Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The Worlds of TRAPPIST-1

Episode Date: March 1, 2017

The discovery of seven, Earth-sized planets in a nearby solar system was announced last week. Astrophysicist and planetary scientist Sara Seager joins us to share her excitement about this find that includes three planets in the habitable zone.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The many worlds of TRAPPIST-1, 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. MIT astrophysicist and planetary scientist Sarah Seeger was there when NASA announced the discovery of seven Earth-sized worlds circling a nearby star. She'll tell us why this revelation is even more exciting than you may think. Surely you've heard about SpaceX plans to send two humans looping around the moon next year? Bill Nye shares his thoughts. Venus is still high and bright, according to Bruce Betts. He'll join us for What's Up.

Two missions to Jupiter's ocean moon Europa are making progress. Planetary Society digital editor Jason Davis is here to tell us about them right now. Jason, you wrote about pretty big news for the Europa missions, and I do say missions plural now. We're going to talk about the Lander mission, which we have not really discussed on this program before. But first, what's the news regarding the so-called Europa Clipper, the orbiter? Yeah, so the Clipper officially moved into phase B. And for everyone not up on the exciting life cycle development of a mission at NASA, they have phase A through E. B is the development phase. So we're officially now developing the concepts behind the instrument. It's kind of still on the drawing board,

but one step further along. If all goes well, when will this spacecraft leave for the outer planets? And what will it be riding? The Clipper would leave notionally in 2022. And notionally meaning if it continues to get funding from Congress and actually makes it all the way through the development phase to becoming a reality. And it would right now launch on the Space Launch System, that would put it on a direct trajectory straight to Jupiter, which is something that no other vehicle can do right now. If they don't use SLS, they'd have to use a different launch vehicle and do some swing-bys of Earth and Venus, and that kind of changes everything and lengthens the cruise time. That's the slow boat to Europa in this case. Let's turn to the lander. What is the news regarding

this mission? It's not nearly as far along, is it? No, it's what they call pre-Phphase A, so not very far along. But what happened was Congress, as part of its direction to tell NASA to do a separate lander mission, NASA had to commission a science definition team where it's a bunch of scientists and engineers all get together, talk about what would this theoretical spacecraft look like? And what could it do? And they release what's called a science definition team report. That report just came out. And it's the most fascinating thing about it. When I was reading, it just kind of blew me away. There's this wonderful quote, like on page six, that says, the lander will directly search for signs of life on Europa. And that's something we haven't done since the Viking days on Mars,

is really do this, try to detect, is there life on the surface in a sample that we pick up? So that's pretty cool. And then the report goes on to describe all kinds of other aspects of the mission and what kind of instruments the spacecraft might have. Pretty exciting. And let's hope that the results, when this lander gets up there, if it gets up there, are going to be more conclusive than they were from Vikings 1 and 2. How soon might this happen? Again, we'll use the word notionally here. In the baseline plan that they present in the report, they say the lander may be around 2024 or 2025. A lot of things still

would have to happen in terms of funding to get that going. If that launch date did stick, again, they would need to use SLS. And in this case, the lander would be so heavy, they actually don't have any choice but to use SLS at this point. And even with SLS, they would have to use still a swing by and a deep space maneuver. They swing by Earth and get another kind of push out to Jupiter. So that kind of gives you an idea of how hard it is to slow down around Jupiter and then slow down around Europa and get way in close to Jupiter. It just takes a lot of fuel and a lot of mass to do that. So by the time that was all said and done, the earliest we'd be looking at

results from the surface would be probably 2031 or 2032 at this point. So a long ways out, but hey, it's something to look forward to. It's pretty cool that it's moving forward. Yikes. I'll keep taking my vitamins. Just one other question. How long will this spacecraft be able to survive in that terrible radiation environment? Not very long. And that's one of the key interesting things about the mission. After this long journey, it would only be on the surface for a few weeks. It would only be battery powered. Mainly the reason is it needs a relay orbiter.

It needs to have a spacecraft in orbit around Europa, which would actually be a piece of the spacecraft that carried it there, to relay the signals back to Earth. And this report estimates that an orbiter around Europa would probably fail within a month because it would just be flooded with radiation. And then, of course, the lander would have no way to send signals back to Earth. Well, I hope that it can get its work done quickly and hope it gets to make that mission. Hope that it can get its work done quickly and hope it gets to make that mission. There is, as we said, a blog that Jason has posted about this, posted at February 21st, right after the announcement.

