Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The MILO Institute: Opening the Solar System for Exploration by All

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

Planetary scientist and bestselling author Jim Bell is joined by space entrepreneur Lon Levin to tell us about the MILO Institute, a new collaboration by Arizona State University, Lockheed Martin and other organizations that hopes to make robotic exploration of our solar system much more accessible. Solar System Specialist Emily Lakdawalla takes us to the newly-discovered habitable zone world that’s a mere 100 light years from Earth. What’s Up becomes the new home for space jokes! Learn more and enter the contest at https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2020/0115-2020-jim-bell-lon-levin-milo.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A new way to explore the solar system, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Ed Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of a human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Cost and lack of experience have generally put planetary science missions out of reach for all but the wealthiest nations and space agencies. That's changing, and we'll learn today about a new effort that promises to accelerate this change, putting participation in missions within reach of universities and other institutions around the world. Two founders of the Milo Institute, planetary scientist Jim Bell and space entrepreneur Lon Levin, will be my guests. Earth has a newly discovered sister just 100 light years distant. We'll hear about this world from Emily Lackdawalla in moments, and we'll wrap this week's show with

your jokes about space and the new year as Bruce Betts guides us through What's Up. Did you know that I write a monthly Planetary Radio newsletter? I have a lot of fun with it, taking readers behind the scenes of the show, and it has become one of the Planetary Society's most popular mailings. The next edition comes out on Friday, January 24. You can sign up at planetary.org slash radio. Here's a sampling of space headlines from the latest edition of The Downlink, the Planetary Society's weekly digest presented by our editorial director, Jason Davis.

The first-ever core stage of NASA's giant Space Launch System rocket is ready for shipping by barge from Louisiana to Mississippi, where it will be installed in a giant test stand and fired before heading to Florida. If all goes well, the first test flight will send an uncrewed Orion spacecraft to lunar orbit in 2021. The European Space Agency's Rosalind Franklin Mars rover recently underwent electromagnetic interference testing ahead of its scheduled mid-2020 launch. Whether or not the rover will be able to leave Earth this summer depends on crucial parachute testing. If successful, the rover will join Mars missions from the U.S., China, and the United Arab Emirates. And here's one you have to see.

U.S., China, and the United Arab Emirates. And here's one you have to see. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station watched from above as the Quadrantids meteor shower, always a tough one to say, rained down on Earth. An image shows several meteors streaking through the atmosphere with the northern lights in the background. There's a link in the January 10 edition of the downlink that's easily found at planetary.org slash downlink. That edition also has a story about the discovery of an intriguing exoplanet.

As I said, I invited Planetary Society solar system specialist Emily Lakdawalla to tell us about it. Emily, the discoveries from TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, are rolling in. And the latest, of course, is the latest discovery of a planet that may not be too different from our own. Can we talk about TOI 700 d? Yeah, it's amazing how commonplace the discoveries of new planets have become. It's just one of the most wonderful things about the 21st century. And this is a planet, like many, that are in the habitable zone of its star, which I should define briefly. It's the space around a star in the planetary system around a star in which it's close enough to the star for water not to be solid all the time, but far enough from the star where water

won't be gas. So it's basically what people call the Goldilocks zone. It's an area around the star where water could theoretically exist. And an interesting thing I want to point out about habitable zones that I think not everybody realizes is that they don't stay static. They don't stay in the same positions with respect to a star over time because a star changes in brightness and heat output over time. And so these things actually move over billions of years as the star evolves. You surprised a bunch of us at the Planetary Society yesterday because, like them, I assumed, believed that, okay, Earth, we are the most Earth-like planet. believe that, okay, Earth, we are the most Earth-like planet. And therefore, we must be right in the middle of the habitable zone.

Apparently, not so much. Yes, this is one of the great many reasons why I do not like the phrase Earth-like planet to describe what we're really looking for in other solar systems. Because after all, Earth, we know as the place that is our home, that is covered with liquid water oceans, that has been the habitat for life for 3.8 billion years. But it's actually not in the very dead center of the habitable zone. It's actually quite a lot closer to the inner edge of our sun's habitable zone than the outer edge. Venus is not within the habitable zone, but Mars is. edge. Venus is not within the habitable zone, but Mars is. So the sun gets a little bit hotter,

or Earth gets a little bit warmer, and it'll not be all that habitable anymore. Now, I do want to calm people's fears. It's not so close to the edge of habitability that the global warming that we should rightly be worried about right now is enough to tip us over into is enough to tip us over into non-habitability. Earth has, in fact, warmed before, just not this fast. And so life will still exist here. It just may not be so fun for us. Well, that's reassuring. We'll leave that role in our own solar system to Venus, I suppose. Let's talk more about this world. It's become part of this, it's still a relatively small club, right, of roughly Earth sized planets in that Goldilocks zone? Yes, I haven't kept track of how many planets there are. Obviously, with missions like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, we'll be

finding more of them. We're talking about planets that are not a lot smaller than Earth and not a lot larger. They can't be a whole lot bigger or else they start beginning to look like Neptune and Uranus with big envelopes of gas. So this one's just a little bit bigger. The thing is that the star that it's orbiting is not a sun-like star. It's a much cooler red dwarf. So the habitable zone is located much closer to the star. And this planet that we're talking about is in a fairly quick orbit. It measures just about a month going around its star. And what that means, it's so close to the star that it's tidally locked. It keeps the same face pointed at its star all the time. At least it's probably tidally locked. Physics tells us that it would be tidally locked. The face that faces toward the sun all the time constantly gets sunlight. There's a dark side that would face away from the sun all the time that would probably be quite cold. There may just be a ring of habitability in the kind of twilight zone, a literal twilight

