Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Universal Harmonies: Sonifying images for science and accessibility

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

Kim Arcand from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory joins Planetary Radio to share her team’s new album “Universal Harmonies.” It’s a beautiful collection of sonified observations taken by the space telescope that aims to make space images more accessible to people with low or no vision. The Planetary Society team celebrates the release of their new member community app and shares an update on the Boeing Starliner. Stick around for a chance to win a vinyl version of “Universal Harmonies” in this week’s space trivia contest.Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2023-universal-harmoniesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Making space images more accessible through sonification. This week on Planetary Radio. I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Space is for everyone, and we all deserve to experience space images. Space is for everyone, and we all deserve to experience space images. Our guest this week, Kim Arkand, and her colleagues at Chandra Labs have just released an album of sonified data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This collection of audio tracks called Universal Harmonies hopes to make space more accessible to people with low or no vision. The result is a beautiful and thought-provoking album of ambient and sometimes spooky audio.

This is also a huge week for us here at the Planetary Society. Our new member community app is now live. Amber Trujillo joins us to talk about the app's launch and our upcoming Welcome Festival on March 18th. Matt Kaplan will give us an update on the Boeing Starliner, and we'll close out our show with the night sky and a chance to win a special LP version of Universal Harmonies in this week's Space Trivia Contest. As many of you know, I was out sick last week as I recovered from COVID, but I'm back. I'd like to give a special thanks to Matt Kaplan, the creator and former host of Planetary Radio, who filled in for me while I was away. And thank you so much for all the wonderful get-well messages you sent me. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate it. Now it's time for some space news. Solar sailing is on the rise.

After the success of the Planetary Society's LightSail2 mission, solar sailing is growing in popularity as a method of propelling spacecraft. The latest issue of the Planetary Report, our quarterly magazine, explores new and upcoming missions like NASA's Advanced Composite Solar Sail System, or ACS-3, and how they'll use sunlight to push the boundaries of space exploration. A little bit of sad news. Japan's new H-3 rocket was unfortunately destroyed during its inaugural flight on March 7. Though the rocket's first stage appeared to be performing well, the second stage failed to ignite. JAXA made the difficult decision to send a destruct command to the rocket at 10.52 local time,

citing that there was no possible way of achieving the mission. Space is hard, and we wish the H3 team's luck in their future attempts. Remember back in September 2022 when the DART spacecraft purposefully crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos? It changed the history of planetary defense. The footage was amazing. We practically punched an asteroid in the face for the dinosaurs, and we should all be proud. Hubble, the Italian space agency's Lecce cube, and telescopes worldwide spotted the distant space debris after the impact. It was awesome!

Now, a new video of Hubble images, released by the European Space Agency, shows dust and rock from the collision spilling out into ghostly trails around the asteroid. The debris appears to form a comet-like tail, which is influenced by the asteroid's gravity. You can learn about these stories and more in the March 10th edition of The Downlink, our weekly newsletter. Read it or subscribe to have it sent to your inbox for free every Friday at planetary.org. After years of hard work and anticipation, the Planetary Society's Member Community app has launched for all of our members. Amber Trujillo, our Digital Community Manager, is here to talk about the community's launch

and our upcoming Welcome Festival on March 18th. Hi, Amber. Hi. We did it! Our Member Community is finally launched! How are you feeling? It's a whole amalgamation of relief and so much excitement. Like I'm just so excited to see it up off the ground. I know that this has been a work in progress for the Planetary Society for two years and now it's off the ground and it's good to see that members are enjoying it.

