Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Eagle Has Landed: Remembering Neil Armstrong

Episode Date: July 19, 2016

We celebrate the 47th anniversary of the first moon landing with the reprise of a conversation with author and NBC space reporter Jay Barbree about his trusted friend Neil Armstrong.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Remembering Neil Armstrong, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Happy 47th anniversary everyone. That's how long it has been since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon. We'll look back on that great accomplishment by returning to a few minutes from a visit with longtime NBC space reporter Jay Barbary. Jay was a trusted friend who worked with Neil to create Neil Armstrong, a life of flight. with Neil to create Neil Armstrong, a life of flight. Planetary Society digital editor Jason Davis steps outside his usual beat to report on NASA's next big rover that will head for Mars. The agency provided an exciting preview in a media briefing last week. Bill and I wanted to join us,

but the internet service from the northern slopes of Greenland is pretty spotty. The science guy is witnessing science operations on that threatened land, including ice coring. But Bruce Betts is here, as always, with one of the cleverest space trivia questions I've heard in a while. Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla is ready right now to take us to Pluto and beyond. Emily, welcome back from that well-earned vacation right after Juno reached Jupiter, of course. On last week's show, we talked a great deal about that. I guess we should talk about this piece that you originally wrote for Sky and Telescope magazine, which is now a brand new blog entry at planetary.org.

Tell us about this. Well, this piece was sparked by my frustration with the remarks of some of the NASA officials at the really exciting flyby of Pluto by New Horizons last summer. A lot of people were saying things like, you know, by exploring Pluto, we've explored everything in the solar system. There's no Terra Incognita left in the solar system anymore. You know, you can't blame them for being in a celebratory mood.

But I was just so annoyed because first of all, Pluto's not the last thing left to explore in the solar system. And second of all, why would you say that when we need so much public support for planetary exploration missions? And to tell people that we're done is just to say, oh, you know, we can pack it up and go home. You then make a pretty good case for all the other things that we need to explore or at least revisit in the solar system. In fact, you've got this great collection of all the round objects in the solar system. It's quite a family. It is an amazing family. And many of the things, round objects in the solar system, smaller than the size of Mars,

we visited. So we do have photos of them. But as you start going into the smaller sections, right around the size of Pluto, you begin to see these blank spheres, places that we haven't visited before. And basically all of them, except for a couple of large asteroids, basically all of them are in the Kuiper Belt. So Pluto is just the very first of the worlds in the Kuiper Belt that we've explored. And I should also count Charon there too, because Charon's a spherical world. Everybody's fascinating as Pluto. And you know, just by how exciting Pluto and Charon were, that there is a lot of diversity out there in the Kuiper Belt just waiting to be explored. And they're not all tiny. You mentioned Uranus and Neptune. Yeah. So we've flown past Uranus and Neptune, but that only gave us a snapshot. We really need to orbit those worlds in order to understand them better, like we have done with Jupiter and Saturn. And then Uranus has this whole family of moons that we barely viewed with Voyager.

Voyager 2 only got very distant glimpses at very low light levels of these moons. And after having seen Charon, I just, I really want to see all of Uranus's moons up close. Emily, you make a persuasive case, at least to this biased observer. Thanks very much, and welcome back again. Thank you, Matt. She is our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society. And as there is good evidence of in this piece that she added to the Planetary Society website on the 14th of July, she is also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Jason Davis of Planetary Society's digital editor is back with us

because of a blog post that he put up just a few days ago about the 2020 Mars rover. It still doesn't have a better name than that. Welcome back, Jason. Hey, Matt. Nice to talk to you again. Tell us what was revealed, what was announced at this media briefing. Yeah, so the rover has hit what is known as key decision point C. That means it's moving into phase C of the development life cycle. And that all sounds terribly boring, but the bottom line is that they will now be doing final design and initial fabrication of the rover can now take

place officially. I know they're already starting to put together some of the flight hardware at JPL already, but this kind of paves the way for them to move into full assembly. All right. We will recommend to the audience that they take a look at your blog entry for more details. But what are some of the highlights? I mean, for one thing, this is the sample return mission, right? Or I should say the beginning of the sample return. Right, right. A sample to be picked up at some unspecified later date is the best way to describe it. So as the rover is trundling along, it's going to take some various samples at different points, hopefully scientifically interesting spots that it comes across. And it will kind of cache those.

