Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Two Clouded Mysteries: Jupiter and the Pioneer Anomaly

Episode Date: August 8, 2011

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Music Two clouded mysteries begin to clear, this week on Planetary Radio. Music Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. That roar was an Atlas V rocket beginning the Juno mission, a trip to the king of planets in our solar system. Here is more of its launch from the Kennedy Space Center on Friday, August 5.

Facility. Go. RF-FTS. Go. Flight control. Go. Instrumentation. Go. COM. Go. GCQ. Go. Umbilicals. Go. ECS. Go. Redline monitor. Go. Quality. Go. OSM. Go. Instrumentation. Go. Com. Go. GCQ. Go. Umbilicals. Go. ECS.

Go. Redline monitor. Go. Quality. Go. OSM. Go. ULA safety officer.

Go. Range, weather, and final clear to launch. Go. LC, LD, channel one. Go ahead. LC, you have permission to launch. Roger. Proceeding with the count.

T-minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, ignition and liftoff of the Atlas V with Juno on a trek to Jupiter, a planetary piece of the puzzle on the beginning of our solar system. And if the rest of the mission goes as well as its beginning, we're five years away from the best views of Jupiter ever. Juno will also reveal much more of what can't be seen at Jupiter, the mystery of what lies beneath its thick swirling clouds. But that gas giant is not the only clouded mystery I referred to up front. Pioneers 10 and 11 were launched nearly 40 years ago. They became humanity's first visitors to that mighty world. We lost touch with these interstellar explorers years ago, but a great mystery they left behind is only now beginning to be unwrapped.

We'll get the latest news about the Pioneer anomaly from Jet Propulsion Lab astrophysicist Slava Turashev. First, though, more special coverage of Juno. We'll talk about the spacecraft's camera with Emily Lakdawalla in a few minutes. Bill Nye, the planetary guy, is the guy I really envy this week. The Planetary Society's executive director was asked by Juno mission principal investigator Scott Bolton to participate in last Friday's launch. I connected with him via a somewhat shaky Skype link. I'm at Cape Canaveral at the Kennedy Space Flight Center just a few moments

after the Juno launch, the mission to Jupiter, just took off. I was on the roof of the control building. Oh my goodness, oh my goodness. Fire, smoke, and it's fast. I mean, the thing just goes right up and over the top and out of the atmosphere and on its way to jupiter it'll come back by the earth next year but then it's going to go to jupiter five years from now and we'll look at jupiter's core and it's a crazy magnetic field very very powerful magnetic field and all the radiation that shoots into space it's going to be just a spectacular thing because there's so many exoplanets, Matt, dozens and dozens of exoplanets that are like Jupiter.

So let's have a look. I don't know about you, but the thrill is never abated. Oh, man, you feel it. Seriously, you feel it in your trouser legs. Ground vibrates and then your clothes start shaking. It's really crazy. And then the thing is just shooting up. There's smoke everywhere. And today I got a picture. I've never seen this before. There's a ring of ice, ice crystals, way the heck up in the sky. It's like cirrus clouds that are the condensing exhaust.

And somebody pointed it out. I wouldn't have known to look for it. It's really cool. Tell me where you are now. There's a crowd around you. NASA had a tweet up for this event. It said we're in a big tent right by the press area at Kennedy Space Flight Center. Have you been talking with the mission folks there? Oh, yeah, and I did a little question and answer.

And Mike Levine from Malin Systems was here. Your camera people were here, your camera people were here, and he talked about the radiation problems and the cool software they have where it identifies the planet before it snaps a picture. And it's a spectacular thing. You know, people have been working on this mission for, I guess, more than 10 years. And now they finally get to push the button. Very, very exciting. We will probably talk with Scott Bolton, the principal investigator, again very soon. If you see him, and really, would you congratulate the whole team for us?

We're going back to Jupiter. Exactly. Hey, everybody, congratulations to the team. Well, tell them we say hello from the Planetary Society. Planetary Society of Planetary Radio. Planetary Society says hello. They're thanking you, Matt, for your fabulous radio broadcast. I will. You guys, it is spectacular.