zone, all the way around this planet from pole to pole, where you would have both sun and shadow glancing in on the same regions, keeping the temperature the same all the time. It'd be quite a different place from Earth, to be sure. It's fascinating also to me, looking at the human side of this, that a lot of the work being done to learn more about this world is coming from pretty young people, graduate students, and even in one case, a high school student. It's very pleasing that they highlighted

the role of students in these particular discoveries. But the fact of the matter is that students, high school undergraduates, and particularly graduate students have been major contributors to research forever. It's just that they didn't used to get credit. So it's really nice to see people finally spreading the credit around. There is so much data. There are so many discoveries being made that scientists can afford to be a lot more generous than they were in the past. And we're seeing all of the people involved in working on these research projects getting named and getting a little bit of the credit for the work here. Young people are going to be making discoveries like this for many, many decades to come. Emily, thanks very much for making this world that is just 100 light years away so much more accessible. Thank you, Matt. That's Emily Lakdawalla.

She is our solar system specialist. Not just this solar system, but the solar systems that we're discovering all over the Milky Way galaxy. And she'll continue to join us from time to time here on the show. Jim Bell is no stranger to planetary radio. The famed planetary scientist and author was back at Planetary Society headquarters in early December for a meeting of the Society's Board of Directors. Joining him there was Lon Levin. I had learned not long before the meeting that Jim and Lon are principal players in the creation of the Milo Institute.

I asked them to join me in the Society's media studio for a conversation about this new organization that wants to make exploration of our solar system accessible to universities and even nations that could only dream of such involvement till now. Lon Levin is president and CEO of GeoShare, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin. He's also co-founder of the Milo Institute, our topic for the day, and one of the founders of the XM Satellite Radio Service, now known as Sirius XM, of course. So, Lon, I am grateful to you every time I get in my car. of course. So Lon, I am grateful to you every time I get in my car. I am glad that it's the best part of doing it is that people get to listen in the car to great radio. I tell you, I'm there all the time. Like your radio too. Thank you for doing this.

Jim Bell should be familiar to most of our audience as the best-selling author of Postcards from Mars and many other, several other books. Many? I can say many. Seven, eight. That's many. That's many. That's many. He's a professor at Arizona State University, the lead institution for the Milo Institute. He directs ASU's Space Technology and Science Initiative. He's also principal investigator for Mastcam-Z, the powerful camera system. Leaving for Mars soon. In 244 days. Yes, very soon. All right.

We're going to get back. We'll come back to that because I want to get a quick status update once we talk about Milo. You're also co-founder and chief scientist for the Milo Institute. Full disclosure, as I've already indicated, both of you are members of the Planetary Society Board of Directors. Lon serves as treasurer. Jim, you're our long-serving president. And I want to make it clear up front because there will be suspicious minds out there. I initiated this. When I learned about the Milo Institute, I said, ooh, we've got to talk about this on Planetary Radio. So thank you for doing this. Excellent. Thank you for having us. Thank you for initiating the conversation. So it says on the website, which by the way is miloinstitute.org,

easy, and we'll put that and other relevant links up on the show page at planetary.org slash radio. Here's the slogan, or your raison d'etre, I guess, transforming space science through shared cost and global collaboration. That's an impressive mission, I suppose, right? What's the sort of elevator speech, the pitch that describes the Milo Institute? No, let me try mine first, Lon, and you can go second. Go ahead. So the Milo Space Science Institute is a nonprofit that is associated with Arizona State University. agencies that together, using combined resources, knowledge, skills, together can do deep space missions to achieve exceptional science. That's really what MILA is all about. As we observed, if I tell you the origin story a bit, well, it did start at TPS because as you observe- The Planetary Society.

The Planetary Society. I've been on the board for a while, so has Jim. I came to really admire, I am not a scientist, I'm more of an entrepreneur in space, but I came to really admire two things about all the great scientists and the great minds that I was working with on the board. And that is that one, they think about grand ideas, they implement amazing ideas. The science that they know with their great they think about grand ideas. They implement amazing ideas. The science that they know with their great minds is just so impressive. That's one thing that they did so well. The second thing that they did so amazingly well is whine about how little money they had from NASA and every freaking board meeting.

We're not whining, Ron. It was amazing to me. And I said, there's got to be something better. Now, I'm thinking more on the business side of this. How do we fix this? The good news is, is that Jim and I, Jim still does, he invites me to go talk to the ASU students once a year and all that. And he says, I want you to meet Michael Crow. Now, Michael Crow, who was the head of Arizona State University, one of the most brilliant academics in the United States, if not the world, and what was to be a 20-minute meeting ended up being an hour and a half. Why do we have to keep on doing great space science? There's one way, which is the government gets the taxpayer money, and the big one is NASA.

ESA does it too, JAXA, whatever. They all follow the same model. Why does it have to be that way? Can't we essentially do it without the government help and work together collaboratively? Now, we're not talking about building a multi-zillion dollar Hubble, but the idea was, is there a compelling space science that can be done? What at some more affordable level?

And in our minds, it's $200 million or less that can be spread out among many, many people in the world. And that's the idea. So what we're chasing is there's more compelling space science that needs to get done that's getting done to all these space agencies throughout the world. There's proliferation of them throughout the world. There's maybe at this point 40 or 50 of them.

And the reason why is because every country now that has any kind of wherewithal is saying, this is going to help our economy. And so we're taking advantage of the compelling space science that needs to get done, all these countries that are interested in space, and three, everyone wants to educate their kids. Everyone sees that having a part of the economy

being space will help them. So the Milo Institute, we have three principles in what we're doing and what we're chasing. The three of us said, let's see if we can do something different. And that was the beginning of it, and here we are now, two years later, doing what we're doing. Three principles. It's got to be compelling science.

