Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Meaning of LIFE

Episode Date: August 24, 2009

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Greetings, podcast listeners. This is Matt. I haven't greeted you this way in a while, but I did want to take one more opportunity to, first of all, thank those of you who've donated to help save the show. It has meant a tremendous amount to us and has helped to assure the future, at least for the time being, of Planetary Radio. of Planetary Radio. And so once again, we are incredibly grateful. We do have another favor to ask, especially of you folks who are listening to this, perhaps via iTunes or your favorite podcast aggregator. Pretty much all of them allow you to submit your rating of the podcast that you listen to,

and even to write a review. Some folks out there have written glowing reviews of Planetary Radio that we see on iTunes, and we are very grateful for that because that means other people are going to find the radio show, give us a shot. If you have a moment, we do have this favor to ask, please give us a rating, award us some stars, whatever you think is appropriate, and if you have an extra couple of minutes, write one of those reviews. They make it very easy at iTunes and pretty much all the other places

that you may find our radio show each week. Thanks a lot for listening. Here's the show. The Meaning of Life, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. Sorry to disappoint, but the life we're talking about is the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment. And the guy managing this experiment is our own Bruce Betts of the Planetary Society. Bruce will tell us how an international team plans to send living organisms to Mars' moon Phobos and return them to Earth.

Good thing they're not going farther into our solar system. Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, will talk about a scarce resource that might make future trips to Saturn and beyond impossible. And speaking of beyond, Emily Lakdawalla will answer your question about why our mission to Pluto will sail on by that distant orb instead of going into orbit. Then we'll welcome Bruce back for another edition of What's Up. A busy show, but after all, it's a busy universe. One way to keep track of it is through Emily's blog at planetary.org. That's where she has some of the most exciting images snapped by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. You'll also find some of Emily's favorite tweets. That's tweets as in

Twitter messages. Oh, and by the time you hear this, Space Shuttle Discovery may have set out for the International Space Station. The goodies it will deliver include a treadmill named after Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Rapport. Remember, he's only kidding. But Bill Nye is serious about plutonium. I'll be right back with Bruce. Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, vice president of the Planetary Society. In the news for me this week is the cutting of funding for NASA's plutonium program. Now, plutonium is nominally fantastically dangerous stuff, but it's quite useful when used in spacecraft. About 15 years ago, I had lunch with Glenn Seaborg.

Unlike many of us, Glenn Seaborg had a Nobel Prize for inventing or creating the very first plutonium. He took uranium, which has 92 protons, and the rest, neutrons, and converted it to plutonium, which has 94 protons. And you get this material that has the subatomic particles smashing into each other, and it gets fantastically hot. And you surround it with thermocouples. These are fused pieces of metal that produce electricity when they get hot. And you can power a spacecraft,

a spacecraft so far from the sun that there's barely enough photons to turn on its solar cells. So we use these radioisotope thermoelectric generators, RTGs, in all kinds of spacecraft. By cutting the funding for the creation of plutonium, which I admit is fantastically dangerous stuff, we limit our ability to explore the nearby solar system. And when I say nearby, I understand we're talking about billions of kilometers away. So actually, by reducing the funding for this program, we're lowering the quality of life for people all over the Earth because we won't be able to explore our solar system and other worlds and stars. Not only that, my friends, there are asteroids

out there. One of them has got to have our name on it. And if we're going to explore that part of space and look for those asteroids, which could turn us into the same kind of extinct life forms as the ancient dinosaurs, we need to have this technology, this plutonium and radioactive isotope production, in order to have a quality of life for everybody in the world. It's a strange thing. So next time you go to vote or write a letter or support the Planetary Society, in order to have a quality of life for everybody in the world. It's a strange thing. So next time you go to vote or write a letter or support the Planetary Society, keep that plutonium in mind.

I've got to fly. Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. The Planetary Society's life experiment is still on track for a piggyback ride to one of the moons of Mars. Challenges remain and a delay is possible. But as we get this week's show out to you, the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment is set to launch on the Russian Phobos Grunt mission in October. You know Bruce Betts as our solar system tour guide, provider of space trivia contest questions, and singer of random space facts. But his work as the Society's Director of Projects includes the shepherding of this unique project. Dr. Betts, formerly of the Planetary Science Institute and NASA, got his Ph.D. from Caltech. He was still at that school when he got involved with a much earlier mission to Phobos,

as you'll hear in a few minutes. We met recently, as we so often do, at Society Headquarters. So, what is the meaning of life? The meaning of life is, of course, living interplanetary flight experiment. I thought you were going to say 42, but I like that better.

