that in recent decades, there's been an absence of NASA missions

to Venus. Earth's enigmatic neighbor is shrouded in thick clouds and scorching temperatures. And despite its relative proximity to Earth, there's a lot of fundamental questions about Venus that remain unanswered. We need to know more about its geologic history, its atmospheric composition, and whether it once harbored water or even life. The lack of missions to this world has hindered scientific progress, leaving us with a limited understanding of the planet's evolution and potential habitability. That's where NASA's VERITAS mission comes in. Veritas stands for the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science,

InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy mission. It was designed to address these gaps in our knowledge by mapping Venus's surface and collecting data on its geology, topography, and atmosphere. The mission aimed to help scientists unravel the planet's mysteries and compare its geological processes to those on Earth. Unfortunately, in November 2022, NASA announced that the VERITAS mission would be put on hold. This delay not only sets humanity back in the timeline for gathering crucial information about Venus, but it's also having devastating impacts on the VERITAS team and its international partners. That's why in April, the Planetary Society teamed up with the American Geophysical Union and several prominent academic institutions

to call on the U.S. Congress to save the VERITAS mission. Our guest this week is Dr. Darby Dyer, the Deputy Principal Investigator on the VERITAS mission. She's a professor of astronomy at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, USA. Darby specializes in planetary science with a focus on understanding the distribution of elements throughout our solar system. She's published over 260 scientific papers and won numerous awards for contributions to her field. Darby has spent time studying the moon, Mars, and asteroids, but Venus, among all of these beautiful worlds, is a target that she's had her sights on for decades. Hi, Darby. Thanks for joining me on Planetary Radio.

Oh, so happy to be here. You know, the United States has not been back to Venus with a big mission since Magellan in the 1990s. a big mission since Magellan in the 1990s. And I was so pleased when NASA announced it, I think it was two years ago now, that we were going to be having two big major missions go out to Venus. It feels like now is the perfect time to do that. And then we had this beautiful moment where the decadal survey doubled down on those priorities, told us that going to Venus was something that we should be doing. So I was on a Venus hype train right up until the moment that I found out that Veritas was on an indefinite hold. A lot of people, when they hear a space mission is delayed,

you know, they can kind of shrug it off. But this is more than about a spacecraft. This is a human story that I feel like you are uniquely situated to tell. So how did you find out that the Veritas mission was going to be on this indefinite hold? Well, let me backtrack and go back to the beginning. I started graduate school in the fall of 1980. And at that time, the U.S. had a big mission planned to Venus called Venus Orbital Imaging Radar. And it was a Bonanza mission, Christmas tree, many different cool Venus instruments. And so the first course I took in graduate school was about Venus. I, at that point,

bought the Venus t-shirt also and became emotionally involved in Venus. And soon thereafter, I experienced my first political disappointment of my career as a scientist, which is that Ronald Reagan got elected and VIR was canceled. At that point, I decided, okay, I'm going to do my thesis on lunar samples and maybe I'll work on meteorites for a while and maybe the pendulum will swing back and someday I'll get to work on Venus again. And so in the meantime, I did all of those things. I was part of the Curiosity rover science team. We built part of the rover at Mount Holyoke College. But all of that time in my heart, I carried Veritas. So the story goes, 12 years ago, we started working on this, at least a precursor to this mission. And we've been working on it

really hard ever since. And so, as you said, to find out two years ago that we got selected was a pivotal moment in my career. So fast forward 18 months after that, I was actually at a conference in Houston at the Lunar and Planetary Institute about lunar samples. And I got a phone call from the PI, Suze McCarr, who said, call me. I was like, okay. So I stepped out in the hallway and called Suze. And she said, Darby, we're in trouble. They are going to put us on indefinite hold or maybe even cancel us. And so there I stood in the hallway with tears streaming down my cheeks. I was speechless. We were completely blindsided. I didn't know what to say. You hear in books about people working on something for a decade and finally having it happen.

And so I always thought that that was our fairy tale. And to have the rug pulled out from under us after a decade of working on this thing was heartbreaking. It's the only word I can use. And not only have you been working on this for so long, I know that this was going to kind of be like the cherry on the sundae of your career. You were hoping this was going to be your last big mission before you retired, right? Well, and it will be my last big mission before I retire because I just turned 65.

So at this point, we're not even going to launch until right now. Headquarters is telling us that without action from Congress, we will launch before 2031. And so in 2031, boy, do the math, I'm going to be old. So yes, I will go out on this mission. And I have personally come up with some new strategies for how we're going to interpret orbital data from the spectrometer on Veritas. And so darn it, I'm going to hang in here on this mission, because I want to see my algorithms and my ideas come to fruition and make the first composition map of the surface of Venus. So I'm going to hang in there. But no, it's heartbreaking.

I was planning to retire to my house on the coast of Maine and watch the fishing boats go by. And I guess I'll be watching the fishing boats go by and watching a screen that has Venus images on it. So it is what it is. Yeah. I think something that's also really important for people to understand about this is that this mission was postponed or put on indefinite hold for no fault of its own. Your team was on budget, you were on time, but I'm sure as everyone is well aware, we've been through this really difficult period the last few years. The COVID pandemic had all of these knock-on effects. And that wasn't the only reason why other missions at NASA were delayed, but primarily the Psyche mission got delayed a little bit. And that caused this knock-on effect. It caused this delay to Veritas. And your team did absolutely nothing wrong. That feels a little unprecedented. and your team did absolutely nothing wrong. That feels a little unprecedented.

