Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Exciting Year Ahead on the Final Frontier

Episode Date: January 6, 2015

The Planetary Society’s experts look forward to a great year of firsts in the solar system and beyond.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Looking forward to a big year in space, 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. Last week we looked backward. This time it's a gaze at the near future. My Planetary Society colleagues return with their predictions of the big stories ahead in 2015. In addition to regulars Emily Lakdawalla and Bruce Betts, you'll hear Jason Davis on human spaceflight and light sail, along with Director of Advocacy Casey Dreyer's forecast for space exploration planning and funding.

Bill Nye is moments away with his comments about a decision that NASA will announce in the next few weeks about the so-called Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM. Notice something different this week? That's our brand new theme playing in the background. It was composed and produced for us by Josh Doyle of Three Theory Music. Let us know what you think about the new tune or anything else about the show. Write to PlanetaryRadio at planetary.org. Here's the chief executive officer of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Bill, Happy New Year once again. Welcome to our first official show of the new year. It's great to be here, Matt. It feels a lot the same. You know, I just want to say this is going to be a big year. 2015 is going to be a big year. 2015 is going to be a big year. NASA still hasn't decided whether it's going to redirect or drag a small asteroid into an orbit beyond the moon or go to a small asteroid and try to take a piece off of it. And these are both just,

I mean, it's easy to say in a sentence or two, but these are just extraordinary missions way the heck out into deep space with people. And it shows you in a way how little we really know about asteroids in that is this thing going to be a solid object that we can pull around? Or is it going to be what people like to call a rubble pile? Now, the word pile usually involves gravity, but this would be the only gravity out there would be the rocks to each other and orbiting the sun. These are just enormous decisions based on information that's really hard to get. And don't tell me it's not important. The ancient dinosaurs suffered gravely, pun intended, for an asteroid impact. So it's an important thing to understand. The people running it really want it to be the technology to apply to a mission to Mars, which I think would be great, but it's a lot to ask.

Let me just say it's a lot to ask. Speaking of which, by the time you hear this, SpaceX will have tried to save money on future missions by landing the first stage of its rocket on a barge. How cool is that? I mean, there's nine usable engines on this thing, right? Instead of having it just burn up in the atmosphere as is traditional or recover pieces of it with parachutes, which has happened, actually land the thing on purpose on a platform floating in the Atlantic Ocean. What a wild idea. By the time you hear this, we'll know one way or the other.

Yeah, we're going to talk. I think Jason Davis from the staff is going to bring this up as part of his look forward to 2015. It really would make it an awful lot cheaper to get up to low Earth orbit, don't you think? Oh, that was the idea. And so it's just so forward thinking. It's just such a cool idea. You know, I mean, I've marveled for years as an engineer at these amazing fuel pumps on rockets. Just burns up, just thrown away each time there's a launch. And so it'd be a heck of a thing to not throw it all away. This could be the start of something big that would, as I so often remark, change the world. Bill, thank you very much for helping us get started with the new year

and on this look forward at the year to come. Thank you, Matt. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. We're going to come right back with a bunch of his colleagues. Emily Lochte-Wally is the Planetary Society's senior editor and planetary evangelist. Her blog posts and tweets are followed by tens of thousands, including many of the scientists and engineers who are at the forefront of planetary science. She's been part of Planetary Radio right from our start 12 years ago, and that's not going to change in the new year now underway. We talked a few days ago, as we usually do via Skype. Happy New Year, Emily. Great to have you back.

As we look forward to 2015, you get to go first looking around our solar system. What are you most excited about for the coming 12 months? Well, 2015 is a year that I have been looking forward to for years. It's going to be the year of the dwarf planet. We're going to get our first really good looks at these smaller denizens of the solar system, including Ceres, the largest member of the asteroid belt. Dawn is going to be entering orbit there in April. And of course, finally, Pluto and Charon with new horizons flying past that binary pair in July. These are worlds the likes of which we have never seen up close before.

