Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Gigantic ALMA Radio Telescope in Chile

Episode Date: January 21, 2013

ALMA will make sharper images than the Hubble Space Telescope, yet it’s a radio telescope! ALMA scientists Alison Peck and Al Wooten tell us about this array of 66 huge dishes in Chile’s Atacama desert.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's the world's biggest telescope, yet it doesn't use light, 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. It will make sharper images than the Hubble Space Telescope, yet it is a radio telescope. ALMA is the gigantic instrument already in operation 5,000 meters or about three miles above sea level in Chile's Atacama Desert. We'll talk to two of the scientists who were part of the international ALMA team, along with all of our regulars, beginning with Emily Lakdawalla.

Emily, thanks for joining us as always. I want to look back to something you posted on the 16th of January, actually the 15th and the 16th. It's an indication, I guess, that scientists did the right thing taking this little detour with Curiosity on Mars. That's right, Matt. You know, the rover operators faced a really tough decision months ago when they first decided where to start driving. The thing is that they knew that they were going to have to test out all the equipment on some Martian rocks. And they really want to drive to the mountain that's in the middle of the crater. But there were some interesting looking rocks that were not very far from the rover, but precisely in the wrong direction. Well, they decided to go to those interesting looking rocks that were closer, and that's where they've been doing all their tests. And lo and behold, it is a kind of

rock that is exactly what Curiosity was sent to Mars to study. We're looking at lake bed sediments that have been wet over at least two, probably three different times in Mars's history. So it's preserving a record of water on Mars in at least two, maybe three different episodes. It's precisely what Curiosity went to Mars to do, and so they are so excited that they went on this detour to study these rocks. Great results already, obviously. And kind of complementing that,

another terrific picture from HiRISE. Yeah, and this one was almost, and it wasn't precisely accidental that they got the rover, but they were specifically shooting some color imaging of Curiosity's future trek. But of course, the swath of the image caught Curiosity parked at Glenelg exploring some of those really exciting rocks. And it's just, it's fresh and amazing every single time I see a picture of human-built hardware on the surface of another planet. So it's in the blog. On the 15th and 16th, those entries that Emily made, be sure to look at the close-up of a rover on Mars. And then the panorama it took from exactly that picture.

With a few seconds left, do you want to congratulate the Chinese? Absolutely. You know, they took a spacecraft that they built for lunar exploration, and they, you know, the spacecraft had a little lifetime left. They're like, hey, let's fly it past an asteroid, which is really not something that one can imagine you can ordinarily do with a spacecraft past its lifetime. And they did. And they got tons of images of this weird shaped asteroid. I don't think it's a potato or a yam. I've decided it's a space ginger root. Which somehow seems appropriate.

Yeah, it is a Chinese mission after all. Well, definitely congratulations to everyone behind the Chang'e 2 mission. And Emily, thank you for joining us once again. Thank you, Matt. She is a senior editor for the Planetary Society and our planetary evangelist, a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine.

Up next is Bill Nye. But Bill joins us from a hotel in Washington, where, as you'll hear, he was there for the inauguration. But he also took some time to talk to Casey Dreyer, one of our colleagues at the Society. Thank you, Matt. I am here with our outreach and advocacy Thank you, Matt. I am here with our outreach and advocacy strategist, Casey Dreyer. Yeah, I was in Washington, D.C. all last week visiting people on the Hill, visiting people at NASA headquarters, and kind of meeting and strategizing with other people in the space policy area. So, Casey, you met with Dianne Feinstein or her people? Yes, I met with the staffer in charge of the space policy for Dianne Feinstein and talked to him about the importance of not just the Mars program at JPL, but also the outer

planets and missions like Europa or missions to Europa that we really want to see happen in this next decade. Are they supportive? Are they in? They are interested. Again, most people are never against planetary science. The real question, as most things come down to in Washington these days, is how are you going to pay for it? And it's really something that Congress can do. But again, the advantage that we have here for planetary science and at the Planetary Society is that the money required to do these missions is just not very much. We're talking about less than 2% of NASA's budget to be moved back to planetary science. So they can find ways to do that. 2% of NASA's budget, which is 0.4% of the federal budget.

