Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Moon As You've Never Seen It Before

Episode Date: May 9, 2011

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The Moon, as we've never seen it before, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has given us nearly 200 terabytes of data, including spectacular images. LRO project scientist Richard Vondrack returns to review just a few of the successes his spacecraft has achieved from 50 kilometers above the lunar surface. The rest of the gang will also join us, though Bruce Betts is in Romania, figuring out how to save the planet. Where will you be at 2 p.m. on Saturday, May 28? Can you join us for Planetary

Radio Live in Pasadena? It's free, but you need to RSVP. Still plenty of seats, but they're going fast. You can learn more at planetary.org slash radio. Time for another chat with Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, as always, lots of great stuff in the blog over the last few days. More coming up, but let's talk about some of the highlights of the last week, as we usually do. Beginning perhaps with some images, rather fascinating images, of Earth from space, but an Earth that is no more. Earth is a very unfamiliar-looking globe because there are representations of what Earth might have looked like from space, but an Earth that is no more. Earth is a very unfamiliar looking globe because they're representations of what Earth might have looked like from space many millions of years ago.

And I picked out two globes to highlight from what's called the Visible Paleo Earth Project. They took NASA's blue marble imagery, what's probably now the most famous image of Earth's globe, which is actually a composite image of lots and lots of orbital photos of Earth combined to make the most beautiful possible globe that they could. And then they aged it. They took data on the motions of the continents back into the past, as well as information on the climate on those continents in the past, which of course has shifted with time to create these simulated views of what Earth would have looked like a long time ago. And I have to say that the shifting of the continents and reconstructions of what they look like in the past is one of those things that has just fascinated me since I was a kid. And I think one of the reasons that I was excited about

geology was just the fact that you could imagine an Earth that no longer existed. And so these globes really caught my imagination. And those images are quite beautiful. And they sure point out once again, the jigsaw puzzle nature of our home planet. Let's move on to something else that you did, and this has everything to do with one of the most exciting events this month. And that is Dawn coming into sight of its first destination. Yeah, I am so excited about Dawn approaching Vesta, and I thought that this would be a good time to go back through Mark Raymond's voluminous Dawn journals, where he explains in great detail what Dawn's going to be doing, and pull out the highlights. And in paragraph format, I looked at each phase of Dawn's mission at Vesta. The Vesta part of the mission will be about 15 months long. And it starts very far from

Vesta and slowly spirals in, kind of stopping to do orbits in one position for a few periods. There's a survey orbit, there's a high-altitude mapping orbit, and a low-altitude mapping orbit, and so on. And each one has different science goals. So I explain all that in this post. Right now we're just in the approach phase, though, and I haven't yet seen any images of Vesta, but I'm looking forward to the first ones. And I am proud to say that Mark Raymond, that project engineer for the Dawn mission, will be joining us next week on this show, a return visit for Mark.

I think he's been on a couple of times before. Perhaps by then we'll have the first of those still rather distant images from that big asteroid. Last thing to mention very briefly, a new contributor to the blog. And this is just one of those fortuitous events. For probably a year or two, I've been wanting to have some other contributor to the blog who could fill in some of the gaps, things that I don't cover, like human spaceflight and private spaceflight. But I wasn't really actively searching. And then suddenly, I got an email out of the blue from a guy who had a blog and wanted my advice on how to raise his profile, maybe get into the business of science writing. And I looked at his blog, and it was perfectly complementary to mine,

so I invited him on board. What is his name again, Jason? Jason Davis. Well, look for that. We'll put up a link to it, of course, at planetary.org slash radio or the page for this current episode of Planetary Radio. Emily, we're out of time. Thanks again. All right. See you next week.

Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next, we'll head out to the moon. And that'll be right after we hear from Bill. Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here this week, expressing concern about the SETI Institute. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute, is having some financial trouble, and they've decided to shut down, at least for now, the Allen Radio Telescope Array. This is a group of radio telescopes in a valley in Northern California in the United States.

And I've been there, and it's a cool thing. It was built by the good graces of Paul Allen, one of the Microsoft founders. And it's a great idea. And the idea is to listen for alien radio signals, alien signals that would be evidence of alien civilizations. This sounds like an extraordinary and crazy thing. It sounds like science fiction. And it is. And I want to remind everybody, they're not the only people in this business. The Planetary Society does an optical search for the extraterrestrial intelligence in the northern hemisphere, and we have radio searches going on in the southern hemisphere. But what it says is that it's not that important to us, but I submit

that it is. What we need to do is not devote all our resources to have an Apollo-style program to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. No, you just do it in the background. You just make sure as a scientifically literate, technologically advanced society, you're always keeping an ear out for the possibility of hearing a signal, detecting a signal that would absolutely change the world. It would change the world forever. And we would just do this in the background as something we keep going. And scientists would go there, run some stuff, keep an eye on things, maintain it. And so they're hitting on hard times right now. My hope that everybody figures out that it's something that's worth doing.