They're smaller than the planets, but they're still round, which means that they're interesting. They have internal geology. They probably have very curious histories, and we're hopefully going to be able to tell their stories after we get these spacecraft encounters with them. Now, why are you also, you told me, going to include Cassini out there at a giant planet as a dwarf planet mission. Well, Cassini this year, after spending a couple of years in these highly inclined orbits that give it really good looks on Saturn's and Titan's poles and also on the rings, is finally going to be returning to an orbit that is in the plane of the ring system. And what that does for you is it gets Cassini close to all of the icy moons of Saturn. does for you is it gets Cassini close to all of the icy moons of Saturn. So in 2015, we're going to be seeing multiple icy moon flybys, including quite close targeted flybys of Dione, there's

going to be two of those, and three very close flybys of Enceladus at the end of the year. But also mixed in with that will be more distant flybys of most of the other icy moons, as well as a lot of the little potato-shaped small moons, things like Polydeuces and Hyperion, Epimetheus, Atlas, and Prometheus. Now, I throw these things in when I talk about the year of the dwarf planet because these worlds, they're all very similar in size, like 500, 1,000 kilometers across, about 2,000 for Pluto. You know, that means that they all have very similar physics acting upon them. And it makes sense to look at them all together, to consider them as a class of worlds. So when people talk about what is a planet and what isn't, I don't

really care about where it's orbiting. I care about what it's made of and how it behaves. And for me, then, Titan is as much of a planet as Pluto is. And so are Enceladus and Dione and all these other cool worlds that Cassini will be exploring. All right, you make a good case. Hyperion, that moon that still creeps me out. Last week, as we look back at 2014, Rosetta and the little Philae lander seem to be at the top of your list. Are they still going to be a high priority in the coming year? Oh, absolutely. It's going to be a thrilling year for Rosetta because the comet is going to spend the beginning of the year getting closer to the sun, producing much more active jets. Rosetta will have to be flying at a slightly higher orbit in order to stay away from some of that activity, although they do plan a couple of close passes in in order to sample some of the material that's coming off

the comet and get it into their mass spectrometers. And there is always the hope that Philae could wake up. Depending on who you talk to on the mission, you get different estimates about when or if it'll wake up. They're certainly planning for it to wake up because they have to be planning for it to wake up. Some people will tell you March. Some people will tell you May or June or even August. But there's certainly high hopes that the little lander will wake up and talk to us again. I hate to end on a downer, but any regrets?

Yeah, I think that 2015 is very sad for those of us who care about the exploration of the innermost parts of our solar system. We learned that Venus Express is going to die very early in the year, going to fall into Venus's atmosphere, and Messenger will end its mission in March or April of this year. And that will leave us with no science missions in the innermost solar system. We do have Akatsuki, which is on its way to a hoped-for Venus arrival in November 2015, but that's not guaranteed because that's a crippled spacecraft and it may or may not be able to make it into orbit. So it's a sad year for those of us who want to see a robotic fleet

invading all of the worlds in our solar system. Well, we'll add the inner solar system to the to-do list for solar system exploration in coming years. But it does sound like 2015 is going to be great, and I'm looking forward to spending it with you, Emily. Same to you, Matt. That's Senior Editor and Planetary Evangelist, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily is also a contributing editor at Sky and Telescope magazine.

She continues to work on her book about Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover. It's slated for publication later this year. Let's move over to Jason Davis. Jason is a digital editor for the Planetary Society. He writes about all aspects of human spaceflight, which is why he was in Florida for the recent successful test of the Orion spacecraft. But Jason is also our embedded correspondent in the

LightSail SolarSail project. These are two of the topics we discussed in a recent conversation. Jason, it's your turn to tell us what we might be looking forward to in 2015 on maybe the largest scale human spaceflight and related developments. And one of them is something that, as we speak, may only be a day or two after this program becomes available. If it happens, it'll be quite an accomplishment for SpaceX. Yeah, yeah. Our listeners here might already know the answer to what happened. Tuesday, January 6th is the scheduled day that SpaceX is going to try to land a stage of their rocket, the Falcon, on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. And if they pull that off, it will be a huge leap in reusability for spaceflight. They list the chances of it happening successfully at about 50%. They're trying not to get our hopes up. But if it doesn't happen this time, it's

probably safe to say they'll pull it off sometime this year, or at least get very close to pulling it off this year. Very exciting development for lowering the cost of access to space and access to the International Space Station. Tell us what kind of a year is it going to be for the ISS? Well, it's going to be a busy one. In March, we have a one-year mission kicking off. Two astronauts, American astronaut Scott Kelly and Cosma Mikhail Kornienko, are going to spend a year aboard the station. And that's kind of to mainly do a lot of physiological tests to see how humans do on long-duration spaceflight, eventually in preparation for a trip to Mars. So that kicks off in March, and they'll stay until March of 2016. So if we have a year looking ahead next year,