Yeah, you know, in my life, I try to always say, what could I have done differently, you know, to affect a better outcome? And in this situation, there's nothing that anyone on the Veritas team could have done to affect a better outcome. And that's another part of this that is really hard to accept. The other thing is that it's been kind of a gradual trickle of information from headquarters. I mean, initially, they told us, okay, because of the psyche issues and because of budget issues, we're going to stand you down. And then the next thing we knew a couple months later, it was like, oh yes. And also we aren't going to stand you up until Mars sample return is on budget and

Europa Clipper is in good shape. And oh, by the way, we also want you to deliver this piece of equipment to India. So over a period of months, headquarters kept adding additional heartbreaking conditions to this. So that was very difficult. You know, as a scientist, you always want a clear explanation. And had they been able to give us that, I think maybe it would have been easier to accept this. able to give us that, I think maybe it would have been easier to accept this. It's just unclear to us the fact that, you know, two years ago, we had $811 million in the budget. And now we have 1.5 million times five years. You know, so there's no, there's no paper trail, no accounting of what exactly where that money went. And that just, they're not trying to make

it hard on us. But it just makes it that much more difficult emotionally to deal with. Yeah. And that money doesn't just go to actually building the spacecraft. It goes to retaining the teams that build and work on this spacecraft. And I'm sure this has had a deep impact on everybody who was a part of this team. Well, of course, because another thing that was handled sort of poorly was that when we found out when I was sobbing in the hallways in Houston, the foreign partners who are contributing $90 million to this mission were also told at the same time. And they are in a difficult bind because the European Space Agency is committed to a follow on Venus mission called Envision. And by pushing Veritas back, NASA is forcing those partners

to do two missions at the same time, which they cannot do. And so what's ended up happening is that the foreign partners are going ahead on schedule because they all have their money. But we're in this really awkward situation where imagine building something to go on a spacecraft and not having anyone in the U.S. to talk to about the spacecraft. It's a very, very difficult situation for our foreign partners. And those people, of course, are my friends. So it's doubly difficult for me. Did you have enough information that they can work from? Or is it going to be a situation where

they might alter some things on accident because of lack of information that they can work from? Or is it going to be a situation where they might alter some things on accident because of lack of information that will later impact the spacecraft when you actually have to finish everything? Well, of course, yes, we're terrified of that. Anytime you push a mission back, you induce risk because, you know, certain components that you might already have purchased become less useful as time goes on. NASA did give us a small amount of money to stand down. And we've spent most of that money in the stand down period, trying to do the best we possibly can to interface with the foreign partners and make sure that they have the information that they need. So as a team, we're trying really, really hard to make sure that our colleagues and friends and partners in Europe are going to be as little

inconvenienced by this delay as possible. But it's hard. There's also kind of an extra thing on this, which is that not all of these things are built just by the space agency. They have outside contracts that you have signed. There are some consequences when you try to pull out of these contracts. And as I was learning about what was happening with your international partners, I realized they're not pulling out of those contracts. They're going full steam ahead. So it's going to be a very interesting situation if they find themselves in a space where that mission gets ultimately canceled. Absolutely. NASA will lose a lot of good faith. I mean, it's already kind of awkward for me as a U.S. citizen to hang out with my friends in Europe now because I'm terrified that we're going to let them down.

And NASA has been unable to give any of those foreign agencies a guarantee that this mission will go. So, you know, we teeter between being worried about being canceled and being worried about only delayed. It's a tough period for us on the team. And thanks for sharing that with us. I know it's a tough period for us on the team. And thanks for sharing that with us. I know it's a very emotional subject. I've had tears in my eyes. Yeah. But there is hope. I don't want to make it sound like this is absolutely going to be canceled because you have the support of all of us here at the Planetary Society. We are going to try everything we can to try to get the mission,

the funding that it needs. Because it's important. We haven't even begun to touch really on what the spacecraft is going to do. So I think we should let everyone know. We need to make the case so everyone knows why they should give their time to advocacy for this. Because the things we could learn from Veritas are mind blowing. And it's unique. There are many missions about to go to Venus, but what this spacecraft does is pivotal in the structure of all that we're trying to learn. Why don't we go into this from the very beginning? What are the main mission objectives for Veritas? In planetary science, it's a sort of a typical progression that when you start to explore a body, one of the first

things you do is do a topography map. Because regardless of whether you're going to do some kind of orbital measurement in which you need to know where the high mountains are, or whether you're going to take pictures or do any other kinds of measurements, you need a topographic map. Quickly following on that in most planetary bodies will come some kind of camera so you can figure out what the surface looks like in whatever wavelength range you're able to make the measurements. Because we haven't been to Venus in 30 years, the data we have on Venus are nothing short of pathetic. Let's put it that way. We have better topographic data on Pluto, which isn't even a planet, than we do on Venus.

We don't know the rock type on Venus. which isn't even a planet, than we do on Venus. We don't know the rock type on Venus. We have a few chemical analyses from a handful of sites that look like basalt, but that's like saying, you know, I'm going to walk out in my backyard and analyze the outcrop back there, and then I'm going to extrapolate that to all of Earth. That's just ridiculous. So VERITAS was really designed as the fundamental mission to take us to Venus

and get us ready for whatever kind of exploration comes next. And the two fundamental measurements that we really need to make on Venus are what is the topography? We need to get the topography better than Pluto and as good as Mars. And we need to get good topography data on Venus. And then secondly, we need to get some hint of what the rock type is. So those are the two big measurements. And we're going to cover the entire planet with these measurements many times over. So all of these data lay the groundwork for anything that can come after us, including potentially a Venus lander, which was proposed by the recent Decadal survey as one of their

possible flagship missions. We'd love to know more about what the atmospheric composition is so we can do orbital measurements even better. So those are the two fundamental measurements that we're making, really the two big instruments that we have, the radar, which will make topographic measurements, and the spectrometer, which will take spectra of the surface. I think what's really cool about the radar in particular is that these kinds of synthetic aperture radars have only been used on Venus once in the Magellan mission. And I had a really great time talking with Robbie Herrick and Scott Hensley more recently about their paper of recent volcanism on Venus.

