Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Touring the National Solar Observatory at Sacramento Peak

Episode Date: November 14, 2011

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. And this week, back to New Mexico for the second stop on our science and space tour of that land of enchantment. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, and we're headed for the National Solar Observatory at Sacramento Peak to meet Dave Dooling. We'll also get a Phobos grunt update from Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bruce Betts is the manager of the Planetary Society's Phobos Life Experiment on board the Russian Phobos Grunt spacecraft. He'll give us his take on the troubled mission just before we give away another Planetary Radio t-shirt. First, though, let's check in with Emily Lakdawalla, who recently made her own pilgrimage to the desert.

Emily, I think we're going to talk just about one story today, and it's the trip that you took last week that, if truth be told, I kind of wish I could have gone along with you instead of going up to San Luis Obispo, although it was great fun to take a look at LightSail and go to that review meeting. But tell us about this trip to the desert that you made. Goldstone, the Deep Space Network radio telescope station, it's kind of in Los Angeles' backyard. It's about a 150-mile drive. And I've lived here for 11 years, and I've never gotten a chance to go see it. So I was really thrilled when the Jet Propulsion Lab invited media out to take a look at the most gigantic

of their radio telescopes, the great DSS-14 70-meter antenna. And the occasion was, of course, for the close flyby of a decently-sized asteroid on Tuesday last week. There were probably about 20 of us on the trip, and it's kind of amazing. You drive into the desert. It's desert, desert, desert. And then you'll see some hills on the horizon, and then you come up over a rise, and nestled down in the hills are these teeny-looking little white circles. And then as you drive, you realize how large they actually are.

And really, I kept on losing a sense of scale when I was looking at these antennas. It's awesome to look at this thing from up close. But they showed you around inside as well. Actually, we got to go into two interesting locations on this antenna. First, they actually walked us up the outside on what's basically like a set of fire escape stairs, iron stairs on one side of the antenna. And they pointed out this gigantic bearing ring structure. It's kind of amazing to imagine the entire 70 meter dish and all of its support structure is all floating on this incredibly thin film of oil on a seven inch wide steel ring. And they actually

had to replace this ring last year. It was a huge operation to jack up the whole antenna by, they said, about half a centimeter, a quarter of an inch. And then they replaced that whole steel ring and then they set the antenna back down on it. It's an amazing piece of engineering. And the guy who was giving us the tour, he seemed to just be blown away by the engineering himself. It's kind of great to see somebody who's so excited about the job that he works on. Floating on a quarter millimeter of oil. Anyway, very quickly, take us inside and what did they show you? Inside, there were people monitoring what was going on with the antenna. And

to my great surprise, there were actual radar astronomers sitting in the control room looking over the shoulders of the people who were operating the telescope because they were looking at this asteroid. And when an asteroid gets as close to Earth as 2005 YU55 did last week, you can get really amazingly detailed radar pictures of it. And that's what they were working on. And they still haven't released all their pictures. So I think you should stay tuned for even better pictures of the asteroid. And I love how these operators of the great radio telescopes, they're almost like air traffic controllers, handling, juggling so many missions, of course, around the solar system. That's right. I think that this particular station, they said they support typically 35 different missions in a week.

Over 130 or 140 separate contacts spread over five main dishes that they use to contact these distant spacecrafts. So it's really quite a juggling operation, as you say. Fascinating, and a great collection of pictures taken by Emily. They're in the blog. It's a November 9 entry, and we will link to it from planetary.org slash radio. Emily, thank you very much for the tour. Thank you, Matt. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Here's Bill Nye. Bill, I know you're in Atlanta. Unfortunately, the Skype connection wasn't working out this week, but we thought it was so important to be able to talk a little bit about Phobos Grunt that I've got you just on the phone line.

