Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - To Phobos and Back

Episode Date: November 13, 2007

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To Phobos and back with life, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. The Russians are coming to Mars' bigger moon, and they plan to bring a piece of Phobos back to Earth. Along for the ride might be a tiny Planetary Society experiment that may help us learn if life on Earth could have originated on the red planet. We'll feature highlights of a seminar held at the Planetary Society just a few days ago.

You'll hear from Alexander Sasha Zakharov, chief scientist for the Russian Space Research Institute, Phobos expert Tom Duxbury of the Jet Propulsion Lab, and our own Bruce Betts, manager of the Planetary Society's Life Experiment. Of course, we'll also check in with Bruce for a what's-up look at the night sky. And we've got yet another prize to announce in our fifth anniversary contest, now underway. What's the news from around the solar system and beyond? Start with another congregation of planets that just keeps getting bigger. A team of astronomers has announced discovery of a fifth planet circling the star known as 55 Cancri, just 41 light-years away. That's the most complex found to date, other than our own system, that is.

You can learn more on a nice article at planetary.org. NASA headquarters has restored two previously deleted instruments to the Mars Science Laboratory rover, scheduled to head for the red planet in less than two years. One is the extremely cool ChemCam that will zap Martian rocks with a laser and then analyze the stuff that emerges. Finally, a ray gun on Mars. We've got such powerful telescopes.

Why can't they see the spacecraft we've sent flying around the neighborhood? Emily is ready to tell us why in this new edition of Q&A. I'll be right back with our visit to the Planetary Society's Phobos seminar. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, Can we spot dead spacecraft with telescopes from Earth? Members of the public are usually surprised that our great telescopes, particularly Hubble, can't spot distant spacecraft. The distances to spacecraft, often measured in billions of kilometers,

are larger than most people can imagine. Equally hard to imagine is the contrast in size between a spacecraft and the object that it studies. For example, Saturn is more than 10 million times larger in diameter than Cassini. Hubble gets roughly 300 pixels across Saturn's disk. Cassini would be less than 1 ten-thousandth of a pixel across to Hubble. So our only hope for spotting most spacecraft in deep space is if they are alive and broadcasting a signal that can be picked up by a giant radio dish. Dead spacecraft are mostly lost and gone forever. There are some rare occasions when

spacecraft can actually be spotted by optical telescopes. Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out more. A sizable group of scientists and engineers gathered at the Planetary Society on November 9th. They came to learn the latest about Mars' moon Phobos, a potato-shaped lump that is just 27 kilometers long. Mars orbiting spacecraft have given us superb views of the larger of the red planet's two moons. The Russian Space Research Institute has a much more ambitious effort in mind. Planetary Society Executive Director Lou Friedman, an old Mars hand himself, got the seminar started with a brief description of a mission called Grunt. What a lot of people haven't realized is that Russians are

hard at work at a Phobos sample return mission. And this is no mean achievement. Only one nation has ever done automated sample return from a planetary surface, and that is the Russians, and it was way back from the moon in Lunokhod days, and that's it. We're all anxiously awaiting to see if the Phobos sample return mission will be done. We have with us Sasha Zakharov. Sasha has been a longtime friend and colleague of the Planetary Society, but in addition, he has another job, which is the chief scientist at the Space Research Institute in Moscow, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and he's also the chief scientist for the Phobos Grunt Project.

And we always kid the Russians about having terrible public relations in the naming of their missions. They have Phobos grunt. No, no, no, Phobos soil. Okay, and lunar glob, which, but I mean, grunt means soil. It's a perfectly reasonable word just because the English language doesn't handle it well. And glob, the same thing. It's a perfectly reasonable word for lunar globe, meaning an orbiter mission at the moon.

