Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Launch of LightSail

Episode Date: May 26, 2015

This special edition takes you behind the scenes on May 20, 2015 as LightSail is lifted into orbit. You’ll hear the thrilling launch, meet key team members as they prepare for the big moment, and hear a special status report from Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join us for the launch of LightSail, 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. On May 20th, I finally saw a rocket lift off. And I was among friends, hundreds of them. If you weren't there, I hope you'll stay with us as we take you to the launch of AFSPC-5, the Air Force Space Command 5 mission, an Atlas V rocket carrying the X-37B orbital test vehicle, and just below it, ten tiny CubeSats. You'll hear from Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye and many of the men and women on the Air Force, United Launch Alliance,

and LightSail teams. But before we take you to Florida, let's visit with Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, it's back to series with your blog entry from the 22nd of May. Lots of great stuff coming back, but tell us what ice weasels and schmutz have to do with this story. Well, you see, the ice weasels are flying around their vertical takeoff and landing capable jet fighters on the surface of Ceres. And that's what makes the little black dots that are appearing in all these Ceres images. So anyway, they released this amazing animation that had 51 different frames on Ceres. That's 51 photos they released in one day, which is just tremendous. And it's an animation that shows more than one day's rotation on Sirius. You can see all these really cool features rotating in and out of view. But you also see these black dots jumping all over the place.

And if you look very closely at them, you'll notice that they stay in the same relative positions with respect to each other from frame to frame. And that tells you that they're schmutz on the camera. And so I went through all the animation frames and I erased them, which is not something that any self-respecting scientist would do. But I'm not doing science. I just want to appreciate the pretty animation. And so I erased them all. I kind of painted them over. And I made a smoother looking animation of Ceres rotating.

And what a cool place that is. It's got these hexagonal shaped craters. It's got the white spots. It's got various other white dotted crater features on it. It's got grooves. It's all kinds of interesting things. It's really going to be a fun mission once we get even closer and can map these things in more detail. Still getting better and better looks at those bright spots, those white spots, speculation about those. You also have some links to some external work. There's one particular animation that just is glorious in showing the topography of one piece of this world. It's pretty mind-boggling, and it's a very strange feature. It's this conical-shaped mountain, which is not unheard of on planetary surfaces. You often get that kind of thing in the center

of an impact crater. But as far as anyone can tell, there's no impact crater around this mountain. So it's conical-shaped, it's got some white streaks on it, and it projects fairly far above the surface of Ceres. You can see it poking quite far out on a limb when it's against black space. And this animation that somebody put together on unmannedspaceflight.com just shows you how conical it is as Dawn rotates around and Ceres rotates underneath it. Certainly for my money is one of the most interesting features we've seen so far. But there are a lot of really interesting geomorphological features on this world, and we really need to get closer. And fortunately, Dawn is doing that. And much more to come.

Absolutely. As I said, it's a May 22nd entry in Emily's blog. You'll find it at planetary.org. And then there's one just a couple of days later, which is quite dramatic, quite a piece of art. It's a sunset on Mars, somewhat simulated, but still beautiful. And who else to score something like that than Gheorghe Ligeti, who made us all feel properly ethereal in the movie 2001. Emily, thanks, and we'll talk to you again next time.

Looking forward to it, Matt. She is our senior editor and the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, also a contributing editor for Sky and Telescope magazine, Emily Lakdawalla. Perhaps you've heard. The Planetary Society's first light-sail solar-sail spacecraft is in low-Earth orbit. It got there on Wednesday, May 20th, but its story began decades ago.

Solar sailing was the dream of the Society's three founders, Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Lou Friedman. In fact, Lou Friedman wrote the definitive book on the subject and led the organization's Cosmos and light sail efforts for many years. That long trail leading to last week's launch is a great story, but it's not the one we'll tell this week. We'll start the day before launch at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, commanded by General Nina Armanio.

The General gave us extraordinary access so that we could bring you this coverage, which includes blogs and video at sail.planetary.org. On the day before launch, Bill Nye faced a roomful of reporters. He made sure they understood that this light sail flight is very much a test, a pathfinder for the next mission, now expected to fly late in 2016 on the first Falcon Heavy rocket from SpaceX. In fact, this first spacecraft would never get the chance to sail on the light of the sun. There's still too much atmosphere in low Earth orbit for that.