What's the current status as you know it? Well, Phobos Grunt, everybody, Grunt is Russian for soil. This mission was going to go to Phobos, the moon of Mars, scratch up a little soil and come back, and on board was the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment, the Planetary Society's test of the hypothesis, can living things get from one planet to another through deep space with all the radiation and zero-g and cold? Anyway, speaking of cold, this thing is stuck in Earth orbit as we speak. So anyway, speaking of cold, this thing is stuck in Earth orbit as we speak. Now, in the next few days, if the Russian space agency can get a message through to the spacecraft,

there is still time. The window is still open to shoot out of Earth orbit and go all the way to Phobos, to Mars. But right now it's not looking good. And there's another troublesome thing, Matt. It's got seven tons of hydrazine, of this fancy rocket fuel in it. This is the stuff that just starts burning on its own. The expression is hypergolic. It may surprise many listeners, but these systems often have heaters in them to keep the fuel a liquid so it doesn't get too slushy in the cold of space. Well, everybody speculates that the heaters aren't working.

So you'll have this very large seven-ton chunk of frozen hypergolic fuel falling down onto the Earth in a few months, and this is also bad. But the people in Russia are working so hard to build the spacecraft and make it do the job. I'm not giving up. I'm not giving up. They know what they're doing. We'll see what happens in the coming days.

And hopefully we'll have better news to talk about next week, Bill, but we'll pick this up then, I'm sure. Thank you very much. Thank you, Matt. Bill Nye is the executive director of the Planetary Society. Of course, he's also the science guy. It was a lovely day. I drove out of Cloudcroft, New Mexico, on Highway 63, otherwise known as the Sunspot Highway.

Along the way was a 1 to 250 million scale model of the solar system, courtesy of my destination, the National Solar Observatory at Sacramento Peak. I pulled through the gate of the compound and parked in front of the Great Visitors Center, packed with displays created by my host, the observatory's education and public outreach ace, Dave Dooling. What a gorgeous drive on the way in here. That is one of the most beautiful roads I've ever been on. But you missed it at its peak about two weeks ago. The aspen returning, and it looked like God had taken yellow highlighter across the woods.

This place is like, it's not just an observatory. It's a whole town. It's like a village up here. Yes. We were started in 1947 with a couple of observers from Harvard, and the Air Force decided this was the place to build a solar observatory for what became early space weather forecasting. And it was remote.

The beautiful road you came down did not exist until the 1960s, so they built a small village to go with it where all the base personnel lived. NSF now owns and operates the facility, so if you work here, you can rent one of the houses that the Air Force built back in 50. Dave showed me around the Popular Visitor Center. Its displays include many astounding images, including several high-res shots of sunspots. My God, the structure of that thing. It looks like a living thing. And in many ways it is. First off, when you look at a sunspot, you're not looking at something black.

Even though the center of it is called the umbra, which the name given by Galileo and his contemporaries because they thought they were looking at a shadow on the face of the sun, comes from the root word in Latin from which we get umbrella. It is actually quite bright. It's brighter than the tip of an arc welder's torch, which tells you how much brighter the surrounding sun is. But these things constantly change. Any picture that you see of a sunspot, by the time it gets into print, unless you're looking at a real-time downlink from a satellite, that spot's changed and quite possibly gone. No fixed features on the sun. Things are constantly moving and changing.

The granules around it are about the size of the state of Texas. And in textbooks, they are drawn as little perfect circles of circulation, and that's not right. These are random globs of hot gas rising, shining light into space, and then cool gas jetting back to the interior. So it's really like the surface of the sun being covered by 10 million lava lamps, constantly moving back and forth. So yes, almost living is a good description because it is so dynamic. It is changing so fast.

I don't know what to compare it to, an anemone or just these filamentary structures that surround the umbra. That is the penumbra, which means almost a shadow. And this is where the magnetic flux that causes the spot is leaching out into the rest of the photosphere. And there's some complex flows in there called Evershed flow and reverse Evershed, where you actually have the gas moving horizontally back and forth.

