Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Pearly Clouds of Mars

Episode Date: June 23, 2021

Want to see wild colors on Mars? Look up! Planetary scientist Mark Lemmon studies planetary atmospheres at the Space Science Institute. He marvels at the images taken by Mastcam on the Curiosity rover of shimmering iridescent clouds high above the Martian surface. The Planetary Society’s Kate Howells looks back at the 1998 blockbuster movies that got a lot more people thinking about the near-Earth object threat. A few clouds won’t keep Bruce Betts from sharing his latest What’s Up look at the night sky. Discover more at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/mark-lemmon-mars-clouds-and-dustSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now, on Mars, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. We'll do some Martian cloud watching with atmospheric scientist and solar system explorer Mark Lemon. Cloud Watching with atmospheric scientist and solar system explorer Mark Lemon. And when we're done staring at the clouds, we'll ask Mark about dust, fog, and snow. Yeah, snow on the red planet. Snow falls lightly. Asteroids, not so much. My colleague Kate Howells has written a belated review of the asteroid disaster movies Armageddon and Deep Impact,

reviewing what they got right and what they got very, very wrong. Of course, Bruce Betts will also join me for this week's What's Up and his latest space trivia contest. File this under, Why Didn't We Think of That? There's an image of China's first Mars rover next to its landing platform at the top of the June 18 Downlink newsletter. It's not a selfie. The rover dropped off a wireless camera and then backed up into the resulting image. Pretty cool, and you can see it at planetary.org slash downlink. Of course, there's also this helicopter on Mars. Of course, there's also this helicopter on Mars.

The headlines include very good news for everyone who wants to avoid a deep impact. NASA is moving forward with the infrared space telescope called NEO Surveyor. We'll soon welcome back the asteroid hunter's principal investigator, Amy Meinzer. You've probably heard that China has astronauts back in space for the first time in several years. The three men are aboard the nation's first space station. Meanwhile, the first Space Launch System rocket is coming together in the Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building. The giant core stage has been mated to the twin solid rocket boosters. Lastly, comes word that a Finnish company is building the first nanosatellite made from wood. Plywood, actually. How long could it be till someone builds one

out of Legos? Here's that conversation with Kate Howells. Kate, good to get you back on Planetary Radio. Thanks for this cute little piece about those two movies that came out weeks apart in 1998 that, frankly, I had such high hopes for. The results mixed at best, would you say? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I rarely have very high hopes of accuracy in Hollywood movies about space. high hopes of accuracy in Hollywood movies about space. It's a shame that they didn't do the topic justice because planetary defense, as we know, is an intricate and fascinating field. But at least they made people overall aware that asteroids can hit Earth. You got to give them credit for that.

And you did give Armageddon credit for that because it was basically the only thing that it got right. I share your opinion of that movie, but it's kind of fun. Oh, it's a good time. I enjoy the movie. It's very silly, especially when you kind of know the truth of the topic, but it's a romp, that's for sure. the truth of the topic, but it's a romp, that's for sure. The best thing I can say about it is that it got Bruce Willis at least one mention in every Planetary Defense Conference. That's good. So let's move on to the other one, which frankly, I thought was a great deal better.

Yes. What did you think of Deep Impact? Oh, I love Deep Impact. I think it's the lesser known of the two movies. And I'm often recommending it to people because the first time I saw it, I mean, spoiler alert, if you haven't watched Deep Impact, you might want to pause this and go quickly watch it. The fact that this comet does damage the Earth, I mean, they do not completely escape the consequences of the solar system throwing rocks at us. I thought that that was marvelous. I mean, normally in a movie like

Armageddon, you know, the hero saves the day and disaster is averted completely. I liked that Deep Impact showed that sometimes you can't save the day completely. So just for that, I appreciated it more. But also, it's a more satisfying movie if you are a bit of a space buff. I couldn't agree more. Anybody can see your piece. It is both in the current issue, that is the brand-new June solstice issue of the Planetary Report,

but can also be found separately at planetary.org. In fact, the whole magazine can be found there for free nowadays. Of course, our members get the beautiful print version. You close with the thing that hit home most with me, and that is that, yes, we are all about raising public awareness of this, and that's still what we're about. I guess there's still room for a better movie on this topic. Yeah. I mean, especially given that in this day and age, Hollywood just seems to be regurgitating old movies, just making remakes. I would love to see a remake of an asteroid movie. I know, and people have written in saying that just by focusing on Armageddon and Deep Impact, I ignored a whole

host of other asteroid related movies. And this is true. But in terms of sort of blockbusters, it's about time for another asteroid movie. And maybe they will consult a little more with the science community and create a scenario that is more realistic and depict some of the actual geopolitical and technological challenges that face us when we think about the possibility of an asteroid or comet impacting the Earth. That would be interesting. That would be interesting and a great service, Kate. Indeed.