So why fly it at all? Bill answered that question with a favorite story. There's a folk hero in Seattle named Tex Johnston who was the test pilot on the first 707, the Dash 80. Yeah, I saw him doing that. He did a barrel roll with an airliner and Boeing managers expressed some concern. You know, this is the company's hope and you're rolling it around like you're still in World War II. Tex, you know, what are you doing? He said, I'm selling airplanes. And then he said, one test is worth a thousand expert opinions.

So there is no thermal vacuum chamber big enough to test all four sails at once. We're going to put this thing in space tomorrow and see what happens. Joe Fust is a spacecraft integrator for United Launch Alliance, or ULA. That's the Lockheed Martin and Boeing partnership that has boosted virtually all of the U.S. military's payloads into orbit for years. They were about to do so again, but this time, a special arrangement with NASA would also enable the launch of LightSail and nine other small CubeSats. They and the Air Force's X-37B robotic shuttle were already on top of an Atlas V rocket out on the pad. I'm an old guy. I first started watching Atlases take off when they had a Mercury capsule on top.

It's an amazing history that these vehicles have. The Atlas V, 100% success rate. The RD-180 pushing it. A superior engine, superior. I love this vehicle. We're going to evolve again, and I support that wholeheartedly. The end result is glory when it launches, right? You could just about guarantee me a good time, it sounds like.

That's right. That's right. First time. You say Atlas, first time. Go. All the hard will be ready. We really can't control the weather, but we've got a pretty good track record on that. So if you were a gambler man, bet on this one. I'll do that. Thank you, Joe. I'm reassured and it's been great talking to you. Okay. Thank you. Early on the morning of Wednesday, May 20th, we were welcomed into the Morrell Operations Center at Cape Canaveral, where two separate yet equally impressive control rooms

were preparing for launch. One was staffed by a ULA crew, the other by uniformed Air Force personnel. And in a third room, loaded with impressive technology, meteorologists were carefully monitoring the sky. Clay Finn is the Atlas Program Launch Weather Officer. What are we looking at up here? That's the three-dimensional, actually four-dimensional lightning detection system, where we can detect in-cloud discharges as well as cloud-to-ground discharges. You said four-dimensional. We're looking at time? Time, yes, sir.

Time is the fourth dimension, yes, sir. So X, Y, Z axis and time are overlaid on there. But you're a meteorologist, right? Yes, sir. What would your prediction be for two hours from now? Do you think we're going to be go? I think we'll be go two hours from now, three hours from now. I don't think so.

So we're that close. We're, you know, 11 to 12 o'clock is where we'll going to be go? I think we'll be go two hours from now, three hours from now. I don't think so. So we're that close. 11 to 12 o'clock is where we'll start to get marginal. All right, well, we'll take that. It's warm and fresh and it's delicious. It's delicious. It's so good for you. Man, it's really good. Have a taste.

Thank you. Good luck, popcorn. Yes. It was soon time to head for the launch viewing site, right next to the Kennedy Space Center's Apollo Saturn V facility. The heat and humidity were terrible, but the hundreds of men, women, and children on the unshaded grandstands weren't going to let that stop them.

Jason Davis is the Planetary Society's embedded light sail reporter. I found him standing next to his camera, ready for the mighty engines of the Atlas to lift it off the pad about two miles away. Jason, we're at about T-minus 20 minutes. Give us an idea of what's going on now. Yes, so T-minus 20, the United Launch Lines webcast is going to start. They're going to do final tanking on the Centaur upper stage, bring everything up to flight pressures. They'll do a final go-no-go poll at about 10 minutes, and if everything's go, they'll go into the final terminal count.

The terminal count's the last thing that happens before the rocket lifts off. This is a bigger crowd than I expected. Yeah, a lot of people here at the Kennedy Space Center, Visitor Centers, Apollo Saturn V Center. A lot of people filling some bleachers here. It's very hot and humid, and there's a guy kind of giving the crowd an overview of what to expect. It's a pretty big turnout. How are you feeling? I'm pretty excited, yeah. Everything is going so well. I'm just waiting for something to not go well, but it's been pleasantly surprising so far. The probability of violating launch constraints is 10 percent. The ground winds are five to eight knots out of the west-southwest,

and the temperature is 81 degrees Fahrenheit. So we are proceeding towards liftoff with a Plan T-0 at 11.05 a.m. Eastern Time. The Planetary Society, I'm very proud to say, is launching our light sail spacecraft. It's a test flight. We're very hopeful it will get up. We'll deploy its sail. We'll verify that it works. And then next year, we'll really get farther, a bigger orbit, and demonstrate solar sailing, which we believe, and we're sure, will greatly lower the cost of space exploration for all of us, which will enable humankind to make further discoveries and learn more about the cosmos and our place within it. So good to see you all.