It's at planetary.org, and it has many other great details. Jason, thanks so much. Thanks for having me, Matt. That's Jason Davis, digital editor for the Planetary Society. Up next is the boss, the CEO of the Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill, we find you in Washington, D.C. this week. Why? We are here. The policy analysts of the Planetary Society, Jason Callahan and Casey Dreyer and I are here meeting with various members of Congress along with the congressional blitz. Members from the Planetary Society in the

Washington, D.C. area came into town to meet with various congressmen and talk to them about us, about planetary science, the importance of planetary exploration for the U.S., for NASA, and for humankind, if I may. Has anyone brought up SpaceX's Elon Musk big announcement just yesterday as we speak? Maybe. People in the planetary community, though, aren't that, that's not really their thing, because they want this Falcon Heavy rocket or the Space Launch System rocket to carry planetary payloads farther and deeper into space. Either one of the rockets, according to the specifications, would be great for certain missions. Now, SpaceX and Elon Musk have made extraordinary claims in the past about their schedules. I'm open-minded, of course, but I'd be surprised if they fly two

people in a free return orbit around the moon in 2018. I mean, I'm not saying it won't happen. It just seems like an aggressive schedule. They haven't launched the first Falcon Heavy rocket yet. And as the CEO of your Planetary Society and grateful for the support of our many, many members around the world, we are scheduled to be on the second Falcon Heavy with the LightSail 2 spacecraft. So I hope the Falcon Heavy's cadence picks up and things go very well. But by the end of 2018,

to fly people around the moon is aggressive. John Logsdon, our friend and colleague, member of the Planetary Society Board, said much the same thing this morning on National Public Radio, that, yeah, they've been known to have their intentions, the schedule slip, but they have achieved eventually everything they said they would. Oh, man, it's a fantastic thing. And the other thing that I really look forward to as an engineer is pretty soon they're going to use one of the boosters that SpaceX landed on either a floating platform or on concrete pad to reuse one of those boosters on a mission of flight with expensive spacecraft on board. So no one yet has reused a booster in this fashion. So that's another milestone which you got to figure SpaceX will meet eventually, will reach eventually.

Thank you, Bill. I better let you get to Capitol Hill. Oh, yes. We've got people to influence. No, we really are making the case. I'm feeling good about things. Thank you for having me on the air. Let's have the electric computer machine.

Let's change the world. Always a pleasure to talk to the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy. having me on the air. Let's have the electric computer machine. Let's change the world. Always a pleasure to talk to the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy. Now we're going to talk with Sarah Seeger. She was part of that NASA announcement about seven, count them, seven Earth-sized planets found by a relatively nearby star. by a relatively nearby star. Our progress in the discovery of exoplanets has been extraordinary. Nearly 3,600 so far, including many that share a star with other worlds. Most intriguing are the growing number of Earth-sized planets in the so-called habitable zone,

where liquid water may flow. Perhaps the greatest find yet was announced at a NASA media briefing on February 22. MIT astrophysicist and planetary scientist Sarah Seeger was there to congratulate Belgian astronomer Michael Guillaume and his international team, who published their findings in Nature that day. and his international team, who published their findings in Nature that day. Sarah also explained why she is so excited about this newfound solar system centered on a small star called Trappist-1. And she joins us now to share that excitement with us. Sarah, thanks so much for joining us once again on Planetary Radio

to talk, in part at least, about this big announcement just made last week. Let me start by asking you, I told some people I couldn't decide where I should vacation, Trappist-1e or F. Do you have a recommendation? Wow, well, my recommendation is if you ever find a way to get there is to go to Morgul. Yeah, flippant, of course. You talked during the press conference last week, the media briefing by NASA where this announcement was made, about how exciting this is. What do you find most exciting about this discovery of seven Earth-sized worlds? main research goals of finding another Earth and signs of life on another world. What's most exciting is just that we now have not just one, but many planets whose atmospheres we know for sure we can study. And doesn't this say a lot about what we are coming to believe is the number of Earth-like or at least Earth-sized planets in our galaxy? I'm glad you corrected that because