The resolution, the sharpness, if you will, of this image is about seven times greater than the sharpness of this image, which was taken with a larger telescope. Now, in general, a larger aperture means higher resolution, greater sharpness and definition to the detail. Except if you're on the ground, which most telescopes are, the atmosphere is this horrible rubber lens that is constantly wobbling back and forth in front of the telescope and blurring the view. So that's why even the biggest telescopes can't see any sharper than a small backyard telescope. They can see fainter, but not sharper, until adaptive optics came along. until adaptive optics came along. So now our telescope here, we can see seven times sharper up in G-band,

the blue part of the spectrum, as compared to when it was built in 1969. And with the four meter that we hope to build on top of Haleakala on Maui, we will be able to see on the order of 30 to 40 times sharper than what is possible with an uncorrected telescope. Dave and I move to a cutaway drawing of the largest telescope at the facility. The Dunn Solar Telescope extends about twice as far underground as above, and it has other surprises. This is a vacuum chamber? Yes, it is a vacuum tube, and it's about the same height, top to bottom,

as the Saturn V moon rocket. So the whole structure extends 135 feet above ground and another 220 feet below ground. The vacuum tube, of course, is a little shorter than that. But the idea was that we wanted to have a, and it was Richard Dunn's idea in the 1960s, have a very long focal length view, high resolution view of solar activity. This meant we needed to have a very flat image. Focal plane in a camera is not flat. It's actually a part of a sphere. So with the kind of work we're doing, we needed to have it as flat as possible or things would be out of focus. Having an evacuated telescope barrel would be impractical because

hanging it or mounting it at an angle like a conventional telescope, it would sag, and that would be a mechanical nightmare. But you don't want air in front of the mirror because the sunlight goes through it twice. It's going to heat it up and make the seeing conditions even worse. So Dr. Dunn came up with the idea of suspending the whole thing straight up and down, and then we have two mirrors up top and a window that came out of the same production line that made the blanks for the space shuttle orbiters that tracks the sun, reflects the light down to the primary mirror, and that focuses it back up to the Cade platform, this 40-foot diameter rotating platform that is welded to the telescope barrel. So the whole thing, all 220 tons, will rotate very slowly to track the sun across the sky, so the area that we're studying does not rotate in the cameras.

It makes for very stable seeing. This is one of the best, most user-friendly observing setups in the world for solar physics. It's an incredibly complex machine. Oh, it's beautiful. And the arrangement has worked so well that when we build the 4 meter that I was talking about, it will have an observing platform like this, only wider, but it will be based on this so that it will be easy to move in and set up multiple instruments, have them operating simultaneously, and still have room for something new.

What's the expected time of completion, our first light, if you use that term of the solar telescope, for the 4-meter in Hawaii? If everything moves along on schedule, hopefully around 2017, 2018. When we return, Dave Dooling will take us to the largest of the National Solar Observatory's great telescopes. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth.

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

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That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're on a tour of the National Solar Observatory at Sacramento Peak, high in the mountains of New Mexico. Our guide is Dave Dooling, the head of education and public outreach at the facility. There are many telescopes at the NSO. You can see several of them and much more in my slideshow at planetary.org slash radio. more in my slideshow at planetary.org slash radio. Dave and I hiked up to the two largest instruments, beginning with the John W. Evans Solar Facility, under a dome that looks a bit

like a flying saucer. Okay, so you're opening a steel door and a bigger door. There we go, a simulated squeak there. This almost looks like just a typical refractor telescope. Good-sized one, though. Well, at the front end, that's what it is, is a refractor telescope. The key difference is that we have an occulting assembly in the middle of it that rejects the light from the bright disk of the sun and just reflects the light from the corona into the observing platform on the other side of the wall up there. And as beautiful as the corona is, we don't take pictures of the corona.

We make maps of it in lines produced by hot iron and hot calcium at about 1, 2, and 3 million degrees K. These ions line up because they're electrified. They line up along the magnetic field lines and that lets us see the structure ultimately of part of the dynamo that is rooted inside the sun and lets us track and predict some of what solar activity is going to do. One of the great pleasures I have when I drive from Long Beach to Pasadena is looking up the hill and I can see the solar telescopes above us. But I think you're considerably higher here. What's the altitude?

