Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Many Missions of JPL's Kevin Baines

Episode Date: May 22, 2006

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Transcription by CastingWords Frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. Venus Express, Cassini at Saturn, the New Horizons Jupiter flyby, maybe even a balloon in Venus' thick atmosphere. No wonder Kevin Baines talks fast. The Jet Propulsion Lab principal scientist will talk to us about his involvement with all these missions, though we'll stick mostly to that

second rock from the sun, the one that is often called Earth's twin, though maybe that should be evil twin, evil but fascinating. Later on, we'll get Bruce Betts on the horn for another What's Up examination of the night sky, along with a new space trivia contest. And you're just a couple of minutes from a visit with Emily Lakdawalla for more questions than answers about mysterious ridges on Jupiter's moon Europa. Emily also has our top news story this week.

Her blog at planetary.org reports on the newly announced discovery of three more extrasolar planets. The interesting part is that all three are circling one star that goes by the rather romantic name HD69830. The even more interesting part is that these guys could be just 10 or 20 times the size of Earth. And the best part of all is that one of them, the farthest from HD 6, that star, is in the so-called habitable zone, the one where things are not too cold, not too hot, but just the right temperature for liquid water. Oh, and the system might even have an asteroid belt. And it's just 41 light-years away, as the crow flies.

Sharp new radar images of Titan's surface have been released. You can see and read about them in Emily's blog as well. By the time you hear this, she may have even more to report from another flyby of Saturn's big moon. Get ready for STS-121. Space Shuttle Discovery has finally made it out to the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center. Lots of tests and practice runs are planned before the scheduled launch window opens on July 1st. That window runs through July 19. This will be the first shuttle mission since the last flight by Discovery in July and

August of 2005. As promised, Emily is strolling along those ridges on Jupiter's ice moon Europa. Here's her Q&A contribution, after which we'll be joined by JPL's Kevin Baines. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, When the Galileo spacecraft studied Jupiter and its moons, the features that intrigued me most were the double-ridged grooves that crisscross Europa's surface. What are they and how did they form? The question of how Europa's ridges formed has bedeviled planetary geologists since they were first spotted.

Galileo mapped Europa's ridges in incredible detail, but that detail didn't immediately produce any explanation that fit all the data. Europan ridges are linear features that are hundreds or even thousands of kilometers long. They most commonly appear as doublets, that is, two same-width linear topographic highs that are separated by a sharp trough. Where ridges form on Europa, they tend to cross older sets of ridges or grooves. But if you look very closely at the sloping edges of the ridges, you can see that the grooved pattern in Europa's plains continues right up the slopes of the ridges.

That tells you that the ridges formed by deforming the existing surface, not by some volcanic process that poured out new ice to build ridges. Still, that doesn't explain why they formed. Stay tuned to Planetary Radio for some possible explanations. Kevin Baines is a busy guy. He arrived at the Jet Propulsion Lab in 1984 and spent years working on the Galileo mission to Jupiter. Today, this planetary scientist has a hand in a bunch of research projects and interplanetary missions, including his contribution of an instrument for the European Space Agency's Venus Express probe, which has now settled into its polar orbit over Earth's cloud-shrouded neighbor.

Venus was our main topic when I chatted with him a few days ago, but we saved a bit of time for Jupiter and Saturn. Kevin Baines, I really struggled with how to introduce you and give a title because, frankly, you've got more titles than anybody I can think of because you're involved with more missions than anyone I can think of. Yeah, it's a really busy time. A lot of times in the space business you wait around for things to happen, and just the fortuitous alignment of the stars or whatever, we're doing many missions at once right now.

And you're involved in a lot of them. Yes. All the ones that aren't going to Mars it sometimes sounds like. Right. I always say the space program is split into two halves in the planetary area. There's Mars and there's everything else, and I tend to get myself involved in the everything else. And so it was missions to Venus, missions to Saturn, missions to Pluto that are going on right now that I'm involved with. And there's big news, of course, at Venus, Venus Express.

Now in orbit, we did some coverage of orbital insertion. And you, though it is a European mission, there apparently is heavy American involvement, and you're leading a lot of that. Maybe I should take some pride or, you know, take some time to explain the genesis of Venus Express. Sure. This all came out of the realization back in the late 80s that there's another way to look at Venus, that you don't need radar to see the surface. You could actually do it with near-infrared.

