Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The New Horizons Initiative

Episode Date: October 7, 2013

Carl Sagan’s longtime artistic collaborator, Jon Lomberg, designed the cover for the Voyager Interstellar Record. Now he wants to upload another message from Earth to New Horizons, the spacecraft on its way to Pluto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A digital message for the stars, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Voyager 1 has entered interstellar space, carrying with it a message from Earth. Now there's a new effort to put another message, a digital one, on the New Horizons spacecraft that has been on its way to Pluto for nearly eight years. John Lomberg is the major force behind the New Horizons Message Initiative. He'll fill us in and offer an opportunity to get involved.

Bill Nye has been refreshed by the discovery of water by the Curiosity rover. Lots of it, right now, on Mars. While Bruce Betts will point us toward a majestic triangle now visible in the night sky. He and I might also have a hoodie and other swag from the movie Gravity waiting for you in the space trivia contest.

We'll begin with Emily Lakdawalla reporting to us via her cell phone from Colorado. Hi Emily, exactly where are you right now? I'm right now at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Denver for the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting. All right, since you're on location, we're going to forgive the poor audio quality today and hope that the audience does the same. For anybody who may not remember, tell us a little bit about DPS. What's this about? Sure. Well, it's one of the two big planetary science meetings that takes place each year, the other being Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. This one is a more astronomy-focused meeting, so there are a lot of people giving talks on asteroids.

And then there are fewer talks on the other bodies in the solar system. Today I saw things on Mercury and the moon. Later this week we'll have talks on icy moons and small satellites of the outer planets and even some stuff on Pluto and Kuiper belt objects. So it's really going to be a fun meeting. A little bit of Mars at the end of the week. So this is just a preview because we're going to spend more time with Emily next time. Since you've really only been there for a couple of days now or a day and a half, any highlights already?

It's actually more of a low light. The fact is that this meeting is a lot smaller than it was originally planned to be. About 10% of the scientists are not able to attend because they are federal employees and affected by the shutdown. There are people who joke that it's the science rapture. They were taken away suddenly, and then it's just the rest of us who are left here to give their talks and talk science in their absence. So it is smaller, and people are a little bit of unrest about that. But there still is some excellent science going on.

I saw some great talks on Mercury this morning with some of the latest results from the MESSENGER mission, including some really cool geology that's finding different kinds of terrains across the surface that experience different kinds of cratering and volcanism over the history of Mercury. So they're really beginning to tell a historical story about the planet Mercury that's quite different from any other planet in the solar system, and that's really fun to watch. That is pretty cool. Hey, what is this going to mean for what used to be called NASA night,

but lately has been agency night? Funny you should ask. I will now be presenting at NASA night to talk to the scientists about what the Planetary Society is doing and what they can do to try to affect positive change and make things better. Standing in for a NASA deputy administrator. You're moving up in the world, Emily. I'm doing my best. Speaking of moving around, just mention for a NASA deputy administrator. You're moving up in the world, Emily. I'm doing my best.

Speaking of moving around, just mention for a moment here the conversation on the way to the conference that you had with a taxi driver. Oh, yeah, that was really fun. So, you know, when you're in a cab, usually they'll ask, are you in town? Are you leaving town? And what are you leaving town for? And I always love to be able to say that I'm on my way to a huge meeting of scientists who are talking about exploring the solar system and the planets and the moons. And people are usually mildly interested about that. This particular cab driver on my drive there was really into space,

and we had a fantastic conversation about just how exciting it was to be learning all these new things about the solar system. So that was great. All right, Emily. Next time, we'll spend much more time reviewing what's happened at DPS, and it'll be with a much better connection. Have a great week there. I look forward to it.

Thank you, Matt. She is the senior editor, and if you read her blog entry about that conversation with the taxi driver, you'll find out also why she is the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society. She'll join us again next week. Bill Nye, the science guy, is up next. Bill, I welcome you back with condolences,

but a job well done on Dancing with the Stars. Thank you, Matt. I mean, I am injured, people. I tore my tendon when I slipped. It felt like a pant cuff, but that was not it. It was just me sliding on a slippery floor. A man of a certain age firing up his quadricep muscles a little too, I overloaded them and tore a tendon. So I'm on the mend. I'm off the show, but on the mend. I'll be back for the finale is the plan. Oh, that's nice. You did it with grace, dignity, and your typical humor. So thank you. Thank you. It was a pleasure to watch.