Sasha, or Alexander Zakharov, presented his institute's profile of the mission, which hopes for a 2009 launch. A quite complicated trajectory will eventually bring it into contact with Phobos. It's really more of a rendezvous than a landing. Escape velocity from such a small body is amazingly low. In fact, Sasha described how small rocket engines would be needed to keep Grunt from bouncing off Phobos like a billiard ball. He illustrated this with a beautifully animated video

that documented the entire mission plan. You will see now that during the landing, to avoid some jumping, jets will be switched on, what will harass spacecraft at the surface. Once on the surface, Grundt would activate an amazing array of spectrometers and other instruments. A sample arm would deliver tiny amounts of Phobos regolith to some experiments, and then attempt to pick up more soil, and hopefully a rock or two, for return to Earth. To collect about 150, 20 grams to return, it needs about 15 or 20 samples from different places around the spacecraft. But it's very critical to have a rock or several rocks.

Next up at the Phobos seminar was American Tom Duxbury of the Jet Propulsion Lab near Pasadena, California. Tom's fascination with Phobos goes back decades to the Viking missions, which most people remember only for its landers. But the Viking orbiter snapped some of our best images of Phobos, at least until much more recent spacecraft arrived. Tom is part of the Mars Express orbiter team. more recent spacecraft arrived. Tom is part of the Mars Express orbiter team.

This very successful European Space Agency mission has come very close to the little moon. So we've had flybys as close as about 140 kilometers. And we have many, many, many within 1,000 kilometers. With this high-resolution camera, if we're in 2,000 kilometers, Phobos is bigger than our field of view. Over these many years, we have now hundreds of Phobos images. We have higher resolution and much more surface coverage than we got on Viking. We did a pretty good job on four years of orbiting Mars with Viking, where we had a lot of close encounters. But we're doing a better job now on Mars Express

because we have higher resolution cameras, and we actually can get closer encounters without doing anything. The Russians have asked us if we could take images of their landing site, and that seems like a reasonable thing to do. And we've actually been trying. They want to land not quite on the backside. The one side of Phobos always faces Mars. It's in synchronous rotation. It's elongated than the long axis. It's tidally locked, so we're on one side facing Mars like our moon, one side always faces Earth.

So we have very good coverage of about three-fourths of Phobos. The one-fourth area of Phobos that we have, that's where the Russians want to land. And it finally dawned on me that, hey, you know, we can never see where the Russians want to land with good lighting. So with the good international cooperation, the ISIS agreed to change the orbit, which we're doing right now. And so that come next year when Phoenix comes in to land, Mars Express orbit will be flying right over it. And so we're stuck in that orbit.

But as soon as Phoenix lands, we're going to change the orbit and go after the Russian landing site and try to get these high-resolution stereo and the super resolution under good lighting and close proximity to get high resolution to support their selection of the actual landing site. MRO does take observations of Phobos, but they're on the front side. But it's still useful, though, because it's still Phobos, and it tells you a lot about Phobos. So that's one nice thing we've seen. We've seen very good cooperation between the U.S., Europeans, the Russians, and now there's new opportunities with the Chinese and the Indians and and the japanese that's of course the planetary society's been out there in the front of encouraging international cooperation and

whatever so there's a lot of it going i'm a believer that phobos is the accretion of all the objective stuff that in a crater ejecta these huge things like hellas and Argyre and Isidis and all these huge things. You know, we got a lot of meteorites here on Earth. There are going to be billions of more of that stuff closer to Mars that I believe accreted. One exciting thing is just a month ago, we had one of these 140 kilometer flybys of Phobos with Mars Express. And the Marsis, which is a radar sounder, got excellent radar sounding. I've seen some of that data, but of course, I didn't quite understand it, and they were still processing it. They have potentially can penetrate more than a few kilometers. And if Phobos happens to be an accreted glob of all these crater ejecta and stuff like that,

they might be able to see some of these boundaries of these things. But if the interior of Phobos came from some solid asteroid or something, you might then see a solid surface and maybe layering or something solid underneath of that. So potentially we have the data in hand that might let us lean one way or the other. So anyway, there's a lot of very exciting things going on with Phobos. We're just not allowed to show it. Did Marses see a part of Phobos where all those grooves are? Yeah, it went right over, it went actually right through, or maybe just a little

north of Stickney, the big crater, and it went right over the huge groove networks on the front side. Tom Duxbury of JPL. When we return, we'll hear from the last of the Phobos seminar presenters. Why, it's Bruce Betts! And he'll tell us about the Planetary Society's

life experiment. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration.