As is your article. Thank you so much for giving us this little capsule movie review that dates back to material created 23 years ago. Well, thanks for having me. Kate Howells is the Communication Strategy and Canadian Space Policy Advisor for the Planetary Society, my colleague. Mark Lemon has joined us a couple of times. He's now a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in College Station, Texas. But his work has put him in a virtual sense in the skies of Jupiter, Titan, and especially Mars. He studies aerosols, stuff suspended in the air of these worlds. Along the way, he has become one of Earth's most experienced

and accomplished photographers on other worlds, including his work as imaging team lead for the Phoenix Mars lander. He's also a co-investigator using Mastcam-Z on the Perseverance rover. Mark was quoted in a Jet Propulsion Lab media release that led me back to his door for a conversation that began with those clouds above Mars. Mark Lemon, welcome back to Planetary Radio. Good to be talking about the clouds of Mars, although we have some other things that we may want to cover as well.

Welcome. Well, hello. It's great to be here again. So when we talked 10 years ago, we were still mourning the loss of Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. We were looking forward to picking a landing spot going strong. Maven, the UAE's hope. India's mom and others looking down from above. That's a lot of exploration in science. What has most excited and or surprised you after 10 more years of observing Mars? Well, it's a great time to be trying to explore Mars because we've got all of these wonderful assets

that are participating in the exploration. I love being on the rover teams, the lander teams as well, when there's that chance. It is just startling on maybe not a day-to-day basis, but certainly a month-to-month and a year-to-year basis that we can have this rover sitting there on Mars and find new things. We've intentionally set out to find new things, and we're still doing it on purpose. And then we're also doing it because Mars decides to show us something. So it's just excellent. That is such a regular theme across almost every show we do,

every person that I get to talk to, that there is no end to the surprises out there across our solar system and beyond. Do you still actually work with commands, write commands that get sent to Curiosity to tell it what it should look at and image? Well, I've had a lot of different roles on the different missions as time goes by, and some of them have literally been writing the last human readable version of the command file before it gets translated into something that the rover can execute. What I do on Curiosity, on Perseverance, is work with a very slightly higher level version of the commands and occasionally dabble in the actual command itself.

system engineering of the protocols for ensuring safety and things like that. There are a lot of people to make sure that I don't go and point the camera in a way that it's going to cause damage, that sort of thing. They make sure that they follow all of the rules. I worry about composing the pictures, making sure that they're going to achieve the science that I want, and that level of manipulating the commands. But yeah, I am sitting there saying, well, I want this rover to take a picture using these filters to see these wavelengths of light at that particular time. Then I get the privilege of seeing this imaging sequence

that I dreamed up happen and play with the data when we get them back from Mars. It's great. That is a heck of a thing to be able to do and tell people, yeah, I take pictures on Mars for a living in part. And I want to talk to you maybe toward the end of this conversation about what it takes to get a good picture, a good snapshot on Mars. Let's get to the story that caught my eye and made me think, shoot, I've got to bring Mark Lemon back. And this was a press release just recently about what we're learning about the clouds of Mars, which, you know, we've been seeing those for ages, but it was the beauty of some of

these new images that really caught my eye, quite literally. I knew I had to talk to you about it. Tell us about these, first of all. I mean, what are these new clouds and what are they made of? Yeah, clouds on Mars and our observations of them go way back. We were observing them from Earth before we ever sent anything to Mars. So it's not a surprise that there are clouds. We get to Mars with some of the things to be able to characterize them, starting with the orbiters, the first landers, and now the rovers. We're able to see the clouds in different ways. We've known, again, for some time that there are a couple kinds of clouds. There are water ice clouds.

And depending on where you are on Mars, those water ice clouds can form as low as the surface. They're fog in some places. And they're high altitude clouds, 15 kilometers, 10 miles in other places. Then Mars also has carbon dioxide clouds, dry ice. And these are frequently caused by gravity waves when basically a hot, cold section of atmosphere propagates itself upward with pressure changes. And when the atmosphere cools, it's already very cold.

You get the atmosphere itself below the freezing point of that atmosphere, which is carbon dioxide, and the carbon dioxide freezes out and you get clouds. Yeah, we took pictures of those clouds with Pathfinder. We've seen them from orbit. We've seen them from time to time. But there's not a ton of information about all of the different kinds. We've seen in daytime images with Curiosity, we see clouds all the time. They're not all the time.