And now what were you about to say? Well, it's just that Juno is going to fly by this week, Matt, on its way to Jupiter. This is J-U-N-O, not an acronym, named after Jupiter, the ancient god's wife. In order to get to Jupiter on an off-the-shelf Atlas V rocket, you've got to swing by the Earth and take a little energy from the Earth's orbit. That's rocket science. That's cool. So if you're in South Africa, look up.

It's amazing. Of course, some of you may be listening to this after the fact. Go to planetary.org. We probably have coverage of this mission to Earth event. It's pretty cool. Let's go out to Mars. Oh, my goodness. Two percent water by weight.

What do you take up there, a backhoe, a trowel, your entrenching tool, and you can get water. And the thing that impressed me, I have to say, as a thoughtful guy with regard to planetary science, As a thoughtful guy with regard to planetary science. The stories were about how humans could use this as a fuel, as an in situ resource as it's called. But wait a minute. If there's water in the soil, maybe there was something alive. What about that? This is very exciting.

I mean it's the kind of thing that you hear about, you read about. But to really stop and think about seriously the deep philosophical implications. about, but to really stop and think about, seriously, the deep philosophical implications. If there's that much water on Mars now, just think how much water there was, and then just the likelihood of something that was once alive. It's amazing. If we find life on another world, Matt, it's changing this one. I'm telling you. You know what else I like? I'm going to pull back.

I'm going to pull back. Please don't. You know what else I like that I think of with some significance? If human beings ever go there, they might actually be able to afford to take a shower now and then. That's right. That's good. That's good. Along with your tang and a lot of something to breathe and keep warm.

It's a challenging thing. But, Matt, this is another exciting week in space exploration. It really is. Thank you so much, Bill. I'll talk to you again next week. Thank you, Matt. He's Bill Nye. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society.

Stay tuned. You're going to see him some more on the big tube and the little one. John Lomberg was the principal artistic collaborator of Planetary Society co-founder Carl Sagan. From 1972 until Sagan's death in 1996, he illustrated most of Sagan's books and magazine articles. He was chief artist for the original Cosmos series, and won a Primetime Emmy for his work. He came up with the iconic cover for the Voyager Interstellar Record, also known as the Golden Record. As you know, one of these is now in interstellar space.

More than 35 years after the launches of Voyagers 1 and 2, John doesn't want humanity to miss the only remaining opportunity to send a message to the stars. Full disclosure, John is a member of the Planetary Society's Advisory Council. He was project director for Visions of Mars, which became the Society's Messages from Earth DVD that made it to Mars on the Phoenix lander. He also helped design our Mars dials that are on the Mars Exploration Rovers. John, what fun to talk to you again, especially as you have just become the first artist to have his work exhibited in interstellar space.

Yeah, it's a pretty amazing feeling to work on something that's actually leaving the solar system. It's exhibited in many, many places around this planet as well. While we're on the topic of Voyager 1, I just would love to get your thoughts about the fact that this spacecraft, this human emissary, is now out there as you and Carl Sagan and so many others dreamed of so many years ago. It's thrilling, and you couldn't ask for a better spacecraft.

You know, Voyager, I'm now confident, will outlive me in terms of still being in touch and still doing great science. When you think how different the world was in 1977 when Voyagers were launched and how many things have happened on this world and how many things Voyager has shown us in its incredible journey through the solar system. So I couldn't be prouder to have any association with that mission. And, of course, even when that spacecraft has used up the last of its power, that interstellar record with its golden cover is going to travel on farther into interstellar space. Let's talk about this new message that, I guess, is your idea,

the New Horizons Message Initiative. Am I right about that? Did you come up with this? Yeah, it had always bothered me that New Horizons did not contain some nano-quantum superconducting version of the Voyager record. And I understand the reasons that it didn it did not spoke to some of the mission people and it is a very hard thing to do it it's not easy and i think they didn't want to do anything if they couldn't do it

really the way voyager voyager record was done but then it occurred to me that uh... we do have a way of of leaving a message and that's on the computer that's aboard the spacecraft. I thought about it, and I thought, well, this is probably a crazy idea. And I floated it to Alan Stern, the mission principal investigator, and he liked the idea, and he checked with his technical people and said, yes, technically there was no reason why they couldn't do it.