And, in fact, if you use near-infrared wavelengths, which is just about three to four times the wavelength of light that you don't need radar to see the surface. You could actually do it with near-infrared. And, in fact, if you use near-infrared wavelengths, which is just about three to four times the wavelength of light that you can see, it is barely beyond what you can see. If you just use those wavelengths of light, you can actually see the surface. You can see clouds. You can see temperatures. You can do all sorts of things throughout this atmosphere. So this planet, which has been shrouded in clouds in a mysterious place for centuries,

we can finally reveal and unveil using this technique. And so we got a hold of that and used it. We went by Venus with Galileo on the way to Jupiter. You know, we launched and we had to go to Venus. Right. Use Venus as a power source, basically, to get us out to Jupiter. Sure. And so we had a few hours in the vicinity of Venus and we said, let's go look with this camera. Having been alerted by some ground-based astronomers who, by serendipity, actually found

there was some interesting features. You know, Venus is there, it was kind of bland and we always thought it was bland. But it turns out in the infrared, it was recognized by some ground-based astronomers that, wow, it's got lots of neat, intriguing features. So we, fortuitously, only about a year after this was discovered, realized we're going by Venus ourselves, so let's go train our cameras, our infrared cameras on that. And we used near-infrared wavelengths then to take advantage of it, and we saw the surface, we saw the clouds, but only for 45 minutes to an hour in total in terms of the total length of time it took to take the data. So we realized at that point we need to go back because now we have a way to do a three-dimensional study of Venus. We can do Venus from the ground up in so many different ways.

And so we tried. There's many efforts to propose missions to Venus through the Discovery Program. I was germane to a lot of those efforts. Through NASA, I know. Through NASA. And on my team, we did it four or five times, and actually we were almost selected in one year. We got very close to being selected for the full enchilada. But on my team, I had several Europeans.

And in 2000, they called me up and said, Kevin, instead of banging our head against the wall with Discovery all the time, there's an opportunity here in Europe where they decided to build a second Mars Express bus. Now, Mars Express is going to go to Mars, but they decided, why don't we build two of these? The second one only costs about a third of the first if we build them together. So they built the second bus and didn't know what to do with it. But the director, David Southwood, said, let's have a competition like they do in America all the time for Discovery. Let's do a competition and see what they could use this bus for. And so my co-investigators on my team for the American mission who were in Europe, they called me up and said, hey, can we lead the mission and we'll do it?

I said, fine. Just put me on your team. So we won the first time. It was great. I mean, we did a great job putting together the proposal. I tend to believe largely because we've been through the ringer so many times with our proposals in America that it was pretty easy. We were pretty sophisticated how to write this proposal. And it worked.

And so we got this mission. And, boy, within three years, I think it is, from when we were told we could go, within three years we were launched. And talk about better, faster, cheaper. We did it really quick. And now it got there We did it really quick. And now, you know, it got there and did a great job. And again, one unique thing about this mission, there's like 17 countries involved in putting this thing together, including a Russian launch vehicle. It's amazing to go over to Europe and see how they can put missions together and go

across, you know, seamless borders. I mean, it's really, this space program, I think, has really gotten the Europeans, taught the Europeans how to work together. It's a pleasure to go over there and watch, actually, the European Space Agency work and all the people and how they do things. It's really quite amazing. Different culture, and it's really kind of nice. So now Venus Express is, you're sort of at the stage that Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is at Mars.

Yeah, right. So it takes, we have a commissioning phase to get into the proper orbit and also to test out things. But the very first image we brought down, I think you know, there was a press release on that. I'm pretty sure you saw it. It was an amazing image. It showed everything was working beautifully, at least on this one instrument that can do so much, that can do the three-dimensional structure. It came out beautifully, but we're also testing out a lot of the other instruments right now.

I think around June 2nd or 3rd is when we get out of commissioning phase, we get into the observatory phase, and that's where we take daily images. I mean, this is in a 24-hour orbit. It's like clockwork. We're going to be there day after day after day for maybe up to six years now. You know, it's 118 roughly Earth days for one Venus day. That is sunrise. The sun rises over Venus.