Together we can understand our place in space, and we can, dare I say it, change the world. Thank you all very much. Here you go, Jim. That was Bill Nye on the PA system at the viewing site. Watching him in the heat and waiting anxiously for T minus zero was Barbara Plant, founder and president of Boreal Space. She was a big part of preparing LightSail for this day, and she wasn't going to miss the launch. We have to get to low Earth orbit, so the ride's terribly important. And I still get butterflies because if we don't go today or tomorrow,

we get reset to a different time. I just want to see her go today. Go LightSail! Thanks, Carl Sagan. When we return, you'll hear the final moments before the launch of LightSail and the joy that followed. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here. I'd like to introduce you to Merck Boyan. Hello. He's been making all those fabulous videos which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right. We're going to put all the videos in one place, Merc, is that right? Planetary TV.

So I can watch them on my television? No. So wait a minute, Planetary TV is not on TV? That's the best thing about it, they're all going to be online, you can watch them anytime you want. Where do I watch Planetary TV then, Merc? Well you can watch it all at planetary.org slash TV. Random Space Fact!

Nothing new about that for you Planetary Radio fans, right? 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 Planetary Society. 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 with special coverage of last week's launch of LightSail from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. There were now just seconds left before ignition of the Atlas V's first stage engines.

My heart was pounding along with hundreds of others as we listened to the countdown and roll call. Here's a compressed version of what happened next, with Bill Nye leading the reaction. Go. UAS safety officer. Go. Vehicle system engineer. Go. Anomaly chief.

Excuse me, go. Range coordinator. Clear to proceed. Launch Director. The launch vehicle is ready to launch. Mission Director. So there's the venting, yes. Wow! Yes!

Yes! Wow, yes, yes, yes! Yes! Go LightSail! Yes! Go LightSail! Oh man, now we feel the sound. Perfect, clear blue sky. Bright orange flame. Going to space! Go LightSail! It's going to be in space. Three, two, one. Go, Nightsail! Three, two, one, go LightSail! The rocket and its payload were soon out of sight. If all went well, LightSail and the other CubeSats would be released in minutes,

but it would be two hours, before a team at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in central California would hear the first signal from the little spacecraft's radio, if they heard it at all. I climbed back into the grandstand where Barbara Plant had been joined by Alex Diaz of Ecliptic Enterprises, the prime light sail contractor. But Alex had started on the project years before while still a student at Cal Poly. So tell me, what's happening now at Cal Poly? What are they up to? They just gather around a radio? What's happening now at Cal Poly? What are they up to? They just gather around a radio?

Yeah, those guys are pretty good. And so they're used to always helping identify the spacecraft and picking up beacons. And usually what happens at first is they'll record all the passes and then they'll fine-tune the decoding post-pass. And what are they going to hear or receive if everything goes perfectly? They'll hear beacons from the spacecraft. It'll include general health data for the spacecraft, battery levels, that kind of thing. Just little bursts of data? Yeah, every 15 seconds you'll hear a little burst of data.

So that'll be our bird up there. So is there actually a sound? I mean, can it be translated into a sort of zeros and ones sound? It's not like you would expect with Morse code or anything like that, but it is a short burst of kind of sounds like high static. Sure, like... Yeah, you'll hear this little burst of static come through the speakers, and that's the data flowing.

So, Barbara, we all know this is a test mission. We all know that there are certain challenges ahead. What are the kinds of things that you're most worried about now? Since, you know, we know that there is that problem that was discovered late with the software, which we've talked about on the show. Sure. So I think what we're looking for first is, of course, to receive beacons. That's a very critical item because that means we've deployed the antenna and we're hearing beacons. So then when we have our call to stations and we see some of the telemetry coming in, we'll take a look at the initial indications, look at power, look at temperatures on board, and just generally the health and status of the spacecraft.

And as more information comes in over several passes, then we'll start to put a picture together, along with the folks at Cal Poly, and also there's a team over at Georgia Tech that I want to give a shout-out to. They're the other ground station. And there are some graduate students and undergrads there who are helping Dave Spencer, the project manager over there, to look at the data with us, all hands on deck today. Have you been in touch with your bosses back at Ecliptic? Not yet, not yet. I haven't talked to anyone yet.