He thought that the best way to persuade NASA to do it was to show that there was popular support. And that's what caused me to begin the New Horizons Message Initiative. I spoke with people that I knew, you know, friends and colleagues in the space science community and outside of it, and got pretty much unanimous encouragement to pursue this and put together a board of advisors that has some just amazingly talented and smart people from the space community and outside the space community, each of whom has something to contribute to the idea. It's never been done before. It sounds easy in principle to actually do it. There are a host of technical

issues that have to be worked out. But the first thing is to get NASA to agree to do it. And I'm happy to say that we now have over 60 countries represented on our petition, many of whom, you know, I had no contact with and none of our advisors had any contact with, and this indicates to me that it's sort of percolating through the planet. Just today I saw a new signature from Bangladesh, our first Bangladeshi signatory. It's also interesting to me to see how people in different countries are approaching this based on their own history of space exploration and their own feelings about communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. So it's kind of taken on a life of its own.

I don't know how long it's going to take to get enough signatures to go to NASA. There's no real hurry. The spacecraft doesn't get to Pluto for a couple of years, and we won't be able to upload the message into probably a year after pluto encounter so we have time to think about it and and to do it right and i'm uh... just encouraged to think that nasa will approve it because i see no downside for them

the voyager record has proven to be such a positive emissary, not only to extraterrestrials, but to the world, to show the world that NASA can do these things that involve the whole world and that thrill everybody. One of our Australian advisors, Brian Gensler, a very good astronomer from Australia, said that he remembers the Voyager record when he was in school and how it electrified his imagination.

And he thought that today's generation of students need something similar. Maybe the world at large needs something to show that we can do things as one planet, we can do things that are positive, forward-looking. And I think the Voyager record has been such good publicity for NASA that I just can't understand why they wouldn't want to do something similar again for New Horizons. Well, I hope you're right about that. And I want to do our part to help this go viral. So, folks, if you want to sign the petition, it's at newhorizonsmessage.com. That's all one word, It's at newhorizonsmessage.com.

That's all one word, newhorizonsmessage.com. We'll put that link and a link to John Lomberg's site up on the show page that you can reach from planetary.org slash radio as well. That really is quite a group of advisors. I noticed Greg Benford in there, one of our guests on this show just last week. Greg and I are old friends, and we worked together on a project to design a ten thousand-year nuclear waste marker he documented that and some other messages in a book called deep time

which is an excellent kind of survey of these unusual messages for far away times and places so yes greg is on board uh... as is a lot of people well known in the city community uh... nikololai Kardashev, who is one of the grand old men of Russian SETI, is one of our advisors. That's interstellar artist and producer John Lomberg. He'll be back with more about the New Horizons message initiative in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from

PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water in the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business.

You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. John Lomberg was a big contributor to the Voyager Interstellar Record, the so-called Golden Record, containing images, music, natural sound, and other information about our home planet that is on its way to the stars. Now he has conceived the New Horizons Message Initiative,

a plan to put a somewhat similar message in the computer memory of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and across the galaxy. By the way, as I was putting together this week's show, John let me know that the first 10,000 people who sign the petition to NASA asking for support of the initiative will have their names written to the spacecraft's memory as part of the message. My name is on that list. The other thing that excites me about this project, Matt, is that the Voyager record was made by a small group of people who were pretty similar in their backgrounds and nationality and interests. And we tried to represent the whole planet, but it was really a small group sort of taking it on themselves to speak for Earth.