all we know about is Earth-size and in some cases, approximately Earth mass. So yes, actually, we're starting to think that all stars have planets. And not only that, but small rocky worlds are very common. So it's great to have at least one set of them all set, ready to go for when the James Webb Space Telescope launches and is ready to take data. Oh, and we definitely want to talk about JWST in a few minutes. It is a recurring theme on this show, how we are gradually beginning to fill in the variables on the Drake equation. Do you see this happening too? Well, we have been for a while seeing at least the first few terms of the Drake equation get filled in, and it's definitely gratifying. Let's talk about this

solar system. How does it compare with our own? Well, this new system is absolutely nothing like our own, to be honest. I mean, maybe only in kind of the number of planets that it has. But in our solar system, we really see it in two or even three separate categories of planets. We have the terrestrial worlds, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, which they're very different, of course, from each other, but they're all rocky worlds. And then we have the giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, which are mostly hydrogen and helium. And then we have Uranus and Neptune. But in this particular case, they'd all be lumped together from our viewpoint as terrestrial worlds. It'd be like having seven objects like Venus, Earth, or bigger than Mars.

It's a very tiny solar system, right? I mean, at least compared to ours. That's right. I mean, all of these planets would be crammed in well within where Mercury is in our planetary system. Now, the main difference, which may have led to all of these other differences, is the star itself. The star is what we call an ultra cool dwarf star, which if you pick apart, the name is kind of funny, right? Because we would have had dwarf stars, then cool dwarf stars, and then having used up cool and dwarf, the only thing to add was ultra. This star itself is so tiny. Any smaller and less massive, this object wouldn't even be a star. It wouldn't be able to fuse hydrogen. It would be a brown dwarf.

These dwarf stars have come up before on the show, and maybe non-intuitively, they may actually be pretty good places to look for life. So I've been told anyway. Why is that? Well, I wouldn't necessarily say that everyone's in agreement that these are good places or, you know, these places will have life that we can look for. What we're really doing now is we're going after the easiest group of planets to find right now. And because the most popular or the easiest way today of finding planets is with the transit technique, that's when the planet goes in front of the star

as seen from the telescope, the smaller the star, the more light a like-sized planet can block. So the team that discovered these worlds purposely went after the smallest stars out there. And there's no shortage of these dwarf stars in our galaxy, right? Well, there's no shortage of them. The M stars in general are the most common type of star out there. But like all stars, all stars have a different limitation that there are only so many bright ones. NASA has been having a great time with this story. In fact, we'll put up a link to a really terrific site that they've created. But that site is full of these rather fanciful artist's concepts of what these planets might look like. And I wonder if that troubles you at all, because, I mean, they are careful to say that these are no more than artist's concepts.

Well, we work so hard every day, and like most people's job is really quite tedious. So we do like to take a break and speculate once in a while. I'm definitely fine with this as long as people know that it's illustrated, not actual. Yeah. There certainly is the chance, and maybe a good one, as we also find water in more and more places around our solar system in the galaxy. If they do have surface water, it very likely is liquid water. That's right. I mean, water is a very abundant material. So we're hoping that some of these do have liquid water. There's a good chance that at least one of them does. The Spitzer Space Telescope, which has been at work up there in space for a good long while now, about 14 years, played a key role in this discovery. Is there a reason that it was

especially well suited for this? Yes, there are two reasons. One is a space telescope above the blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere and away from the day-night cycle is just incredibly huge improvement over what we can do from ground-based telescopes. The second thing is this ultra cool dwarf star is very, very faint at visual, at optical wavelengths, where the ground-based telescope that discovered it operates. Spitzer works at infrared wavelengths, and so the star is relatively bright at infrared wavelengths. So having a telescope that's more sensitive to bright stars, that has no day-night cycle, and is above the blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere is why Spitzer was able to do such a great job. It was able to stare at the object for 20 days and nights

straight. Wow. And that's a lot of observation time that was made available to this team, and thank goodness it was. The last time we talked, it was because we were visiting the next great infrared telescope that will hopefully be launched very soon now. And of course, that's the James Webb Space Telescope that you already mentioned. And you're quite involved with that. Why are you so much looking forward to this great new observing platform unfolding in space? Well, it's not just me, but astronomers all around the globe. We're excited because it's so much more powerful than anything that came before it. It's much larger.

