Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Gemini Planet Imager: Worlds Made Visible

Episode Date: January 13, 2014

Principal Investigator and physicist Bruce Macintosh joins astronomer Franck Marchis to celebrate first light from the most powerful instrument for imaging exoplanets.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Making new worlds visible with the Gemini Planet Imager, 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. They call it GPI, and it has already outstripped the abilities of all other instruments that allow us to see planets circling distant stars. We'll talk with scientists Bruce McIntosh and Frank Marchese about this remarkable new device. Yes, Virginia, there really is a polar vortex. In fact, as we'll hear from senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla, there are many of them just within our solar system. Bill Nye has been ogling the great new images

from China's Lunar Rover, and Bruce Betts will give away another year in space wall calendar during What's Up. Emily, there are so many other things we could talk about, but I absolutely would love to talk about polar vortices across the solar system. A blog entry that you posted on the 9th. This is pretty significant because I guess there are some people who have been questioning whether this is a real term or whether it was just invented by nefarious folks who believe that climate change has some human element to it. Well, if those nefarious folks must be able to travel back in time and put the definition of polar vortex into Al Roker's meteorological dictionary from 1959, he pulled out his copy of his American Meteorological Society dictionary,

talking about this feature that actually happens anywhere you have an atmosphere over a spinning ball, which is pretty much anywhere you have an atmosphere, because anything big enough to have an atmosphere is usually ball-shaped. It spins, it sets up these whirling motions in its atmosphere, and usually you wind up with a polar vortex at one or both poles. I love this, because Al Roker actually said to Rush Limbaugh in his demonstrating that this is a term that has been in use for well over 50 years and probably much longer than that. He said, so stuff it. You provide examples elsewhere in the solar system. As you just said, there are some terrific images in this blog post.

I think it's really cool. This is a really good example of something that unifies planetary science. When you're a planetary scientist, you tend not to specialize on just one planet. You use each one of the planets as sort of a test case, slightly different starting conditions, different gravity, different composition, but same physics. And the differences among planets can tell you a lot about how physics operates on slightly different starting conditions. So you look at places like Venus and Mars, both of which have these oval-shaped wave number two polar vortices.

They're slightly oval-shaped when you look on them at the pole. Or then you can go look at Saturn and see its famous polar hexagon. It has a wave moving around its pole with a wave number of six. That means there's six up and down motions. And when you look down upon it, upon its north pole, you see its famous hexagonal shape. But they're pretty much everywhere in the solar system. And that makes me kind of wonder, are we going to see a polar vortex in the atmosphere of Pluto when New Horizons flies by next year?

Because Pluto does indeed have an atmosphere with wind and climate and meteorology, so we probably should find one there. It wouldn't be a bit surprising, would it? And I will mention that you have an animation of Saturn's north polar vortex, probably only surpassed in its beauty, maybe, by the Earth polar vortex, which anybody can also see if they look around the web without taking too much time. Emily, thank you. I'm glad we took some time to talk about this today. Thank you, Matt. She's the senior editor and our planetary evangelist at the Planetary Society

and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next, Bill Nye, the science guy. Bill, how about those Denver Broncos? The Denver Broncos. Yeah. Orange jerseys. Yeah, them. And they beat the Chargers for the AFC championship.

Lightning bolts, atmospheric friction on their helmets. And the funny thing is, you're the football fan i turned it on because you were finishing the game and i turned it on in time to see this beautiful live shot of the moon aha yes it's amazing those cameras are so good on modern television they really are hd does it and there on the, something was looking back at us. Yes, the U-2 rover, the Jade Rabbit from the Chinese Space Administration, a fantastic mission. And these new super sharp, crisp pictures are coming down. And we have them posted on the Planetary Society website with, of course, excellent commentary from our Emily Lakdawalla. It's an extraordinary

thing. Chinese nation has committed to this. They are step by step, no pun intended, moving out farther and farther into space. And I say congratulations to them. And these latest pictures, which are being made available to us in the West with that kooky internet that the kids use. These really are spectacular pictures, and it's a spectacular accomplishment. It really is. And they're going to keep it up. I mean, next they want to do sample return. Just as the Russians did, robotically, barely seven months after humans walked on the moon,

after our beloved Neil and Buzz. And it's really a step. It's a step in taking human steps on our nearest celestial body, the moon. And this is really something for everybody in the world to consider that the Chinese government or Chinese space administration is not doing this just to find out about the moon.