And at some point, it can actually deposit a little cache of samples in the middle of Mars, kind of set them there and say, well, I hope someone comes by later to pick these up. Someday. Someday, yeah. And so the plan would be to have either one or two missions launched to go and collect these samples and then put them on a launch platform and then blast those back to Earth. So this is the first step. And that was really the decadal survey list. This is a very high priority to actually get samples back to Earth. So that's the first step in it.

Now, something we're going to talk with Bruce Betts about later today during the What's Up segment are the microphones. But we're finally going to get microphones. Well, we tried once before, but we may actually get not just one, but two microphones to Mars. Yeah, hopefully this one stays in one piece, unlike the Polar Lander project that the Planetary Society had the previous microphone on. Yeah, so they're going to have at least two microphones, one to capture the sounds of EDL, entry, descent, and landing. So as the rover is coming through the atmosphere and doing all of its cool, well, actually hair-raising kind of seven minutes of terror thing, just like Curiosity did, it's going to record sounds of things like the parachute deployment and the sounds of landing.

And then there'll actually be another microphone on a science instrument, on the SuperCam instrument, that's going to record the sounds of the rover driving around on Mars, the wind blowing, and that's going to be really neat to finally get those sounds back to Earth and hear what it's like. So exciting. And SuperCam, that's sort of the upgraded version of ChemCam, right? Yes. They're really going for broke here. They're going to try some pretty challenging things. Yeah, so apparently this EDL sequence, while it is similar to Curiosity in that it uses the whole crazy sky crane maneuver where it drops the rover down on a tether and then the descent stage flies off and crashes, this will actually be able to shrink the landing ellipse by about 50%. And what they're going to do is they have two different things that enable them to do this. One is they can better time the parachute deployment point. Too long to describe here, but basically they can time it better so that the parachute deploys at just the right moment that enables them to really hit their

target landing spot. And the second piece of that is terrain relative navigation. And what that is, is we saw these beautiful pictures during the Curiosity mission where the cameras were taking pictures of the landing site as it was coming down, but they didn't really do anything with that information except show us the pretty pictures and kind of analyze later how the whole descent went. This time, those pictures will be mapped up with prior satellite imagery, and the rover will actually be able to determine where it is during the landing sequence, and it can make course adjustments accordingly. And so that'll really enable them to hit a much smaller target when they're coming in for a landing. Yikes. All right. Like I said,

lots more about this in Jason's recap of this media briefing. It's at planetary.org. Just look for his blog posts. And when you do that, you'll also see the first installment of his new Horizon series. It actually appeared this morning as we speak on July 18th, Monday the 18th, and simultaneously in the Huffington Post. Jason? co-publishing this new series looking at the past, present, and the future of NASA's human spaceflight program since we're on the eve of a presidential transition. All of this is going to be talked about. It's already being talked about. You're hearing rumblings about the whole moon versus Mars thing. So we're going to really lay the foundation by looking at how we got to where we are today and where we're going from here. And that's both at planetary.org and at the Huffington Post. We have links up. Absolutely terrific writing. Thank you, Jason. I recommend it very

highly. Yeah, thank you, Matt. Jason Davis, he is the digital editor for the Planetary Society, usually sticking to human and commercial spaceflight and light sail, of course, but this time veering into a little bit of coverage of Mars exploration with this 2020 rover update. When we return, a reprise of my conversation from two years ago with journalist Jay Barbary, author of Neil Armstrong, A Life of Flight. See you in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. This is Robert Picardo. I've been a member of the Planetary Society since my Star Trek Voyager days.

You may have even heard me on several episodes of Planetary Radio. Now I'm proud to be the newest member of the Board of Directors. I'll be able to do even more to help the Society achieve its goals for space exploration across our solar system and beyond. You can join me in this exciting quest. The journey starts at planetary.org. I'll see you there. Do you know what your favorite presidential candidate thinks about space exploration?