It's got a much larger collecting area than Hubble. thing that came before it. It's much larger. It's got a much larger collecting area than Hubble, and it's going to be away from Earth's orbit at the L2 point, where it can make observations away from the bright, hot Earth. But in particular, the reason why I'm so interested in the James Webb is because of its capability to study atmospheres of other worlds. It's going to be able to look at the planets as they go in front of their star, as they transit, and as some of the starlight shines through the atmosphere by subtracting the star without they go in front of their star, as they transit, and as some of the star light shines through the atmosphere, by subtracting the star without the planet in front of it from the star with the planet in front of it, we actually can try to tell what's in the planet atmosphere. And the James Webb will just do a far better job than we've been able to do so far

with Hubble on giant and smaller planets. Sarah Seeger will return with more about the worlds of TRAPPIST-1 and a look ahead at the future of exoplanet research. This is Planetary Radio. Where did we come from? Are we alone in the cosmos? These are the questions at the core of our existence. And the secrets of the universe are out there, waiting to be discovered. But to find find them we have to go into space we have to explore this endeavor unites us space exploration truly brings out the best in us encouraging people from all walks of life to work together to achieve a common goal to know the cosmos and our place within it.

This is why the Planetary Society exists. Our mission is to give you the power to advance space science and exploration. With your support, we sponsor innovative space technologies, inspire curious minds, and advocate for our future in space. We are the Planetary Society. Join us. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan.

TRAPPIST-1 got its name from the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope in Chile. It was used to discover the first world, circling close to this ultra-cool dwarf. Now we know there are seven Earth-sized planets out there, three of which are in the habitable zone. MIT astrophysicist and planetary scientist Sarah Seeger wants to know much more about them, and she hopes the soon-to-fly James Webb Space Telescope will be the right tool. Is it your hope that the JWST will be able to observe these planets circling TRAPPIST-1 and identify what's in their atmospheres and perhaps find elements that would give us some indication of biological activity? Well, that's the dream. That would be the ultimate holy grail of the entire field of

exoplanets realized early, because we were counting on this being a decades long journey. And the TRAPPIST system is outside of our experience. So we're not sure these things have atmospheres. If they have atmospheres, we're not sure what's in them. study planet formation aren't sure if volatiles, if like water was delivered to these planets by asteroids or comets or whatever they have in that system. So we're really starting out to answer the most basic questions possible. But there's no question we hold hope that they also have more interesting things in their atmosphere, such as water vapor, a sign of liquid water as all life as we know it, and even some sign of gases that don't belong that we might attribute to life. I wouldn't call these Earth twins just because the star is so different and the conditions on these planets will be so different from what we know, but there's certainly a chance that we can find what we're looking for in the next few years. Even before the JWST takes to space,

there is this other mission which is launching this year, which I knew about, but I did not know until I started to prepare for our conversation, is actually an MIT-led mission. MIT, of course, your institution. And that's TESS. Tell us about this spacecraft. Well, TESS is an all-sky survey. It's going to look at most of the sky over the course of two years. It has four identical cameras. You can think of them like glorified telephoto lenses. And each camera can observe a very large field of view about 24 by 24 square degrees. And all set together, they make a strip on the sky of 24 by 90 degrees.

And each of these strips TESS will stare at for 26 days. It will first tile the southern sky followed by the northern sky. And the goal of TESS is to find planets by the transit technique, building on the pioneering Kepler Space Telescope and other telescopes. And we're going to find thousands of planets. But the motivation that we here at MIT have for TESS is that it will find a pool of rocky worlds, of small planets transiting these M dwarf stars.

So that we will have even more candidates beyond the TRAPPIST-1s for the James Webb Space Telescope to observe. Is it fair to call TESS sort of a super Kepler? Well, it's very different from Kepler. It's far more capable in terms of the number of stars it observes and the nearness of the stars. The closer the stars are to Earth, the more photons they have, the brighter they are, the easier they are to follow up. TESS is also red sensitive. It's designed purposely to be more sensitive to red stars than yellow stars. Now, TESS isn't as good as Kepler in a few other things. It's not targeted for sun-like stars. It can't find orbital periods of a year. It is not as sensitive in terms of