That detection was made with that synthetic aperture back 30 years ago. And I can't even imagine with the new resolution on this instrument, how much more information we could get about the surface of this world. What's the resolution on this thing? Topography is 5.9 meters vertical resolution, 250 meters horizontal. The SAR imaging will be 30 meters resolution. In certain places, we'll have targeted data sets where the SAR imaging will be 15 meters. We'll be able to look at surface deformation of 1.5 centimeters vertical. So imagine what we're going to see with the radar alone. It is mind-boggling. I know too that it's not an instrument necessarily, but you're also going to be getting gravitational information

about this planet as well as you're orbiting, right? Right. So another of the big mysteries that's persevered ever since Magellan is the whole question of how does Venus resurface and how does Venus lose its heat? And in order to answer those two questions, we need to understand the thickness of the crust and how and where heat is flowing out of the planet.

And as part of that, we will also determine the size of the core and its state, whether it's liquid or solid from these gravity measurements. So those, again, are fundamental measurements. You know, in any science, it seems that fundamental measurements should come first before you do all the other exciting things. But they are the foundation on which all subsequent Venus research must rest. I'm hoping that by learning more about the internal structure of this world, we can learn a little bit more about its magnetic field and that situation. Having a planet like Venus with such a thick atmosphere, but no internal dynamo is so fascinating to me. And it also leads to more fundamental questions. Like we don't even know whether or not plate tectonics are a thing or what role that would play on Venus.

There are so many fundamental mysteries about this world. And it's right next door. Not only is it right next door, but of course, you have to recognize that Venus is similar to so many of the hundreds and soon thousands of exoplanets that we're discovering. And if we don't understand what Venus is doing, we can't hope to understand what's actually happening on exoplanets. I think Venus is the key to following the water in our solar system. If you're familiar with the Mars program, you know, as I am, you know that for many years, the slogan for the whole Mars program was follow the water and find the life. That was what we were doing. But in the last five years, it's become obvious to everyone involved that Mars only had liquid water for 300 million years compared with Venus's liquid water, which was by some estimates as much as 3 billion years.

So if you're going to look for life elsewhere in the solar system, Venus seems to me now the logical place to be looking for it. So Venus is so important in the light of that habitability discussion, because if indeed there was liquid water, and if indeed there were to have been life developed during those 3 billion years, then that's a pretty good scenario for all those other Venus-like exoplanets that we're finding. And to me, I don't know, I always say as a professor that the most profound question you can ask in almost any class at college is,

are we alone? And I think Venus might hold the keys to answering that question. I think you might be right. I mean, honestly, I've been steeped in planetary science and astrophysics my whole life. It was what I wanted to learn about. I always want to learn more about particularly the worlds on our solar system because they're so close at hand. But when I learned that Venus had had potentially water on it for not just the hundreds of millions of years, but billions of years, maybe even three billion years. I was stunned. We're dedicating so much time to Mars, and rightfully so.

It's a fascinating world that deserves all of that research. But could there have been life on Venus? The conditions seem so much more good for it. I was stunned. It should have struck me. I sort of had the same epiphany myself about a decade ago. It should have dawned on me because, you know, when I teach planetary science, I always talk about how a solar system heats up as the star heats up and the

heat wave moves out through the planets. And so, you know, it stands to reason that, yes, Venus is both close to Earth in terms of orbital distance from the sun, which means it's compositionally similar. And yet it's closer to the Sun, which means it heated up earlier. So we now think that Venus was probably warm enough to have liquid water before Earth. So once you start putting together those very simple conclusions, you realize, oh my gosh, this is a place where we have to go. And I too love the Mars program. I was part of, I am part of the Mars program. I think Mars is a really fascinating place and it deserves all the, as you say, all the interest that people are giving it. But it may not be the place where we answer this fundamental

question. What I'm wondering is what this mission can actually tell us about that history of habitability and how this world has changed over time. What are the measurements that we're going to be taking that will help us determine that? Let's talk a little bit about plate tectonics for a minute. So Earth is the only planet that we know of that has plate tectonics on it currently. And yet there are tantalizing hints on the surface of Venus that perhaps there are trench-like structures around the fringes of these large volcanic structures called corona. There are many scientists who have put forth compelling arguments to suggest that the trenches around the corona could be the nascent plate tectonics smoking gun on Venus. If that's the case, then plate tectonics is not unique to Earth.

And why is that important? It's important because although we think about plate tectonics in terms of recycling crust, it's also recycling water. And plate tectonics has a very valuable role on Earth in helping to affect and influence our hydrologic cycle. And so if there is plate tectonics on Venus, then that could have both in the past and in the future play a very important role in regulating how water is extracted from the planet. So that's a key question. So another thing that we'd really like to know that's related to plate tectonics, of course,

is, is there active volcanism? Now, if you heard the episode where you talked to Robbie and Scott, you know that we've recently found in 30-year-old Magellan data, evidence for pretty obvious volcanic eruption that suggests that volcanism was going on 30 years ago on Venus and presumably is still going on today. How will Veritas deal with this? Veritas has a lot of cool ways that he can do this. First of all, it can see the ground moving. Second of all, we can see the glow of a volcanic eruption. You know, when there's heat and light being given off by an eruption, you can see that from orbit. And the other thing that happens in an eruption, of course, heat and light being given off by an eruption, you can see that from orbit.