To people all over the world, I'd say if you've never gotten a chance to see a launch of a rocket, be it a U.S. rocket or any rocket. It really is just a spectacular thing. It really is quite an undertaking. As I often say, space exploration brings out the best in humans, the best use of our intellect and treasure, and who knows what we'll discover on this other world. It's going to affect this one, whatever it is, I'll tell you. Great day, Matt. Great way to finish, too, Bill. We'll let you get back to the party there. Thanks for taking a couple of minutes with us. Thank you. Everybody say hi to Matt. We're going to fly the planetary people. See ya.

He's Bill Nye, the executive director of the Planetary Society, and he's the science guy, as well as the planetary guy, reporting to us from the Cape, Cape Canaveral, where he and a lot of the rest of us via webcast just watched the launch of Juno, a mission to Jupiter. So we go from Bill to Emily Lakdawalla, the Science and Technology

Coordinator for the Planetary Society. And Emily, we're going to get to Juno in just a moment. But first, you are coming off of yet another big event, your daughter's birthday party. That's right. It was her fifth birthday and we had 60 people in the house yesterday. So pardon me if I sound a little tired. So I'm glad that you're up early enough to talk to us this morning. Can I mention, first of all, I want to call it the image of the week. It's a really stunning image. Saturn and five moons. You know, if you're in orbit at Saturn for long enough, you'll get a chance to have five moons pass through your tiny little camera field of view at once. And that happened again recently with Cassini. And they did a nice thing.

They took advantage of it by taking the three pictures through red, green, and blue filters that you'd need to do to make a very pretty color picture. So, of course, I had to do that. Okay. Now on to Juno, which we just talked with Bill Nye about. But you have something that actually gives us an idea of at least part of what the spacecraft is going to accomplish. That's right. You know, Juno is a mission that is designed to peer deep into the interior of Jupiter to learn things that we've never really managed to measure before about how it's put together. And so it didn't actually need a camera.

But I think pretty much everybody in the world would think that it would be a crime to go to Jupiter with a spacecraft and not put a camera on it. So they put one on it just for public engagement, just to take pretty snapshots. It's called JunoCam. It's built by the same guys at Mail and Space Science Systems who brought you so many great Mars cameras and all the cameras on Curiosity. It's designed to take pictures of Jupiter like we've never seen before, because Juno will be flying over Jupiter's poles. And so this camera will get a totally unique perspective on a global shot of Jupiter shot from above the North Pole or below the South Pole. And the simulation is amazing because it shows just how incredibly elliptical this orbit's going to be. Yeah, and that orbit is designed specifically to keep Juno from being fried by Jupiter's electromagnetic fields and particles and all

that stuff. The elliptical orbit basically flies it in between Jupiter's cloud tops and the inside of its magnetic field, and then it flies it all the way outside its magnetic field. And this camera actually is only guaranteed to last for about eight of Juno's orbits, but they're hoping it'll last much longer. And Scott Bolton talked to us about how they worked very hard to protect the instruments on this ship, but you got to have a camera that looks out, right? You just have to. You can't not do that at Jupiter. Yeah, thank goodness they included this as part of that package. Emily, I think we're done. Thanks so much for joining us once again. All right, talk to you next week, Matt. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology

Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to you next week, Matt. Emily Lakdawalla is the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. I'll be right back with Slava Turashev and a discussion of the Pioneer Anomaly. 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 space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join 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.

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. What happens when your spacecraft, long past Saturn, on its way out of the solar system, is discovered to be not quite where it's supposed to be? That's exactly what happened with Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. Launched respectively in 1972 and 73,

they headed toward the outer reaches of our solar system on different trajectories. They would give us our first close-up views of magnificent Jupiter, while Pioneer 11 would journey on toward Saturn. It was in 1980 that John D. Anderson of the Jet Propulsion Lab first noticed something funny was going on. As he carefully measured the Doppler shift of the spacecraft's radio signals, he realized they were not quite as far or as fast as standard celestial mechanics said they should be. The Pioneer anomaly was born. Years later, a small team of scientists decided to take a much closer look at this discrepancy.