Hi, I'm Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy. You can learn that answer and what all the other candidates think at planetary.org slash election2016. You know what? We could use your help. If you find anything we've missed, you can let us know. It's all at planetary.org slash election2016. Thank you. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. This week marks the 47th anniversary of the first moon landing. We're going to briefly celebrate that accomplishment for the ages by stepping back into the Planetary Radio archives. My last conversation with Jay Barbary was two years ago. Jay had just published Neil Armstrong, A Life of Flight. He did it with the blessing and

encouragement of his trusted friend, the first man to step on a world other than our own. Jay gained Neil's trust over the course of reporting for NBC on every spaceflight by Americans, from Alan Shepard's suborbital leap to the last space shuttle mission. We lost Neil in 2012, but not before he had helped Jay get the book underway. Many of the other early astronauts also contributed stories. They were and are amazing human beings, but Jay reported that they all had the highest respect for Armstrong. No one was surprised when he was chosen to command Apollo 11. Do you have any doubt in your mind that Neil Armstrong was the right choice to command that first mission to land on the moon?

God, no. And I can tell you, Matt, why. He was probably the best pilot out of all of these great pilots to make that mission because he had the ability to get out of tight situations. He proved it. He ejected him from his jet over the mountains of Korea during a Korean conflict just three weeks after he was 21 years old. This guy proved to be he was the best pilot. But more than that, when you go to character with Neil Armstrong, he never ingratiated himself or enriched himself from that experience

when many people would have. They would, as Brian Williams said, they would have been richer than Donald Trump with a thousand Moonburger joints. But money never seemed that important to Neil. Maybe it was, but it never seemed that important to him. He just wanted his family fed. He wanted them clothed. He wanted them comfortable.

And beyond that, he didn't seem to be interested. He was more interested in continuing to build the stockpile of knowledge that we need. He was a scientist as well as a research aeronautical engineer, research test pilots. He got the life that he wanted from the time he was 10 years old to he passed away when he was 80. For 70 years, he lived the life he wanted. Yeah, I'm so glad that you brought up that story of what happened to him in the skies over Korea, because it comes up again later in the book. Neil, unlike I would think some of the other astronauts, because of ejecting over Korea, he had an idea of what freefall, of what zero-g felt like. Oh, sure. Yeah, sure.

We open the first chapter of the book is him taking off from the Essex on the morning of September the 3rd, 1951. He'd just turned 21 when he took off on that mission, and after losing half of his wing to an anti-aircraft cable, he could not come back. He had to eject. Just to keep his aircraft airborne, he had to fly at 170 to 180 knots. He couldn't land at that speed on the carrier. There are so many other great anecdotes and stories in this book, and you tell them exceedingly well. Thank you, sir. You're very welcome.

Talk about what happened on the Gemini mission. This is pretty well known, but you bring insights to it because of your really intimacy with Neil. What happened to him on that Gemini flight that could have ended his career, but ended up proving to NASA that, yeah, this just might be the right guy to take us to the moon? You're absolutely correct with that. Absolutely correct with that. Neil was the fastest fingers and hands ever, as far as I'm concerned, at the controls of an aircraft or a spacecraft. Yet he was the slowest man on the ground to make up his mind.

He was terrible. You'd ask him a question, and he'd say, you know, that seems to be a pretty good idea. I'll think about it. Well, he may not get back to you for two or three weeks, but when he was in that aircraft, he was fast. Now, what he did, he performed step after step after step. He and Dave Scott, they had trained so well for it. He performed our first rendezvous and docking in space by docking to the Agena stage, Atlas Agena stage, the top stage that it set up as a target rocket.