And perhaps, let me just say it bluntly, perhaps we should join forces. Now, there's stuff at the SETI Institute where NASA supports astrobiological research, and that's vital because if we could find alien life here on Earth, a second Genesis, that would be astonishing. If we found life on another planet like Mars or Europa, that would be astonishing. But what we got to do also is go back to the conventional radio listening. Consider supporting it. Keep it going back there, and someday the world may be changed forever. No big deal.

I've got to fly, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. Combine all the data from 50 years of moon missions, Combine all the data from 50 years of moon missions, and you still won't have as much as was returned by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in just one year. The final data set from its exploration phase was released in March, yet there's much more to come. That's according to Richard Vondrack, the LRO project scientist. We last talked to Rich as his spacecraft was beginning to circle Earth's only natural satellite. I called him last week at his Goddard Space Flight Center office in Greenbelt, Maryland. Rich, it is great to get you back on Planetary Radio. Thank you for returning.

Oh, hello, Matt. It's good talking to you again, and we have a lot of things to report. Can we start with an absolutely mind-boggling amount of data returned by your spacecraft? Well LRO is in a wonderful position in that we're exploring the Moon and the Moon is this wonderful world right next door to the Earth. Being in a mapping orbit, because we're close to the Earth and we have a dedicated ground station, we're able to return a tremendous amount of data. It's very difficult to get information back from Mars or distant parts of the solar system,

but with LRO, we're close by, and so we can bring a lot of information home. So you don't have to fight for time, as other missions do for the Deep Space Network? Yes, that's a problem with missions that go to deep space. What we did with LRO is that we constructed a dedicated ground station at White Sands, New Mexico. In there, we have a dish that's only objective is to observe LRO and record the data we send home. You knew that your spacecraft had these capabilities to return these unprecedented amounts of data.

One figure in a recent press release that I love, the equivalent of 41,000 DVDs. That's right. thousand DVDs. That's right. It's 192 terabytes of reduced data has been released to the national and international community through the planetary data system. So anyone can go to the PDS and access that amount of LRO data. As you know, we started as an exploration mission funded by the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, NASA headquarters, in order to pioneer the way back to the moon by hopefully humans, but if not by robotic spacecraft. And the agreement with ESMD was that all of our data from launch would be made available to the engineers at NASA, but also to the scientific community through the planetary data system. And that's a public archive that anyone can access. How much of that 192 terabytes of data is imaging data, most of it? The majority of it is imaging data.

We also have a substantial amount of data from our technology demonstrator, MiniRF, which is a synthetic aperture radar system that is on LRO. Why use that system? I mean, it's not like Titan where you need radar to look through clouds. use that system? I mean, it's not like Titan where you need radar to look through clouds. Well, the advantage of the radar system is that it's a new pair of eyes looking at the moon. Radar can penetrate beneath the surface, and in fact, it has discovered features of impact melts that are not visible with the camera. And in addition, the radar can look into shadowed craters where there is no sunlight and just looks black to the camera system.

Makes sense, since it's providing its own light, in a sense, bouncing through the radar. It's an active sensing system. We have two active sensing systems on board. One is the radar. The other is the laser altimeter. Talk about that altimeter, too, because you have gotten a tremendous amount of data back from that. 3.4 billion measurements? Well, actually, right now we're up to 4 billion, which is staggering. I think right now we know the topography of the moon better than we do the topography of any other object in the solar system.

You've seen the beautiful maps, the topographic maps of Mars made by a predecessor experiment called MOLA. That experiment was based on about 700 million measured points. was based on about 700 million measured points. And right now we're over the 4 billion measurements on the moon. On a smaller body? On a smaller body. And because we're in polar orbit, we've virtually saturated the polar regions with laser beams so that now we can give you maps of the topography, the shape of the polar regions, with a contour interval of about 10 meters. How about those polar regions?

Remind us of why this mission has paid such close attention to those, as have other missions. Well, Matt, the reason is that the polar regions of the moon are unique in the solar system. The moon has its spin axis oriented perpendicular to the ecliptic plane, so that there really are no seasons on the moon. The tilt of the lunar pole is only 1.5 degrees, so that there's regions in the polar regions where the sun never shines. These are called permanently shadowed regions. They're extremely cold.