Tell us about this experiment. 42 is not a prime. Clearly, it's not the answer. Hey, this experiment is trying to fly microorganisms to Mars, Moon, Phobos, and back. The real purpose is testing whether life can survive in deep interplanetary space, because no one has ever flown life, not just the experiment, but the critters, to interplanetary space for any extended period of time and brought it back and seen if it could survive. They've done it in low Earth orbit. It's done for very few days on Apollo 16 and 17. Not in deep space where you have a different environment that's not protected by the Earth's

magnetic field. You get more high-energy charged particles and other nastiness. And basically the whole thing is a simulation of a meteoroid traveling through space with organisms inside it to test a part of the transpermia theory, whether you can transport life between the planets. For example, ejecting them off, say, Mars in an impact, if life were there, and having the rocks travel and end up on Earth. Since we know that there are Mars meteorites, or meteorites that rocks that originated on Mars, the thinking is that, well, who knows?

If there was life on Mars at one point, maybe there still is, it could have just hidden out in one of these guys and made it here to Third Rock. Exactly. And theoretical studies, and besides actually having Mars meteorites, theoretical studies show that you can get a few of these over the long history of the solar system actually being delivered on very short time frames, like the duration of this mission, three years, although most would take longer. How did this come about? What's the origin of LIFE, life? The origin of life. You're going to have fun with this all through this interview, aren't you?

I'll just call you Charlie. Charles. Darwin. Oh, that guy. Didn't he have a dog, a beagle or something? Yeah, yeah. I think he was very fond of it this actually grew out of a smaller experiment that the planetary society was involved with when our uh science principal investigator david warm flash came to us many years ago and had an opportunity to fly just bacteria films you know kind of stuff you kind of want to scrape off the wall of the shower.

You do. Not really. But bacterial films, and they flew on what was unfortunately Columbia's last flight. So it was a space shuttle experiment, low Earth orbit, very brief time frame. It recovered the experiment, but it was not able to do any analysis. But that was kind of a start into it. Then Lou Friedman, executive director of Planetary Society, kind of saw that wouldn't it be great if we could do this in deep space? And it turns out,

in talking to David Wormflash and others like George Fox at University of Houston, that's the real unique contribution here is that people have done a lot of experiments on life. They've found it to be very hardy in low Earth orbit, but they haven't tested it beyond that. So we're going to take the science another step farther. And it turns out the Phobos Grunt mission, which we're flying on, Russian Phobos Grunt, Grunt meaning soil, their primary purpose is to go land on Mars' moon Phobos, collect samples, return them to Earth. Well, they are the only deep space sample return

that's going right now and have been for a few years that's actually, you know, being built and prepared. And so we checked and after long periods of negotiation and lots and lots of paperwork, got our experiment onto their mission because this is what we need is some type of deep space out and back to do this experiment. And there's a special sense of not just deep space, but deep deja vu for you in this, isn't there? There is indeed deep, deep deja vu. Yes, I actually did my PhD work working on data from the last time the Russians tried to go to Phobos with the Phobos 88 mission, which were two spacecraft that, not surprisingly, launched in 1988. And I worked on that, working with one instrument, the camera, to plan all sorts of observations. Then one of

their spacecraft failed, and then I planned a different set of observations, and then the second spacecraft failed before they'd gotten them. So I ended up switching instruments, switching science topic, but still using some very unique data that they did capture in their two months in orbit around Mars. You were still at Caltech at the time. I was. I was a Caltech graduate student. So all of this periodically, all of this seems very odd to me. Yeah, really. A real return to a Phobos, a Russian Phobos mission.

Little did you know, 21 years later. I mean, you've been involved with it for a while now. Gosh, that seems long. Describe more of your role with the mission. I am the experiment manager for Phobos Life. So basically I'm making sure it actually gets done and organizing the science team, which is very broad, very diverse. We have members from several countries around the world and making sure they're connected with our engineering group, which is led by Stellar Exploration, the company and our lead designer,

Bud Fraze, all are talking to each other and that we're meeting deadlines and doing testing and that all this is going to work. And then there's a really fun part of my job, which is the tons and tons of bureaucratic paperwork to fly on a Russian mission, ranging from our State Department to the Russian Space Agency. Yeah, and that really has been, I was going to say a hassle. I guess I'll just leave it as it's really been an eye-opener because it's not easy to get something on a Russian spacecraft, is it? No, no, it's not. Turns out. Now, we do have, especially our colleagues at the Space Research Institute there have been very eeky, have been very helpful, but it is a, it's not easy.