Jim Bell and his team, but it's Jim who says this is compelling science. Knows how to do compelling science. Yes, but it's got to be compelling science. There's a lot of people chasing great engineering in space. Engineering gets us the great science. That's one thing, compelling science. The second thing is it's got to be affordable. In our minds, $200 million or less. Actually, our first mission is a lot less. We'll talk about the lunar lander. And then the third part of this is it's got to be timely. We've got to do something that people will take note of

quickly. And what that comes down to is within five years, we can do a mission. We think that's how long it takes to get a PhD, whatever. And so it's got to be the neighborhood. It's got to be Mars, Venus, asteroids, the moon. That's where we're concentrating right now. We hope for greater things in the future, but that's what we're doing right now. It's a good start. So let me just amplify a couple of things.

So the reason for the whining, my friend, Lon, is that, and I think your listeners know this, so many missions for planetary exploration are proposed to NASA, to the Europeans, to the Japanese, Russians, Koreans, other space agencies, and many space agencies around the world. And at least for NASA, for example, something like nine out of 10 missions that are proposed are rejected. And yet so many of them, basically all of them. They're all spectacular missions. Absolutely. And so there's clearly plenty of space science, planetary science that we can be doing. As someone who's both won and lost those mission competitions, I know that the competition is fierce, and NASA really likes what we're trying to do because they know that there is so much more to do than they are able to do,

just like the Europeans are not able to do everything as well. So there's a real science need. There's plenty of compelling space science to do that's not getting done. And secondly, coming back to this dozens of space agencies around the world now, it's very difficult, especially for new players in the space game, countries or institutions that are trying to get in there, work their economy, realize, recognize what Lon said, space is part of a modern world's economy. And they get frustrated. We've spoken to a lot with them. We've met with a lot of them

in their countries and at international conferences. They get frustrated because they can propose to be involved in a NASA mission or an ESA mission or others, but they don't have any experience. They have lots of interest, enthusiasm. They may have an industrial and academic base that supports their involvement, but because they don't have the experience, NASA being conservative, the European Space Agency being conservative, says, no, we're going to pick the folks that we know. It's catch-22. Right. So we come along, and we'll talk more about this. You know what?

You don't have to compete. This is a member organization. What you have to do is join. You said, Lon, you mentioned the word education. And I know that that's a big component. What you have to do is join. You said, Lon, you mentioned the word education. And I know that that's a big component of what you hope to do. Education, training, workforce development. A couple of magic words. We'll come back to that.

$200 million. That's the ceiling. Yeah. It's not chicken feed. No. But it's maybe half of what NASA would spend on a relatively inexpensive third quarter. But I really don't want to compare NASA, which has its own economics. So what really is about the number itself.

Can we get enough universities, space agencies who would be willing to give money to the universities? But even then, if we can split it among 10, 12 nations, we're not talking about a lot of money. And there are models for this. I'm thinking of like the international consortia that build the big telescopes, like the new generation of telescopes that's about to see first light, or CERN and things like that. The European Space Agency itself is an example of these 24 member nations, members joining, pooling resources into a central repository that organizes billion-dollar class missions for them. The only difference to think about it, though, is it's the universities who are driving it.

It's the universities who want to educate their kids in various countries as well as in the United States as well, those universities. And all of them, rather than read about these missions, they're going to now participate in them. And also, we have varying ways that people can participate. You can just be a member for a certain lower amount. You can build a sensor. You can build one of the landers or whatever. I mean, you can go from all different levels, just get the data. We are trying to make it as accessible to as many people as possible. And let me be clear, there's the Milo Institute, and then you can participate in each mission as you wish. So we have multiple missions going on at the same time. Yeah, we have the $200 million one. That's the future. That's the Neo share. We'll talk about that. And then we have others that for actually $1.3 million, you can put a sensor on one of the lunar landers that's going to go up soon. I'll be right back with much more from Jim Bell and Lon Levin of the Milo Institute.

I know you're a fan of space because you're listening to Planetary Radio right now. But if you want to take that extra step to be not just a fan, but an advocate, I hope you'll join me, Casey Dreyer, the chief advocate here at the Planetary Society at our annual Day of Action this February 9th and 10th in Washington, D.C. That's when members from across the country come to D.C. and meet with members of Congress face to face and advocate for space. To learn more, go to planetary.org slash dayofaction. Isn't this enabled to some degree by the fact that access to space and spacecraft themselves have become so much less expensive?

Sure. Sure. And, you know, this revolution that's going on in smallsats, cubesats, Sure. And this revolution that's going on in small sats, cube sats, democratization of all of the things that used to be in the realm of giant aerospace companies, huge federal laboratories, all of those systems, power propulsion, computing instruments, all of that is getting smaller. It's getting smarter. It's getting cheaper. And we have very much a similar philosophy as, say, NASA in that we want these experiments to work, right? On one level, yes, we're trying to educate students and build workforce, and that's all wonderful. But the driving factor, as Lon said, is science. Doing science is not getting done. driving factor, as Lon said, is science. Doing science is not getting done. And we can do amazing science now with much smaller, cheaper, capable spacecraft and missions. And we can follow kind of a NASA-like philosophy of design and test and review and all that. And we can keep it at scale at the level that Lon's been talking about. Part of the reason we can do that is because of our amazing partnership with Lockheed.

We in the professional planetary science world are planetary society members. We know Lockheed because Lockheed builds these amazing landers to Mars or these orbiters around Mars and other planets and all kinds of deep space missions and Earth orbital satellites. They have an amazing track record of competence. You know, we're not talking about, hey, Lon and I want to go off and do a Kickstarter to do a mission. Let's do it. No, this is a different scale. We need the competence and the experience of Lockheed to build our membership base and convince our members, some of whom in their countries may be spending a large fraction of their resources devoted to space on this project.