Still kind of getting over the, you know, this program's been going for a while, and it doesn't quite feel like it's been close to finishing until I finally got to see this thing go up. And I kind of felt really relieved. It's kind of bringing some closure. And obviously the mission now, the ground operations are going to be beginning, so that will be exciting. But this is kind of a big step in getting everything done. A sweaty group of Planetary Society staffers clambered back into a big van.

Before long, we had gathered around a conference telephone in Bill Nye's hotel room. We listened as Dave Spencer of Georgia Tech polled the key light sail managers and engineers. Then came the first indication that light sail had indeed made it into orbit. This is Mission Ground Systems reports that indications are that an R signal is being received with the beacon cages that consist of light sail telemetry beacons. That would indicate that the antenna deployed successfully and the radio is transmitting

appropriately. It was a little bit earlier than predicted because the overflight path predictions assume a 10-degree elevation mask. There may be some trajectory uncertainty as well. So it's a few seconds early, but that's a great indication. So we'll stand by and see if some of the data gets decoded. We have packets. We have decoded packets. Yeah!

That's great. That's a big deal. Mission Control, it's Bill Nye in Florida. Go ahead, Bill Nye. We repeat 5-by-5. I would just like to say the following thing. Woo-hoo! So I'm here with the whole crew from the Planetary Society, you guys. We just very, very much appreciate your effort.

We've been listening. We've been watching the data come down on the website. And this is really extraordinary, you guys. You've just watching the data come down on the website. And this is really extraordinary, you guys. You've just done an outstanding job. And we very, very much appreciate it. Just great job, everybody. And I know there's many, many more challenges over the coming weeks, many more milestones or kilometer markers to pass. But I just want to thank you all on behalf of everybody at the Planetary Society. Well done. Thanks very much. Okay, copy that.

Thank you, Bill. All systems are reporting nominal. We have a couple of readings that are not as expected. The solar panel deployment reading is indicating fully deployed solar panels. That's not an unexpected reading. We've seen that in vibration as well, pre-launch environmental testing.

Also, we have a couple of temperature readings for the daughterboard A and B. They're about three degrees below the low limit, three degrees centigrade. So overall, the health and status of the spacecraft appears to be very good. To echo what Bill said, this is really fantastic. I mean, we're 3 for 3 today. You know, a good, clean launch, a deployment from the Peapod right on schedule, and we're

actually getting decoded telemetry at the first pass, and that is, I think, better than any of us really could realistically have hoped for. So it's just fantastic. You guys have done a great job. I think I speak for everyone. We're just delighted and very pleased. Thanks, you guys. Carry on. We'll let you get back to work. It's a great day.

Bill, we are breaking format because we wanted to wait until the last possible moment as this week's show was still being put together to provide a status report on light sales, since that's what we've been talking about. Things are not quite as, what, joyful at the moment as they were last week. Can you tell us what's going on?

We're breaking format. We haven't heard from the spacecraft for a few days. And this apparently is not uncommon with CubeSats, and it could be the result of a single event upset, which is a cosmic ray, which they do mess with these small spacecraft. We don't carry all the shielding that you might in other spacecraft. It could be just a subtle problem in the software, and what we're going to do is either reboot it from the ground or it will reboot itself.

And the team is analyzing that right now. So everybody stay tuned, watch the Planetary Society LightSail website, and we will give you updates as soon as we have them. But these, the people that have been working on this the last couple of years are so good. They're so competent that I'm confident that they will figure it out in the next couple of days. But, man, you know, Matt, people say, people wonder if I'm crazy. I wonder all the time. But this uncertainty with LightSail after 18 years of trying to get the thing in space is not helping.

All right? So stay tuned, everybody. Watch the website, and we will update you as soon as we have news. And I think we will have good news soon. Thanks, Matt. And we sure had a great time last week at that launch. Oh, man, that was cool. That was fantastic. For all these years, it went up just perfectly. It went up just perfectly. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. And if you're looking for that LightSail website, it's a microsite devoted to LightSail.

It's sail.planetary.org. He wasn't on the trip with us out to watch the light sail launch. He was back home, keeping an eye on the skies for us. And he's going to give us that report now, since it's time for What's Up. Here is Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. Hi there. Hello. I hope you had fun at the launch. It really was such a wonderful experience and it could not have been better. Also, just spending time with all the members and guests of the Planetary Society and the Air Force and the ULA people. It was just a wonderful trip.