And the other thing that happens in an eruption, of course, is that gases are given off. And Veritas has spectral bands that can detect gases being given off. So Veritas has many different ways of detecting change, not to mention radar pictures, which will presumably show the same kinds of changes that were detected by the previous paper, which will presumably show the same kinds of changes that were detected by the previous paper, i.e. a volcanic vent opening up or the texture of a flow changing as it moves away from a vent, those sorts of things. I know that a major challenge for that team when they were trying to figure out whether or not this volcanic activity was happening was mostly just that as they were going around this planet, they were getting kind of different angles of vision on these locations. So it's kind of difficult to see if there's actually been changes over time. And have you been kind of connecting with that team to see if you can use similar technologies to actually see differences between your orbits in this data?

Well, so they had three cycles of data acquisition on Magellan. We're going to have many, many more. So we will have many more opportunities and better viewing angles than they had with Magellan. So we will be able to see things in a much more straightforward way, rather than doing all the modeling that had to be done with the Magellan data because of the limited angles of look that were available for that mission. angles of look that were available for that mission. And with the higher resolution, I'm sure it'll be much easier to tell if that's a difference in the light versus an actual difference in the topography. And forgive me if I'm incorrect about this because I'm not a geologist, but I remember reading that you can actually kind of tell more about the water content of a world from the volatiles that are actually expelled from volcanoes. Absolutely, yes.

I mean, Veritas will look for water vapor. That's the predominant gas that we're looking for to help us detect eruptions. Although, with respect to understanding the volatile budget, if you will, of Venus, I have to give kudos to our sister mission, DaVinci, which is going to have an atmospheric probe that's essentially going to look at noble gases and gas composition as a function of altitude in the atmosphere. And Envision will give us complementary and yet different kinds of information about what's in the atmosphere now. So Veritas is going to look for sort of changes and unusual locations of water vapor in the atmosphere because we have the advantage of being global, whereas DaVinci will go through in one place and punch through and make those measurements.

So we're going to have these two great measurements that are going to give us different types of information that will answer the same kinds of questions. We'll be right back with the rest of my interview with Darby Dyer after this short break. Want to see humans on Mars by the mid-2030s? You can join the people working hard to get us there at the Humans to Mars

Summit, once again offered by our friends at Explore Mars. Humans to Mars happens May 16th through the 18th in the beautiful Washington, D.C. headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences. You can learn more and register at exploremars.org. Planetary Society members, enter our discount code for substantial savings. It's Planetary Society Mars 2023. And say hi to Matt Kaplan if you attend. There's also a lot that we don't understand about just the basic chemical makeup of the surface of this world. And thankfully, you've got spectroscopy to help you out with that. But how much do we actually know about what's going on with the surface of Venus and its composition? And how much more could we learn through this mission? Oh, of course, I'm a spectroscopist, so this is my baby. So let's begin with the fact

that it's pretty obvious that much of the surface of Venus is covered with flows. They look like basaltic flows. We're confident from previous missions from the Soviet Union in the 60s and 70s that we have an idea that those are probably basalt, which should surprise no one since basalt is the predominant rock type in terrestrial bodies in the solar system. However, there are these very enigmatic terrains on Venus called tessera. And the tessera are these intensely deformed, high-standing, topographically high-standing terrains. And there are multiple hypotheses for what formed them. One side says, oh, maybe those are remnants of some old, giant basaltic lake where somehow the cooling crust coagulated in what one of my

colleagues calls pond scum. So imagine pond scum on a basaltic lake. So one side says that the tessera are composed of basaltic composition rocks, and they're old and broken up and eroded, and they've been impacted. And another side says, oh, no, those are actually old continents that still persevere. And therefore, by analogy with Earth, must be granitic. And if they are granitic, then on Earth, granites form in the presence of water. So all of these things sort of tie together. Understanding the rock type to a geologist like me is the most important measurement we could be making. Which parts of the surface of Venus are older or younger? And what can that tell us about the way that the planet evolved over time? So without return samples, of course,

we have very little way of understanding age except through impacts. And the impact record on Venus is tricky to interpret for a couple of reasons. First of all, the thick atmosphere means that a lot of the little impactors don't make it through. They end up burning up. So we don't have quite the same distribution of crater populations that we do on other terrestrial bodies in our solar system. So that's part of the problem. that we do on other terrestrial bodies in our solar system. So that's part of the problem.