We need to convince them, hey, you know what? This is going to work because you've got this incredibly experienced and competent aerospace company behind it. What's in this for Lockheed Martin? It's not the military. It's not NASA. It seems like a departure. Well, contrary to popular belief, and I now do work there, but I've had an entrepreneurial track record. XM is the one that I'm most known for, but I'm part of a startup called GeoShare, which is the seventh startup that I've been part of.

And Lockheed invited me in to do these kind of things. And so Lockheed, there's an awful lot of innovation that goes on there. That's why they keep on remaining the leader. Rick Ambrose, who is the head of it, is the head of space. He's encouraging as many of these ideas that make sense. And he certainly is a big fan of Milo, and he's pushing it. And the reason why is because Lockheed itself is always looking for new opportunities, as they should. Now, on this one, this is not the big, humongous moneymaker as some other programs may be, but it's Lockheed's responsibility, in a sense, as the preeminent corporation in space to make sure that worldwide there's as much space going on as possible.

And everyone benefits. And we hope there are more and more Milo Institutes that pop up throughout the world. It's only going to benefit everybody. Lockheed's a leader in a lot of places, including this one, and we're just proud to be associated with ASU. What other kinds of partners are you looking for? I mean, you just said countries, other institutions, other non-profits. Yeah, so I think our target audience has been universities, universities that have experience or want experience in space science, space engineering, education that's focused on space-related topics and issues. So we've talked to, I don't know, 150 different universities around the world.

And we're also making sure to talk to their national space agencies. And many of these countries have space agencies now. This is a proliferation of space agencies popping up around the world in the last five years. So we make sure to talk to their agencies, make them aware of the Institute, what we're doing, what our goals are. And we're talking to your university folks, or maybe we're talking to some corporate folks in their country. And they might be coming to talk to you, space agency, looking for some funding to get this going. So making sure everybody's aware of what we're doing and that potential funding lines are open as wide as we can. I'm going to give you some examples. I can give you the whole list of people we're talking

with, but right now, just as an example. So we're speaking with one country and this country has just started a space agency. And even though they have very big hopes, all of a sudden they run into this is going to be a lot of money. They have modified their interest. And then when they found out about the lunar lander and the $1.3, $1.4 million sensor, all of a sudden they're very, very interested. And they're also interested, as Jim just said, we go through the universities first. We're always keeping the agencies aware of what we're doing. The agencies go, wait, actually, this is why we're doing this. We're doing this because we want our industry to be aware of this and the universities to be aware of this. And we're open. Lockheed is not saying other industries can't be

involved throughout the world, obviously friendly ones. What we're saying is let everyone be part of this. So if a particular country wants to run their part of the Milo mission the way they want to, whoever's part of it, that's great. And also we try to make as much money that they give us that goes through the Milo Institute, goes back into that country. So we'll have a Milo representative there that they'll pay for, but it'll go back, it'll be in their country. We'll have their mission, they'll get the science first. They get the benefit of it, but they go through Milo to get it. And then we have as many entities throughout the world who are interested to be part of that collective for that particular mission. And we'll do other missions and we'll keep on

duplicating it. That's a really important point that it's not just, we're expecting people to show up, write us a check, and we throw that money over the wall and build a spacecraft, right? Like any member organization, the aggregate, the pool of members combined has much more power than any individual member. That combined pool is used, we have to buy a launch vehicle. We have to integrate spacecraft and components with that launch vehicle. We have to run mission operations. But Lon's right. That's a small fraction of that pool. And a lot of the rest of that is going to go back to these individual countries and institutions for their workforce development, for their scientists to process and analyze data and write papers, for their scientists to work with their engineers or their corporate base to build sensors or instruments or propulsion systems, whatever.

or their corporate base to build sensors or instruments or propulsion systems, whatever. And it's our job as the central management organization to figure out, okay, how do we put a spacecraft together? How do we put a mission together from all of these disparate interests, which are all space-related, all science-focused, all of them want to gain the experience so that they can continue on with their own programs, get involved in bigger missions with ESA or NASA or others. So how do we make that all happen? And that's kind of our management job as well. How's it being received? Are you seeing enthusiasm for this concept? I mean, this is

pretty new. You'd think it might make people a little anxious, but also they have to see the opportunity. The anxious side was a year ago. We went public at Bremen, at the IAC in Bremen. Going on a year and a half, October 2018. October 2018. And it really came down to are we competing, who are we competing with and all that, are we taking away money from people? And the answer was no.

So there was some noise, but it wasn't much because once people saw that, A, it was a nonprofit coming out of Arizona State, even though Lockheed was working as a collaborator with Arizona State University very up front, there was this like what's – just the questions like what you're asking about what's in it for them, why are you doing this and all that. But once they understood and once we had the comprehensive story, which we do, and we explained how they benefit, and we've refined that over the years since we started in Bremen or in public in Bremen, I can't tell you that there's been too many people who've been negative. You get the negatives about, can you really pull this off? That was a year ago. Now we're still around. And we are, by the way, about to pull it off when it

comes to our first lunar lander mission. And frankly, because we got the prices down, the $200 million was ambitious. We started scaling back and saying, let's just do a few less expensive missions. We'll talk about the Apophis mission as well. Those are lesser cost than the actual NeoShare mission, which is the mini-mini asteroid mission. But the point of the whole thing is, once they saw that it was affordable, once they saw they had a path, once we explained in detail because we thought it all through how they can participate, they see that it's real. I can tell you many, many anecdotes, but the activity is very strong.

Something like 150 or so universities we've talked with, more than 35 space agencies we've talked with or met with. Lots of individuals from those organizations. 14 letters of intent. Right. Very good. And moving towards MOUs. Some MOUs in place already.