They're doing it because they know that by having a space program, they will innovate. Society will come up with new ideas, they'll solve new problems. Problems never been solved before. And we'll learn something. We learned so much about the age of our planet by looking at the age of our planet's moon, the rocks from our planet's moon. It's an extraordinary time. It's an extraordinary time in space history. Bill, thanks very much. Talk to you again next time. Thank you, Matt. Go Seahawks! He's a Seahawks fan. He's a Seattle guy. That's Bill Nye, the science guy, the CEO

of the Planetary Society. The Holy Grail in the world of exoplanet discoverers is finding a second Earth. We're not there yet, but steady progress in that direction has taken a big leap forward with the Gemini Planet Imager, now integrated with the Gem Gemini South telescope in the mountains of northern Chile. This exquisite device saw first light just a few weeks ago, after years of development by an international team. Leading that team is Principal Investigator Bruce McIntosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Labs and Stanford University. Previous guest Frank Marchese is also on the team.

He's a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute and serves as public officer for GPI or GPI. The three of us recently talked by phone and Skype. Gentlemen, congratulations on a really spectacular first light for the Gemini planet imager. Bruce McIntosh, it looks like you're only just getting started. Definitely right. We've been on the telescope for a total of 11 nights, most of them spent doing engineering, only a little bit to start doing science. And in fact, one of our students accounted that there's been only a total of six working days to reduce and analyze data since the end of the last run between that and the meeting at which we presented the results. So

it's a very spectacular start, but we're looking forward to getting it fully tuned up and starting to do new science and discovering new planets with it. So there is much more to come, it sounds like, from this instrument. I mean, how much better? These images are already, and the performance is already so terrific. How much better might things get? Right now we're probably about a factor of 10 better than sort of what's typically done with previous instruments. And there's still room for a factor of two or three improvement, especially very close to the star.

So, right now, we could see planets at the equivalent of where the orbit of Saturn is in our solar system, and we would like to push that in to being seeing planets at the equivalent of the orbit of Jupiter in our solar system around nearby interesting stars. So there's definitely some room for tuning up once we get all the data analyzed from this current run before we start a large scale survey looking for new planets. I will also add that we did not yet use the full potential of GPI. There is still some unknown. We don't know how far faint we can go, like in terms of the type of star we can observe. The preliminary images you just saw are just like the brightest, the easiest for the moment.

And we expect to do something more difficult in the future, like search for exoplanets around stars, which are very much fainter than what we have so far. Is GPI, working at the Gemini South Telescope, going to be capable, can you imagine it being capable, of finding a planet that would be Earth or super-Earth-sized in the so-called Goldilocks zone, the range in which water would be liquid? Unfortunately, from a ground-based telescope with current technology and current telescopes, that's not possible. So although GPS is extremely powerful, even when we get it tuned up, we'll be able to

see planets maybe 10 million times fainter than their parent star. And an Earth-like or a super-Earth planet would be more like a billion or 10 billion times fainter than their parent star at those kind of separations. So it's a step on the road towards that. But GPI is really tuned to look at giant planets and also to look at not just old giant planets like Jupiter in our solar system, but young giant planets. What we're seeing in these pictures is the infrared radiation from hot young planets, 10 million, 100 million years old, that are glowing with their original heat that was released during their formation. And so using that, we can study systems, planets

like Jupiter, maybe planets down to the mass of Saturn, if we get extremely lucky. But if you really want to see Earth or super-Earth planets, that would require a 30-meter telescope on the ground or a dedicated space telescope using some of the same technology. Well, and of course, we have 30-meter or so telescopes that are not too far off. They may be interested in this sort of proof of concept. It's more than that. You're doing real science. But the work that GPI is doing, I would guess that they're going to want to get their hands on an instrument similar to it. I think that's certainly the expectation.