By the way, it rises in the west, not in the east. Everything is backwards on Venus. But every 118 Earth days. So there's like three Venus days per Earth year. So we can get about 18 Venus days. And that's very important for understanding a lot of the strange dynamics of Venus, to be able to get multiple Venus days and really see what's happening to create the very bizarre environment that Venus has.

What are we already getting back from Venus Express? You talked about this one image that's got lots of... Well, so far, I've only seen a couple images. And they did do, in this first long orbit, you know, when you get to a planet, you basically put the brakes on with as little energy as you can spare. So you barely get into orbit the first time. So the first orbit's just barely

there, and it goes out much further away from the planet than you normally do. But it was great, because we got images then that the sort of global view of Venus, in one frame of this camera, this infrared camera, we could see the whole planet. That's not going to happen in the frame of this camera, this infrared camera, we could see the whole planet. That's not going to happen in the matter of course of things.

We're going to have to put together these little mosaics, you know, a three-by-three mosaic as a standard thing. It's not too tough to do, but it's just it was nice getting this one global view in our first image. And then we took for the next five days, we took about an image a day. When I say image, I really mean image cube. I don't know if your listeners know about an image cube. Talk about that because you're talking about spectra in black, right? Right. So instead of us taking a black and white picture, everybody knows about color pictures. So you can imagine a black and white picture. You can enhance it and learn more if it made a color picture out of it. It gives you more information. Well, we take a color picture

basically in over 400 colors with this camera. So there's a lot of things you can diagnose with 400 colors. And really you could imagine it, picture it this way, that you have a piece of paper and you're looking at the piece of paper and that's an image. But now imagine you have a stack of paper, a book, and you flip to the next page, a different color, flip to the next page, another color, and you can kind of flip through the book and see different colors. And then you can take a pen or something or a pencil and spear right through.

Let's say you could extract out, you could take a little straw or something and extract out that one pixel all the way through and look at it. You'd see spectral features. You can say, oh, look at that. This wavelength is darker. This other wavelength is brighter. Well, that's the characteristic signature of a certain molecule, for example. And so you could start doing chemical composition. You could see where the trace, what we call trace species are more enhanced than elsewhere.

see where the trace, what we call trace species are more enhanced than elsewhere. And on Venus, there's such a complex, what I call pressure cooker chemistry, that you get all sorts of strange exotic materials showing up in different places depending on the local conditions. So this instrument in one fell swoop can see clouds, can see chemicals, can see temperatures, and it can do it at different levels too, the way that we use the data. We can actually tell, for example, water. We can tell what the water abundance is at different levels on one image. And that's very, you know, water is a strange beast on Venus.

Venus is almost bone dry, but not quite. It has about 30 parts per million versus about 30,000 parts per million or even up to 300,000 parts per million at times on Earth. So it's really, you know, it's almost dry. It's a desert. I believe that's one reason we're not so excited. You excited that people have not spent so much funds to go to Venus because we know it is a very hostile place and doesn't have that much water. But nevertheless, the little water it does have is pretty intriguing to see what happens as a function of latitude and longitude and time

of day and all sorts of things. So this instrument will, this one instrument will do all these things. It's an amazing instrument. This instrument, by the way, is called VERTIS, standing for Visual Infrared Thermal Imaging Spectrometer. There's a like version on the comet mission they have out of there, which Rosetta, the Rosetta mission. And that's one thing. The other reason why this was done better, faster, cheaper over there was the head of the space program, the planetary part, Dave Southwood, said, look, I want to do a cheap mission. So we're going to do this extra bus. And now anybody who proposes to use it, you've got to have the instruments already built. And he knew that from the comet mission and from the Mars mission and several other missions,

there were people lying around all over Europe with spare instruments on their shelves. And he knew that they could just take those instruments and throw them on this thing, and that's what happened. We grabbed instruments from all different types of missions, and boy, did they work right. They were just right for Venus, and we kind of slapped them onto the spacecraft, and we got a mission very cheap. Actually, the cost of it is, I'd say, about two-thirds the cost of a typical discovery mission, but it does about one-and-a-half to two times what a typical discovery mission.