So thanks for asking. So you liked it? Yeah, kind of. Okay. Well, as we've established that. You know what else you'll like, Matt? What, what? You'll like planets in the evening sky.

Oh, I do. And they're really, really easy right now. You go out in the early evening, you look west, you see super bright Venus down. Well, it's even up pretty high and even higher is Jupiter. And I'm excited. And I know I keep mentioning this, but it's cool. They're going to be coming together over the next month and partying really close at the end of June. And then Saturn has just passed opposition, the opposite side of the earth from the sun. So it is rising around sunset over in the east and setting around sunrise in the west. So you've got three pretty easy-to-see planets in the early evening

and lots of goodness to look forward to. Well, thank you for that. We had a good time looking up at a lot of this stuff in Florida when we had clear skies, which was not often. I'm impressed you arranged such clear skies for the launch. Yeah, we did our best. Well played, sir. Well played.

On to this week in space history. It was 2008 this week that Phoenix successfully landed in the polar regions of Mars. Wow. Seven years ago. Hard to believe. Including our mini DVD with hundreds, thousands of names and the visions of Mars content with art and greetings and

literature about Mars. A time capsule for the future. The DVD that got dirt, Martian dirt dumped all over it. It did. It's really cool. They made it dirty. Never mind. So anyway, on to... I don't know.

Something from Mario Brothers, I suppose. Okay. Light sail. Surprisingly enough. We'll give you a little more light sail. Light sail has the mass... At five kilograms, light sail's mass is about the same as two average mass adult chihuahuas. Or about one Pekingese.

That's great. All right, I'll be sure to tell my daughter with the chihuahua. Okay, you do that. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. We ask you, what galaxy was named after a larval stage of an amphibian? How'd we do? We had a quite large, a huge response for this. Gosh, I don't know if it was the T-shirt we're giving away or the 200-point itelescope.net account.

Is it the Tadpole Galaxy? That is indeed what I was looking for. Wonderful. Our winner, therefore, is James Kerr. James Kerr of Greenfield Park, a town not far from Montreal, up there in Quebec, Canada. That's where our volunteer, worldwide volunteer coordinator, Kate Howells, is

based. She was with us on the trip last week. Anyway, he said, Tadpole Galaxy, which in a few years, billion years, I expect, will be promoted to the Toad or Frog Galaxy. That's a joke that we heard from a lot of people but james thank you very much for that he also uh says that he backed our light sale kickstarter campaign and that means he's going to be a member of the society so he's looking

forward to that he adds ribbit very cool all the way. I got a few other good stuff, good ones here. We heard from a whole bunch of people that the Tadpole Galaxy is a disrupted, barred, spiral galaxy, a little more than 400 million light years away from a home sweet home. I really like this from Mark Thomas of Welland, Ontario. He said, I heard the Tadpole Galaxy is the setting for a new sci-fi film. Brace yourself, Bruce. Star said, I heard the Tadpole Galaxy is the setting for a new sci-fi film. Brace yourself, Bruce. Star Wars, a new hop. Rawr!

And finally from Mark Little, think about it, folks. We're going to need a bigger jam jar. Oh. Okay, that closes it out. I think we'll do another itelescope.net account and a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

itelescope.net is where you can learn about that worldwide network, nonprofit network of telescopes. And you can get time on them, take some pictures. What have you got for us? As you might be aware, a ULA Atlas V launched light cell. No kidding. Really, turns out. How many launches did the Atlas V have in 2014? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Get us your entry. I had a little bit of a tougher one, but you guys are up to it. I'm sure you are.

You're going to need to get it to us by Tuesday, June 2nd at 8 a.m. Pacific time. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about whether you can dust for fingerprints using printer toner. Thank you, and good night. You got a nice note from all of those printer companies for coming up with a new use for those cartridges. So congratulations on that. He's Bruce Betts.

He is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week here for What's Up. Again, the latest news about LightSail is at sail.planetary.org. Here's a special message for our UK listeners, or at least those of you in and near London. I'll be there on vacation in mid-June and would love to meet some of you. I hope to share information about a very informal gathering on next week's show. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the hopeful members of the Society. Danielle Gunn is our associate producer.

The theme music comes from Josh Doyle. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.