We did a very basic design sketch for what an instrument like this on the 30-meter telescope that California, Japan, India, and China are putting together would look like. And I'm hoping that there'll be a renewed interest in that. There's actually a group that Frank has been working with from Japan that's been trying to make the design even more sophisticated and put a whole bunch of new technologies even going beyond GPI. So that's the next step.

But right now, I'd like to concentrate on actually doing science with the one we just finished and what we can do about the Jupiters. Frank, you want to say anything about that other project? Yeah, the other project is basically combining what we have been doing with GPI and a new type of imager called fiber imagers. So this project is called SAIT. Of course, it's very preliminary. There will be a call for a second generation of instruments for the TMT. The TMT is not yet built, and we are already talking about the second generation of instruments.

So that's kind of interesting. And we hope that GPI will basically open the window, will initiate the race to search for exoplanets and to image them. And with GPI now in the sky and the first result being published, we hope that the committee of the TMT, the TAC committee, will choose an instrument like SAIT to image exoplanets using the TMT. And the TMT, of course, that 30-meter telescope, we've talked to the people behind that who are based in Pasadena,

not far from the Planetary Society, and we will do that again. GPI, I like that. I like that better than GPI. I think I'll use that in the rest of our conversation. Bruce, how long did it take to make this instrument a reality? We've actually been working on this for almost 10 years, which is a long time, but becoming typical for projects of this scale to really advance the field. We did the very first proposal for a basic design study, went in around March 2004. After that, we were doing detailed design work through about 2005, 2006,

and then started real construction of hardware around 2008. So it's been coming up on a decade for a very large international team to put all this together and get it onto the telescope. More about the Gemini Planet Imager right after a break. This is Planetary Radio. Greetings, Planetary Radio fans. Bill Nye here. Thanks for listening each week. Did you know the show reaches nearly 100,000 space and science enthusiasts?

You and your organization can become part of Planetary Radio by becoming an underwriter. Your generosity will be acknowledged on the air each week, as well as on the Planetary Society website. To learn more, visit planetary.org slash underwriting. That's planetary.org slash underwriting. Thanks again for making us your place in space. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society.

We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, and I'm talking with physicist Bruce McIntosh and astronomer Frank Marchese about the Gemini Planet Imager, or GPI, which has just become the most powerful tool yet for enabling us to see exoplanets. Frank serves as public officer,

while Bruce is principal investigator for the project, which has been in development for nearly 10 years. That's a long time to develop any device. Does that have to do with why this is called an extreme adaptive optics instrument? It certainly took that long in part because it was pushing the technology so much that it wasn't just a simple scaling up of what we've done before. What people call extreme adaptive optics is something that's really designed to perform an order of magnitude of factor 10 better than what we have right now. So GPI, rather than correcting the atmospheric turbulence a few hundred times a second,

with equivalent of a few hundred degrees of freedom, does it about a thousand times a second, and does a much better job of fitting very precisely atmospheric turbulence. And that requires things like deformable mirrors that didn't even exist when we started the project. The adaptive optics systems people use right now use mirrors made out of glass that are pushed around by little piezoelectric actuators. The mirror's about a millimeter thick, the actuators are about a centimeter apart, and they can change the shape enough to correct atmosphere turbulence reasonably well. We need to do it with the equivalent of thousands of these actuators

and couldn't actually make a mirror that big with conventional technology. And so as an example of advancing the technology, GPI's deformable mirror is a silicon microchip. It's a lithographically etched piece of silicon, about an inch in diameter rather than being tens of centimeters in diameter like the normal mirrors that can change its shape with an accuracy of a fraction of a nanometer, almost equivalent to the height of a single atom, a thousand times a second to correct for the atmospheric turbulence. And so we worked with a company in Boston that developed the technology for this mirror, made the first few examples that pretty much only exist for us.