So it's being well received. There is sort of a snowball effect with this kind of effort, right? They want to see other people get into it. That's right. And they're all talking about it. That's what's great. That's a great point, that others are talking about it in their own meetings. And we know that ESA is talking about it, and the ESA members are very active with us, the individual members.

We have a lot of activity in the U.K. in particular, and Italy. I'm not going on and on about all the different interests, but it's been very exciting. I saw on the website that intellectual property, you hope to follow what the website says is sort of the Hubble model. But what does that mean? Well, it means that the Milo Institute members have unique access to data or other telemetry, other information that they need for a year. And that's what happens with Hubble. Astronomers will write a proposal, you get it accepted. They have a year to work with that data, and then it becomes public. In our case, after a year, the data will become publicly available among all the MILO members. And then we would be talking

with space agencies and others about releasing it more publicly in general. But the idea is for a limited amount of time, the scientists, the engineers involved have unique opportunity to write juicy research papers, make discoveries about the objects we're going to and places we're going. And that's basically the way the Hubble Space Telescope works. places we're going. And that's basically the way the Hubble Space Telescope works. So the other side of this, the other part of IP, of course, is somebody's got to design the spacecraft and come up with the components and the instruments and so on and so forth. But those are protected as well among the MILO partners. Yes, it is. Yes, all of that will be protected. And we hope, because this is an educational

endeavor, there can be as much sharing as possible. However, if you don't want to share, that's up to you. As long as you're participating, you have the right to do what you want with your IP. But again, it is an academic exercise, and we want to make sure that the world is as educated as possible and at the same time respect that people invent things and they want to protect it and benefit from it. That's why each of these agencies throughout the world is going to be doing it. That's why the universities are participating. They're getting a unique benefit because they're putting their resources into the institute. There's lots of precedent for this. Universities deal with this kind of stuff all the time. Patents

coming out of researchers and IP issues and all that. So we're not blazing a new trail here. We're just following sort of traditional paths. All right, let's talk missions. I thought, looking at the website, that this one that you call NeoShare was going to be the first up. Sounds like, no, there is this wonderful rendering of a lunar lander. Is that going to be the first effort? Well, let's back up a little bit. So when we started this, before we publicly released it, we decided among ourselves that we needed to start coming up with some potential missions that we could use to gather members. And we had sort of three constraints, right? It had to be high quality science. We could check things off the Planetary Science Decadal Survey. Hey, we're going to do this.

We're going to do that. As Lon mentioned, it had to be relatively quick because it's a proof of concept. We're trying to test a new model. So let's do something relatively close to home, the moon, asteroids near the Earth, Mars, Venus. And then third, affordable, keeping it under that couple hundred million dollar cap, which was our early idea for what would be affordable. And that's, you know, in comparison to much larger missions that are done by the traditional space organizations around the world. Lockheed was heavily involved. We had the science council of Milo involved,

studied a lot of different options. One option that we studied was just a, am I allowed to say kick-ass on radio? It was a kick-ass. It's a podcast as well. Kick-ass Venus mission. And it was spectacular. We couldn't get it into the price point. We should try to do this mission someday. It's on the list. We're going to do it. Because it was a Venus mission, we were, you know, Venus to Milo. We were kind of codenaming it Milo. It was a secret project we were doing, codename Milo. This is the most important question I had for you in this entire conversation.

Where did Milo come from? And Lon's idea was to keep it all caps so it kind of looks like an acronym, but it's not. It confuses people. They get talking about it. They ask this question. Actually, we'll go back to what you were saying because it's important, more important. But I want to make a very important point about Milo. And that is, it is not an acronym

and no one's going to make it an acronym. We are different than every other organization in space. This is not an acronym. It's a great name. I'm done. Because we could go to our listeners and have a contest and make it into an acronym for you. We've tried.

This has happened. We have a big list of this. It's not going to get acronized. Is that what it's called? Acronymized. Acronymized. Acronymized. I like that.

Acronymized. Anyway, so we had this set of missions, and the one that rose to the top, and again, this is going back to 2018, is Neoshare, which is a single launch of a moderate medium class launch vehicle that's carrying six small satellites. They could be CubeSats, they could be small sats. Six satellites that are independent spacecraft that are all launched from a deployment ring off that one launch vehicle. Each of them sent on a trajectory to encounter, just as a flyby, at least one near-Earth asteroid. Some of the spacecraft, because they carry their own propulsion system,

some of them could be diverted on to a second. Because it turns out, and this was what our friends at Lockheed on the mission architecture side discovered for us, it turns out any day you want to launch, tomorrow, next week, three years from now, any day with a medium-sized launch vehicle and the Delta V capability on one of these typical smallsats, any day there's a hundred near-Earth asteroids you could fly past and about 20 comets you could fly past that aren't too far from the Earth. Says something about the threat that they present. There's 20,000 known objects out there, right? So any day. And we have only visited

five with spacecraft. In one mile of mission with six spacecraft, we think we can get eight to maybe as many as 10, but maybe at least eight flybys, almost double the number of spacecraft flybys in a single mission. Flyby do basic science characterization, geology, topography, some basic composition, mass, density, just what are these objects like, and sample the cosmic zoo of asteroids. Of those five missions, we've only sampled a couple of the different kinds of color and mineral classes and densities and sizes. So there's a real diversity of objects out there. So we said, hey, you know what?

This is going to make an impact. One mission, relatively affordable, a couple hundred million dollars, really adding to the diversity, which is a major goal of planetary science, right? Just to understand these primitive objects around us and how they went into forming the planets and where they're coming from and all that kind of stuff. And more data points is good. Right. That's the compelling science.

Right. And then what we discovered, you know, over the course of a year, people are interested in that, but the price point is, it's daunting. It's even a couple hundred million dollars. As long as the Institute has not proved itself as a model. That's right. So we came up with two smaller versions. I'll talk about one, and then you can talk about the other.