However, we do know that if you look, and this was known as far back as the Magellan mission, if you look at the distribution of craters that we do see, they're actually quite rare on the surface of Venus and quite randomly distributed, which suggested both to the Magellan scientists and to most modern scientists that much of the surface of Venus, especially those basaltic flows, is all the same age or comparable age. And when we say the same age to a geologist, that maybe doesn't mean the same as what it means to a five-year-old. It means it's within a couple dozen million years of the same age. So the surface is probably much the same age, but we also see impacts on those tesserae. In fact, because they're so poorly exposed, it's difficult to say whether they really are older. Most of the information that we have about the tesserae's age comes from the fact that the

basalts seem to flow up into them, but not be able to flow over them, which tells us that the basalt came after the tessera, but how much longer after, we actually don't know. And in order to actually send anything there to get a sample, it's going to have to survive the surface. And just doing that functionally is very difficult, but I can't even imagine trying to do that without a good topographical map of the whole planet. How do you even avoid landing on rocks? Yes, that's exactly, I mean, the Da Vinci mission is bravely descending in an area of Tessera. And lucky for them, well, cleverly by them, they did not guarantee that their probe would last after it landed. But we're hoping to get some insights into that from the Da Vinci

imagery as they descend. But unfortunately, their spectrometer only has two channels, as opposed to the six channels that we have on VERITAS. So I fear that we won't maybe get as much compositional information from the DAVINCI mission as I would want. But on the other hand, they're getting amazing data on the atmosphere. So, you know, you can't have everything in one mission. And that's why you have multiple missions going to Venus. Exactly. I'm wondering, part of this is because we want to learn about the history of life in

our solar system. We want to know if Venus was habitable at some point. And this mission is going to be doing things like looking for water content and all those other things. But you're going to need other missions like Da Vinci to literally test, like taste the flavor of the atmosphere and see if there's things like maybe, maybe life. I know it's still a little contentious, this idea that there might be some kind of phosphine creating life in the atmosphere, but there's so much mystery here to be had. And you need all

these missions working in coordination to really answer these questions. Otherwise, what if we get some kind of measurement and then we can't interpret it because we don't have fundamental data? I think missing out on VERITAS is really going to impact these other missions. We have 30 years of no missions to make up for. So you think about how many missions have gone to Mars or the moon in that period of time. We have a lot of catching up to do. I suspect we will ask more questions than we will answer. But man, are we going to answer a lot of questions. It's funny because I get a little frustrated about it. You know, why are there so many missions to this, that, and the other thing? And then there's whole worlds like Venus and Neptune and Uranus that just don't have the dedicated missions that they need. And then I just have to scale it back

a little bit. And remember that we're just at the beginning of this age of exploration. We haven't been back to the moon in 50 plus years, but we only just sent people to the moon 50 years ago. We're just starting out and I just, I have to be patient. That being said, delaying missions like this could have consequences all their own. What are the impacts if say we send this mission in 10 or 20 years instead of now? Oh, so many consequences. The first one is the potential for obsolescence of some of our components. You know, we started designing it 12 years ago. Obviously, every time we resubmitted it, we updated the technology that we were going to use. But the longer we push this off, the harder it's going to be to catch up in terms of components.

Before we were told to stand down, we were already kind of wheeling and dealing and making deals on components. And it's unclear now, if we get pushed back by an additional three years, whether the components that we thought we wanted, which we couldn't, of course, pay for now, are going to be what we want. So there's a huge risk of obsolescence when you push back. There's also the risk of losing people. You know, I'm a good example. Well, I'm an academic, risk of losing people. You know, I'm a good example. Well, I'm an academic, so I'll never retire. But the same cannot be said of the professional staff who probably will retire. And that's another part of the heartbreak that seems to be the theme of my remarks here. The heartbreak of this mission is that we had just brought on a team of incredible engineers

and support people at JPL, really top-notch people, excited about the mission, supportive of the science, wonderful people to work with. And then almost as soon as the ink was dry on their contracts, we had to let them go. And it's unclear because JPL has so many different commitments whether we'll get any of those people back. So obsolescence of technology, loss of senior people who understand the mission. And as I said, retirements, people like me and Scott Hensley, who have been around a long time, we risk us retiring. So that's part of it. And then the last part is that anytime you postpone a mission, things cost more. So we put in a budget and you, like anything, if you budgeted for something and then said, oh no, you're going

to have to wait 10 years before you can buy that thing, you quickly realize that you didn't have enough money. And so every year that they push Veritas back is going to cost more money. And of course, the delay also interferes with this beautiful progression that we had. Veritas gets the fundamental data, makes the fundamental maps. Then DaVinci goes in with its eyes open to where it's going to go based on Veritas topographic data and spectroscopic data. And then Envision comes along from the European Space Agency. They look in more detail at some of the areas that we've flagged as being interested. There was supposed to be a nice long gap, like a 10-year gap between Veritas and

Envision so that we could do change detection quite easily. So all of those things got thrown out the window when the Veritas mission got stood down with this nebulous startup date of no sooner than 2031. Interesting too to me is that we're just at this beginning of understanding the broader populations of planets outside of our solar system. And you touched on this a little bit earlier that a lot of the planets we're finding outside of our solar system. And you touched on this a little bit earlier that a lot of the planets we're finding outside of our solar system are Venus-like in size. I think it's almost 50% of them are about like Venus in size. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. Although you got to remember that that number is, you have to take it with a little bit of a grain of salt because there's an observational bias. The way we observe exoplanets mostly is by watching them pass in

front of their stars. And obviously, the closer something is, the more often it passes in front of the star. And so there is a little bit of an observational bias there. But yes, that's true that of the exoplanets that have been discovered, close to half of them are Venus-sized. And that's a little startling when you think of it in the context of using the transit method. The bigger a planet is, the easier it's going to be to find. So finding anything of Venus's size is necessarily more difficult. So the fact that half of them are Venus in size speaks to the fact that they're probably common, very common. And we're just beginning to analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets with JWST. I hate the idea that not understanding more about Venus could impact our understanding

of the broader populations of exoplanets. That seems like it could impact our understanding for years to come. Exactly. And to me, what's really fascinating about looking at exoplanets is, you know, in our solar system, we currently have this paradigm of the habitable zone, which currently is sort of centered on where Earth is in terms of Earth distances from the sun. But few people take that analogy far enough to realize that the habitable zone is mobile, and it's a function of time. And so when you think about our solar system, sure, the habitable zone is where it is now. But when you start looking at the observations that have been made for exoplanets, we don't know how old those stars are. And so we don't know

exactly where those Venus-like exoplanets are in terms of their own habitable zones. So it's fascinating to think about the concept of habitability as being different in every solar system that forms because of the rate at which the star heats up. That also impacts the way that we think of our planet in the context of our solar system. I think of Venus as this beautiful kind of case study or cautionary tale, if you will, about what happens to habitable planets when things go wrong.