We now know through LRO measurements that they're the coldest regions in the solar system with a temperature of less than 30 degrees Kelvin, 30 degrees above absolute zero. Wow. There we think that there are volatiles that are sequestered, that there's materials like water ice, carbon dioxide ice, that are preserved underneath the surface that could have two benefits, two uses. One is by measuring them, we can understand better the history of the Earth-Moon system, and we can also perhaps use

these volatiles for resources. Expectation before LRO was launched was that if there is water ice at the poles, they would be confined to the permanently shadowed regions that are very cold. A very provocative measurement from the neutron detector, LEND as it's called, on LRO. This instrument was supplied by Russia. And by measuring the neutrons, we can infer the presence of hydrogen. LEND is showing that some of the permanently shadowed regions indeed have large concentrations of water. And then it's also showing that some are dry. The surprising result is that some of the regions near permanently shadowed regions, regions that are illuminated at times, these regions also have water beneath the surface,

or in fact to be specific, hydrogen beneath the surface, but we presume it's in the form of water. This is very exciting. Future astronauts could go to these regions that aren't as cold and dark as permanently shadowed regions inside craters and perhaps harvest that water for use for exploration. That's Richard Vondrack, project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. He'll tell us more about our moon in a minute when Planetary Radio returns. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth.

That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join 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.

Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is buzzing the moon, flying just 50 kilometers above its surface. LRO's instruments are probing that surface and returning incredibly detailed images. Project scientist Richard Vondrack couldn't be happier with the results so far. Is all of this science already returned by LRO? Is this just the beginning? Oh, it certainly is the beginning. The 192 terabytes of data that we've discussed was the results of our one-year exploration mission.

Got into our mapping orbit on September 15th of 2009. We spent one year mapping the moon for exploration purposes. And then rather than shutting off the spacecraft and ending the mission, NASA headquarters decided to fund us for an additional two years to do what we call the LRO science mission. So now you're into the science mission, how much longer can we expect LRO to be returning data about our moon? We're in a 50-kilometer low-altitude mapping orbit, and this orbit requires monthly propulsion burns in order to raise our altitude so that we don't impact the moon just due to the gravitational anomalies.

We could stay in this orbit through the fall of next year, but we're going to propose an additional two-year mission. And so in order to prolong the life of LRO, we're planning later in about five or six months to raise the orbit of LRO into an eccentric orbit that has a fairly long lifetime. So we're going to be able to see LRO around the moon for probably another five or six years, although our funding to make operational measurements and to reduce the data may run out before the spacecraft impacts the moon. Just a word or two as we run short of time about, I'll only mention a couple, of the myriad images that this spacecraft, your spacecraft, has returned. They are starkly

beautiful. Magnificent desolation, as Buzz Aldrin once said. The image that you have of Far Side, the far side of the moon, not the dark side, that looks so strangely familiar, eerily familiar, and yet it's completely foreign from what we normally think of as that moon that we look up at every night in the sky. What's appealing about the LRO images are the clarity, the sharpness of the images. The LRO cameras we have, we have a narrow-angle camera that measures the surface with a resolution of 50 centimeters. So if you go to our website, you can download images where you can see rocks and boulders that are meter-sized.

And it's just phenomenal to look at those because they're so inspiring with the detail. In addition, we have a wide-angle camera that continuously maps the moon with a resolution of 100 meters, the size of a football field. Those images of the entire moon were put on our website in March. So you can go there and you can download images of the lunar hemispheres that are about 500 megabytes of data, so it's quite a bit, but you can zoom in and see any crater you want on the moon with those high-resolution images of 100 meters.

So we're globally mapping the moon continuously that way, and with an arrow-angle camera, we have about 15% of the moon already mapped. And as we go on in time, we'll map more and more of the moon with that incredible spatial resolution. It is marvelous. There's another one I'll mention that I saw right up front on the website, which we will provide a link to, of course, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter website, of a relatively fresh impact crater with the beautiful ejecta. It really looked like a flower. That's right.

That was the small crater that was on the website on April 21st, I believe. It's just incredible to look at it. That's a high-resolution image, and you can see all of the ejecta structure. image, and you can see all of the ejecta structure. We think that crater is less than a thousand years old, maybe a hundred years old. That's why it looks so incredibly fresh, like it was just made yesterday. And I know some other features that you've got a handful of images of. For example, Tranquility Base. Take that, moon hoaxers. Well, you know, one of the first things we tried to do when we got into orbit was to image the Apollo sites, and we succeeded in getting nearly every one of them before the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. We've gotten even better images

since those preliminary ones. You can see all of the artifacts brought to the moon. You can also see the tracks left by the astronauts. This was very surprising because, although we should have expected it, but as the astronauts walked across the surface, they kick over the regolith, the dirt on the surface, and what you can see is the trail they leave. They're not individual footprints, but you can in fact see the evidence of them walking across the surface. It's just amazing to revisit the Apollo sites and to see the view with such high resolution. And quite inspiring.

to see the view with such high resolution. And quite inspiring. Rich, thank you so much, you and your team, for helping us to learn so much more about our nearest celestial neighbor than humans had probably uncovered in all of previous history. Well, thank you. It's really a privilege to be able to discuss it with you. Rich, or Richard von Drack, is the Deputy Director of the Solar System Exploration Division at the Goddard Space Flight Center out there in Greenbelt, Maryland,

on the other side of the United States from us. He is, of course, also, quite significantly for this conversation, the project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. We will be right back for a look around the night sky with our friend Bruce Betts, and that'll be this week's edition of What's Up. Bruce Betts is the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he is in Romania. What are you doing in Romania, he said with a note of alarm in his voice. I don't remember.