its photometric precision. But TESS is designed for the sweet spot of the small planets orbiting small stars. Is the idea then that maybe when TESS makes these thousands of finds that they'd be followed up by other instruments, perhaps in some cases the JWST? Yes, actually. You can think of the TESS survey as the opening to a giant funnel where TESS will find lots and lots of planet candidates. And through a network of astronomers who are signing up to be part of our follow-up program, all from around the world, we're going to narrow down through a funnel-like structure the very best candidates to follow up whose atmospheres can be accessed by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Other than these two great instruments that we'll see in operation, hopefully getting first light before too long, what are you most looking forward to in this search for other worlds like our own? Well, I have to confess that despite all the exuberance for this early search for Earth-like worlds and signs of life, this search is focused on the M-dwarf stars because they're the easiest ones that we can study right now. But the part I want to confess was my heart is still with the sun-like stars and with potential Earth twins. That's why I also do put a lot of time into enabling those future missions. We're planting the seeds now, both for ourselves and for the next generations, to be able to do direct imaging of sun-like stars.

able to do direct imaging of sun-like stars. Remind us of what this Starshade project would do for us, because I know this is something that you've been pushing for for years. Yeah, well, the Starshade is one of a few different ways that you can image Earth. And by image, we still don't mean a spectacular picture. We just mean a point source. But we'd be seeing the Earth in visible wavelengths in reflected light, light reflected from its host star. Well, what we're looking here to do is to block out the starlight entirely. And Earth itself is really faint, about as faint as the faintest galaxies ever observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. So our problem in observing another Earth is not that it's so faint, it's just that it's adjacent to a big, bright host star. Our detectors can't manage the

difference in brightness. In order to see the planet, we actually have to block out, literally block out the glare from the star. My favorite way to do this is the star shade. It's called the star shade because it's a very specially shaped screen, tens of meters in diameter. And it would have to fly tens of thousands of kilometers from a space telescope. And the star shade has its own spacecraft, and it would have to line up precisely, blocking out the starlight so that only the planet light can enter the telescope. And when it's finished, it would have to move to the next target star and realign and take observations again, searching for another Earth. Big technology challenges in achieving this, right?

Right. There's big technology challenges, but there's also large heritage from large radio deployables built in space. And indeed, Astro Aerospace, part of Northrop Grumman Corporation, actually did some of the initial deployment tests of Starshade based on a trust that was left over from other things they built. These are exciting times to be in your line of business. Absolutely. I mean, it really is the golden age of exoplanets. Sarah, it is a great pleasure to have talked with you once again about this. I really appreciate the opportunity to get your expertise about TRAPPIST-1,

its seven worlds, but also the very bright future, literally bright future, for the discovery of exoplanets, edging ever closer to finding that twin. Are you hopeful that we will find Earth's twin in your professional lifetime? I'm extremely hopeful. That's why I work so hard every day, that we are going to find that other Earth in my lifetime.

Thank you, Sarah. Thanks a lot, Matt. That's astrophysicist and planetary scientist Sarah Seeger. She's a professor of both planetary science and physics at MIT. She's on the advisory board for the asteroid mining company Planetary Resources. Professor Seeger was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2015, and she's a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. Time magazine named her one of the top 25 most influential in space a while back. You can sign up for her exoplanet news updates at sarahseeger.com, as I just did a few minutes ago.

We'll have many more links right where you can find this show at planetary.org, including a link to Sarah's colleague astronomer, Frank Marchese, who's written a great blog post on the Planetary Society website. We'll go on now to talking to yet another astronomer. It's time for Bruce Betts in this week's edition of What's Up. Bruce Betts is the director of science and technology for the Planetary Society, Bruce Batts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, and that's one of the reasons he has joined us again via Skype for this week's What's Up? Welcome back. Hi, Matt. We have had some fun figuring out the correct answer for the trivia contest this week. I think we've got it. I do have a surprise one for you as well. But let's start with what's up in the night sky. We've still got Venus and Mars low in the west in the early evening.

Venus spectacularly bright, near its brightest that it gets. And Mars to its upper left. And they are rapidly separating in the sky at this point. We've got Jupiter coming up around 9 p.m. in the east, also looking super bright. We've got Jupiter coming up around 9 p.m. in the east, also looking super bright. And the bright star, but not as bright, Spica, is below and to the lower right of Jupiter. And Saturn in the pre-dawn is coming up in the east. And by the way, if Bruce kind of sounds like an astronomer, well, it's because he is. And we got this, Bruce, from David Fisher, regular listener in Australia, down where iTelescope comes from. I'm loving Bet's class.