There is conceivably a history where that planet could have had life, could have had oceans and been very earth-like, but something went wrong and now it's a face-melting hellscape with acid clouds. And we do not want that to happen to Earth. I'm not saying that delaying a mission like Veritas could impact and turn Earth into Venus in the short term, but we want to understand more about how planets change over time so we can protect ourselves

and look for habitable worlds elsewhere. It all goes back to the two recurring themes in this conversation, heartbreak and fundamental. Fundamental data, to me, are the key to understanding not just global, as a geologist, I always think about global processes, but universal processes, which is how I think about as an astronomer. So understanding the fundamentals of how planet habitability changes over time is such an important question in astronomy. It's critical that we get moving on this as soon as possible by studying Venus and understanding what it has to tell us. When we're looking for life in the universe, people come back to this idea of the Drake equation that helps us kind of calculate how long intelligent creatures could be around, how many of them are out there. And we always think

of what the actual species are doing themselves, how that could impact their longevity and whether or not we discover them. But there's this great mystery to how long planets remain habitable. We don't really know. And knowing that a planet like Venus could have changed, that could be a huge piece in this mystery. Maybe it's not the alien's fault. Well, eventually, our sun is going to continue to heat up and eventually, Earth will become a hot enough place that our atmosphere will boil off and then it will no longer be a very nice place for whatever kind of life forms exist. But I don't think that's going to happen tomorrow. Luckily, I have a side anecdote about this.

So when my daughter was like five years old, she started for weeks on end crying herself to sleep every night. And we couldn't figure out what the problem was. And finally, she told me tearfully one evening that she was worried that our star was going to explode and that the earth would burn up while she was sleeping. In order to convince my daughter that this wasn't going to happen soon,

I had to bring home a textbook and read it to her where it says, yes, in 6 billion years, the Earth will burn up because our star is going to explode. And only then was she able to get to bed at night and not worry. So I don't think that's going to happen to Earth anytime soon. But it is interesting to see the progression of chemistry that happens when the atmosphere starts to heat up and the sun starts to heat up and the environment changes. From that, we will get fundamental data which will inform how we lessen and mitigate the climate change things that are happening on Earth. Exactly. But happily, this is not the end of the tale. While the situation is a little

dire, sorry to make that joke. We still have a chance to change this. And we've been working very hard in our advocacy efforts at the Planetary Society to try to support this mission. And I'm really happy to share that over a thousand people in the United States written their congresspeople to try to advocate for this mission because we believe it's important. So what are you hoping would be the outcome? What can Congress do to save this mission? First of all, let me say on behalf of the team, many of whom are unable to lobby because they are federal employees, but on behalf of those who can speak, I want to say that we are so grateful to everyone, especially including the Planetary Society, for reaching out and helping us advocate for this mission.

You know, it's one thing to be a heartbroken scientist, but to know that you're a heartbroken scientist supported by a community of people who believe in science is incredibly inspiring. And it's really made all the difference in this battle. I personally went to Washington and visited over 105 congressional offices myself, wore out some shoe leather in the process of doing that, and was aided in that by Jack Corrale of the Planetary Society. And it was really inspiring on those visits to find out that most of the congressional people support NASA. People are really interested in Venus, excited about what NASA is doing, understand on both sides of the aisle that scientific exploration and fundamental science of the sort to be done by Veritas is something that everyone wants to do.

So that's been quite heartwarming to know that we're supported by people. However, the battle isn't over. We went to those congressional offices and asked for some specific authorization language in support of launching Veritas in 2029. So I won't have quite as much white hair by the time it launches myself. If we launch Veritas in 2029, we'll still beat Envision and DaVinci to Venus, and we'll be able to support them in ways that are useful. So launching Veritas in 2029 is the goal of our public relations campaign. And if people want to sign on to this petition, all they have to do is go to the Planetary Society website, planetary.org forward slash action, and you can sign on to the petition. And I thought it was pretty cool.org forward slash action, and you can sign on to

the petition. And I thought it was pretty cool. You just put your name and address in and it figure that who your Congress people are and writes to them for you. It's a really good tool you guys have. I'm so glad. I love I love anytime I go in there, I have to activate myself to take the next step of action. And then I get in there. And one minute later, it's already done. I love how easy that is. And also, I want to say that if you live outside of the United States, you can also support this mission. I know we're talking about this in a very US-centric, NASA-centric way, but there are many international partners working on this.