The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe and it built the first solar sail. Transcription by CastingWords voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're reviewing the recent Phobos seminar held at

Planetary Society headquarters in Pasadena, California. Last up to present was a planetary scientist all of you regular listeners are very familiar with. I'm the director of projects here at the Planetary Society, and as part of that, the experiment manager for the Phobos Life Experiment, the living interplanetary flight experiment. The basic concept here is to test the survivability of microbes with two things that have not been done together before. One, it's to look at, can microbes, simple life, different types, survive over long duration, in this case 34 months,

and can they survive outside the magnetosphere? That you could have life going any direction, but for example, blasted off Mars, if it evolved there inside a meteorite, transfer times usually would be much, much longer than this. But there are theoretically, there are orbits where you get a few of these meteorites coming to Earth that should survive to the surface of Earth with transfer times like three years, like what we're talking about. And so the concept here is to do a simulation, a very rough simulation of this type of science. Who are the passengers on this? Well, this hasn't been set yet. So there's still options. People want to volunteer, but nominally we have to fit

you into a hundred grams. So the concept is to send examples from all three parts of the tree of life. These are some example things, as I say, the science team, this is not set, but these are some examples to give you an idea. Good old B. subtilis, the gold standard flying that's flown before, and then also things that are hardy, that have shown resistance to something. So radiation resistant, thermophiles, salt resistant, some of the harshest environments that nature can throw out there at you. And then the Russians will be contributing a soil permafrost, basically, a community. So most of these will all be well characterized, but single strains that will be separated from each other. characterized but single strains that will be separated from each other. Then there also will be a soil type sample to test the con because there's some evidence that having communities

actually increases survival. All of these will be desiccated. They will not be in reproductive mode. Some will be spores. There may be things like plant seeds, but all chilling hard in the distant areas of space. The plan is to send no pathogenic-type materials in this. These are all non-pathogens that are being sent. What do you do after sample return? Well, you get them back, and, of course, the first thing you do, and the fundamental question, do they survive? Can you resuscitate them? Can you get the little tiny paddles out clear and bring these things back to life? Can you get the spores and the bacteria to regenerate?

What survives? What doesn't survive? But there's also a number of other details one can go into to understand if there are morphological changes, mutation changes. And so there's a variety of things that are being planned to look at these samples upon return. And of course, you want to have some controls. So we'll have controls on Earth that will have the same organisms, same containers, but sitting here on Earth in various permutations of Earth environment or Earth environment plus irradiated. So there can be a comparison when you come back. Current plan is to have all of them in triplicate.

So you have for every organism you take, you have three sets of samples, somewhat independent in independent containers. These are some of the main limits that we've faced. We've been at a 100-gram limit that this is fitting under. It's all passive. It just sits there. You bolt it on before the spacecraft leaves. You pull it off after the spacecraft comes back.

We wanted to accommodate diverse samples. Right now the design has 30 individual tiny sample holders, and I'll pass around some examples in just a moment, and then also a central larger area for permafrost soil type sample. And then also we'll include some passive radiation detectors. We'll get some idea of radiation dose during the flight. The challenges, as you saw in Sasha's video of that coming back and slamming into Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan, correct?