The Planetary Society's Director of Projects, Bruce Betts. He'll be back to tell us more about life in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe,

and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio,

or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society society exploring new worlds welcome back to planetary radio i'm matt caplan my whatsapp partner bruce betts has become my guest as he tells us about the planetary society's living interplanetary flight experiment that's life a tiny super tough canister of living organisms that may begin a round-trip to Mars' moon Phobos

as soon as this coming October. Bruce is the Planetary Society's Director of Projects and manages the LIFE Project. Describe this little cylinder. I've seen mock-ups of it sitting in your office for ages now. But tell the audience about it. We'll post a link where they can learn more about the life experiment at planetary.org or planetary.org slash radio, and they can see it

for themselves. Well, at the life experiment, we had some very rigid constraints that the Russians imposed, not surprisingly. And one was that we had to be under 100 grams. And two was that we had to survive very kind of worst case high G impacts when they return it to earth. So we had to test this thing to over 4,000 Gs and be able to survive. And this also drove the design between having a very small mass and a very high G load and wanting to have lots and lots of seals. So we're absolutely sure nothing's going to come scooting out of there. So we're absolutely sure nothing's going to come scooting out of there. So we end up designing what looks kind of like a half hockey puck made out of titanium.

And inside that is other basically plastic, Delrin plastic. And there are 30 little tiny tubes that each contain organisms. And then a central container that contains a soil sample. container that contains a soil sample. And we have multiple different sealing mechanisms to ensure that this thing stays tightly sealed up. You know, I didn't know about the soil sample, so Phobos grunt is bringing its own grunt to Phobos. It is bringing its own grunt. In fact, it's even from our Russian collaborator, Elena Vorobyova, so it's even more grunt. Where did the critters come from? Well, we thought of asking you for critters. Because I could scrape the shower wall.

That's what I figured. But instead, we went to professionals. And so most of the critters came from a group called ATCC, American Type Culture Collection, in Manassas, Virginia. And they've been a tremendous ally, partner, science team member with us. And they're basically the repository in the United States for critters, as you call them. Microorganisms, if people do experiments on different strains, they either order them from there, or when they're done with experiments on different strains, they either order them from there or when they're done with experiments, they store them there. So they're experts in storage

of these things for long term. They have lots of them. So about three quarters of our organisms came actually from ATCC, who also were the ones who loaded them in the tubes and packed them up. We also have some really radiation resistant bacteria that came from a group in Germany. Some animals, our only animals, tardigrades, so-called water bears, coming from Ingmar Johnson in Sweden, and the soil sample that came from the Russians, but actually from Israel. And we have all sorts of fun and friendly, well, okay, not friendly.

I should mention. We're going to get to this. It's not Andromeda's grain. No, no. None of these organisms are pathologic. None of them are dangerous. None of them are harmful to humans, animals, anything else. But it's a great little micro zoo. It is a micro zoo. We've got

examples. It's like what you would see if you went to a micro zoo for the really extremely hardy animals. So we've got examples. It's like what you would see if you went to a micro zoo for the really extremely hardy animals. So we've got samples from all three domains of life. The eukarya, which we hang out in. That's us. Animals, plants, et cetera. And then bacteria and archaea.

Mostly they share some common characteristics. They're really hardy in some manner. Many are radiation resistant. Some are heat resistant. hardy in some manner. Many are radiation resistant, some are heat resistant, some live in salt crystals. They also, many of them are very well studied, and so we have some of the best studied organisms that biologists really love, and so therefore we can study their changes when they come back, whether dead or alive, much more effectively. Pretty much all of them have their genome sequenced, and we have a diversity to give us a comparison.

And many of these have flown in low-Earth orbit in experiments, including from some of our collaborators like Petra Rettberg's group in Germany are flying these on the ISS right now, some of them. So we'll have a lot of intercomparison possibilities. How is this little capsule going to be recovered once it gets back to our neighborhood? And then what happens? When the life biomodule comes back inside the Phobos-Grunt sample return capsule, it comes into the atmosphere and lands in Kazakhstan and gets recovered with the sample return capsule.