We've seen them every year. There are seasons for them. And we see these faint, wavy patterns, these wave clouds, and have tried to characterize those. But we were shocked two years ago to see clouds during a time of year that we thought of as not cloudy for that particular site, which was right after the turn of the year, the northern spring equinox. which was right after the turn of the year, the northern spring equinox. And we got a few pictures of them at the time, but that turned out to be a very limited cloud season. But we could use some old data that we had to show that this was not a one-time occurrence. This had actually been happening, and we just didn't know about it. So we put a note on the calendar, and this year came back to it,

and it coincided essentially with Perseverance landing. So that was a very, very busy time dealing with Perseverance on the one hand and then trying to characterize these clouds that we saw with Curiosity on the other. But we put together this great set of observations. You've seen some of the results in these pictures that came out. They're gorgeous. We will put up a link to the press release that has some of these photos, and there are links from that as well. But we'll put that on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. I was shocked to read that some of these carbon dioxide clouds are more than 60 kilometers

up or about 200,000 feet, more than 200,000 feet. I'm surprised to learn that there's enough atmosphere at that height, especially above Mars, that you could have clouds. Was this a surprise to any of you? It's a surprise in a bigger picture sense. We knew it before we took these pictures, but it's certainly stunning to think about an atmosphere that's already 1% of what we have on Earth at the surface. And then you go 70 kilometers above that, and we're seeing clouds. But those clouds have been seen from orbit.

There was actually even about the same time we saw these clouds the first time with Curiosity, a paper came out from Todd Clancy using spectra taken from orbit to show that some particular high altitude, 60 kilometer altitude clouds that he was looking at were carbon dioxide. He could actually see the composition because he had spectra. And then with the spectra, he could tell that they were iridescent clouds. Iridescence shows up in spectroscopy differently than it does in the images. And you get this nice wavy spectrum. And he looks at that and says, what in the world is doing that? Oh, that's an iridescent cloud, which means that it's a cloud full of cloud particles

that are all just about the same size. So they all scatter light in exactly the same way. It all adds up in a coherent way. And you get what visually looks like this variation of pastel colors. There are spectacular clouds to look at on Earth. There are spectacular clouds to see on Mars. But that first indication was from the spectra from orbit that we actually had iridescence. As it happened, I had seen the iridescence in the pictures before I found out about that. The paper was being published at the time. So it's a way to see the same thing in two very different ways. So we know that there are these high altitude clouds. The orbiters see them and even Mars Pathfinder in some of the few images that it got in the twilight saw clouds that were

because the sun was shining on them when the sun was way down, they were demonstrated to be 50 plus kilometers high. That's essentially what we can see with these clouds is we, with the images from Curiosity, we can't measure that they're carbon dioxide. We can't measure that they're water ice. of the timing that we took the images and especially some of the nav cam images, the black and white ones that we released, where you can see the sunset line move across the clouds. It's basically the shadow of Mars projecting onto the clouds. And that tells you what the altitude is. So we can use that and figure out that whatever these clouds are, we're looking at clouds

that are up 50, 60, 70 kilometers, depending on the night and the season. From that, we start inferring that, well, the orbiters that can measure the composition do see water ice up to around 50 kilometers sometimes. But by the time you're above that, it's almost always CO2. I love that you could, in part, tell how high these clouds were by watching the sun crawl across them as it set. Pythagoras would be so proud. There was a word applied to these twilight or even nighttime clouds. I imagine a lot of us have seen them here on earth, but I had not seen the word before,

noctilucent. Yeah, there are a couple of words that I have used for these clouds that are not quite everyday conversation. These are noctilucent clouds, night shining noctilucent, and that describes clouds that are so high that the sun is still shining on them after it has gone from the surface and they're bright. They might be in the sky in the daytime, but you might miss them because they're faint, they're thin. But at night, when they are the only things that the sun is shining on, you cannot miss them. And so they're very commonly seen from high latitudes. They're clouds above the troposphere. The ones in the troposphere, the sun sets on close enough to the same time that they never get outstandingly bright. They make for beautiful sunsets, but they're not noctilucent clouds. These ones that are up in the mesosphere,

basically up at similar altitudes on Earth to where we see them on Mars, those clouds are the noctilucent clouds. And then among the noctilucent clouds, you can also see clouds that are iridescent. And iridescence is when you see the wavy colors across the clouds. And you can see that in the daytime too. If you find clouds that have all the particles have the same formation history, so usually young clouds, then you have a whole bunch of particles of the same or almost the same size. They scatter of the same or almost the same size, they scatter light the same way. And this cloud that would otherwise be white suddenly has red

and green and blue parts to it. And it's still just water, typically, when you see in the daytime on Earth. Well, when you see that iridescent cloud that is also noctilucent, the name that we have for that on Earth are nacreous clouds. Nacreous? Nacreous clouds. Okay. And the less highfalutin name that we have for those on Earth is mother of pearl clouds. Oh, yes. Now that I saw. And I have seen these.