4,000 Gs is what this is being designed for to survive, and so we will be doing tests to ensure that survival. In addition, structural integrity is the primary concern, keeping everything inside where it is, whatever happens. With that in mind, there's a very clever set of seals and locking lugs that are separate from each other. And so you can have one, two, or even three failures and still keep your samples contained in here. In addition, of course, we're keeping planetary protection in mind. The main concern of planetary

protection in this case is contamination of Mars. If something should go awry, something should go wrong, and we're doing some detailed studies on that. Right now it looks that we'll be well within, meaning order of magnitude, orders of magnitudes within the COSPAR guidelines for probabilities on how long you need to survive in any given permutation, probabilities on how long you need to survive in any given permutation, what your probabilities of impacting Mars and actually surviving to the surface would be. And it looks like we'll be well within that, but we're doing much more detailed studies on that. And just generally, as I say, for all the reasons, trying to have a strong structural integrity of the container. Bruce Batts, Director of Projects for the Planetary Society and Manager of the Society's LIFE experiment,

presenting at a seminar about Mars' moon Phobos just a few days ago. If all goes well, LIFE will piggyback on the Russian Grunt sample return mission leaving for Phobos in 2009. Bruce will join me for this week's edition of What's Up right after we hear a bit more from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla back with Q&A. Can optical telescopes spot spacecraft? They can indeed, provided the spacecraft is close enough to Earth. In fact, it's now routine for missions to ask the community of amateur astronomers to point their modestly sized telescopes along the trajectories of launching spacecraft. Having a lot

of observers track the position of a spacecraft near Earth can be extremely helpful if something goes badly wrong, as happened to the ill-fated Contour mission five years ago. Spacecraft that are flying near Earth are easier to spot than asteroids because spacecraft are usually wrapped in reflective metallic coverings, while asteroids tend to be very dull and dark in color. So spacecraft a few meters long can appear as bright as an asteroid tens of meters in diameter. In fact, there are several cases in which spacecraft on return trajectories to Earth have been briefly misidentified as new near-Earth asteroids. This most recently happened to Rosetta, which for one

day was also numbered as the new minor planet 2007 VN84. Rosetta is a live spacecraft whose position is known from its radio transmissions. But it's also possible to identify a new near-Earth object as a dead spacecraft. In 2002, Earth captured a tiny object into orbit that turned out to be too reflective to be an asteroid. It is now thought to be the missing third-stage booster from the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 12. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio.

We are in the now empty seminar room, the conference center at the Planetary Society, which doubles as Studio A. And Bruce Batts, one of the presenters we just listened to in this very interesting afternoon of talk about Phobos and missions, is's here with us, as he is every week, for What's Up. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Hey, nice work. Nice talk. Why, thank you. Thank you very much.

What's happening in the night sky? In the night sky, that naked-eye comet. Yeah. Comet Holmes. Crazy. Crazy, man. Made the cover of the LA Times last week. We made the cover of the LA Times?

No, I'm sorry. Just the comet. I don't know if they mentioned it. Because we mentioned it? Yeah, I'm sure of it. That's it. Yeah, no, it's a naked eye in a dark location anyway. And binoculars from the city.

It's in Perseus. It's in the north. It's pretty much up all night if you're in the northern hemisphere. It's going to be a tough object if you're in the southern hemisphere. And it looks like comets are supposed to look like a fuzzball, basically. So you will strain to see a fuzzball, but you will know that that fuzzball is a comet. And that is Comet Holmes. You can find some nice finder charts online.

It's in the northern hemisphere below Cassiopeia and hanging out near Murphak. Murphak? Murphak, the bright star in Perseus. Murphak. There's one they should have just kept a number. Well, it has a Greek letter, too, but we enjoy Murphak. And it's not that far from Algol. Yeah, Algol is okay with me.