Yes, yes. So we're talking about vanishingly small numbers that are losing all meaning, really, when you're talking about it in that larger context. But the vanishingly small number you're talking about is 302 million this year, right? And about 300 million in coming years. Is that right? Yeah. If we keep it flat at 1.5 billion, that's returning about 300 million. And keeping it like that for the next five years, we can do missions like a mission to Europa.

We can do the Mars sample return mission. And then we can do a bunch of other really exciting small missions to other parts of the solar system. Again, it's a lot of money to an individual, but we're not talking about individuals here. We're talking about the federal government, and it can very much work. So who else did you speak with? I met a staffer at Judy Chu's office. Judy Chu is the congressional representative

here on Pasadena. She just got redistricted into this area and has taken a much larger interest in space policy. She's been saying some very exciting, very supporting things about JPL's Mars program. And again, I met with her staffer to share that it's not just Mars. There are missions to Europa and these smaller missions called Discovery Missions that are really important too, and that all of those would benefit the community here. And of course, they would help humankind

make discoveries that could change the world. No big deal. Toss that in at the end. Just a great job, man. I'm Bill Nye, CEO of the Planetary Society, handing it back to Matt Kaplan. Travel south to Chile's Atacama Desert, where so many of our planet's most powerful telescopes can be found, and you'll also find a growing array of gigantic radio dishes arrayed across a plain that is 5,000 meters above sea level. This is ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Submillimeter Array.

With a year to go before it is completed, ALMA is already enabling astronomers to make discoveries no other telescope has been capable of. The project is a partnership that includes the European Southern Observatory, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Chile, and the United States. Al Wotan has been working on this project for 30 years. He is the North American Project Scientist and head of the North American ALMA Science Center at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Alison Peck has just returned from five years of shuttling between Santiago and the telescope site, where she led a team of ALMA commissioning

scientists. Here are excerpts of our conversation at the recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The complete interview, which is more than twice as long, can be heard online at planetary.org slash radio. We just came a few moments ago out of a session that you chaired, Al, with the scientists working with this instrument. While I did not, I have to admit, understand a lot of their data, I sure noticed that they kept using these adjectives like remarkable, amazing, fantastic. And this about an instrument that's only partially complete. Absolutely. And this about an instrument that's only partially complete.

Absolutely. Just 16, 17, 18 of the eventual 66 antennas were involved in the data that we saw. What is it that ALMA is going to be able to do for the astronomy community that no other instrument has ever been able to do? Well, we'll be able to peer into the cool universe, the cold, dusty places where stars are being formed and planets are being formed with a sharpness of vision that nobody's been able to use before. And that will enable us to discover how and where stars are formed and where planets are formed, much like the planets in the solar system.

But additionally, because distant galaxies are at large redshifts, their whole spectrum gets shifted from the optical part of the spectrum into the millimeter part of the spectrum. And so an additional aspect of ALMA is that the galaxies which are faint optically because their emission has been redshifted out of that portion of the spectrum are bright for ALMA. And so we have an unusual advantage in being able to see very distant galaxies pretty sharply, as you saw in many of the talks this morning. I read about five different areas of research that ALMA will be able to conduct. Really, these capabilities, while it's not limited to looking back toward the beginning of the universe,

that's one of the things, obviously, that ALMA is going to do better than any other instrument. That's right. That's right. And in particular, at the wavelength ranges that we're looking at, the sensitivity that we have is unprecedented. There have been submillimeter interferometers before, and they're still going, and they're very good instruments. But with limited sensitivity, they have fewer antennas, they have smaller antennas, and so with the advent of ALMA, we're able to observe a large number of sources in a very small amount of time, and that means that we can do more complete surveys.

We can build up statistics about the galaxies in the early universe. If you look at one object, you may be able to learn quite a bit about that object, but you don't learn a lot about the topic of galaxy evolution. You need to look at a large number of galaxies in order to see what the general trends are, what the majority of galaxies were doing. And that's one of the doors that ALMA opens. We can look very far back towards the beginning of the universe, and we can look at a very large number of galaxies and find out what the trends are, how they tended to evolve, when the stars are formed, whether they have active galactic nuclei inside, that sort of thing. So very much like, I mean, exactly like optical astronomy, that superb sensitivity that you'll have means not only can you look at fainter objects, but you can look at more of them because your observation time doesn't have to be as long.