And everything looked good. They were parked with it. Everything looked good. And they went out of radio contact with mission control. We didn't have in those days 100% contact with mission control that they do today because of satellites. We had to go over stations, and they were going over China, of all places, out of range of any stations when it started spinning on them. And they first suspected the Agena. It kept getting faster and faster, and Neil knew without question that they would black out. If they blacked out,

that was the end of it, and they were already doing about 400 RPM. Anyway, he knew that they were getting close, and he knew he had to get things under control, so he had to fire a couple of rocket thruster rings that he normally used for coming back in. They got it under control enough that he could get off of the Agena. Well, when he got off of the Agena, they felt okay. Well, the only problem is the Gemini kept spinning. So it wasn't the fault of the Agena rocket. It was the fault of the control system, the rocket thrusters on Gemini,

and they started firing one at a time until they got down, and I think if memory serves me correctly, it was thruster number eight, and it was stuck open. They couldn't shut it off, and it was just spinning them faster and faster and faster. So he used his reentry thrusters, and he had some left of it when he brought it under control. But then the book says you have to come home at the next opportunity. So they wound up coming in and landing in the Pacific Ocean 400 or so miles from Okinawa. They came in pretty much by themselves, and they made a landing to be spotted by an aircraft. And it was something that only the very skilled of pilots could have done by themselves,

out of range, with talking to other people. So that was one of the things, as you said, Matt, that set him up to make the first landing on the moon. Jay, there are so many other insights that you put in this book, and some of them are stories that are pretty well known, but you put a different spin on them because of your communication, because of the trust that you had from Neil. I'm thinking in particular of a story that was an eye-opener for me. We'll go back to when Eagle was descending to the lunar surface,

the lunar module with Buzz Aldrin and Neil inside. Neil had to find a good place to land, and he was flying sideways for a while. Talk a little bit about that story, because Neil apparently wasn't as worried as some people back here on Earth. No, because, Matt, he always prepared for the expected. He would train for what they thought would take place. But what concerned him more was the unexpected. And he always trained so that if the unexpected was suddenly before him, he would have to handle it. In his training, I think this is where he took it a step farther. Well, when they're coming down on the moon, all of a sudden he realized, looking at the sights that they were going over that had been computerized for him already

and also had been shot by Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan when they went down in the lunar module Snoopy to 8.4 miles, all of a sudden he realized that the computer was landing him about four miles from his original target. And he saw a football-sized crater they're headed for. So he knew he had to take over and fly Eagle. He did. And he had practiced this 61 times in his lunar training aircraft,

which one of them he had to eject from with less than three seconds before hitting the ground, another tight spot he got out of instantly and did the right thing. So he started going across the surface of the moon, and Buzz has given him his height, and they're looking for a smooth place to land. And when they got down below 50 feet, Neil felt pretty good, even though he was running out of fuel. People at Mission Control did not realize what Neil had come to realize. And Neil had come to realize that above the moon, at one-sixth of Earth's gravity, if he ran out of fuel,

the limb would settle easily onto the moon, probably without tearing anything up. So he looked for the smooth place to land, picked it out, Buzz agreed with him, they settled it on the limb on the moon with 16 seconds of fuel left. Jay, it has just been a delight. Thank you for capturing this important piece of history for us.

Matt, you're most welcome, and thank you, and God bless. You're a good guy. Hang in there and keep going, okay? Talk to you later, buddy. We'll keep trying to fight the good fight. That's Jay Barbary. He's still with NBC News, a 55-year career. He's the only person on Earth to have covered all 166 American astronaut flights and moon landing. And as you heard, he was part of the team for NBC News that won the Emmy for his coverage of his friend Neil Armstrong's first walk on the moon. Wherever you are on July 20th each year,

I hope you'll take a moment to think about what was accomplished nearly five decades ago. Remember that it was a giant leap, but also just one of an infant species' first steps into a limitless universe. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society and an astronomer and a guy who knows a lot about missions all over the solar system. Welcome back. Thank you. We're using microphones, but they're not like the ones that are going to go to Mars in 2020. Nice segue. Thank you. We're using microphones, but they're not like the ones that are going to go to Mars in 2020.

Nice segue. Thank you. No, ours are probably bigger than the ones going to Mars in Mars 2020. But we're very excited that some microphones are finally going back to Mars. Planetary Society, as I know you recall, flew the very first microphone to Mars on what turned out to be, unfortunately, the failed Mars polar lander. And then we also participated with a microphone on Phoenix that didn't get turned on because of various strange fears. You can read more about all this at planetary.org and my blog. But the point is, Planetary Society has been trying

and trying to get microphones so we can hear mars so we can have that planetary radio experience we're listening we can add a second sense to our seeing beautiful mars and now uh both in the edl the entry descent and landing there's microphone and also on one of the science instruments super cam which is another like chem cam instrument that will zap rocks, but this time we will actually, with a laser, but this time we'll actually hear the popping sound of the zapping rocks, and we're collaborating with them, working with the SuperCam team on microphones.