we'll be still talking about this same thing. It's quite a physiological challenge for these guys, and pretty courageous, I'd say. Definitely. Both are veteran spacefares, so they're used to long trips in space. And Scott Kelly has a twin brother, Mark Kelly, who will be back on Earth, and they're going to be doing some tests together to kind of see how their bodies change over the course of that year. Mark will have the easier job sitting here on Earth getting the tests, while Scott will be in space doing it. Reminds me of a Robert Heinlein story I read many years ago about twins, one of them on an interstellar trip, but that's something to take

up at another time, I think. Looking ahead, is there anything else going to be happening about new ways to reach the International Space Station? Yeah, well, we should see milestones being met from both SpaceX and Boeing, the two commercial providers that are going to be eventually ferrying crews to the station. So they have a list of milestones that they'll be trying to accomplish in preparation for possible 2017 flights to the station that they'll carry American astronauts. But for now, things will stay on the Soyuz capsules. In September, a new capsule will go up to be the lifeboat for Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko. And that'll have a space tourist aboard, Sarah Brightman. She's an actress, singer.

She'll be up there for about a week. And essentially, they'll just be dropping off a new spacecraft for those two long-duration crew members. Yeah, a lot of us who are Andrew Lloyd Webber fans out there know who Sarah Brightman is. I hope she'll do some singing for us from low Earth orbit. Let's turn now to LightSail. You mentioned last week when we talked about highlights of 2014 that it had completed all of its testing. What can you tell us about what may happen in the coming year? I still can't say much, unfortunately, but we do have an announcement planned for January.

It's definitely safe to say it's a big announcement for us. To kind of tell you where we are, this first spacecraft is scheduled to go on a possible test flight. So we would put that on a launch vehicle, send it up into Earth orbit. It would deploy its sails, test out all the systems, talk to the ground, but it won't go high enough to do actual solar sailing. So it's kind of a precursor to the full-fledged solar sailing mission. So we have some big news about that aspect of light sail coming out this month in January. So it'll be very exciting. So there's one that we, as we radio and TV people say all the time, stay tuned. I'm sure there'll be many other things happening during the year that we'll be able to talk

about a year from now. But Jason, for now, we'll just look forward to your ongoing coverage of these and many other topics at planetary.org. Yes, sounds good. I'll be excited to be right there covering it all. Thanks for joining us once again, Jason. Yeah, thank you, Matt. Planetary Society digital editor Jason Davis

covers human spaceflight and the Society's LightSail SolarSail project, among other things. When we return, we'll visit with Director of Advocacy Casey Dreyer and learn what he expects will make big space news in 2015. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, Emily Lakdawalla here. Thank you for listening

to Planetary Radio. The Planetary Society has lots more ways for you to hear the latest news and see the greatest pictures from around our solar system. I lead a growing family of expert bloggers

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Wrong! Random Space Fact is now a video series, too. And it's brilliant, isn't it, Matt? I hate to say it, folks, but it really is. And hilarious. See? Matt would never lie to you, would he? I really wouldn't. A new Random Space Fact video is released each Friday at youtube.com slash planetarysociety. You can subscribe to join our growing community and you'll never miss a fact. Can I go back to my radio now?

Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. On this first show produced in 2015, we're looking ahead with several of the Planetary Society's best at what the new year has in store for us out there on the final frontier. It's Casey Dreyer's turn. Casey is the Society's Director of Advocacy. He spends much of his time in Washington, D.C., walking the halls of Congress and meeting with NASA and executive branch officials. Casey also writes about space policy and funding at planetary.org and sometimes elsewhere. His great op-ed piece in the December 15 Space News explored the opportunities for bipartisan support of planetary exploration.

Casey, of course, we heard from you last week about what a good year 2014 was. What are we looking forward to in the coming year, the year we've just begun? Well, Matt, we have the restart of the entire advocacy cycle. It's an annual cycle with appropriations, with Congress and the White House, and that all begins with the president's budget that comes out in February. So we'll be looking for that. And the really important thing to us here at the Planetary Society is if that budget is going to contain a new start request for a mission to Europa, this is the missing key between what Congress has been giving money for. NASA wants to do this

mission. The White House needs to approve it so they can work it into their long-term planning. That would be a fantastic victory if that was in this year's budget, start coming out in February. That's what I'm looking forward to. I can't think of another mission that has generated more excitement and yet doesn't actually exist yet. Exactly. It's been a little frustrating, I can say. But hopefully, you know, as I said last week, the message I think is really crystallizing about how important it is to maintain planetary exploration, not just in Mars, but throughout the solar system. This is a very, to me, a crucial keystone of any future outer planets exploration program. Europa has to be the next big major mission, and I'm hoping we'll see it in February. All right.