So there are a whole bunch of other examples like that through the system of technology that just didn't exist 10 years ago that we knew we would need, and that we worked with collaborators and suppliers to make sure they do exist. The more I hear, the more amazing it is. Frank, you and I have talked in the past about adaptive optics. Say something about why this is generating, in addition to gigantic telescopes, why this is generating such a revolution in astronomy. Well, simply because with adaptive optics on a ground-based telescope, we are using

the full potential of these telescopes. I'm talking about having 8, 10, 30, 45-meter-class telescopes on the ground. So with adaptive optics, we correct in real time the effect of the atmosphere, and that allows us to get an image like if the telescope were in space. For comparison, now we can observe Io and Europa with a resolution which is quite similar to the resolution of the global observation from the Galileo spacecraft taken in 1995. I mean, this is remarkable that from the ground, we can see volcanoes on Io that were detectable before using only a spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter. Yeah, so GPI also has the potential to observe planets in our

solar system. And that's a decision that Bruce took early in the development of the instrument. And thank you very much, Bruce, for that. I mean, that was a great decision, I think. So now with GPI, we can observe the Galilean satellite of Io. We can map the Galilean satellite. And look what happened recently when we observed Europa with Hubble Space Telescope. We discovered some activity in the south pole of Europa. So even if we had the spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter for 10 years, we still have a lot of stuff to discover on this Galilean

satellite. There is still some mysteries, some signatures of molecules that we did not detect using the space-bound instruments. So GPI, we most likely contribute by helping us understanding the composition of the surface of Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, and Io volcanoes. We can also observe asteroids, multiple asteroid systems. As you know, there is a lot of asteroids with moons now. We know that. So with GPI, we can observe some of these largest asteroids in the main belt, and hopefully we will discover some moons,

some small rocks in orbit around larger rocks. And that's going to be an exciting research for me, in my case, definitely. Bruce, talk about how GPI will also help us to learn about planets that are still under construction, so to speak. So yeah, another class of science beyond observing planets and other solar systems is to look at the dust and debris left behind by the process of forming planets. And in fact, probably our prettiest picture from the first light release

is a ring of dust around the star HR 4796. In our solar system, which is pretty old, asteroids and comets get eroded by collisions by photon pressure from the sun and make bands of dust like the zodiacal light you can see late at night when you're somewhere very dark. That kind of would tell you, even from outside our solar system, that we had asteroids and comets in the first place. In other solar systems much younger, with many more asteroids and comets, they can have

10 or 1,000 times as much dust as our solar system does. Tracing the patterns in that dust can tell you something about how the planets in that solar system formed or are forming, or even about planets that you can't see. Like, for example, in the HR 4796 image, there's a very sharp inner edge to that dust, which probably requires some invisible body, like a not-yet-seen planet, to confine that dust the same way in our solar system Neptune confines the comets of the Kuiper Belt or Jupiter can find the asteroids of the asteroid belt. And I will try to put up that very beautiful image of HR 4796A at planetary.org slash radio. At least that's where you'll be able to get to the show page where it will be.

The other image, the primary one that has been published, is this shot of a planet, of Beta Pictoris B, one that has been studied for some time now. Is it an illusion, or am I looking at a disk there? You can't really see. So there is a disk in the Beta Pictoris system. So we looked, just to make life easier to start with, we looked at systems that already were known to have planets in them. So the Beta Pictoris planet was discovered by the Europeans several years ago. And Betapik does have a disk of dust seen almost edge-on from our solar system. So like looking at a dinner plate from the side, it's a very narrow line that the planet lines up from. We don't think you can see that in the images we released,

although we're doing a lot of post-processing to try and see if we can pull the disk out. So we think all you're seeing there is the planet itself, which is probably about eight times the size of Jupiter and with a temperature of about 1,600 degrees. Well, and the planet itself appears in this image, not just a point source, but can actually see some diameter of the planet? Or again, is that an illusion? That's a processing artifact by the image processing we're using to try and pull the planet out of the scattered background light. So the planet itself is definitely just a point source.