But really, it was a unique set of circumstances. Everybody agrees it was a unique set of circumstances, building two buses at once and then having these spare instruments around to use. And unfortunately, it's not the situation in America where we have a lot of spare instruments still hanging around, just ready to be used. So it was a special situation. When we return, JPL's Kevin Baines will tell us about the balloon he'd like to send to Venus.

Also, what a Pluto probe may tell us about Jupiter. Stay with us. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets.

We sponsor the search for life on other worlds. And we're building the first-ever solar sail. We didn't just build it. We attempted to put that first solar sail in orbit. And we're going to try again. You can read about all our exciting projects and get the latest space exploration news in-depth at the Society's exciting and informative website, planetary.org.

You can also preview our full-color magazine, The Planetary Society Exploring New Worlds Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Planetary scientist Kevin Baines has been telling us about his contributions to Europe's Venus Express spacecraft, but his interest in that hot, cloudy world includes the possibility of a Venusian balloon. This is going to turn into a Venus-exclusive interview, which was not my intent, but we'll save a little bit of time for Saturn and

Pluto. But I've got to ask you one other question. And that's another Venus mission that you're working on. Right. A balloon. Yes. I think it's time to be able to have the first American aircraft to another planet. After all, the Russians did it in 1985. And I like to say, you know, the Russians had their Vega mission, and we didn't cover it that well in America. But they had two balloons floating around in the atmosphere of Venus for a couple days in 1985. Now, what's even more astounding was, I like to characterize it, this mission that they used, it was the Halley mission. It was actually going to the Comet Halley, and they used Venus to help them get them there.

So as they passed by Venus, they threw, basically, I like to characterize it, they threw these balloons overboard, and it worked, but they did the balloons as an afterthought on the way to a comet. So what's so difficult about that? And it worked remarkably well. Now, the instrumentation they had on there, they did it, you know, it was almost a fly by night, you know, bailing wire and all that kind of thing, the way they put it together. And in fact, on our team, I loved talking to one of our scientists.

I have a co-investigator on our team named Victor Gazanovich, who was on that mission in Moscow. Oh, no kidding. On the old Soviet system. He came over to America 15 years ago, five years or so after that mission, and now has been dying at the bit ever since to be involved in another balloon mission. So I put him on my team. That must be a valuable knowledge base.

Oh, yeah. He's so enthusiastic about getting back to Venus with his balloons. And he's intimately involved at JPL with balloon development. And so we have a new type of balloon that we're going to be using. In fact, we've test-ballooned about two months ago at JPL. We actually got the funds to actually build the test balloon through another manufacturer, ILC Dover in Maryland. I think they're in Maryland, maybe Delaware. I have engineers at JPL that monitor all this. And this balloon came in. These guys built this balloon in under a month. This balloon's ready to go go it can survive sulfuric acid and do everything so that was my next web what do you

make a balloon out of so that it doesn't get to disappear in minutes with sulfuric acid it turns out that a common material that you use in your kitchen all time is excellent for keeping sulfuric acid away from you and that's called teflon teflon does a great job so all you do is put teflon you just have a little bit of teflon and everything and you can keep that sulfuric acid away and so this balloon uh we've got teflon a little very thin teflon layer is great job. So all you do is put Teflon. You just have a little bit of Teflon on everything, and you can keep that sulfuric acid away. So this balloon, we've got Teflon. A little very thin Teflon layer is one part of the skin. Then you have Mylar because you want to keep temperature control. Mylar is a very lightweight thing that you can use.

But it does reflect back light, so you can keep a good thermal. And then we have another material that has a lot of strength. So this balloon is very robust, by the way. This thing can take a licking and keep on ticking. So we're very convinced now. After this one test we did at JPL where we had it fly for just 10 days and we saw what it could do, we're pretty convinced this thing could last for months in Venus' atmosphere. When might it go to Venus?

Real quick. Well, 2012 is what we're proposing. We just put a proposal in. We're competing with probably 20 other proposals. But, you know, this is tough. We're in this competitive environment where, you environment where it's competed missions to different targets, and people have put in missions to the moon and, I don't know, not Mars because that's in the other preview, but moon and comets and asteroids.