How about that? Can you talk about both of them? The smaller version. I'll have the color commentary. All right, all right. The first one is a subset of Neoshare. We asked ourselves, if we were to only send one or two satellites instead of six. Of course, we could bring the cost down dramatically.

We wouldn't need a dedicated launch vehicle. We could do a rideshare, for example. But is there a compelling single near-Earth asteroid? We wouldn't be sampling diversity anymore, right? Could you just go to one object? And my bar for science is really high. Sampling diversity of 10 objects, wow, that's spectacular. But just go fly by one near-Earth asteroid? Science Council, we thought about it. And the answer is yes. There is, in fact, one,

and perhaps only one, super interesting object that is worthy of a dedicated, low-cost flyby mission. And that's Apophis. And you know about Apophis. Which has been mentioned many times on this show. You know about Apophis. On April 13th, 2029, which is a Friday, by the way, on April 13th, 2029, the asteroid Apophis, which is four or five football fields in size, will fly very close past the Earth, within about five radii of the center of the Earth. Well within the lunar orbit. Well within the center of the Earth. Well within the lunar orbit.

Well within the orbit of the moon. It'll actually fly past fairly close to the moon as well. But well within the geostationary satellite ring where Lon's spectacular XM satellite ring is located. This is a really close pass. It won't hit the Earth, but it's going to come really close. It'll be a naked eye object over the Atlantic that night. Seven or eight years later, it's going to come really close. It'll be a naked eye object over the Atlantic that night. Seven or eight years later, it's going to come back by the Earth.

And this object, this particular one, always comes back close by the Earth. It's not known. Astronomers don't think it's going to hit the Earth anytime soon. But we don't know 10,000 years from now, a million years from now. Every time it passes by the Earth, it tweaks its orbit just a little bit. So what we want to do is take a subset of NEO-SHARE, a couple of these satellites, and just fly by Apophis well before the 29 flyby. Our expectation is that NASA, the Europeans, Japanese,

others are going to be mounting some significant mission efforts to study Apophis because this is not only a great science opportunity but a great planetary defense opportunity. And of course, Planetary Society members know all about planetary defense. It's one of our big staple columns upon which we rest. Just trying to save the world. Absolutely. Absolutely. So a big planetary defense implication, big science implication.

And we expect that the world's big space agencies will be doing a lot of stuff in 29. So we want to go. Apophis comes by the Earth every couple of years. There are opportunities in 23, 24, 25, 26. We just want to do a quick little reconnaissance, relatively low cost, imaging, spectroscopy, geology, composition, basic properties, mass density, if we can measure them, and feed that information forward into the big space agency's billion-dollar class missions so they are ready, so they are optimized. And that has gotten a lot of interest and a lot of attention because the price point there is closer to $50 million.

So that's one. And the second one is really just a fabulous opportunity because Lockheed is one of the commercial lunar payload service CLPS providers for NASA. So they're building a spectacular lunar lander, the McCandless Lunar Lander, that has a lot of heritage from their Mars lander experience, Phoenix and InSight. So they're leveraging that technology to go to the moon, They're leveraging that technology to go to the moon, and they're making available some payload space for Milo members at a great price, $1.3 billion per kilogram. Yeah, that is a deal. And so there's an opportunity now for Milo members, and it could be a single member. It could be a small consortium of members who want to occupy a certain amount of payload volume, power, mass, data volume, et cetera,

to go to the moon just in the next few years. And the good news on that one is that we actually have different space agencies and universities now competing. And I don't mean competing like they have to fight. It's more like they really want to go on. We want to be on the first one. So to be clear about that one, if there is interest and sufficient interest for another one, we'll keep on doing

other landers. It's not going to stop with just one. And by the way, same with the NeoShare idea. There's only one Apophis. But with the NeoShare, with the flybys, at least eight to 10, we'll do it again. There's no reason why if others want to do that, once we learn how to do it, obviously, it'd be cheaper. They can do that too. And when it comes to the Milo, these are our ideas. Our hope is a university, some seven Asian universities that work together, want to go and have a mission. They want to put it together and they need a Milo to help consolidate or find other partners throughout the world to do this.

That's our hope. They'll keep on using Milo as the way to go to space. And then they'll put the money in, the money will come back to their country, and we hope this Milo will take off. As well as if others want to do it too, that's fine. This is all about as much compelling space science inexpensively as possible. And every member who joins gets a seat on the science council. So as joint decisions are being made about destinations, about mission, architecture, science goals, all that kind of stuff. It's a heck of a model. Training, workforce development. I've been here for 20 years at the society, but even during that period and prior to it, I worked for a continuing ed unit

at a local California university. And ASU, Arizona State, was one of those we always looked at and said, oh, God, those guys are good. One of the things ASU is especially good at is continuing ed, which apparently the work that you'll be doing, the workforce development stuff, falls under that area? Absolutely. I mean, it's obviously we're a major research and educational institution. Our charge includes educating the world at whatever level we can, and there's an enormous online program that ASU runs as well. So an important part of this is helping, especially new entrants in the space game, maybe nontraditional ones, get involved, get the expertise that they need,

train students, train staff, train new principal investigators who could lead future instrument investigations or entire missions. We already have some components and we're building more with Milo of certificate programs and online training programs for satellite telecommunications, for principal investigator training, for how do you put a mission together? How does the mission cycle work? How do you put a science traceability matrix together that drives your mission towards specific instrumentation and mission architectures?

All this stuff is getting developed, and our goal is to share as much of that with the world as possible because if we can help lift up more of the world, I mean, that's got to be a great thing for planetary society members. It's got to be a great thing for planetary science. It's got to be a great thing for society and civilization as a whole. One of the reasons why NASA likes us, we're essentially creating a farm system. If I can use the baseball analogy, this is a farm system.