Exactly. To my surprise, ALMA, which is going to be looking back to the beginning of everything, it may also be able to help out with things much closer to home right here in our own solar system. Yeah. When you look at an asteroid or some of the deep solar system, Kuiper belt objects for instance, you're looking at reflected sunlight and so it's very difficult to tell how large the object is. What you're really looking at is how good a mirror it is for reflecting the sunlight back. And so you don't get a very good estimate of its size. But ALMA directly images the thermal radiation, the mass of rock at a certain temperature,

emits at the ALMA wavelengths. And so by measuring the emission from these objects at ALMA wavelengths, you can actually get an estimate of the mass much better than you can optically. And so ALMA will be very important for doing that, particularly as we begin to explore the distant solar system with the New Horizons mission coming up, getting close to Pluto, which we now realize has, I've lost track, four moons. That's quite a busy place. Quite a few moons, right?

And you don't want one of them to hit the spacecraft when it goes past. So we need to know the orbits of those very accurately. From the Earth, we have the moon to worry about optically. That doesn't affect radio observations at all. And so we can look at the very faintest objects basically anytime. One of the other exciting things that we can do with ALMA is because we can detect molecules and using the Doppler shift, the Doppler effect, we can see what direction they're moving. We can see whether they're moving towards us or away from us. And we have high enough resolution to be able to see what the distribution of molecules is

in the atmospheres of planets in our solar system. And so that means that we can measure how fast the winds are blowing in different parts of the atmosphere on planets in our system. Saturn, for example, was one of the Cycle Zero projects. And so we can actually see what the weather is like on other planets. And that gives us a very good sense of what the conditions would be like if you were on the surface that we can see from Earth. Mar from Alwatton and Allison Peck about ALMA is moments away. This is Planetary Radio.

Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from, and are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. 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. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're talking with Al Wutton and Allison Peck, two leaders of the International Radio Telescope Project known as ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Submillimeter Array, now nearing completion in Chile's Atacama Desert. ALMA uses interferometry to make its many individual instruments

act as a single gigantic telescope. How is it that you're going to be able to get 66 dishes spread across this plane to function like one gigantic telescope? Well, not easily, but so far all the telescopes are sort of within a kilometer of the home base. We're just constructing the more distant pads and putting the wiring in to connect them up. So that's one of the big jobs that we have over the next year as we finish up with the construction. Eventually it covers 16 kilometers. It's about the size of the Washington Beltway that we have covered with antennas.

And that will enable us to give an acuity of vision sort of like the Hubble Space Telescope, well, better than the Hubble Space Telescope has. So we get very fine details in all these objects. So there were a number of challenges associated with that, and not least of which is that we have antennas coming from the different regions of the project. So they were built by different companies. And all of the antennas have to meet very, very specific parameters so that they all operate in exactly the same manner. And they all have to respond exactly the same way to the

software. So obviously, we have a very large software package operating the telescope because it has to move all of the antennas in unison. They have to be moving at exactly the same rate and pointing at exactly the same place. Incredible precision. Incredible precision, that's right. And all of the signals have to come underground on optical fibers to a supercomputer called the correlator. Now, the correlator multiplies these signals together to construct one single image from all of these diverse antennas. And so the software challenge there is enormous. And we've had very good people working on it for a number of years. And so now we are able, in fact, to move the antennas to kilometers apart, be able to look at exactly the same point in the sky, and add the signals

together to make the fantastic images, some of which you saw downstairs in the special session. Talk a little bit more about this correlator, because I have read that this is one of the most powerful supercomputers on this planet now, and certainly the one that is higher in altitude than any other. Right. So one of the challenges you face is cooling it. That's a lot of electronics. If you were to look at a picture of the building at the high site, a lot of it is involved just with the look at a picture of the building at the high site,

a lot of it is involved just with the cooling machinery to keep the correlator cool. Furthermore, there's no air up there, and a lot of the data on your devices that you have in your pocket and in front of you are written on hard disks with magnetic technology. But we have to use diskless technology up there because the air pressure is such that it won't support the flying heads that ride on the disks. Oh, gosh. Yeah, so there are a lot of challenges with moving that much data. I've got to throw one number at you because it looked like a typo.