That's what I expected. Yeah. Something you don't see on the image, Matt, it's simply that it's also that we don't have only an image, we have a spectra of this planet. So there is another dimension to add on this image, which is the emission light coming from the planet itself. So using this spectrum, we'll be able to know the composition of the planet and infer the type of molecules you have on the top of the atmosphere of the planet. And these are giant planets like Jupiter, most likely, or even larger. But maybe variation as well will be visible from some of them. And there's nothing like being able to get the spectra of a source like this.

With any uniquely powerful instrument like this, everybody in the astronomy community that can make use of it is going to be trying to knock down your door. Do you already see the demand building for this? Yeah, Gemini built this as a facility instrument that's available to the whole astronomy community, and they'll actually start what's called science verification, the kind of early testing observations. In the first half of this year, there'll be a call for proposals going out for astronomers who want to use it. Meanwhile, our job as the people who built it is to make sure that we document it and make sure everything is understandable enough for other people to

take advantage of it. We'll get to do one of the larger projects with it starting in the second half of this year. We're going to survey about 600 stars in the solar neighborhood to look for the planets they might host. But lots and lots of other groups will have the opportunity to do other kinds of science programs ranging from the solar system to look for the planets they might host. But lots and lots of other groups will have the opportunity to do other kinds of science programs, ranging from the solar system stuff we were talking about to the disks to planets around different stars than the ones we want to look at to maybe looking at evolved stars, at red giants and the outflows of gas from them. So we're hoping it'll be one of the most used instruments on the Gemini telescope.

Gentlemen, before we close out, one more question about the future. Can you imagine an instrument like GPI on some future space telescope? Absolutely. I think that's the holy grail in this field you were kind of leading us towards earlier is seeing a planet like Earth and actually getting the spectrum

Frank was mentioning to see in that planet like Earth evidence of water and oxygen and all those life-associated elements. That's really going to require a spacecraft and probably a spacecraft built only for this purpose. But when it does fly, it will have to use a lot of the same technology, masks to block the star, even deformable mirrors. Though there's no atmospheric turbulence, to see planets you have to correct even for little things like tiny polishing imperfections in the

main mirror of the telescope, and so you'll need a deformable mirror for that. In fact, the most likely way to fly such a thing, NASA has just, in the process of approving a mission called WFIRST, which is mostly a wide-field telescope to look for the signature of dark energy, but it will probably fly with a 2.4-meter diameter telescope, which is big enough that it's worth putting a coronagraph on it. And so NASA's in the process of designing something that looks a lot like GPI, with a spectrograph like ours and deformable mirrors like ours, to fly on this WFIRST telescope and look at maybe super-Earth-sized planets.

Gentlemen, I just want to congratulate you once again. It's a tremendous achievement. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Gemini Planet Imager Principal Investigator Bruce McIntosh at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs, and GPI Public Officer Frank Marchese of the SETI Institute. I'll be back in moments with our own Bruce.

It's that time again. Time for Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He is going to talk to us about what's up in the night sky because this is What's Up. Hey, welcome back. Hey there. Hi there. Hello there. We're as happy as can be.