This is a way that younger talent, newer talent, universities that don't otherwise participate with NASA, can get their chops, can learn how to work on a compelling science mission, and then have that credential so that when NASA calls out for, well, we have this effort, and who are the universities that can do it, they say, we have experience. We have principal investigators who have already done this. We'd like to participate in that particular now grander, more expensive mission that maybe NASA's doing or

ESA's doing or whatever. That's part of why we're getting support from the more established space agencies. Because they know their farm system stinks. They keep on going back to the same universities, same people. Great universities, don't get me wrong. And they do great stuff. It's just that they can do so much more if there was a way to develop others in the world who are interested. Yeah. There's one

more element to this, which makes me think of yet another of our boss, the science guy's favorite sayings, which is that space brings out the best in us. The ability of space development, space exploration in general, but I think also what you guys hope to accomplish with Milo to inspire. Yes, right. I mean, obviously, you know, many of these members that we're dealing with, they don't have the experience, but they see the achievements of NASA and the achievements of ESA and individual nations that have space programs and the incredible efforts, the Israelis trying to land on the moon and other countries around the world that are trying to get into this game and how much recognition and helps inspire their kids, their teachers, their politicians.

Hey, you know what? We're going to play in this game too. It is part of the world's economic future. Space is every day getting more and more. But it's also part of the inspirational work that nations do to advance science, technology, education. And we're seeing a lot of interest by these new players to get in on that level. We feel we're at the right place at the right time. This is for their society. This is for their country. We are giving them a very practical, realistic path to do compelling space science. And rather than just have... And what we're finding, I don't mean this to be a negative,

they have great ambition. They start their agencies with great ambition. Some of them are really well-developed countries that have money. And then they see how much more expensive it is to actually do the compelling space science, not just the engineering. And I'm not knocking all the universities that can launch all these smallsats and all that. It's wonderful that we have, going back to your other question about how things are getting less expensive. So people can taste it. They see access to space, the bar is coming down. But what I think they don't realize is, although the bar is coming down, to do great things in space, it's still hard.

It's hard. Space is hard. Space is hard. It still requires money. It still requires talented groups like a Lockheed or an ASU. It requires a collaborative effort, and that's what we're offering. You can do it. You can do it with your budget. Contribute what you can, and now you can actually be part of these kind of compelling missions. Gen 1, we could stop there.

But Jim, I want to hear how things are coming along. You said good progress. We're headed toward that launch to the red planet. For Mars 2020. Yeah. Yeah. So the rover has gone through most of its major what they call thermal vac testing. We had the rover last month in this big chamber here at JPL and simulated the Martian environment.

Things work great. Of course, there's problems here and there, and they crop up and they're getting fixed. And there's general people pulling their hair out all over the place. That's all normal. But we're just finishing all that testing. The cameras are working great, by the way. Our zoom cameras, MassCam Z is working beautifully. Great image quality.

Super happy about that. In the next month or two, different parts of the rover will be sort of carefully disassembled and the big, you know, the landing system and the sky crane system, all that's going to get shipped out to Florida within the next few months and kind of reassembled for final testing at the Cape and then buttoned all up into its stack that sits on the top of the Atlas V rocket. And the launch window opens at 8.44 a.m. Florida time, July 17th, 2020. And I'd be delighted to get a bunch of Planetary Society members out there. And of course, the Society is our educational and outreach partner for Mastcam-Z. Yes.

So there's lots of stuff available on the Society's website. Maybe you can put that link up in the broadcast as well. Sure. But things are looking really great. The normal kinds of technical problems are cropping up, but we're all feeling very positive about getting to the launch pad. So eventually another seven minutes of terror, and then you once again get to roll around on Mars taking beautiful pictures. February 2021 will be the landing, and we're going to Jezero Crater, which is a big hole in the ground former crater lake with a beautiful delta, like the Mississippi River Delta, that fans out into it on Earth. These are great places to preserve evidence of past biologic activity and organic molecules.

And so we're kind of rolling the dice that that's going to be maybe a great place to look for that kind of evidence on Mars. And, of course, 2020, which we'll get a name sometime soon. Very soon. Next year, there's a naming contest that's just completed. So that rover will have some kind of intrepid name. Of course, that mission is the first step in Mars sample return. We were caching these samples, creating these little cigar tube-sized cores of rocks and soils and other materials.

We'll set them down carefully somewhere on Mars for a follow-on rover in the mid-2020s. Go find them, grab them, put them into the rocket that it's wearing on its back, launch that rocket into orbit, and then an orbiter will collect that maybe cantaloupe-sized container from Mars orbit and bring it back to the Earth. And, of course, everyone thinks it's really important, and it is important, to get samples back here before people go there so we can understand all the materials in great detail, the risks in great detail, but also do the detailed biological assays and other measurements of these materials that we just can't do yet on Mars. But using the Earth's laboratories all over the world, those samples will be subject to some of the greatest scrutiny of any extraterrestrial samples ever brought back. It's that Martian holy grail that we talk about regularly on this show.

You got it. Looking forward to those pictures and movies, right? Yes, movies as well. Yes, videos. We're testing modes right now of taking video while the rover's driving, so that should be kind of cool too. Oh, man, that's great. Rolling across Mars.

Thank you, gentlemen, Lon, Jim. Exciting stuff throughout. I wish you the best of luck with the Milo Institute. Great to be here, Matt. Planetary Radio rocks. That's right. It's wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for what you do. Thank you, guys. I'll let you get to lunch. I'll be right back with Bruce Betts and What's Up. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. It's the joke edition of Planetary Radio.