137 million processors in the system? Yeah, it's an impressive supercomputer, but you have to remember that it's designed for a single purpose. And so it's not as versatile as a lot of the computers that are called supercomputers. But because it has a very specific design for a specific function, then all of the effort can go into making it as fast as possible and also as robust as possible, because you don't want to have to service it very often at 5,000 meters. It is one of the highest supercomputers in the world, as you mentioned. One interesting aspect of it is we're high up, and so the cosmic ray flux is pretty high. And the cosmic rays can damage some of the electronics. Just as they do with spacecraft now.

Right. And so it has self-check circuits in it, which actually check for cosmic ray damage. This brings up an interesting point, which I knew was true in the general public, but I didn't realize was so true among astronomers, particularly astronomers used to working with different wavelengths, than what you do, radio astronomy. It kind of gets to, you'll pardon the pun, the image problem that radio astronomy has always had. I mean, if you get beyond Arecibo and the VLA, largely thanks to Jodie Foster, I think,

we really just don't, the vast public, don't think much about these tools in radio astronomy, which are able, as you said, Al, to now, ALMA will resolve better than the Hubble Space Telescope. You are getting images from it. That's right. I think most people, when they think of radio astronomy, think of perhaps in contact with the earphones listening to the hiss from outer space. I don't think we've ever heard a hiss from ALMA being processed through. You'll let us know if you get a signal.

Absolutely. We could turn it into a hiss, but it wouldn't be as meaningful as images are. So the real goal has always been to provide those stunning images. And in the past, many radio images have sort of looked like blobs because we just haven't had as many antennas

and as much sensitivity as Alma has. So our goal is to make radio images as visually pleasing as those you get from the Space Telescope, in addition to making them as sharp. You had a scientist downstairs who, as he was describing the spectacular results he's already getting from what you call Cycle Zero in this unfinished instrument, he was saying, but if only it was a magnitude, an order of magnitude bigger. Scientists are just never satisfied. That's true.

I was trying to see what our funding agency's fellow's face looked like when he asked for that. So how far are we from seeing ALMA fully complete, all 66 of those telescopes, working together through that amazing supercomputer. Well, about a year. Yeah, we're very close now. Not far. We're very close now, that's right. Once the antennas started being delivered and the correlator was delivered, it all started to move very quickly.

And right now, the antennas are going up as quickly as once a week up the mountain and they're integrated into the array a lot of tests are done and then they're used for science and so it's a very fast process with a lot of people working around the clock they're operating 24 hours doing the engineering tests as well as making the science observations so i think right now there are something like 46 antennas that could be used together in an observation, but we have both 12-meter and 7-meter antennas there. Now, in full ALMA, these will be used as two separate arrays. The 7-meter antennas will be used for observing things with a larger angular scale, larger structures in the sky, which are actually resolved out, meaning you don't see them at all using the 12-meter antennas

because you simply have too much resolution, and so you don't see the large structures. So these provide the context. That's right, and so you'll be able to add the data from these two arrays together to see very fine detail on very large scales, which will be something that has not been done before. So that'll be a new thing for Alma. I want to thank you both very much for joining us for this conversation, particularly when

there is so much other stuff going on here at AAS. And I hope that we can check back with you. I know that you've got a big day coming up, Al, the official inauguration of Alma. Yeah, in March. That's right. A giant ordeal. Well, maybe we can check with you either before that or when you've relaxed a little bit afterward

and talk a little bit more about how ALMA is coming together. Sure, absolutely, Matt. Thank you. Absolutely. It's something we're really looking forward to. Thanks for having us. My complete conversation with scientists Al Wooten and Allison Peck about the tremendous new radio telescope called ALMA

is available online at planetary.org slash radio. Al is ALMA's North American Project Scientist and head of the North American ALMA Science Center at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Allison Peck led a team of ALMA commissioning scientists in Chile for five years. I'll be right back with Bruce Betts. Live on the Skype line, we've got Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up, and I hope you can tell us about the night sky. I can, I can. It'll