I hope all of you out there have seen them. And really, I'm not kidding, folks. You need to take a look at some of these images, at least one of them, of these iridescent or mother of pearl clouds in the high atmosphere of Mars. It is just sublimely beautiful. Really, science at its artistic best. Yeah, I'd never seen colors like that on Mars except in colorful things that we took with us and actually see Mars making colors like that was awesome. I got a question for you that I wasn't expecting to ask because it didn't occur to me. I was many, many years ago in the Southwest, hot, dry day, and looked up at the sky with a whole bunch of other people who were there, and we saw color in the sky.

We couldn't see clouds. At least I don't remember seeing clouds. But there were the same sorts of faint color that we could see. Does that make any sense to you? Is that a phenomenon that you are familiar with? I've certainly seen ice clouds, sometimes colorful ones, in a similar environment anywhere from Tucson to here, a more humid version of that, Texas. The clouds that do that would likely be very thin clouds with very uniform particle sizes.

So you basically don't necessarily see the white of the cloud. And then you see the shimmering colors from it. And that's just telling you that you have ice particles that are all about the same size. And this is probably, I'm just guessing here, I didn't see what you saw, probably very close to the tropopause. So again, you know, above 10 kilometers. If I was standing on Mars under some of these iridescent clouds, looking up at them through my helmet faceplate, would I, with my naked eye, be able to see some of these colors? Or is that something I need instrumentation for? I find it very difficult to predict the details of what you would see when you look at anything through a picture and then look at it with your own eyes.

It's always surprising to go from one to the other. But in my experience, yeah, those are colors that you would see. It wouldn't look precisely like the picture because we would perceive things differently. But again, we would be in a dark environment with a slightly bright sky and then have these shimmering colors above us. Those were not super processed to bring out things that we would not otherwise see. Those were calibrated images. They're displayed a certain way, but you have that problem whenever you show an image on a monitor. That kind of issue, but there was no particular effort put into making those clouds look more spectacular than they are.

They just are like that. And when you get away from looking towards sunset, the pictures with the colors are looking above the area where the sun set previously. When you look away from there, you don't get the iridescence nearly as much. It fades off pretty quickly. And then you tend to see essentially the whitish clouds

in the tannish and darkening sky. So when the picture is taken in other directions, don't have those shimmering colors. I got to think that I got to hope anyway, that in some number of decades, they're going to be Martians on Mars, human Martians who, you know, will be out on expeditions and maybe just love the thought that, hey, I got to see some mother of pearl clouds the other day. When you were on the show 10 years ago, we also talked about fog as it was seen apparently by Phoenix with its great surface stereo imager that you were in charge of. And you mentioned it again now. Is fog, these clouds that are right down on the surface, is that, are we seeing this as a fairly common occurrence on Mars?

Fog is not uncommon. It is common in some places. It is not likely at all around Curiosity. That would be a major surprise if we saw the fogs there someday but at higher northern latitudes we would not be surprised to see fog if we were up near viking 2 we would expect to see fog around perseverance i haven't looked at the details i'm personally not expecting to see fog there but i haven't proven that that is the right expectation. I don't think it's a high enough latitude yet to expect it. But at a higher latitude, yes, you would expect it. Another thing that happened 10 years ago,

you couldn't say for sure that it snows on Mars, that there's snowfall. How about now? I'm pretty confident that it snows on Mars at a high enough latitude. about now? I'm pretty confident that it snows on Mars at high enough latitude. I guess you could have the polar ice caps just forming, right? I mean, just condensing out, reverse sublimation, I suppose. But you're thinking that they're actually, I mean, water ice snow or carbon dioxide snow or some combination of the two? Just going from memory, I think that there has been some evidence for carbon dioxide, snow at the South Pole, but that happens in the polar night. Whether or not there is water, ice, snow, as opposed to just condensation, basically

giant frost piles, may be an open question, but I think that it's fairly likely that snow contributes. White Christmas on Mars, yeah. Yeah. One of the other things that we talked about in the past and still I love to talk about is how knowing that these familiar phenomena taking place on Mars makes that otherwise still very exotic world seem so much

more, more earth-like. There's a real emotional impact to this, isn't there? Oh, there is. I mean, at a technical level, I spend my time studying usually dust on Mars, but, you know, stuff in the Martian atmosphere. And there are a lot of technical things that I can do. But one of the things that I really enjoy doing, going beyond the science of it and just talking to people, bringing it to people, that's why I write or contribute to press releases like the one at JPL. There are many things you can do

to show Mars as this dynamic place. The familiar happens there. It's not just a bunch of rocks sitting there. And I know a lot of people who are really excited about all those rocks sitting there, but those rocks have going on around them, dust devils sweeping across and blowing things around and dust storms coming across the entire landscape and clouds going overhead. And now we know those clouds are even shining with cool colors sometimes. It's a cooler place than we sometimes give it credit for being.