We are as happy as can be. Boy as happy as can be boy we're dating ourselves do tell alright well Jupiter's just passed opposition that means the implication being it's rising in the east around sunset setting in the west around dawn and it's big and bright and lovely so check it out in the east

in the early evening if you catch this show right out of the block you can see it hanging near the full or the early evening if you catch this show right out of the block you can see it hanging near the full or almost full moon on tuesday and wednesday january 14th and 15th but it'll it'll be up there for for weeks and months so uh check out jupiter we also have mars getting brighter over the next two or three months it's coming up in the middle of the night in the east and saturn is up pretty high now in the east in the pre-dawn so check all those out as well as the lovely constellations in the sky we move on to this week in space history

the guy we might hear a little bit about later galileo galileo galileo discovered the largest moon of the solar system ganymede not that he knew it was that. He was just busily discovering moons around Jupiter around this time in 1610. And then in 2005, we skip ahead just a wee bit. The Huygens probe, the European Space Agency Huygens probe, went through the atmosphere and landed on Titan, Saturn's moon, this week in 2005. As usual, hard to believe it was that long ago. And around the turn of the century, both of my sons were born in this week. Oh, I didn't know that. Both in the same week, separated by some years.

Separated by one week, three years and one week. That's great. Well, wish them a happy birthday for all of us. I will indeed. We move on to random space effect. I don't know. I love it. I always enjoy these kind of analogies. Pulled this one off the Chandra X-ray Observatory website. And if the state of Colorado were as smooth as the surface of the Chandra X-ray Observatory mirrors, Pike's Peak, which is 14,000 feet, 4,300 meters, would be less than an inch or a couple centimeters tall. That's great. I love these, as you know. Ridiculously smooth. They have to be, particularly when you get to such short wavelengths.

Yeah, it's these comparisons that I'm just crazy about, you know. Alright, I'll try to find you more. Thank you. On to the trivia question. We asked you who recorded the first observations that indicated that Venus had phases. So phases like the

moon. A whole slew of people came up with this. And as you said, we come back to that really great guy, one of my heroes. It turns out if you're competent and have one of the early telescopes and decide to stare at things, you learn a lot of stuff. Right. Well, you know, he may have been the first guy to point one of those things with lenses at the sky. Whether he was or not, he sure discovered a lot of cool stuff like the phases of Venus. It was Galileo, Galileo, Galilei. He looked up and noticed that it was doing the stuff the moon No, it told us that it was yet another strong indication when people thought it through that the planets revolved around the sun, not around the earth. Our listener Wojtek Nawalek said, yeah, his first words after seeing this were, boy, that's going to, should I say it?

Tick people off? Yeah, I'll clean it up slightly. Boy, that's going to, should I say it? Tick people off? Yeah, I'll clean it up slightly. Boy, that's going to tick a lot of people off. He didn't use quite that language. Well, no, he probably said it in Italian. That's true. It's a family show, though. You want to know who won this?

I desperately do. It's James DeYarman of Las Vegas, Nevada, where I just was. That's amazing. In a terrible crowd making my way around the Consumer Electronics Show, which was just massively crowded but fascinating also. James said, indeed, that it was Galileo. For that, he's going to get a year in space wall calendar. And we're going to give away at least one more of those to the winner of the question that you're about to ask for this week. All right.

We're talking about constellations. What northern hemisphere constellation is best known for looking like the letter W or some parts of the year the letter M? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Radio guests, radio hosts, radio celebrity, radio contest. Planetary.org slash radio contest and get your entry to us. By when, Matt? By the 20th. By Monday, January 20th at 2 p.m. Pacific time.

And you will have a chance to win yet another of these year in space wall calendars from the same folks who make the Year in Space desk calendar the source of random space facts, right? Not random space facts. Not random space facts. Occasionally, but usually sort of the always source of this week in space history. And the wall calendar, by the way, includes random space facts. Ah, right. Where can they see the calendars?

Yearinspace.com. We're done. This was a quick visit. This was a quick but highly enjoyable visit. Oh, I'm glad. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about Ziploc or non-trademark versions of Ziploc bags. Thank you, and good night.

He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He could find his way out of a Ziploc bag. He's a smart guy. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Next week, the entire cosmos with Jay Pasikoff and Alex Filippenko. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the highly adaptive members of the society. Clear skies.