be very exciting. Not as exciting as the answer to the trivia question, which brought out the rocker in our listeners. Well, good. I look forward to finding out about that. In the meantime, I'll tell you about that night sky. We've got Jupiter, of course, still dominating the evening sky over in the east. If you pick this up right after it comes out, you may see the moon still in the either very close to it on Monday night or in its general neighborhood on Tuesday. We've got Mars low in the west. It's tricky to see, but low and reddish shortly after sunset. And what's interesting is Mercury will be coming to play with us in February, so it's coming up very low in the west, and Mars and Mercury will pass within 0.3 degrees of each other. In other words, really,

really close on February 8th, although it will be tough to see because you'll have to have an open view to the western horizon in the early evening, but Mercury will then keep getting higher and Mars keep getting lower. In the pre-dawn sky, you can check out Saturn high overhead and Venus, also very low but super bright. For a little bit longer, you can see how much longer you can still see it over in the east. We move on to this week in space history. 1967 was the Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts. And on a much happier note, 2004, nine years ago, Opportunity landed on Mars, still going strong. Off we go to random space. Space.

The X-15, which I know you enjoy. Very much. The space plane program hypersonic testing. It had 12 pilots over its history, the most famous being Neil Armstrong, for other reasons. In 2005, NASA awarded astronaut wings to three of the pilots, two of them posthumously, for going above 50 miles, which is one definition of space.

The military pilots had already been given astronaut wings, but the civilians hadn't, primarily because NASA didn't award them at the time. Well, good for them. Good on them. And I'm glad at least one of them was around to enjoy that honor. Well earned. That was such a terrific program. All right. We move on to the trivia contest. And in a different take than usual, I asked you what song by what group starts with the lyrics,

We had a lot of luck on Venus, we always had a ball on Mars. Looking for the group and the song. And we got both from many, many people, a near record setter in terms of responses to this question. I don't know whether it was the classic rock and roll that brought people out or the fact that our winner is going to get Bill Nye's voice on his answering machine. And it is a he because our winner is Chris Campbell, chosen by Random.org. Everybody who entered had the right answer. The song is, I guess you know all too well, Bruce, was Space Truckin'.

Space Truckin' by Deep Purple. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Space Truckin'. We got all kinds of discography information from listeners. Some of it really quite fascinating. Claude Plymate pointed out it's on the album Machine Head, a classic of rock and roll. It was released in 72, although the song was written in 71, and apparently just about coincided with the arrival at Mars of Mariner 9 that went into orbit around the planet. I don't know if that's what inspired it or not. Claude

also says that that album featured the iconic song Smoke on the Water that features the three first chords learned by just about every budding guitarist ever since. Let me tell you why I'm so happy that Chris Campbell of Atlanta, Georgia, is our winner this week. He listens to us on WREK 91.1 FM. That's the Georgia Tech radio station. But here's what really makes me happy that he got it. He says, come on, Random.org, give me Bill Nye's voice so I can impress colleagues and score chicks. Noble goals. Yeah.

No, not the Planetary Radio or the Planetary Society endorse these goals, but good on you, Chris. It's a fun radio station, call letters. I didn't realize the Ramblin' Wreck had a wreck. It's the wreck of the tech. So anyway, congratulations, Chris. What do you got for us next time? Going a little more traditionally, what pilot flew the most flights in the X-15? It was a lot. What pilot flew the most flights in the X-15? And Matt, what are they supposed to do to enter nowadays? Bruce, they need to use our new online form. They go to planetary.org slash radio trivia, planetary.org slash radio trivia. That's the shortcut. You can also get there from the page where this show is listed on our website.

Go to planetary.org slash radio. And I think that'll do it, except to say that this time we need your answer by Monday, the 28th of January at 2 p.m. Pacific time. And the prize, once again, third time running, will be Bill Nye's voice on your answering machine. Is his voice going to hold out? We shall find out together. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about archery. Thank you, and good night.

That's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Well, we had a lot of luck on Venus. We always had a ball on Mars. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society. Keep on trekking, Captain Kirk.

Come on! Come on, let's go space truckin'!