I'm glad you mentioned the dust devils because I still love to see them, of course, especially in movies. I guess Phoenix has not had enough of them though. And so there was this story recently, I'd love to hear your comments about, where apparently somebody decided, let's sprinkle some dirt, some sand on Phoenix's solar panels. And it actually, they saw some of the dust that was collecting there swept away.

So the Insight solar panels. I'm sorry. Yeah, of course. Of course, Insight. Yeah. Same engineering, but different problem. So yeah, InSight has been sitting there getting dustier and dustier as we have gone along with this mission. With Spirit, we went for 400 days of the solar panels getting dustier every single day before all of a sudden they got cleaned off one day by wind gusts.

With Opportunity, the wind gusts came more often, but they got cleaned off one day by wind gusts. With Opportunity, the wind gusts came more often, but it got cleaned off pretty regularly. With Spirit, it got cleaned off almost every Mars year, though there was one exception and Spirit did not survive that winter. InSight has not been cleaned. The solar panels are a different design. They're even a different design from the Phoenix lander. And for whatever reason, the dust that has stuck to them has not come off again. And there has been winds. There have been dust devils. We have a meteorology experiment.

We can measure these big vortices. We can measure these strong winds. We can even see dust being picked up off of the surface and sand blow around on the surface and almost nothing happens to the array. I mean, there was one day early in the mission, like Sol 50 or 60, where we saw a tiny part of the array get slightly cleaner with one particular wind gust. I was like, okay, cool. Wind gust clean things, we're good. Year later, hasn't happened again. Year after that, hasn't happened again. So at this point, the engineers and the people in charge of the mission are a little desperate because we have a fraction of the energy that we had before, which when we started was way

more than we needed. And now it is restricting the science that can be done. that can be done. So the idea is to do these little tests that if you think about winds cleaning things in a natural environment, yeah, you can blow dust off of something, but a lot of dust is sticky. So if you're doing it in your house, sometimes you want to use a rag or something. Well, we don't have access to that. If you look at natural environments that get cleaned, the thing that those environments frequently have in common, if it's not water, is sand. Because the dust is sticky, it is small, the wind goes right over it like it's not even there, so you blow on the surface, a lot of the dust never comes up. The sand moves across the surface and it bounces and bounces and bounces. And every

dust particle that gets hit never comes back. So that's the general idea with sand cleaning something. I have no idea how far it'll go. Well, best of luck to all of you on that mission, of course. And maybe a particularly strong dust devil, a Wizard of Oz strength one, at least on the Mars scale, will help a little more. Let's talk a little bit more about dust, since you do study it so carefully. Just two weeks ago, I was talking with Brian Keating about dust getting in the way of his examination of the origins of the universe. It doesn't really get in your way. I mean, do you still find it as fascinating as ever? And do you think it's going to continue to be a problem,

especially when humans get up to the red planet and decide to live there? Well, I think it will be a fact of life for Mars. You will not go to Mars with a robot or with people without being concerned about dust and how you're going to deal with it. And some of the early efforts, the concern with us was simply, well, that's going to be the limit to the mission. Spirit and Opportunity were only 90-day missions. So we learned that maybe we were a little pessimistic, but we also see that it is a threat. It has ended. Well, everything solar paneled that we've sent, this mission is complete is because of that.

We're going to have to deal with the dust in the sky, the dust on surfaces, the dust that people bring in. That's one of the motivations for finding out more about the physical nature of the dust. If you do anything outside and come in, you're going to bring in dust. The Apollo astronauts complained about that of the dust. If you do anything outside and come in, you're going to bring in dust. The Apollo astronauts complained about that with the moon.

That's going to be an issue with Mars as well. The Martian dust is magnetic. There will probably be computers involved in Mars exploration. I'm just guessing here. You think? And I have not tried to use a computer in an environment full of magnetic dust, but I'm not thinking that that's the best combination.