And so there's a lot of missions out there. The question is who has got low risk because everybody has great science. Am I low risk? I mean, I'm hoping we think we are, but we need reviewers to really read the proposal and understand what we're saying. But if they just did a cursory review, then you say, oh, I must have a flyby. So this is what we're facing, but we believe we have a low-risk method to do it. You're going to hate me. You've got one minute each for Saturn and Pluto.

Oh, okay, great. Saturn. Saturn. One thing we've done with this near-infrared techniques that do so well for Venus is we now have a way of looking at the depths of Saturn, and we've now revealed the storms at the three-bar level. Normally from the outside – Three bars of pressure.

So you're actually looking through the top layer of clouds. Normally you're restricted to the top half bar to one bar. When you look at a typical image of Saturn, you're restricted because the clouds and the hazes just reflect back too much light. But by going along our wavelengths, we can pierce through that just like radar can in a sense, and we're getting down to the clouds down below. Now, the energy source we're using is the internal heat of Saturn coming out, and so we see clouds silhouetted against this background glow, and if you go to five, in this case

it's five micron radiation, out there you see the heat of Saturn, and you watch these clouds get silhouetted against it. And these are big, these are clouds that have large particles, because they have to stop the light at five microns, which is a pretty long wavelength, and they definitely have the shapes of storm systems. So we're seeing the meteorologically interesting part of the atmosphere. We're not stuck up in the stratosphere where things are just kind of mundane. We're looking at actual active meteorology, and we're starting to collect movies of that.

Pluto. You're involved with that mission. Well, I'm involved with the Pluto mission. We got launched in January. New Horizons. New Horizons, a fantastic mission, another better, faster, cheaper in my book, and it really is an incredible mission. It's doing Pluto now. There is an atmosphere of Pluto.

The team brought me on after they got selected because they recognized on the way to Pluto they're going by Jupiter. And, boy, we're going by Jupiter in just over a year. I mean, we start observing before the year, the one-year anniversary comes up. So here we took seven years to get there, I think, with Galileo, and several years to go by with Cassini. So here this one mission gets through in a year. And so we're really ramping up really quickly to try to take advantage of this pass. And it's going to be a fantastic set of data because they have such great instruments on this mission that we're going to be able to study weather systems and things on Jupiter

much better than we were even on some of the other missions. So it's going to be great. You've got to come back, talk more about Saturn, talk more about what's going to happen at Jupiter very soon, actually. Next January. We've got to have you back when that happens. Great. Love to come back. Last comment, you have the highest data rate of anyone we've had on the show.

Oh, that's, yeah. That's how I get involved in all these missions, because I talk to people and people say, okay, you can go on this other mission and keep working. So, yeah, it's been a lot of fun. You're a busy man. Yeah, yeah. Kevin Baines of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is involved in all of these missions and more,

and we will have him back on the show. Probably next opportunity will be that Jupiter flyby as New Horizons heads out for the edge of the solar system. Thanks, Kevin. Thank you. We are going to return in just a moment with Emily because she's got more of the Q&A segment for this week. And then, of course, it's Bruce Betts for this week's installment of What's Up. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. How did Europa's double ridges form?

One explanation is that they formed by a process called linear diapirism. This is how the mid-ocean ridges form on Earth. Convection cells in the crust bring warmer material toward the surface. The upwelling of warm, less dense material raises the topography on either side of a linear ridge. But there were a lot of problems with this model. A different model called shear heating has recently become more popular. Europa is subjected to massive stresses from the gravitational tugging of Jupiter, Io, and Ganymede.

These stresses can be enough to crack the crust of Europa. Once a crack has formed, the stresses cause the icy crust on the two sides of the crack to rub back and forth with each Europan day. The rubbing generates heat from friction. The ice is warmest nearest the crack. Warm materials expand, which raises the topography in the crust on either side of the crack. But this model still doesn't explain all of the images. How Europa's Ridge is formed will be one of the scientific questions motivating a future mission.

Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is here, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Every week he comes around to tell us what's going on up there. So, what's going on up there? There's cool stuff up there. Let's start with our bright planets. We've got Jupiter looking really bright in the evening sky.