First, though, they had to get access to the Pioneer data. That presented a major challenge. Largely stored on long, obsolete computer tape reels, there was no longer an easy way to read the data. And some of the tapes seemed to have been lost. With help from the Planetary Society, a huge amount of mission data was recovered. That information has enabled JPL scientist Slava Turashev and three co-authors to publish a brand new paper. It's titled, Support for Temporally Varying Behavior of the Pioneer Anomaly from the Extended Pioneer 10 and 11 Datasets.

Now, the key words there are temporally varying, as I learned in a very recent conversation with Slava at Planetary Society Headquarters. Slava, it's great to get you back on Planetary Radio for an update on the Pioneer Anomaly. Thanks. It's wonderful to be here. It has been a while since we've talked, and a lot of things have happened. You're not ready to talk about all of that, because even though there's a paper coming out,

possibly the very week that we are talking about this, or the people are hearing it, but there's been a remarkable amount of progress in this project. Maybe getting toward a conclusion? Several years passed since our previous interview, and we stayed focused on our work. We were silent. We did not comment on the progress we made.

But now time came to actually report on the progress that we made in studying the Pioneer anomaly. We have recovered a significant amount of new data, and this new data is the source of our analysis that is going to be published in the week of August 8th in physical review letters. So this new data helps us to understand what pioneer anomaly is much better than we used to know before this paper. So essentially, this new data is used to study classical properties of the anomaly. The classical properties are that anomaly is constant and is directed toward the sun, and it has an interesting feature such as sudden onset after the orbit of Saturn.

So these three features we studied in this new paper, and what we realize is that anomaly is not constant. It is likely there is a significant temporal decay in the value of the anomaly, and we have good confidence that this decay is real. So also it is likely that anomaly is not directed towards the sun. It is likely towards the earth. And so the basic classical properties of the anomaly are now basically, we question them.

And so this paper will discuss in detail the results of this new analysis. And when you say classical, we're talking Newton, Einstein, and certainly not any new physics. Now, you can't really talk about a lot of this stuff yet because that's the paper yet to come. But the nonlinear nature that you've discovered is extremely significant. Could you have uncovered this very subtle effect, this very subtle drop-off

without looking at these decades of data, which uncovering that data was such a big part of the project. Exactly. It would be impossible to see the signature of the temporal decay with the short amount of data that we used to have. Thanks to the Planetary Society, we were able to recover a significant amount of new data. In fact, the length of our Pioneer 10 data doubled, and the length of the Pioneer 11 data almost quadrupled. So the length of the data helps us

to see that temporal signature. You appear to be a guy who is all about exquisite precision in many of the projects that you work on. Is that a fair description applying to this analysis of the Pioneer anomaly? Yes, it is a very small effect, very tiny effect, but it is very significant. So if it is new physics, then it would indicate something very important. If it's not a new physics, if it's a mundane effect effect such as those generated by the spacecraft themselves, this understanding will help us a lot in building future spacecraft that will be very precisely navigated because the precision of their orbits will help to determine gravitational fields of planets, satellites, and gain new understanding of the solar system. So as far as we see that work, it's a win-win situation. If we discover new physics, then it's great, it's wonderful. But in the case if it's a standard physics, the Newton and Einstein were right, then it's

wonderful as well, because we will be able to put this new knowledge into engineering of the new spacecraft. Yeah, we were talking about that before we started recording and how really these kinds of extremely tiny effects still need to be taken into account by mission designers. Definitely. In the several missions in the near future, we would have to account for those tiny forces acting on the spacecraft.

The precision that a few missions, such as gravitational wave observatories and the mission that is going to be flown to the moon, which has the name GRAIL, so these missions are going to be looking for tiny effects, and they will be very precisely navigated in order to discover something new. In case of gravitational wave observatory, looking for gravitational waves. In case of GRAIL mission, we will be able to determine the gravity field of the moon. And so the precision that these missions will achieve will necessitate analysis that we've done, similar analysis that we've done on the Pioneers. similar analysis that we've done on the Pioneers.