9,200 feet. That explains why I get a little winded. Enjoying the vacuum? But we had to be here, and that was one of the selection criteria back in 1947 when it was started was to have very clear skies for coronal observations. So even though conceptually this telescope is relatively simple, building and operating it is not a simple matter. In fact, the coronagraphic telescope did not exist until the 1930s. It was invented by Bernard Leo in France. And he came over and consulted with us on the design and construction of this in the late 1940s. Part of the

mechanism for rotating the dome is the transmission from an old Chevy pickup. And it's the second one. We burned through the first one and had to scrounge scrap yards to replace it. There's no question that the king of the hill at the National Solar Observatory Sacramento Peak is the Dunn Solar Telescope. This is the huge vertical instrument with the vacuum chamber Dave Dooling described to me in the visitor's center. I'm walking up a little incline now toward this big white sloping structure that looks like some kind of alien monument. Funny you should mention that because there are actually some people who think that the Roswell saucer and bodies are buried down in the basement. Up here?

Yes, yes. You know, we started the same year as the crash. We have a couple of trucks parked, Army camo, painted Army camo, and a few other things. And why else would the Air Force dig a hole in the top of a mountain if they weren't trying to hide something? It's not true, is it? Well, I went to the bottom once, came back up, didn't see anything suspicious, but of course, I neuralized myself on the way out, so. Just as well. All right, so we're going in here.

Observing in progress. Nope. You can use a flash because it's too cloudy. Ah, okay. Just like Palomar and other big scopes, you don't get a feel for the scale until you're actually looking up at it. It is immense. It's not the biggest industrial apparatus in the world,

but it is big, it is impressive, and you can see in the main barrel of the telescope exposed right here in the world, but it is big, it is impressive, and you can see the main barrel of the telescope exposed right here in the middle, and then these three large barrels on the sides used to hold diffraction gratings and spectrographs from early days. Now we have more compact, sophisticated instruments that we use, including two adaptive optics benches. We're the only solar telescope in the world with two AO benches. And several setups, for example, immediately in front of us is a setup for what is known as multi-conjugate adaptive optics, where instead of trying to correct for the entire problem, we will have two or three mirrors focused or conjugated to different altitudes in the atmosphere,

each one solving the turbulence at a different altitude. So one would be focused, say, just outside the telescope, one at about 6 kilometers and one at about 9 kilometers. It's looking very promising. This is quite a bench here, an optical bench. Yes. For those who are not familiar with it, an optical bench is a massive, heavy metal table that is designed to absorb as much vibration as possible from the ground.

The instrument that's over on this bench is IBIS, and that's a guest instrument, permanent guest instrument from Italy. IBIS stands for Interferometric Bidimensional Imaging Spectrometer. Easy for you to say. Right. It's an optical trombone. You can adjust its frequency? Exactly, exactly. Just like a trombone. On a trombone, if you want to get a low note, you push the slide out and the sound oscillates on a longer resonant path. The shorter notes get cancelled out and you want a high note, you pull the slide in, the short wavelength, the high notes get reinforced and the others get

cancelled out. You can do the same thing with light, with two glass plates and a thin air gap in between. And if the wavelength is a match for the size of the gap, that one gets reinforced and the rest of the white light gets canceled out. But you've already seen this effect. Yes, you have already seen it in a soap bubble or an oil film in a parking lot. The colors that come out of the soap bubble or the oil film are an indicator of the thickness of that layer relative to the light. Oh, fascinating, yeah. Except we do it in a very controlled fashion here.

Yeah. So here, not far from one of the great astronomical tools in the world, is one of those insert a quarter, look through the telescope things. We have to pay for this place somehow it says for for distant viewing as I swing it around right but it but it is it is kind of blocked out so that you can't point it and look at the Sun which would be very very dangerous yes good and this is quite a view from up here I'm gonna back off over this way a little bit and stand up here Wow yeah you can see all all the way across the Tularosa Basin which is And this is quite a view from up here. I'm going to back off over this way a little bit and stand up here. Wow.

Yeah, you can see all the way across the Tularosa Basin, which is a part of a rift valley caused by the crustal plates pulling apart. So this is a stretch mark in the skin of Mother Earth. And you can see White Sands National Monument and Holloman Air Force Base over to our right. And White Sands Missile Range is over in that direction, and yes, you can see rocket launches from here. Spectacular. Absolutely spectacular. So here we are back in front of the Sunspot Astronomy and Visitor Center. Dave, thank you so much. It has been really, what a terrific tour and a great, great time I've had up here on the hill. Come back and see us and bring the entire

Planetary Society with you. Hear much more of my tour and see my slideshow of the National Solar Observatory at Sacramento Peak at planetary.org slash radio. You know how I said I'd be recording Bruce live and in person from now on? Well, obviously I lied. He's back on the Skype connection for this week's edition of What's Up? Because we've both been very busy guys. Welcome back. Thank you. Busy, busy. Before you tell of What's Up, because we've both been very busy guys. Welcome back. Thank you. Busy, busy.