That's that thing you look at and go, hey, what the heck's that star? Oh, I bet it's a planet. And it's over there in the east, so it's rising a little before sunset. And then in the west, you've got Mars, kind of dim, but hanging out now near Castor and Pollux, the bright stars of Gemini. And actually over the next few weeks, moving closer and closer and eventually slamming into Saturn, which is to its upper left right now. Well, okay, it won't actually slam into it, but it does get closer and closer as seen in the night sky.

I was just waiting for you to fix that. You know, when worlds collide, great book. And then in the pre-dawn sky, for those of you out there, you can see Venus looking way totally bright over there in the east before dawn. And if you look in the west, then Jupiter's just about set, or set just before dawn in the west, looking also like a bright star, but not quite as bright as Venus. Hey, we've got a cool This Week in Space history this week.

I mean, not as cool as, like, you know, launches of dogs and chimps and stuff. But it is the 45th anniversary of the John F. Kennedy speech declaring that the U.S. would land an astronaut on the moon by the end of the decade. Great speech. Neil Tyson at the ISTC talked about that speech and sort of put it more in context than we normally get it. But still, what a wonderful goal he set. And it must have made a lot of people like Wernher von Braun very nervous.

You mean whether they could achieve its success? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's kind of a pretty good goal. So that was 1961. Landed them by mid-69. Gave themselves a few months to spare.

Anyway, let us move on to the Ramblin' Space Pack! Dum-da-dum! Hey, the Andromeda Galaxy is the largest galaxy

in our local group. We've got a local group of galaxies. They all come together, hang out, share stories. Andromeda Galaxy beats out

our Milky Way by a little bit, about 125,000 light years across, as opposed to the Milky Way, about 100,000 across. I have to mention, when we talk about the Andromeda Galaxy, I've mentioned it before, but it is the farthest away object you can see with your naked eye at about 2 million light years away. It needs to be a fairly dark night, right? Yeah, I'd say it's pretty impossible from bright areas. But dark areas, you can do that, and it looks like a fuzzy blob, but a fuzzy blob that's really, really far away. Hence the coolness.

Yeah. Let's go on to the trivia question. We asked you about neutron stars. The funky thing about neutron stars is they're the end of life of a supermassive star that collapses, and the electrons all just scurry away, and the neutrons can coalesce very close together. And this beast always ends up right about a certain mass. And what mass is that measured in solar masses? How do we do? A lot of smart listeners out there.

I think some of them didn't have to look this up, just the way they put it. Our winner this week hails from Cincinnati, Ohio, Allison Zumwalde, or Zumwalde, I'm not sure which. Allison came up with the number that most people did, about 1.4 solar masses. She didn't say why. A lot of other listeners, a lot of other entrants did. One of them, Greg Winkler, pointed out, it's thanks to at least the reason they aren't bigger than that is something called the Chandrasekhar limit,

which says that if they get much bigger than that, they become black holes. Wow. They're still pretty darn weird, though. Yeah, very strange stuff. Very strange beast. Yeah, a handful of that stuff weighing about as much as the Earth. And the whole neutron star fitting 1.4 solar masses into just 10, 15 kilometers, the size of a city, basically. So, thank you, Allison.

We're going to send you out a Planetary Radio t-shirt real soon now, and I bet Bruce has another question for us. Oddly enough, I do. And the question is as follows. Who was the third space agency or country to have a spacecraft orbit the Moon?

So, of course, the Soviet Union and the U.S. doing orbiters in the 1960s. Who is the next group that successfully orbited the moon? With a robotic spacecraft, of course. You're going to want to get that entry to us by May 29 at 2 p.m. Pacific time, because that's where we live, 2 p.m. Pacific on May 29. We'll make sure that your entry makes it in to this next opportunity to win a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

And if you don't know how to get it to us, go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter the fabulous trivia contest. All right. Got anything else to announce? I don't know, do I? Nothing I can think of, actually. Nothing I'm talking to you about. Well, maybe after the fact.

Thanks so much for joining us on the phone. Hey, my pleasure. And everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about if you had a big block of marble, what would you chisel? Thank you. Good night. He's Bruce Betts. He's no chiseler.

He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Got something you'd like to hear on our show? Write to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. No promises, but we'll see what we can do. Have a great week, everyone. Thank you.