This time, I thought, why not have the whole Earth participate in making the message? The Internet permits a level of crowdsourcing and global communication that was just impossible to imagine during the time we made the Voyager record. So rather than me or any other self-proclaimed expert trying to decide how should we present our planet and species, this time I want to try to make it a message where the contents, the images that we send, and I'm assuming we'll be able to send images, but that those images are actually submitted and voted on by people all over the world, so that we can really claim this to be a self-portrait of Earth. Given the range in geography of people that we have, I think the only continent we're lacking now is Antarctica. And I fully expect to get a signature from Antarctica.

Why not? You guys down in McMurdo Sound, I know we've got a couple of people who listen to this show there. Time to step up, guys and girls. Listen, you're answering all my questions, but I've got one other before we run out of time here. Have Alan or maybe somebody on his team, have they told you how much room there actually is in the computer memory of this spacecraft to upload this message?

Well, there's no official commitment to give us anything. But when I've been speaking about this with Alan, 100 megabytes would represent 1% of the memory on the computer. Until they pass Pluto, they need all of that memory. They're going to need every megabyte to store the information that they acquire during the encounter, and then it's going to take a long time to play that back because it's so far away. It's kind of like a dial-up Internet, if you remember that. It sadly is. But when that's done, even though there is an extended mission through the Kuiper Belt,

they're not going to need as much memory as they did in the encounter. So 1% seems to be a reasonable amount to dedicate to this project. And if it were only 1%, that's still, I think, over 100 megabytes. We should be able to figure out how to pack a lot of information into 100 megabytes. we should be able to figure out how to pack a lot of information into 100 megabytes. Yeah, you know, people, kids today, they may be thinking of a 32 gigabyte thumb drive as the minimum that they need, but you can do an awful lot with 100 megabytes. I have to warn you, though, that we can do a lot with 100 megabytes because we use compression algorithms that allow us to make pictures much smaller

than they would be if you mapped every pixel. You can't do that with a message like this, because no matter how smart you are, you couldn't figure out JPEG or any of the other formats from first principles. So we have to figure out a way to put this on the computer so that an intelligent extraterrestrial examining the computer and finding this set of information will be able to find a way into it, find a way to read it. That's one of the real challenges. But as you say, 100 megabytes, especially if you're just talking about pictures and even sound, is quite a lot.

Once we do get the approval, one of the major tasks our technical people will have to address is what is the best way to format the information and what kind of information can we send? I mean, we're not making any fixed assumptions. I hope we can send pictures and we can send sound the way we did on Voyager, but why not send some software? Why not send some computer games? Why not send other kinds of information? In fact, I was speaking to some artists who pointed out there's actually a way to do choreography. Maybe we could send a dance. One of the advantages of crowdsourcing this is that we can get ideas, out-of-the-box ideas that maybe have never been proposed before for interstellar communication.

And it's really a new concept, and quite apart from New Horizons, what a number of people have said is that we're establishing a precedent that maybe every spacecraft leaving Earth should have some kind of message in its computer memory. Well, I certainly hope so, and maybe a physical record as well. John, I wish you the best of luck with this campaign. I want to mention again that the website is newhorizonsmessage.com. You can learn much more about this initiative and sign the petition and learn about other ways to support this project. If you want to learn more about John, it's all at johnlomberg.com.

John, thanks for joining us, and I would love to check in with you again when you reach the point, or maybe when you're almost at the point where you're ready to turn this over to the folks at NASA HQ. Thank you, Matt. John Lomberg has been talking with us. He, of course, I love describing you as the first artist to have your art in interstellar space. It's true, because he did the cover for the Voyager interstellar record, Headed Off to the Stars,

and hopefully we'll be following that with sort of the interstellar record 2.0 on New Horizons, if this project works out. By the way, when you're on the big island of Hawaii, drop by his Galaxy Garden. I'll be right back. We'll drop in on Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. That's coming up in just a few moments. Bruce Betts is the director of projects for the Planetary Society,

and he joins us every week to tell us what's going on up there, up there in the sky, which we're going to come back to because I want to talk about Sandra Bullock up there in the sky, looking great, looking great. Surprisingly enough. I don't have that in my little segment here, so you can tell about that if you want. Where do we look for Sandra Bullock? You look overhead near the International Space Station, which apparently is right next to the Chinese space station that doesn't exist. But we'll come back to that.