I'm not trying to suggest that these are insoluble problems. I just think that this is going to be a big concern, and so we're studying the physical nature of the dust, but we're also studying the meteorology. We're not worried about an event like in the Martian where the dust storm comes in and blows over giant structures, but the dust is still kicked up. The sand at the base of the dust devils is kicked up. And so if you're out there, your piece of equipment is out there, whatever, it gets sandblasted. We know that things can have long lifetimes, but we also know that those lifetimes can be limited by the dust and the accumulation of things. I think it

is necessary to understand it as a factor in the environment that we will face. And then beyond that, I think that it's just an interesting part of that environment, that being able to look at the weather instruments and see that there's a vortex, a dip in the pressure over time, and then that dip in the pressure goes away. And maybe you've also got a measurement that the wind was going to the left, and then it went to the right, and then it went back to the left. If you're a meteorologist, you can do a lot with that. that. But it's so much easier to visualize what happens on Mars when you can see that that vortex, that low pressure system, that tiny low pressure system has winds that move sand and pick up dust and blow them around. And so we see these columns of dust moving across the landscape. And sometimes, like at the Curiosity site, there's not that much dust to pick up so they're hard to see most of the time but they're still there at spirit we have wonderful pictures of these columns

of dust moving across the landscape and then at perseverance it's just been crazy that we were just starting to get into our attempts to monitor and track dust devils and see where they were and when they occurred. And they just kept showing up in all the images that were taken for other reasons that we had years at InSight where even though we see the signatures of a vortex in the meteorological data, we have not seen a dust devil. Perseverance, we just see dust devils all the time. Of course, it's a great season for that there right now. I got one other dusty question for you. Are we beginning to understand the forces behind those dust storms that come now and then on a semi-regular basis, at least, that completely envelop Mars? Well, until you got to the last part,

the answer was pretty much yes, that we understand the development of dust storms reasonably well. There are lots of things that go into them. The cocktail of making a dust storm can be reproduced in the models pretty reliably. And the models can put the dust storms in the right places. Their frequencies in the models on Mars match where we actually see them on Mars. What makes a Martian dust storm decide to become a really large regional storm or to even merge regional storms and become this global event? I really don't think we're nearly there yet. That's something that we have to understand. If you're worried about whether there's going to be a global dust storm affecting your mission in the next year, that's not something we can predict right now. Wow. I want to go a little bit further out in

the solar system. You've been around long enough that you've done work with Jupiter's clouds during the Galileo mission, the Galileo probe that plunged down through that atmosphere. Are you looking forward to the arrival of Dragonfly at Saturn's moon Titan? I know that you've had a lot of curiosity about that, that moon that has that atmosphere that is so much thicker, not only the thicker than what we have seen on Mars, but then what we have here on Earth. Yeah, I'm loving the idea of Dragonfly. And that is just going to be incredible to see from that kind of perspective what it's like on Titan. I got started as a scientist with looking at Titan, even before I did some work with Jupiter, Used Hubble Space Telescope trying to find clouds

and eventually we did find some clouds with Hubble. And I did some other work related to that just as a graduate student and as a postdoc. So being able to go back and see it again and see new things. I mean, imagine Huygens and what it did and then think about how much more a dragonfly can be. Very tantalizing. I got one other thing to ask you about. You wrote a great article for us some

years ago. I think it was encouraged by my former beloved colleague, Emily Lakdawalla, about what it takes to get great photos on another world. We've talked with your colleague, to get great photos on another world. We've talked with your colleague, another famous planetary photographer, Jim Bell, about this. What should I consider if I want to take the perfect snapshot on Mars or elsewhere for that matter? Well, yeah, trying to take that picture is certainly something that Jim, I, a lot of other people put a lot of thought into. The themes from some of the earlier work is it takes a village. You don't just pick up your camera and take a picture. You have to consider that it's part of a very elaborate system that has lots of ways that that system can fail. Whether it's trying to command a motor to move like the mask that your camera is on,

it has to be the right temperature or it's not going to move. The electronics of your camera probably don't want to warm up too abruptly. Electronics don't like large temperature changes, so you have to make sure that the heating there is right. So there's a lot of engineering involved. Then there's just the distribution of jobs across the mission that I come up with an idea. I say, okay, I want to take a picture of the sunset. Here is where the sunset is. I can use some software to figure out exactly which direction the camera has to be pointed, or I can just look at a previous image. And I can compose it even. I can look at the mosaic that we took during the day and say, here's what we see. Here's where the sun will be. Here's a set of pictures that I want. And then we need someone to say, well, okay, if you want your pictures to fall there,

then we need a command that moves the motor that's driving the camera here, there, and the other place. So we have these payload uplink leads that take these ideas and make them into real sequences. And then we basically go into a whole series of committee meetings with scientists from other groups. Well, I want the sunset picture, but Stephanie over there wants to get a picture of this rock and probably not at sunset, but there's a finite amount of energy. There's a finite amount of time we can put into planning things.