It's all very exciting. It certainly is. I can't wait. And if they wanted me to go out there so I could say testing one, two, three, I would. Believe me, we want to send you out there, Matt. All right. Let's go on. What's up in the night sky? All right.

In the evening sky, we've got easy to see, but getting lower, Jupiter bright in the southwest in the early evening and Mars and Saturn over in the southeast. and Mars and Saturn over in the southeast. Also, if you want a challenge, you can try to pick up Venus and Mercury maybe 15 minutes after sunset low in the west. Binoculars will help. They're near each other, but a little tough to see in the glow of sunset. We move on to this week in space history. It was, of course, 1969 this week that Apollo 11 landed and humans first ventured onto another world. I don't know. If I had to pick a favorite space anniversary,

that could be it. It's pretty awesome. Pretty profound. And to celebrate it, I've got more information about Apollo 11 as we move on to Ransom Space by IHART. Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut designed the mission insignia with the famous, the Eagle. He originally had the olive branch in its, in its beak, but then it was decided the talents were too warlike.

So they stuck an olive branch in the talents and had it over the surface of the moon with the earth in the background. Not only that, but this insignia went on to be used on the back of two different U.S. dollar designs, the Eisenhower dollar and the Susan B. Anthony dollar. I didn't know that about the dollars. What a cool thing for Collins, very talented artist. Yeah. We move on to the trivia contest. And we asked you about Juno, the first solar-powered spacecraft in the outer solar system. And what is the total power output of Juno approximately at the distance of Jupiter? How'd we do? Big response.

And we got a range of answers from, oh, about 400 watts to 500 watts. And I know you've already told me that we would accept a 500. So that makes Bruce Cordell, or at least I hope it will make Bruce Cordell in Covington, Washington, very happy. Because indeed, he said 500 watts is what Juno will be able to generate roughly in orbit or is generating in orbit around Jupiter. How very strange of Bruce Cordell. Sorry, he designed a game called The Strange, a role-playing game. Anyway, yeah, 400 watts, 500 watts, things are not precise on how much power is getting output, so either of those is fine. The point is

it's not a lot to run a spacecraft on, even with the biggest planetary solar panels ever sent to the outer solar system, but good enough. Bruce, we're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a genuine Rubber Planetary Society asteroid. It never gets old. And a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account so that you can point those iteles telescope telescopes all over the universe. They are all over the world so that you can point them all over the universe. 200-point account worth a couple hundred bucks. We also got this from Dave Fairchild in Kansas.

The folks building Juno had thought to add solar panels a lot. Those cells quite a trove while circ Jove, provide her with 400 watts. And then just one more message that I just, you know, wanted to read because it's a chance to thank someone for their service, which I bet he's tired of hearing of, or maybe doesn't get tired of. Dustin Berg in Richlands, North Carolina said, I love the show. I consistently annoy my fellow marine combat instructors with my infatuation with planetary science.

Keep it up, Dustin. Hoorah. You bet. All right. That's pretty cool. I got kind of a weird trivia question for you all this time. If you landed at the same latitude and longitude on Earth as Apollo 11

landed on the Moon, what country would you be in? So get those lunar latitude and longitude coordinates and then figure out where that latitude and longitude is on Earth. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. I just want to compliment you on

this absolutely superb question. It's pretty random. All right. So get those random answers in. No, they better not be random. But we will pick them randomly. We'll pick the winner randomly. And that winner will get a Planetary Radio t-shirt,

a rubber Planetary Society asteroid, and a 200-point iTelescope account. And you have, let me figure this out, you'll have until the 26th this time, that's July 26th at 8 a.m. Pacific time, to get us the answer. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about bricks and what you can build with them. Thank you, and good night. You ever hear of the brick moon? Science fiction story.

First story ever to propose a satellite in space, a moon made of brick. Check it out. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, checking it out with us every week here on What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its memorable members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed the theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies. Thank you.