It really is so much fun. He loves the radio show and the great interviews, too. Keep up the great work. I just wanted to get in a plug for your class. Oh, thank you. Planetary.org slash Bet's class. Okay, we move on to this week in space history. It was two years ago that Dawn became the first spacecraft ever to go into orbit around Ceres, the asteroid dwarf planet.

And we're going to get Mark Raymond, sometimes contestant in the space trivia contest, back on soon for another mission update. It's been a while since we've spoken to him. Yeah, that would be good. We move on to Random Space Fact. Apollo 10 and Apollo 11 were the only Apollo missions whose crew were all veterans of spaceflight. Oh, what an interesting fact. On to the contest.

I asked you, as of now, what person has spent the most time in space and not been from the Soviet Union, Russia, or the United States? What I meant to ask was, we're not a citizen of those countries at the time they flew, but I said from, which caused confusion in our answers. So we will be flexible in our answers within reason. How'd we do, Matt? Well, most people gave us the answer that you were looking for. And I think one of them was Sean Elliott of the Big Apple, New York, New York, the second home, the home away from home of our boss, the science guy. He said it was Thomas Reiter from Germany at 350 days, five hours, and 44 cumulative minutes

in space. Is that who you were looking for? That is indeed who I was looking for. Then, Sean, you've won, and you won big, because in addition to all the usual stuff, you are getting that signed copy of Rod Pyle's Amazing Stories of the Space Age, the book that we talked with Rod about a couple of weeks ago that has all those just fascinating stories. And there are so many that we didn't get to in the radio discussion, radio and podcast discussion. So I think you're going to enjoy that, along with your Planetary Radio t-shirt, your Planetary Society rubber asteroid, and your itelescope.net account. What a package, man. I don't know why I was so generous, but I could have just given away the book.

But that's me. Generous Matt. That's what we call him. Here's the problem that we ran into. A lot of people gave us Michael Fole, British American astronaut. And you would not have wanted that, although you would have accepted it. Why? I would have accepted it because he was, he's a dual citizen of the US and the UK and was born in the UK. So you could argue he is from the UK, but he was an American citizen at the time of

his spaceflight activities. A few people like Ronald Basask, Ron gave us a whole rundown of people, also mentioned a couple of cosmonauts, Sergei Volkov from Ukraine and Musa Manarov, Republic of Azerbaijan. You would have rejected those. Why? I would have, but if the random.org had pulled them up, we would have thought about it more. Because, at least as I recall, their flights occurred as part of the Soviet Union and part of the Soviet and or Russian space programs. But again, the from was perhaps a little misleading. But there's that whole Soviet Union and post-Soviet Union, and they were flying Soviet Union. Good enough for me. Clem Unger, another regular from Down Under,

he wanted to remind us that among women who are not Americans, it's Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency at just over 199 days. But beating all of them, and I had to look this up, Sander Elvick in the Netherlands said, according to some sources, the correct answer is the Nigerian astronaut Air Force Major Abacha Tunde,

who has been in orbit non-stop since 1990. Do you know about this? No, I do not. It's one of those Nigerian scams. They're trying... They say he was brought up on a Soyuz and left on Mir,

and it'll take $3 million to get him home, and they just need my help or your help or whoever they send the email to, to sort of get that $3 million to the right people so we can bring poor Major Tunde back from being lost in space.

It's legit. Can you hear me, Major Tunde back from being lost in space. It's legit. Can you hear me, Major Tunde? I love it. Thank you. Well done. All right. Let's move on. Wow.

Now, I was unaware of that important science fact. All right. We move on. Several spacecraft or landing sites on Mars are designated memorials. What is the name of the Viking 1 lander designated now a memorial station? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Another great one. And for the person who's chosen by random.org and has the right answer,

we are going to give you a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, and one of those 200-point itelescope.net accounts for astronomy all over the world on that non-profit network of telescopes. You'll need to get it to us by Wednesday,

that's the new deadline, Wednesday at 8 a.m. on March 8th. And we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about how you can use your hair to make someone laugh today. Thank you, and good night. I know, mine makes people laugh, makes me cry. He's Bruce Betts.

He has a luxurious head of hair, and he's also the Director of Science and technology 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 is made possible by its worldly members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.