So sometimes you just don't have the mental band path, the mental resources available to fill up a rover day completely because some of the things are complex. Sometimes you don't have the power. Sometimes you have everything and it works. So we have to get through all of those committee meetings. And then finally this computer version of the command gets sent up to the

rover and it will execute it. Hopefully the execution goes okay. And then the rover will wait for an orbiter to fly overhead and the result, the image in compressed form will get beamed up to the orbiter. The orbiter will eventually turn around and send it to Earth. Goes through a lot of different places on Earth

and then finally I get my pictures and I can use software to manipulate them, make them into mosaics and things like that. Not point and shoot. I will keep this in mind every time I look at one of these beautiful images from Mars and elsewhere from you and others and have some respect for the work that has gone into it. Take a look occasionally at that little photo credit down there. That doesn't even do anything justice, but it'll say NASA, JPL,

That doesn't even do anything justice, but it'll say NASA, JPL, Caltech, ASU, SSI, if I'm involved. And that doesn't even give you a sense of the large number of people that it took to actually make that really happen. But yeah, those pictures represent the work doing a lot of this work from home, even before the pandemic forced a whole lot of us to join you working from home. How does it feel to sit at your breakfast table or whatever and work with spacecraft on another world? Oh, it's great. And, you know, the commute is excellent because the Martian day is different for ours and the rovers are in different places. And who knows what time of day we're going to get data that I'm interested in. I can wake up in the morning, start some coffee and sit down and catch up on things right away. And we've had the ability

to do that from home for a long time. These missions have been developed ever since Spirit and Opportunity outlived their 90 days, we realized that people had to go home. They couldn't stay at JPL. And connecting from when I was at Texas A&M, connecting from there was no different from connecting from home. So I frequently took advantage of working from home even then. And then I became someone who worked from home full time about three years ago. I have to do some things to try and keep my home life separate from my work life, that it is tempting to find a lot of time working. I think a lot of people fall into that naturally when home becomes work and vice versa.

Tell me about it, yeah. Yeah. We power through and we find ways to balance our lives again. Mark, I like to say to astronomers, clear skies. I guess that's not exactly what you want to hear in your line of business and in your arm of planetary science. But just the same, I hope that you'll be able to keep up this great work and sharing it with us for many more years to come

and maybe for many other worlds. Thank you so much. It's been great talking to you and getting this update. Well, thank you. Space Science Institute Senior Research Scientist Mark Lemon. You'll find great images and much more on this week's episode page, planetary.org slash radio. I'll be right back with Bruce. Bill Nye the planetary guy here.

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We're just trying to save the world. It is time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here is the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, Bruce Betts, is with us once again. Hi there. Welcome. Good evening. Hello. hey there, hi there, and ho there. I figured good evening would be a good lead-in for giving us that tour of the night sky that you always provide. It is a good evening, at least if it's not cloudy for you. There'll be a lot of good evenings coming up. If you look low in the west shortly after sunset, you'll be able to see super bright Venus shining there. It's gotten fairly easy to see if you have any kind of decent view to the western horizon. And above Venus is much

dimmer reddish Mars, and they will be getting closer and closer together until July 12th, when we'll be snuggling with each other. And in the middle of the night, Jupiter looking really bright and Saturn looking yellowish, rising in the middle of the night, Jupiter looking really bright and Saturn looking yellowish, rising in the middle of the night in the east and off high in the south by pre-dawn. And to complete our naked eye planet visibility, we've even got Mercury making an apparition low in the pre-dawn east. So all five planets you can see without a telescope fairly easily. Very impressive. And I'll add a couple of cute lineups as well. We've got Venus, Pollux, and Castor. The Gemini twin stars are kind of in a nice line on June 24th, and then kind of a line after that.

And the Moon hanging out with Jupiter and Saturn on June 28th. Do you remember the day that we spent at the Roman Forum when you were shooting random space fact videos? And I helped, and then I went off to look at the forum. Yes, I do. You can still see what is left of the sculptures of Castor and Pollux in their, I assume, temple there in the forum. And it was very exciting. We shot a random space fact video with Castor and Pollux temple, or what's left of it, in the background.

In fact, even involved my able twin, Ekerb. But alas, we digress. We move on to this week in space history. Hey, it was two years ago this week that LightSail 2 launched aboard a Falcon Heavy, and we're still up there solar sailing two years later. So that's exciting. And looking good? I mean, things are still healthy. Is there any degradation?

There is. It's getting a little, you know, a little fuzzier in the brain. The sail has got more crinkles, and it has a few spots that look like the aluminized part is delaminating. I've got an article coming out on the 25th on our website at planetary.org. A longer update about what we're doing in the extended mission. A little fuzzier in the brain, aren't we all? Huh? Exactly.