Very briefly, will your priorities, will the Society's advocacy priorities be shifting at all? Well, one of the great things about the incredible support of our members is that we've been able to grow the advocacy program to contain not just me, but assistance from Jason Callahan, who's a space policy advisor for us, and of course, increasing our time with Bill Adkins, our lobbyist in DC. And because of that, we're going to try to expand our focus next year to not just focus on planetary science, but to start to attack the thorny problem of human spaceflight. So expect to hear a lot more from the Planetary Society about the future of human spaceflight, where we think it should go. And of course, we'll be talking to our members and other experts a lot about that in the coming year.

How soon might we start to see your new series of YouTube videos talking about this work? Hopefully very soon. You know, of course, we have this great new videographer here at the Planetary Society, and he and I have been working on a new series called The Space Advocate. It's going to be a regular series coming out on YouTube, and it's going to be a mix of updates on the news and what we're going through at the Society at that very moment. And then also these kind of bigger picture questions about how the budget works, how decisions in space policy get made, the role of Congress and the role of the White House, and more importantly, the role of you as a space advocate in this country or even outside the country and how you can help impact the future of space exploration. And so we're looking at probably mid-January, but I'm hoping as soon as possible. It's going to be

a lot of fun. I bet. All right, Casey, and I look forward to continuing our conversations here on Planetary Radio. Thanks again. Thanks, Matt. Always a pleasure. Planetary Society Director of Advocacy Casey Dreyer with his thoughts from inside the DC Beltway, which just might be the most important orbit in all of space exploration. I'll be right back with Bruce Betts. Bringing us down the homestretch is Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. We're going to have our regular What's Up conversation with him, but since he is the Director of Science and Technology for the Society,

he's also going to tell us what we'll be looking forward to in 2015, and there's some pretty big stuff. I'd say Happy New Year, Guy. Welcome back. Happy New Year, Matt. Happy New Year, listeners. How are you doing? I'm doing very well. It's been a great start for the year. Spent the first couple of days of it up in the mountains and looking at a beautiful sky. And what was it that I saw up there? Stars. A few. Planets. We'll come to that in a little bit. Should I talk about all the, well, not all, a tiny subset of the science and technology projects of the Planetary Society? Please do.

Well, in roughly March, we've got our planetary deep drill project we're doing with Honeybee Robotics, developing something capable of someday drilling deep into planetary ices like at Mars polar caps or Europa. drilling deep into planetary ices like at Mars polar caps or Europa. And the first ever field test prototype of planetary deep drill will be occurring in March in the California desert. And we'll be covering and sharing with you. That'll be cool. I'm hoping to go along on that trip. We're hoping to leave you there. Salt and sea?

That's a terrible place to leave anyone. I'm not looking forward to the location, just the test. It's a gypsum mine? I feel better now. Oh, good. In April, we are one of the primary sponsors of the Planetary Defense Conference this time around, being held in Italy. We will be there. I'll be announcing our new Shoemaker-Neo grant winners of awesome observers in the world who help protect the Earth from asteroids. If you're one of those awesome observers and want to submit a proposal, you've still got until the beginning of February.

You can leave me in Italy, by the way. Well, I'm sorry. You'll still be at the gypsum mine at the South. On to exoplanets laser we're working again with deborah fisher and her group at yale university sponsoring a a new really super spiffy awesome professional quality laser that's going into their amazing calibration system that will someday allow them to detect smaller exoplanets around other stars from the ground. And that will be going into prototype test phases and also being implemented on telescopes to see how much good it's done, which we expect good, good.

Yeah, we'll be talking with Debra again before long, I'm sure, about that experiment. And we've got lots of other things going on that I will just leave you with. Check the blogs. Stay with us. It's coming here. And of course, more random space fact videos coming. And of course, my online astronomy class, Intro Astronomy, happening again starting the beginning of February at California State University Dominguez Hills that you'll be able to watch online, live, or the archive. We have the archive up from the past. One sky thing I'll mention, we, at least in the Americas and those around the Pacific, get treated to two more total

lunar eclipses this year. Wow, that's great. And I'm looking forward to the course again, as are lots of other people. We get wonderful reports from people about your class, and of course it can't be taken for free. You can just tune in. For free! Alright, shall we move on to the night sky? Because it's happening. Go for it. It's busy. What you were seeing or not seeing up in the mountains. We've got all five planets that are visible with just your eyes are up these days. We've got low in the west around sunset,