And you can help out by going online and sharing the hashtag Save Veritas. Every little bit helps. And hopefully, if we get enough people talking about this mission, we can get enough mobilization to save it. I wake up every morning thinking about this and hoping that the authorization language will come out to get us launched in 2029. I'm hoping that it will happen. I've waited my whole career for it. And I can't wait for this mission to get off the ground. And I still have hope in my heart. I think we can do it. Together at the Planetary Society, we have helped save countless missions. And it's not just about us as an organization. It's about

the true love that people have for space exploration, how they know that it brings out the best in us and helps us collaborate with people across the world. These things are important and it's easy to mobilize people to do it because there's no downside. It's just pure awesome science and love of where we are in the cosmos. I love that. I'm with you. I have to say that I'm a scientist. I didn't even know who my local congressperson was. I'm embarrassed to say. I had to look it up. I am focused on science as only a quintessential geeky person can be. And so it's been very illuminating to me to understand that actually science is enabled by a whole group of people who aren't scientists, but still are as

excited as I am about what we're doing. And I find that incredibly inspiring. It's great to know that there's a fleet of people standing behind us wanting us to get this mission to Venus. Absolutely. And I always feel that way whenever I gather with Planetary Society people. We're not just an organization of scientists. It's literally people of all ages, all walks of life who just love space. And they should. It's awesome.

And always, always inspiring to meet them and even more inspiring to see them take action and through that, learn more about how they can take steps to support the things that they love. Just like you, many people I talked to during our digital day of action last month told me that this was the first time they'd ever done anything like that, writing their congressperson. And it's easier than you might think. So hopefully it helps empower people not just to support this mission, but to support the things that are important in their lives to them. It's certainly easier than what I was doing, which was cold calling, walking by myself into a congressional office and saying, Hi, I'm Darby Dyer. I'm a Venus scientist. I want to talk to you about this mission Veritas, which has been put on indefinite hold. That was very hard for me to do 105 times, but I did it because I believe in this mission. And the response, as I said, was amazing.

So everybody wants NASA to do well and they want space exploration to happen and they want the human condition to be illuminated as only it can be by thinking about it from an extraterrestrial perspective. So we feel so supported by a planetary society and are really grateful for the petition and the ability to make our problems known and hopefully our inspiring science also known so that other people can get as excited as we are. And no matter what the outcome is, whether or not we manage to save Veritas or not, I want to thank you and the rest of the team for putting so much thought and effort into this beautiful mission. Whether or not it flies now, or we have to wait another 10 or 20 years and rebuild the thing, it'll happen. And it's going to be amazing. We'll get there. And God willing,

I'll be on the mission. Yes. Well, thank you so much, Darby, for joining us and sharing your very human story and letting everybody know why they should get behind this mission. Because I know I'm very passionate about this. And I think a lot of other people just became huge Veritas fans. Go Veritas. My conversation with Darby Dyer is a poignant reminder of the dedication and tireless efforts that thousands of people invest in every space mission. It's easy to overlook the human element behind each instrument and piece of bent metal, but these spacecraft carry the dreams and aspirations that drive scientists and engineers to push the boundaries of human knowledge. The Planetary Society's members have a remarkable history of working together to save space missions over the last four decades.

I'm so grateful for every person who's helped support our campaign to save this mission. And I really hope that by working together, we can put VERITAS on that list. Now, before I start ugly crying about spacecraft, let's check in with Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, for What's Up. Hey, Bruce. Hi, Sarah. What do we have to look forward to in the night sky this week, Bruce? Oh, there's good stuff. Just keep mentioning Venus. Well, not even that low in the West after sunset. Super bright. We've got Mars significantly above, well, above Venus. We've got some interesting things coming up in the evening sky. Mars is in a line with the twin stars of Gemini, Pollux and Castor on May 15th, making kind of a neat, even roughly evenly spaced line, and Venus is down

below them. On May 23rd, the crescent moon is near the star Pollux, our friend in Gemini, and between reddish Mars above and super bright Venus below. So you got a nice top going down, Mars, crescent moon, Venus with caster Pollux hanging out in Gemini. That's the 23rd. Then we go to the pre-dawn sky. You got Saturn up, getting pretty high, looking yellowish. Jupiter, our friend Jupiter, the second brightest star-like object in the night sky, is starting to come up. It's really low, though. But if you can see it on May 17th, the crescent moon is hanging out very close to it in the pre-dawn east on the May 17th. But again, you'll need a nice view to the lower of the horizon and just not long before dawn. We move on to this week in space history.

It was the last mission of the U.S. Mercury program was this week in 1963, Gordon Cooper flew in Faith 7 with 22 orbits around the Earth before splashing down. You know, lots of other good stuff happened. But I'm excited to get us along to the One Move Space Park! This must be exciting. What have we got this week? Well, what's exciting is this

week, shortly after this episode comes out, actually right around then, there's an Apophis workshop. T-minus six years for the asteroid Apophis until it flies by on April 13, 2029, closer than geostationary satellites. That's about a 300-meter asteroid. We've talked about it before. We'll talk about it again. I want to point out that it will be traveling, If you're one of the places that can see it, which is parts of Europe, Africa, Western Asia, at that time, it'll be moving along, clipping along at a little more than one lunar diameter per minute.

One lunar diameter per minute. It's supposed to be roughly magnitude three at its brightest. roughly magnitude three at its brightest that would be easily visible from a dark site reasonably visible from a suburban site and could be challenging from a bright city site but with binoculars you can pick it up so anyway get ready six years to go apophis it will not hit us then it will not hit us in 2036 it will not hit us for at least 100 years, probably more, but it is the closest flyby of an asteroid this size in recorded history. So a lot to learn. We'll come back to that in the trivia contest in a little bit. It's funny because, you know, we're all about making sure that asteroids and comets don't get too close to Earth. But this is one of those moments where I'm actually

really excited for an asteroid to fly by in a way that's visible for people to see because i think it's going to spark all kinds of interesting conversations and hopefully a renewed interest in planetary defense yeah people are not they they do not understand this is about to be the only thing people are going to talk about six years from now and And you heard it here on Planetary Radio. We move on to the trivia contest. I said the following five things are still going or working. Put them in chronological order from oldest to youngest with spacecraft starting with their launch date and for others, the first public release.