You just woke up and there you were. I know I'm supposed to be here, and I just got here a couple hours ago, and I'm still kind of fuzzy, but I know there's something I'm supposed to do. Some conference or something? It's the Save the World Conference. Planetary Defense Conference. So it really is the Save the World Conference. All aspects of the near-Earth asteroid threat. Well, good. I hope you come back having saved the world. That would be a plus.

Yeah, we'll talk to you about that next week, how Bruce saved the world. Well, have a wonderful time. How long are you there for? Conferences Monday through Thursday. Well, we'll look forward to a report next time we talk to you. Can you report to us on the night sky? I can. It's cloudy. There in Romania? Right. Actually, by coincidence, here too. I don't think it's cloudy everywhere in between, though. Anyway, that's not important right now.

For those of you who don't have clouds, here are things to look for in the night sky. What's really spiffy keen is the pre-dawn and will continue to be for the next couple of weeks. Get out there, look, half hour before dawn or so over in the east, low in the east, and it is just tons of planets. Four planets visible. Venus is the brightest, hugely bright star-like object. Jupiter is also really, really bright, but not as bright as Venus. And then Mercury is the other whitish one. So we even got a rare Mercury occurrence happening in amongst this. And then Mars, Mars looking reddish. And if you watch them over the days and weeks, you'll see them all do a little dance.

Can I just ask you, couldn't the Planetary Society afford to put you in something better than a galvanized steel culvert somewhere? Oh, I requested that. Oh, I see. It's thematic for the planetary defense where each one of the attendees at the conference is testing out a different type of bunker. I see. Well, I can tell it adds a lot to the acoustics. Okay, you may go on. I have no idea why it's an echo chamber.

It's amazing we're even talking on opposite sides of the world. It is, actually, and via Skype. In the evening sky, we've got Saturn, high in the west after sunset and high overhead in the middle of the night. Always remind you to take a telescope out if you can check out the rings we move on to random space fact speaking of asteroids near earth asteroid 2005 yu55 will pass within 0.85 lunar distances from the earth on november 8th of this year mark it on your calendar calendar. This is a good-sized object. It's a 400-meter asteroid. It would cause quite the regional destruction if it did hit, which it has no chance of hitting, just to be clear.

But it will be coming within the moon radii. It will reach about 11th magnitude, so not something that you'll be able to see naked-eye, but will have all sorts of telescopes on Earth, radio and optical and infrared trained on it as it comes flying past. Wow. Okay. Let's roll on to the trivia contest. In the trivia contest, we asked you about when Apollo 11 splashed down and it was taken back to the USS Hornet as the recovery ship. Who was the father of a future US presidential candidate who was on the ship? We had a sitting president, Richard Nixon, but also this father of future candidate, but he also had his own impressive credentials, which is why he was there. Tell us, tell us, Matt.

We got a couple of interesting nominations for this human being. A couple people did say Nixon, but he was not the father of a future presidential candidate. We got an Al Gore senior, equally incorrect, but an interesting guess. No, the correct answer that most people came up with, including our winner this week, Caroline Fletcher of Marion, Illinois, who I think has won before, though I couldn't find a record of it. Caroline said it was John S. McCain, Sr., father to John McCain, Jr., who, of course, ran for president most recently in 2008. So congratulations, Caroline. We're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Yes, Admiral John S. McCain was SYNCPAC at the time, Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet for the U.S. Navy. The Navy comes up with the best, hands down, the best acronym, SYNCPAC. I love that. They do have impressive ones.

They are not beyond acronyms that have lots and lots of letters. And we did get that mentioned by several people, including Peter Carboni and Craig Hutchinson and others who mentioned that the Admiral was SYNCPAC at the time. Okay, let's move on to our next contest. Let's move on to our next contest. For this time around, thematically, here in Romania, I can't help but ask, who was the first Romanian person in space? First Romanian in space. Go to planetary.org slash radio and find out how to enter.

Fascinating. Shouldn't be too hard to discover this one. You have until May 16, Monday, May 16 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to look that up, get it to us, and win yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt if you're chosen by random.org. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about Romanian echo chambers. Do they exist? Thank you, and good night. I think we have ample proof of that. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society,

who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Clear skies. Thank you.