Venus, and Mercury. and they are going to get really, really close to each other in the sky over the next two, three weeks. You can see them very low in the west, Venus being the much brighter of the two objects. Got Mars up in the early evening in the west, Jupiter near the moon on the seventh, coming up in the mid-evening. So a lot of evening stuff and then Saturn up in the pre-dawn east. But we've also got a comet. Comet Lovejoy will be predicted to reach 4th magnitude, which if it were a star means you could see it pretty easily from a really dark site. But because it's a comet, that brightness is spread over

a ways. So it's probably just going to be barely naked eye visible, but definitely with binoculars or a telescope. And it will get particularly good after the 7th when you get a window to look for it before the moon comes up. The moon's been washing it out. And the second and third week of January will be particularly good. It's in the general neighborhood of Orion over in the east in the mid-evening, early mid-evening, but you'll be wanting to check a finder chart because those pesky comets, they keep moving. On to this week in space history. Way back in 1610, Galileo discovered Callisto, Europa, and Io this week,

moons of Jupiter. The Galilean moons. Oh, that's why they're called that. Jupiter. The Galilean moons. Oh, that's why they're called that. You discovered Ganymede too. It just wasn't during this week. On to Rumble Space Park! That's a rousing start for the new year. I was trying. So we've just barely passed perihelion for the Earth, the closest we get to the Sun, each year happening every early January. And that means we were about 147 million kilometers, whereas six months later,

we're about 152 million kilometers, meaning we're closer by about 3.5% at perihelion. Probably not something you're going to notice with your eyes. And don't stare at the Sun. Mostly circular orbit, but it is elliptical, and we do get a 3.5% variation in distance. Thank you, Johannes Kepler. Was he concerned about eye safety as well? Yeah, I think so. Oh, that's good.

On to the trivia contest. I asked you of all the spacecraft that have visited at least one giant planet, which spacecraft had the highest dry mass, mass without fuel or oxidizer? How'd we do, Matt? We were kind of holiday light, actually. And I think that and this question may have intimidated some people. They might have thought it would be a little hard to figure out. But there are some people who came through for us. And virtually everybody came up with the same answer, which doesn't surprise me. What does surprise me is just how much bigger this spacecraft apparently is compared to number two.

We got a winner in John Gallant of Lima, New York. He last won, man, it's been almost two years since he last won the contest. And if he's correct, the behemoth is Cassini-Huygens. It is indeed. However you carve it up, whether it's just Cassini or Cassini with Huygens, it's definitely the most massive school bus-sized spacecraft with every instrument, including the kitchen sink, hanging off the side of it. Just the Cassini orbiter is 2,100 kilograms dry,

and then you add on Huygens and adapters, you're up over around 2,500 kilograms. Which is, let me see here, well over two tons. In fact, it's more than two and a half tons, close to three tons, 5,500 roughly, 5,600 pounds. And it was more than double that with all the fuel on board. And it was more than double that with all the fuel on board. Gosh. And the runner-up was Galileo, quite a bit farther back at about 1,300 kilograms dry. What surprised me is Voyager, which is a relative lightweight, like 700 kilograms.

Yeah, they're pretty lean. It's tough when you want to check things out of the solar system. You can only make them so massive. All right. John Gallant, congratulations. You are the latest winner of a 200-point account from itelescope.net, that nonprofit worldwide network of telescopes that you can take control over with this account that's valued at about $200 U.S. and point it at anything in the sky and take pictures and share them. Share them with us.

We're going to give that away again this time. Another 200-point account from itelescope.net to the person who was chosen by random.org if they answer this question from Bruce correctly. Besides Galileo, the man, not the spacecraft, besides Galileo, who was the first person to discover a moon around another planet? Besides Earth, not counting Earth's moon. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest.

This time you have until Tuesday, the 13th of January at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us your answer. And I think we've wrapped up the first show of 2015. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about sitting by a river just watching the water flow by. Thank you, and good night. That's Bruce Betts, the Planetary Society's Director of Science and Technology, with a tip of the hat to Julian Lennon, I believe. We'll talk to him again next week for What's Up.

There's that new theme music again. 2015 is going to be a great year on the final frontier. I'm glad I'll spend it bringing you the men and women who are taking us there. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by its forward-looking and thinking members. Clear skies, and once again, Happy New Year.