So we had Mars Curiosity Rover, Planetary Radio, Minecraft, Mars Odyssey and iphones how'd we do a lot of people got this right although people suggested some things that i did not see coming with this one so i'll get into that in a moment but the answer goes in this order first we have mars odyssey in 2001 then planetary radio our favorite in 2002 yay the iphone this was an interesting one iphone came out in 2007 then minecraft that was 2011 and then literally just a few days after minecraft launched the mars curiosity rover launched so people got those two a little bit back and forth but that is the correct order do they go into has a more complicated history, I believe, but go ahead. Well, that's true. Yeah, I was actually one of the first testers on Minecraft back in the day on Reddit.

What? Yeah, back when Notch was just posting stuff on Reddit asking randos to help out with Minecraft Alpha. And you were a Minecraft Alpha rando. Congratulations. Yeah, I love that game. My little sister is very passionate about Minecraft. But our winner this week is Aquiel Godot from Los Angeles, California, USA. And I loved this because we always ask people how to pronounce their names when they send in their trivia answers. And this week, this person wrote in Aquiel as in the Star Trek episode. I had to think about it for a second.

And then, you know, it is, it's an episode in Next Generation. My question is this, was Aquiel named for the episode or is this just a crazy awesome happenstance? You'll have to ask Aquiel. Right, you'll have to write in and let us know when I let you know that you won the prize. Well, that's pretty cool. But John Gweeton from Sanford Valley, Australia wrote in to ask us whether or not you were

talking about Apple's iPhone or Cisco Systems iPhone. Apparently both products and they had a very similar name. And did they come out at similar times? They did. Although it's, you know, there's the testing phase of Cisco systems, iPhone. I think it rolled out a few years earlier for testing, but then officially came out a few months before Apple's iPhone.

And it was very different. This iPhone was one that you could use to call people around the world on Skype and things like that. Oh, yes. No, I apologize. I was unaware of that one.

I meant Apple iPhone, but I would accept any answer that was backed up by justification. Right. I had no idea. But, you know, the more you know. This was another thing that I didn't know. So the prize for this week is a Planetary Society beanie. What I didn't know is that our friends in Canada don't always call this type of hat a beanie. And I did confuse a few people out there. So just in case anybody is wondering what a beanie is, it's a type of really comfy hat that you pull over your head and over your ears. And in some places in Canada, I believe they call it a toque. Toque.

Fool of a toque. fool of a toque another really cool thing that happened this week is you know every once in a while people will send me some cool stuff to the office because they're fans of planetary radio or they want us to check out their new book that kind of thing and this time i went to my desk and i was very happy to see that a company called solar studios sent me the collector's edition of their core rulebook for their new Red Sky RPG. And I know that this happened because I started rolling dice for Planetary Radio instead of using the random number generator. But I'm very grateful that they sent that to me because now I have two copies, one of which I can give away on the show. So if anybody out there is a fan of tabletop roleplay games, for people who are fans of Dungeons & Dragons, Red Sky is a magicless science fiction setting that's based off of the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons world.

So the whole thing takes place on this cool world ship in space. I haven't messed around with it too much, but our trivia winner this week is going to win my new core rulebook extra copy. Yes, we have other roleplaying royalty in terms of people creating things that listen to this show. I'll give a shout out to Bruce Cordell, who was one of the designers of D and D as well as several other RPG games. And he's a regular listener. That's so awesome.

I love that. Now that we're, we're kind of talking more about gaming, like people are coming out of the woodwork. All right. So what is our trivia question this week? Oh, yeah, we should do another one. What will the OSIRIS-REx mission be renamed

when it starts its new mission to the asteroid Apophis after it drops off its asteroid Bennu sample at Earth? What will they rename OSIRIS-REx to? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest and you have until may 17th at 8 a.m pacific time to get us your answer lucky winner will win a copy of this red sky core rule book and i tell you i am so excited that osiris rex is going to apophis this is this is going to be so cool oh it's very cool very very cool uh they'll arrive very very shortly after closest approach but we'll be able to assess some of the changes.

That's great. And they're bringing rocks back from Bennu in just a few months. Here they come. I love that we have so many samples from asteroids now. I mean, it's not so many samples. It's only a few asteroids, but there are so many. It feels like so many samples. It's only a few asteroids. There are so many. It feels like so many. You count meteorites.

But otherwise, I think we're only up to two so far. It will be three. It will be three. So right now we have two. We have a very, very tiny amount from Itokawa and then more from Ryugu. And we're looking forward to piles, piles of rocks, I tell you, from Bennett. Well, maybe not piles, but enough to do a lot of great science. I mean, after the sample, the way that container tried to close, but it couldn't because it literally had too much stuff in its little robot mouth.

That was awesome. I'm expecting a lot of cool rocks. Robot mouth. I like that. I like that very much. And I'm just going to tell everyone to go out there, look out at the night sky and think about robot mouths. Because I know I am now and I'm a little disturbed, but thank you and good night. the end of this week's episode of Planetary Radio, but we'll be back next week with more of the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by our dedicated members and space

advocates. You can join us as we continue to support missions like Veritas at planetary.org slash join. Mark Hilverda and Ray Paoletta are our associate producers. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. And until next week, ad astra.