Sounds like Algor, but okay. The star that invented the internet. Then what's Murphak? It sounds like an insurance company. Let you think that. Yes, yes. So, there's also a bunch of planets out there. Mercury actually, if you listen to this near

the first broadcast time, Mercury's up in the pre-dawn. It is far below Venus. So, the brightest star-like time mercury is up in the pre-dawn it is far below venus so the brightest star like object in the east in the pre-dawn is venus if you follow down below that kind of mostly down a little to the left you will see spica bright star and then below that is the brighter mercury but very low on the horizon but uh take it take a shot at it it's good time all the planets are doing pretty well basically with mercury being tough venus easy mars coming up in the early evening now eight nine o'clock in the east is reddish it is getting brighter through its late december opposition and we've

still got jupiter right around dusk you can still catch off in the west but getting quite quite tough and saturn high above venus in the pre-dawn looking like a bright star but not nearly as bright as venus a lot of good stuff you can actually see if you pull out a telescope or even binoculars you can catch uranus and neptune with a finder chart in the evening sky so a whole horde of planets out there. Busy, busy, busy. Busy sky, busy sky. Let us go on to Rambam Space Fact! That was intense. I'm glad I had the limiter on there. Okay.

All Phobos. All the time. Phobos and Deimos, in this case, you know, between this and I went to a workshop this way, I mean, a conference

all about Phobos and Deimos, Mars's moons. Both small moons, a few kilometers across. But I'd never thought about it before about Phobos and Deimos, Mars' moons. Both small moons, a few kilometers across. But I'd never thought about it before. Phobos is enough bigger than Deimos. It's actually significantly bigger. And when you get that cube of the radius type effect, you end up with Phobos having about 10 times the mass of Deimos.

Huh. It's so strange how that works. It's not intuitive. But they're both basically potatoes in reality. But we'll find that out when we send more missions there. I guarantee it. Let's go on to the trivia contest. We asked you, name four lunar missions going on right now or next year. Two at the moon now, both of them inserted into lunar orbit, and two planned to launch during the next year. How'd we do? Well, we continue to get about triple the normal number of entries because, of course,

people know that we're in the middle of the fifth anniversary contest as well as the weekly trivia contest. And a lot of smart people out there. We sure have a smart audience. The smart one this time who also got the luck of the draw is Kevin Thoma. Kevin Thoma of Marburg, Germany, who said, according to NASA's Lunar Exploration Timeline, Kaguya from Japan orbiting the moon right now. Chang'e is on its way. Actually, now it's there, right?

It's gone into orbit. In orbit. From China. Yeah. Right, it's gone into orbit. It is indeed in orbit from China. Yeah, and then next year Chandrayaan-1 from India and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from the USA, 2008. It is an international lunar decade.

Yeah. Kevin, we're going to send you an international lunar planetary radio T-shirt for your trouble, and we'll put that in the mail soon. And, of course, you are also up, along with everybody else who entered, for that fifth anniversary prize. Tell us how they can get in on it next week. For next week, pretty simple question here. Back to moons of Mars.

For whom was Phobos' largest crater named? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to get your entry to us and not only compete for a T-shirt this week, but compete for fabulous prizes. Did you want to tell us about any of those fabulous prizes, Matt? I sure do, Bruce. They are fabulous, and we've added a new one this week.

We've got, so far, the wonderful Space Station Sim game from Vision Video Games. We've got two copies of that that we'll be giving away. From spaceflory.com, we've got that little piece of a Mars meteorite, your own piece of Mars. Lots of people writing in to tell us whether they're going to eat it or not, if they are lucky enough

to win it. Suitable for framing. And now, thanks to our good friend, Michael Kuda. Michael Kuda and CBS, yes, the network, have donated to us a limited edition poster, Star Trek Remastered. They took the original series, they remastered it,

did all kinds of cool digital stuff to it. It's just beautiful to watch. And we have this poster that was really just intended for television stations, affiliates, and it is signed by Mike Okuda. And that is also part of the prize package now that is very cool isn't it they have till the 19th they have till november 19th at 2 p.m pacific time to get us that entry and you'll be in both contests if you enter all right everybody in addition to doing your entry go out there look up the night sky think about the wonder of Mylar.

Thank you. Good night. Mylar. Now you're going to tell me that's another star. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He does join us every week here for What's Up, and sometimes he tells us about Phobos. Head to the right of Murfak and Mylar and straight on toward morning. Head to the right of Mirfak and Mylar and straight on toward morning.

Join us next week for a conversation with John Callis, project manager for the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.