Eventually, after proper procedures, migrates its way back to ATCC in Virginia, gets opened. All of these organisms will be carefully tested, characterized of, you know, what lived, what didn't, what damage is there, what isn't there, and if they lived, how many of them lived, things like that. So I suppose, I mean, in addition to sort of testing this transpermia hypothesis, it could be something useful here as we prepare to send someday more complex organisms out there toward the red planet, like us. Yes, well, clearly it gives us more insight on what the environment is like on missions to deep space. And our main focus for our science is actually on studying transpermia, but there will be implications from it.

The Russians also, from IMBP organization there, has a different but somewhat similar experiment flying on this spacecraft as well. And they are including more things that they find relevant to human biology and such. Why is the Planetary Society pursuing this? Planetary Society is pursuing this because we believe in it. We also think it's a niche that isn't being filled. That's where we like to get involved, whether it's been solar sailing, testing rovers before they ever flew in space. This is an area that we think has a lot of potentially profound implications, one that we have opportunities to do well with, you know, to create teams that can do this inexpensively but effectively

and pursue some interesting science that also has great public interest. And that's the other thing. It's talking about life in space, going out and back. You get a lot of public interest, and that's what, in the end, we're about is inspiring public interest in space exploration. Thanks, Bruce. You're welcome. Thank you, Matt.

He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society and heavily involved with the LIFE experiment. And you can read more about that at planetary.org. And we'll have some links at planetary.org slash radio.

Are you a regular listener to our radio program? I've heard it before. Yeah, stay tuned because the next segment... I actually enjoy it very much. Oh, thank you. Oh, that segment at the end? Yeah. Oh, God, I love that one. Stick around. I'll introduce you to Bruce Bet. Stay tuned because the next segment. I actually enjoy it very much. Oh, thank you. Oh, that segment at the end?

Yeah. Oh, God, I love that one. Stick around. I'll introduce you to Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Great. I look forward to that. I look forward to that. Thank you.

Right after Emily's Q&A. Think I can get an autograph? Don't push it. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, After going to all the trouble of sending New Horizons to Pluto, why just pass by and not go into orbit? Nearly a decade will have elapsed between New Horizons' launch

and its close approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015. The flyby will happen so quickly that only part of the currently sunlit hemisphere of Pluto will be mapped at high resolution. This seems like a lost opportunity, but there's no other way. New Horizons, like all spacecraft, began its journey with the same orbit around the Sun as its home planet, Earth. The rocket that launched it changed the speed and direction of its orbit to send it out to the distant reaches of the solar system. In order to achieve Pluto orbit, the speed and direction would have to be changed again to match Pluto's. But New Horizons' trajectory has it passing Pluto nearly perpendicular to its orbit at a relative speed of almost 14 kilometers per second.

For comparison, the launch rocket accelerated New Horizons from zero to 16 km per second relative to Earth in the first place. Other spacecraft have achieved orbit at nearer planets because they started out with trajectories that more closely matched their goals, and the bigger planets have much more mass than Pluto does, so the planet's gravity was used to break spacecraft into orbit. The New Horizons team has another excellent reason for not going into orbit. Flying past Pluto means that New Horizons will travel onward to encounter two or hopefully more other smaller members of the Kuiper Belt,

helping to place Pluto in context and advance our understanding of the dimmest reaches of the solar system. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. I'm joined by, ooh, déjà heard, Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. When did you get here? I just came in. I saw some really handsome guy leaving the studio.

Evil twin. Doppelgangers unite. That was such a great guest you had. I know we'll have to have him back someday real soon. I hung on every word. Tell us about the night sky. Up in the night sky, we've got, in the pre-dawn, Venus, the brightest star-like

object. Can't miss it over there in the east. You've got Mars up above it, looking dim and reddish. And in the evening sky, Jupiter looking stunning, bright... Stunning? Stunning. It's stunning. No, it's like a combination between stunning and sunny, which is what you get

from a distant planet. It's all reflected combination between stunning and sunny, which is what you get from a distant planet. It's all reflected sunlight. Really? Yes, yes it is. Jupiter, look over in the east, and you'll see it in a high overhead in the middle of the night. Check it out. It's fabulous. Let's go on to this week in space history.