Minor literary license taken. Tell us what's up anyway. All right. We've got low in the west. Still super bright Venus, but it'll go away in a few weeks, so make sure you appreciate it. Saturn also hanging out nearby, low in the west in the evening. Mercury, maybe you can pick it out. Even lower in the west, early evening.

Some binoculars after sunset might help you out. Got in the pre-dawn east, Mars looking reddish and high overhead in the pre-dawn, Jupiter looking super bright. One collection of stars for at least you Northern Hemisphere gang to check out in this time of the year. In the fall is the best time, of course, to see what's called the Summer Triangle for some reason. So if you look up overhead at 8, 9 o'clock at night, you'll see three bright stars in a spread out triangle. And that sometimes gets the unofficial name Summer Triangle. It's actually Vega, usually pretty much right overhead, the brightest of them. Deneb in Cygnus the Swan.

And Altair in Aquila the Eagle. So something different to look at. Lots of birds. And while you're looking up, you may see a bird. We move on to this week in space history. In 1959, Luna 3 gave the first ever images of the lunar far side. Also not made of cheese. 2009, LCROSS slammed into the moon on purpose looking for lunar water ice in craters.

Want to make sure that cheese wasn't underneath the surface. Well, they're still analyzing the data. There's hope. We move on to random space fact. to random space fact. Yeah, see, once again, I forgot to ask John Lomberg this time to help us out with a guest RSF. Oh, well, you just have to keep it up, guy. You might as well not even pretend you're going to ask people.

No, I really, I don't know why I forget every time. It's okay. I enjoy doing it. Mars, Mars craters, and I may have mentioned this a little bit in the past, but many Mars craters have fluidized ejecta blankets. So not only did the stuff come flying out of the crater, but when it hit, it actually flowed. We think forming from the subsurface ice, turning it into a liquid water, making a slurry of muddy stuff.

This is interestingly nearly unique in the solar system. On a couple of the icy satellites, you get something similar, but certainly nothing as ubiquitous on Mars, though you do need to have sufficiently large craters to generate this, possibly because of needing to access enough subsurface ice in the past. They have to be a few kilometers in diameter. A very interesting random space fact. All right, on to the contest.

We asked you where Opportunity, the Mars rover, is going to spend its wintertime. A bunch of people figured this one out, and they wanted that package from the movie Gravity. I'll get to that in a moment. Oh, that's why you were talking about Sandra Bullock. That's right. Ronald Basque, Ron Basque, who said, Opportunity will winter on a 15-degree north-facing slope, which is an exposed section of the eroded and broken rim of the ancient 22-kilometer Endeavor Crater. The exact area is at the northern tip

of Cape Tribulation, known as Solander Point. Correct? All sorts of good information, yes. Well, Ron, you are our winner. We're going to send you that package, which I now know because they mailed us all the stuff. It's really nice. There's a sweatshirt and a cap and a T-shirt and a sleeve for your tablet, your tablet computer. It's very, very nice. You know what? I think we can afford to do this one more time. I told you we'd give away a shirt, but we'll do this one more time.

Before we do that, from Ben Owens, not our winner, but he left us this message. Ah, a good Tuesday evening. Mythbusters and researching for a planetary radio competition. Excellent. Random space fact. So give somebody else out there a chance to win this swag package. In the theme of movies, although not a space movie, I'm going to stretch and connect it. What nebula, so a little bit of interpretation required, what nebula

would fit best in the movie The Godfather? What nebula would fit best in the movie The Godfather? Preferably justify your answer. Go to planetary.org slash radio guest. Find out how to enter this sort of different trivia contest. Yes, it is. You have until the 14th of October to make Bruce an offer he can't refuse. That'd be Monday the 14th at 2 p.m. Pacific time. By the way, Gravity, I saw one of the first showings on the day it came out. I thought it was terrific.

It's basically a survival film. But they got an awful lot right. And I'll tell you, it makes space look gorgeous. Just watch out for stuff flying towards your space station. That's just a generally good plan in any case. Yeah. They do that. Okay, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about the color teal.

Thank you, and good night. Teal. I like teal. I like Bruce Betts. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society Society who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by the stellar members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.