Is there a way to put in sort of popular everyday terms the kind of deceleration, or really we talk about it as acceleration, is there a way to put that in terms that people might easily be able to get a feel for just how small this force is? This is a really tiny force. And in the case of the thermal recoil forces and those forces might be generated on the spacecraft on pioneer 11 and pioneer 10 because both of those spacecraft have a lot of thermal power on board to power the electrical systems analogy to everyday life would be such as if you would leave your high beam on your truck on all the

time. And so the force that this recoil force due to high beam would generate on your truck will deviate the trajectory, will deviate the path of your, will affect the path of your truck. So you have to account for the high beam. Be careful. That's a level of navigation precision I've never had to deal with on the freeway, I have to say. In space, we have to. Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. Now, we should say, as you talk about if it were some thermal effect on the spacecraft, that's still hypothetical. It's really something you're still working on. That's right. And the new paper that we are working on right now will detail our analysis in

terms of the thermal forces acting on the spacecraft. And we will see if their thermal force explain anomaly fully or there will be still some mismatch. And that is to be discussed, I guess, in the future. So if the conclusion ends up being, and we stay in the realm of the hypothetical here, if the conclusion is, yes, this is entirely due to fairly mundane things, things that the spacecraft may even have generated itself, isn't that still an extremely significant finding for the physical world? I mean, the fact that with these precise measurements, you didn't find some kind of new physics and and dark energy pounding on this spacecraft over a period of 30 years.

It is extremely important because the presence of the Pioneer anomaly generated a lot of theoretical thinking as to how to modify gravity in the solar system. And we realized that after hundreds of papers published with gravity modification theories that would try to explain Payoneer anomaly as a gravitational effect, we realized that Einstein's theory of gravity that we use for everyday navigation in space, which is general relativity. And at the same time, if it is a mundane effect, we will definitely know that Newton and Einstein were right in terms of gravity. And the third significance of that is that now we can use that knowledge to build even better spacecraft,

better precisely operated machines in space. Not even a little disappointed that you may not be headed toward announcing some entirely new form of unsuspected physics? I think personally I was too close and too long to the pioneer anomaly. And so for me, it probably indicates that a period in my life, a certain period in my life is now coming to an end. And basically, I can focus on other things. Or maybe not. We will discuss this in the new interview. The next time that we talk.

That's right. It is a delight to get this update from you. And I. The next time that we talk. That's right. It is a delight to get this update from you, and I do look forward to that next conversation. And it's not like you have any shortage of things that you can go back to working on or continue your work on at JPL. And maybe we can talk about those as well the next time we get together, Slava. Thanks once again for joining us. Thank you, Matt, definitely. I'm looking forward to the next conversation. Slava Turashev is a research scientist

at the nearby Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He's in the Relativistic Astrophysics Research Group there. He's been there for quite a long time, actually, and has a distinguished background. One thing that I just have to mention, he was awarded the USSR, the United Soviet Socialist Republic Supreme Soviet Medal for Excellence

for exceptional scientific and public service achievement back in 1986. And you must have been one of the last people to get that honor. Yeah, I believe a couple years down the road,

Soviet Union ceased to exist. And I think I got almost the last one. Well, much more to come on this week's edition of Planetary Radio, specifically when we get together with Bruce Betts to talk about what's up in the night sky, and

maybe give away a t-shirt. Stay with us. Sitting with Bruce Betts at Planetary Society Headquarters, a very nice room that we're in. Actually, one of our neighbors has this room, I can't lie. Do they know we're here? Shh. Bruce is the director of projects for the Planetary Society,

and that means it's time for What's Up. So welcome back. I've timed the police response time around here. We'll be done before they get here. Can I give you a shout-out or actually give somebody a shout-out first? Yes, please do. Because I told them I would try. Ted Seaman, who is the president of the International Space Elevator Consortium and a regular listener to Planetary Radio. He just wanted people to know that if they're going to be in the area, that the space elevator games are going to be underway in Redmond, Washington at the Microsoft Conference Center

this week, August 12 to 14, when a lot of people will be listening to this. So go space elevator. Go. I'm not ready to ride. Top floor. Don't you be cynical now. Someday those guys are going to give us a ride up to low Earth orbit. Or higher, actually.