It was a Voyager 2 week 1981 it flew by saturn eight years later same week flew by neptune wow only fly by now and forever no now in a long time from now of uh of neptune someday someday we'll get back out to those guys. It'll be good. In the meantime, we're going to entertain ourselves with Random Space Fact! Next, Bruce will be performing excerpts of South Pacific that'll be after this pledge break.

Sadly, the first thing that came to mind was I'm going to wash that man right out of my hair. I don't know what that means. I was thinking of some enchanted evening, which is what we ought to call this segment. Wow. Can we do that? Is that a trademark? I don't know.

Anywho, random space fact. Sun synchronous orbits. That's what we're talking about. A lot of spacecraft in Earth orbit, Mars orbit, definitely, use a clever orbit called a sun-synchronous orbit. And that is near polar. It's actually somewhat retrograde, going slightly in the opposite direction from the planet's rotation. And if you do this at just the right altitude, you end up passing over a given location on the surface

or any location at the same latitude, you pass over at the same time. So, for example, you can have a 2 p.m., 2 a.m. orbit so that you pass over the same place 2 p.m. every day, 2 a.m. every day. You may ask, why would you ever want to do this? I'll bite. Why? Well, one reason is, say, for imaging because that way you always get the same shadowing no matter where you're looking. And so, therefore, you can compare things from one time to another or you can compare one location

to another more easily and it's helpful for for other instrumentation as well where you want to look at things always with the same type of lighting or same time of day for whatever reason makes a huge difference i just saw a thing about lunar surface images and the tremendous difference it makes looking at it different times a day, you know, compared to sun overhead and sun shadowing the craters. They look a lot more threatening. I think we should only land next time when the sun is directly overhead. Brilliant.

They look very peaceful and welcoming. Yes, you lose a lot of perspective, at least with the human eyes, if you drop out the shadow. I sure do. But the disadvantage of sun-synchronous is that it's the same as the advantage. Sometimes you can do other imaging tricks if you can look at different times of day and different amounts of shadowing. But typically, several of the recent orbiters in Mars orbit have been sun-synchronous,

as are the others. And then the scientists all fight for what time of day they fly over in their orbit, because some of them like different times of day. It eventually gets settled, usually by mud wrestling. Sometimes they even change it during the course of the mission. Not the mud wrestling, the time. They are synchronous. All right. Well, let us go on to the trivia contest. I don't have a clue what we asked them. Oh, let me remind you.

You asked about telescopes, not just any big telescopes. That was brilliant of me. Last time around, we asked you about big telescopes, not just big telescopes, but telescopes that are actually one big mirror. Optical telescopes on the surface of the Earth, one big mirror, larger, name all of them larger than eight meters in diameter. So this throws out the segmented mirrors. How did we do, Matt?

I think you scared a lot of people off this time. This was a tough one. I'm sorry. People had to work a little bit harder, so not quite as many entries. It was a good week to enter if you thought you had the answer because the odds were better. And the guy who beat the odds, according to random.org, was Alexander Moeller. He didn't actually provide the pronunciation. What would that be in German?

Miller? I'll go learn German and check back with you. Okay, would you? Anyway, Alex is from Germany and he has the complete list. You ready? Here it is. I'll do it real fast. Gemini, north and south, 8.1-meter mirrors each. And to Kuyen, Melipal, Yeppin, four of them, of the very large telescope in Chile, each with an 8.2-meter mirror. Subaru, atop Mauna Kea, 8.3-meter. And you ready for this? What's the biggest? The large binocular telescope atop Mount Graham with a pair of 8.4 meter mirrors on one mount. So Alex, we're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt and, if you wish, an Oceanside Photo and Telescope Rewards card.

How about next time? For next time, we're going to play Planetary Radio Jeopardy. The answer is 1370. That's better than 42. 1370 is the answer? Yep, 1370. Go to planetary.org slash radio to give us the question. There's certainly one I have in mind, a very important number in solar system science. And I thought the telescope one was hard.

So 1,370 is the answer. Give us the question by Monday, August 31st at 2 p.m. Pacific time. Hey, people got to tune in next week because we're getting some very funny responses of what people should tweet to the alien. So be sure and listen. Okay. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about watts per square meter. Thank you, and good night.

I don't know. Watts per square meter. How? He's on first. He's on first. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up and sometimes other things. Third base.

Next week, Saturn. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Keep looking up.