Before you tell us what's up, I mean, one thing that's up is Phobos Grunt or Phobos sample return. We talked a little bit about it with Bill, but you are the manager of this project. What's your stance on this? Just to be clear, I'm the manager of the Phobos Life experiment on the Phobos sample return mission. I should have made that clear. It's not dead yet, but it doesn't look very promising at the time we record. As people probably know, and you probably discussed with Bill, it's stuck in a

low Earth orbit, and they're trying to communicate with it and do it soon enough that they can still send it off to Mars. So we have some days left, but it doesn't look promising. When I think of all the time that you and so many of the great people have put into this, I can only hope that somehow this thing is rescued from oblivion. but somehow this thing is rescued from oblivion. Me too. We get not that infrequent reminders that space is really hard, space exploration.

It's a weird business. People spend, I mean, we spend a fair amount of time, but obviously people in Russia have been planning science for this mission for 20 years. It's a rough business. It has big, big highs when things work, big lows when they don't, and then these waiting periods where you just don't know. Well, we will, of course, have more news next week, but people can check in at planetary.org for other updates, particularly probably from the blog from Emily.

Well, they can also check Emily's Twitter or my Twitter feed also. True enough. RandomSpaceFact at Twitter if you're looking for me. And you're getting out there more often with Twitter these days. Slightly, slightly. So in the sky, Jupiter, in the evening sky, super bright over in the east, might be able to see Venus sky, super bright over in the east, might be able to see Venus really, really bright over in the west. The challenge is that you pretty much have to look not too long after sunset,

still in the twilight, but it is so bright that you have a shot of seeing it. And if you're really crazed, you might still pick up Mercury below it, but that's even more challenging. And Mars rising around the middle of the night in the east, looking reddish, high overhead by pre-dawn. Shortly after this is released, the Leonids meteor shower peaks on November 17th. This is not predicted to be one of those big years, so it probably rates an official lame in the meteor shower category, but you never know. So that's kind of what's going up in

the sky. What went up in the sky in 1969 was Apollo 12 this week in space history, and also landed during the same week in 1969. Which leads us on to

Random Spruce Fact! That's good. which leads us on to random space fact! That's good. Elmo likes space fact. As we've discussed before, there are 88. Yes, that's right. The number for today is 88. Standard constellations,

recognized by the International Astronomical Union. They've been recognized formally since 1922. The majority of these go back to the 48 constellations defined by Ptolemy in the 2nd century. The remaining ones were mostly defined in the 17th and 18th century and then all formalized by the IAU in 1922. On to trivia. In the trivia contest, we asked you about Uranus and specifically how long is each pole of Uranus in darkness during each Uranian year? How'd we do, Matt? Oddly, a lot of people said it's in darkness, those poles,

each for 84 years. Not really, since that's the orbital period of the planet, but most people did get it right. And I'm surprised that Randy Bottom was the only person who pointed out that the answer is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, 42, or 42 Earth years. But it was Corey Chapman of Ogden, Utah, first-time winner, I think, who picked up the prize this time around. He did have that answer of 42 Earth years. Why so long, wise Astronomical One?

Well, let me tell you, because Uranus is tilted on its side, to use the non-technical jargon. It points one hemisphere towards the sun for half its year. The Earth does as well, but the Earth has much more gradual tilt. Well, Corey, we're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Let's tell people how they can win in this newest contest. In constellation land, what is the brightest star in the constellation Aquila? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. This time you have until the 21st of November. Let's say Monday the 21st at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer.

And with that, I believe we are done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about the smell of slightly burnt toast. Thank you. Good night. Mmm, makes me hungry just thinking about it. I love toast. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he gets toasty with us every week here on What's Up.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.