Huh? Exactly. Georgi Dobrojovsky, Vladislav Volkov, Viktor Patsyayev, all perished and are the only three people to have perished above the von Kármán line to have died in space. We move on to random space fact. So that Soyuz 11 crew, I found out something I didn't realize. One, let's credit, credit is due. They were the first to live on board a space station, Salyut 1, for 22 days, but they were actually the backup

crew until just a couple days before launch. Wow. Have you ever heard this? No. Yeah. An x-ray of one of the primary crew's lungs showed what they thought was tuberculosis indications, a dark spot on the x-ray. So they actually chose to completely go with the backup crew and the primary crew, Leonov, Kubasov, and Kolodin, were sidelined. Turned out that Kubasov, who they thought of tuberculosis, just had a cold. Oh my gosh. There but for the grace of the Russian space agency, I guess, or the Soviet space agency at that time. That's quite a story. One of those trippy stories. Two of the three primary crew went on to fly on Apollo-Soyuz.

Two of the three primary crew went on to fly on Apollo-Soyuz. All right, we move on to happier times in the trivia contest. Who holds the record for the most launches to space from Earth at seven? How'd we do, Matt? Let me give you the rhyming answer to this. Then we can talk a little bit more about it because this tripped up quite a few people, actually. Gene Lewin in Washington submitted, Jerry Ross reached his seventh space launch all from this marble blue,

but Franklin Chang Diaz kept up that pace and seven he completed too. Jerry Ross flew in three different craft. Chang Diaz added discovery. So though they are tied both with seven in trips, in ships, Diaz leads four to three. Nice. Not only poetry, but an additional random space fact. I like it. Thank you very much, Gene. Here is our winner. First time winner, Judy Engelsberg in New Jersey, the Garden State. Really is if you get out of Newark and places like that. Anyway, Judy, got it right with Jerry Ross and Franklin Chang Diaz. She adds to that, greetings Earthlings and Astrophage. A little tip of the space helmet there to our friend Andy Weir and his new book.

Congrats, Judy. You have won yourself both a Planetary Radio t-shirt and a copy of Brian Keating's book that we talked about a couple of weeks ago, losing the Nobel Prize. There are several people who noted John Young's lunar launch. If you count that, it would have put him as seven as well. But then you did address that when you posed this question a couple of weeks ago. Launches to space from Earth. when you posed this question a couple of weeks ago.

Launches to space from Earth. But yeah, show-offs also count their launches from the surface of the moon. Joe Poutre, also from New Jersey. I expect they have more frequent flyer miles than most countries' entire populations. I suppose. I have to think about that, Joe. Ian Gilroy in Australia wants to know if I need to declare a conflict of interest because

Franklin Chang Diaz is, of course, also the founder of the Ad Astra rocket company. And he hears me give them a plug each time I sign off the show. No, no conflict of interest. I just, I love Ad Astra. I've been there. I love what they do. No, forget it, Ian. I'm not knuckling under.

Edwin King in the UK. Ross may or may not also jointly hold the U.S. record for number of EVAs with Michael Lopez-Alegria. Lopez-Alegria definitely has 10. Ross has a confirmed nine, but one of his missions was for the Department of Defense and is still classified. Ooh, spooky. It could be, could be. Finally, this from our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild. He didn't quite get it right because like so many of you, he only identified Jerry Ross.

But here was his submission. It's still a nice tribute to Jerry. Seven times he flew to space and seven he came back. 60 hours EVA. He really had the knack of launching things and fixing things, and that includes the Hubble. I present to you Jerry Ross, of whom there is no double. Yay, unless it's Franklin Chang Diaz.

Thank you, Dave. If we go to Constellations Land, what is the only one of the 88 official IAU constellations named for an actual historic person? Named for an actual person. What's the only constellation

of the official constellations? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. So that leaves out Betts and Dog of the official constellations, go to planetary.org slash radiocontest. So that leaves out Betts and Dogg because you're not yet one of the officially identified. Yeah, it's just unofficial, but important. You have this time until the 30th. That would be June 30th at 8 a.m. Pacific time

to get us the answer. And I have another copy of that great book, the one I was raving about last week, Carbon, One Atom's Odyssey by John Barnett. It is published by No Starch Press. And this will also go to the winner. It is gorgeous. I think whoever gets this, whether you win it from us or get it on your own, will probably display it very proudly

and enjoy his wonderful drawings. We're done. All right, everybody go out there, look up the night sky and think about windy planets. Thank you. Good night. Windy planets. Yeah, of course, there are some, but Bruce mentions this because just before we started, my grandson informed me that he's now going to call Uranus and Neptune the windy planets because they just look that way. And I said, yeah, not bad. Do you agree, planetary scientist? I do. I do. Neptune even has the fastest measured winds in the solar system.

So, yeah, windy planets. There you go. in the solar system. So yeah, windy planets. There you go. The chief scientist of the Planetary Society, Bruce Betts, is in full agreement with the equally distinguished five-year-old Rowan as we close out this edition of What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society

in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its members who see all sorts of wonders in the sky. Share their vision at planetary.org slash join. Mark Hilverda and Jason Davis are our associate producers. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser at Astro.