We're laughing already. That laugh that you just heard came from Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, who's back to tell us about the night sky. And he's the one who posed this question that resulted in some good stuff, some good humor from a few of you. Not very many of you, but a few of you. Welcome. One of these stranger trivia questions I've asked. Because I looked back at it. but people rose to the challenge, but we'll get to that in a little bit.

How about I tell you what's up, Matt? Oh yeah, good idea. Actually, you know, I'd like to mention something else first, which is I want to make sure people know there's a LightSail 2 update blog from last week by Jason Davis that reports on a technical paper presentation that was given by a Purdue graduate student, Justin Mansell. We explain a lot of the orbital evolution and why the perigee and apogee go up and down, and there's even some pretty pictures thrown in for fun. So check it out at planetary.org or sail.planetary.org. That qualifies as a what's up item, but what else is out there? Venus just dominating the evening sky. It's spectacular in its spectacular brightness over in the west in the early evening. And then in the morning, we've got Mars still hanging out near the reddish star Antares and Scorpius, making a lovely red-red combination.

Scorpius-Antares is to the right of Mars. The two of them will be hanging out with the crescent moon on the 20th, which will make a lovely sight in the pre-dawn east. That's where you're looking. And then Jupiter is rising to the lower left of Mars, coming up in the pre-dawn east. We move on to this week in space history. And Matt, after I believe last week's show, you'll be excited to know that in 1747, Johann Bode was born. That's interesting.

It's a nice coincidence that he came up so soon after he made it into the show. Yeah, after Sobota's law, which turned out to not really be a law, but basically says that each planet is twice as far as the last planet from the sun, roughly. And it works pretty well until you get to Neptune and then all the other objects and then it kind of doesn't. But he also was instrumental in his prediction of where people looked for Uranus and finding some old observations of Uranus that we will talk about. Also, 2006 was a big week. Stardust returned with samples from a comet and New Horizons was launched off towards Pluto and beyond. We move on to random space fact. So almost a hundred years before Uranus's discovery by William Herschel in 1781, John Flamsteed observed it at least six times, but didn't recognize it as a planet. But we go farther back. There's possible observations of Uranus by Hipparchus in 128 BC.

And then in 1750 and 1769, the French astronomer Pierre-Charles Le Monnier observed it at least 12 times. But it just was moving so slowly, all these people thought it was a star. That's fascinating. I'd heard bits of this before, but I all these people thought it was a star. That's fascinating. I'd heard bits of this before, but I didn't realize that it was observed so many times. What a shame that it didn't work out for Flamsteed, is it, I think? We'll come back to Flamsteed, amazingly enough. But first, our serious, serious joke competition.

our serious, serious joke competition. So I challenged you to create a joke that combined space and New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, or the new year in general in some type of way. Any kind of joke or humorous riddle was to be accepted, had to be clean. How did we do? Well, I know how we did that. We did, it was a challenge for people, but people, I thank you for giving such effort to my mind's weird wanderings.

Why don't you tell us about some of the jokes and the winner? We don't, of course, have time to read all of these, but I will add my thanks to all of you who took on this challenge. Here's the first of those. It came from our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild, but this time, no poem here, just a joke. What did Bruce Batts do early on New Year's Day to get rid of the sunshine that came bursting through his window after a night of overly enthusiastic celebration? Answer, of overly enthusiastic celebration? Answer, he held a light sail.

Light sail. Light sail. S-A-L-E, yeah. From Robert Johannesson in Norway, the Hubble Space Telescope to the JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope, what do you expect to see in the new year? JWST. I can't say. I don't have

2020 vision, but wait until 2021 and beyond. Now, this third honorable mention actually comes from our winner who submitted a whole bunch of stuff to us. But here is the honorable mention from Mel Powell in Sherman Oaks, California. Why join the Planetary Society? Who doesn't remember that fateful New Year's Eve when the world's dinosaurs gathered in raucous celebration at midnight and watched the asteroid drop in Times Square? Talk about days of old Lang Boom. Ah.

You know who doesn't remember it? The dinosaurs. They don't. And here is that winner from Mel Powell. Here it is. The biggest problem with Universal New Year is that I keep forgetting to write 13.8 billion and one on my checks. Ah. You still write checks, Mel? I keep forgetting to write 13.8 billion and one on my checks.

You still write checks, Mel? That's true. We just accepted that without a second thought. I wrote one today. So congratulations, Mel. You have won that set of three Planetary Society stickers from chopshopstore.com, which is where you'll find the Planetary Society store. And it's also where you can find the current edition of the Planetary Radio t-shirt, which will also be yours, Mel. So congratulations on that. The rest of you can go take a look for it there, or you can enter the next contest that Bruce is going to pose for us,

because we're going to have the same prizes again. As a reminder, almost 100 years before Uranus' discovery, John Flamsteed observed it at least six times. Here's your question. What name did John Flamsteed give Uranus when he observed it? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until the 22nd. That's Wednesday, January 22nd at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer.

I hope it was Flim Flam. I think that would have been a great name for a planet. Man, now I need a new question again. A little hint, he did not try to name it after a monarch like Herschel did trying to name it after King George III. I still think it would be funny if we had a planet named George. All right. Well, I'm sticking with Flim Flam. I think we're done.

As far as I'm concerned, Uranus is now known as flim flam. And we won't have those other off-color jokes that always happen. Yep. All right, everybody. Go out there. Look up in the night sky and think about the humor in your everyday life. Thank you and good night. Well, you know where I get a good piece of it.

At least once every week, it's here with the chief Scientist of the Planetary Society, Bruce Betts. And he joins me every week here for What's Up, Doc? Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its members who can't wait to see more of the solar system and our universe explored. I bet you feel the same way, join us at planetary.org slash membership. Mark Hilverde is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser at Astra.