Someday they will give someone a ride up to low Earth orbit. All right. What's up? All right. Well, I want to mention, first off, Perseid meteor shower, the second best of the year, but often best for northern hemisphere because of the summer weather. It is peaking the 12th and 13th of August,

although it has a pretty broad peak, so there will be increased meteors before and after, typically about 60 meteors per hour from a dark site. The big challenge this year, that dreaded full moon or close to it. So it's going to be trickier, but still you'll get increased bright meteor activity near those dates. We've also still got Saturn in the evening sky over in the west at dusk and Jupiter dominating the pre-dawn sky, super bright overhead and Mars low off in the east and reddish.

We move on to this week in space history. In 1990, Magellan entered orbit around Venus and revolutionized our understanding of our sister planet. We also had the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MRO, launched six years ago. Still returning excellent, awesome data at Mars. Yeah, and still the best eye in the sky over that planet. It certainly is. We move on now to... Random space facts.

Sometimes I have to work pretty hard to try and remain silent while you do your rendition of Random Space Fact. This took the cake. That was good. Was there a bug bothering you recently? No. No, it was random. I see. That's the beauty of it.

I see. That's the beauty of it. Speaking of random, this actually is not that random because launching, hopefully by the time people hear this, the Juno mission, it'll be the first spacecraft to operate at Jupiter without nuclear power. Yeah. It has the largest solar panels ever for a planetary mission at 60 square meters or about 650 square feet. Big buggers. Big, speaking of bugs, big, big, big wings on that bug. In fact, we may know because our boss, the executive director of Bill Nye, oh, there it is.

There's actually a bug on me now. There's actually a bug flying around Bruce's head. You see? Instant karma. It's going to get you. Trivia. On to the trivia contest. We asked you, what was the last spacecraft deployed by a space shuttle?

How'd we do, Matt? Some people might accuse you of being a little tricky with this, but you really weren't. It was a very fair question. It turns out, as you well knew, that the very last space shuttle mission, STS-135, launched a satellite into space. Now, I didn't hear much about this in the popular media, but our listeners were certainly able to discover it, the ones who didn't come up with something much bigger and earlier. And our winner this time, and we're being a little bit kind here to Wayne Likely in Seattle, Washington. Wayne won the contest just like three months ago

because, you know, we don't bar people for any period here. So congratulations, Wayne. He said Picosat. Now that's not real detailed because I guess there's a whole class of Picosats. There is. It is a Picosat or Nanosat depending on what your definition of such things is, which seems to change over time. The full name was the PicoSatellite Solar Cell Test Bed 2, also known as PSSC-2 or PSSC Test Bed 2 or FRED. FRED?

That was only by a few people. You were testing. We did get that full name, PSSC-2, from a lot of people, but we're going to give it to Wayne. And so, Wayne, you've won yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt. David Kaplan pointed out that this was the 180th payload deployed by a space shuttle. Ooh. And another thing to point out about this spacecraft, it is the first flight of what are basically the cameras that have been developed for the LightSail-1 Planetary Society solar sail spacecraft. And they're developed by Aerospace Corporation, who's flying this PSSC-2, and we're taking pictures in space.

And they're testing various little gizmos on this tiny tens of centimeters by tens of centimeters satellite. Very cool. I will just mention in passing, because we don't have time to read it. Ilya Schwartz sent us a poem by Atlantis mission specialist Rex Walheim about this little Pico satellite being launched and the last one from a space shuttle. It just starts, One more satellite takes its place in the sky, the last of many that the shuttle let fly. I'm sure people can find the rest if they want to from Rex Walheim.

He was on STS-135. How about next time? Nice. For next time, what spacecraft made the first ever direct observation and measurement of the solar wind? What spacecraft made the first ever direct observation and measurement of the solar wind? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. You have until Monday, August 15, at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. Thank you.

Thank you. All right, everybody go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about bugs flying around your ear. Thank you, and good night. Do you remember when the lunar module was originally called the Bug? No, but I can pretend. Yeah, I think the Public Information Office put a stop to that real quick. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society,

and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Juno pushed back our coverage of Vesta Fiesta, but you'll hear it next time on Planetary Radio, which is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible by a grant from the William T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, along with the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.