Oh yeah. I've been having such a fun time playing around in there and getting to meet people and people that I've met in past events, too, for the Planetary Society. People that came to our Day of Action, things like that. It's really nice to reconnect. And as someone who spent two years working on this project, getting to hand it off to you so you could work on it. It's so satisfying. I'm so happy. Well, I have to say that the whole team really worked exceptionally hard on it. And you have built such an amazing foundation. And for me to

just kind of like take your baby and cradle it into what it is now, I feel honored to be able to take on the great platform that you guys were able to create. That was a team effort. It took a lot of us. Yeah, definitely. It went down perfectly. How did the launch go? I am very happy to say that it went off essentially without a hitch. Like I said, the team really prepared for this. And because of that, we have over a thousand members in our community already, and it's only been a couple of days and everybody's in and they're engaging and they're meeting each other. This is what we wanted. We wanted to create a community for our members to connect. And that's exactly what's happening. And I'm absolutely ecstatic that it's going well. Yeah. And you and I are

really familiar with what this platform does and how people can connect within it. But for anyone who might not be familiar with our new member community or who might be thinking about joining on for Planetary Society membership in order to gain access, what can they do within this app? To start off, it's a membership perk. So this is considered our digital member community and you can access it two ways, both our desktop and our app. So we officially have an app and it's a place built exclusively for Planetary Society members. Here they can connect, as I said, with fellow members from around the world, join exclusive live events and delve deeper into the cosmos and all of the amazing missions that explore them. So it's a place that no matter your expertise, you can come in and you can just

talk to people about your love for the cosmos. And with my background, I didn't have a place for a long time to go. I didn't know exactly where I fit in the space industry. And it took me a really long time to find it. And I wish that I had a community like this starting out because what took me a decade of being able to find where I fit in, this place is curated for not only people like Amber 10 years ago, but people like Amber now who has a little bit more knowledge

and has a little bit more expertise. And it's just a great place to go no matter your knowledge level, which is really cool. It's a very special place. I love hearing you say that because I similarly, I feel that there were so many times in my life where I felt like people didn't understand my level of nerdiness or like I was seeking that community that wanted to talk deeply about the universe and our place within it. And I wish so much I had had this earlier, but that's okay because now we all get to play in it together, which is fantastic. And there are so many different ways that you can play within it. It has this beautiful

kind of social media feel to it. I wake up in the morning and I get to scroll my space feed. It's amazing. You can have a daily feed, which is what it's called. You pop in and you see what everybody's been up to, or there's these things called spaces where you can go in and look at particular things that you might be interested in. Maybe you want to look at space policy. What have people posted about on that? What are the updates? And one of the coolest parts, I think, is that you get to mingle with the Planetary Society staff. So you can go in there and you can talk about space policy with Casey. You can go in and you can talk about books and movies and TV and gaming with Sarah. You know, the fact that you can go in there and just connect with us, I think is very cool. It's nice to have a connection with our members on that level. Yeah. And there's also a great feature, live events, which is fun. And I'm excited to roll out even

more of those coming out in the coming months. And we have a very special event that's coming up soon on March 18th as well, right? Our Welcome Festival? Yeah. So we have our Welcome Festival, which will be on, as you said, the 18th, which is a Saturday. So we have our Welcome Festival, which will be on, as you said, the 18th, which is a Saturday. And it's going to start off with kind of a welcome from Bill Nye and I. It's hosted by Matt Kaplan. And we're going to bring on Heidi Hamel, who is just named one of the 20 most influential women in astronomy and astrophysics. And who happens to be the vice president of our board as well.

And she's going to do a little presentation on JWST. And then we're going to have Jean-Luc Margot and Megan Lee talk about their study project, which is amazing. Afterwards, we're going to have a meet and greet with members. I'm excited. It's going to be a fun day. Oh, it's going to be a good time. I don't always like working on Saturdays, but I am down for this. It's going to be a good time. I don't always like working on Saturdays, but I am down for this. So if anybody is interested,'ll take you to our member community where you can, if you're not a member, you can sign up to be a member, or you can also just visit our website and join through there. And you'll be able to access the digital community specifically from the join link. And you can also find it on the Google and Apple app stores. If you want to just

get it straight on your phone again, you will have to be a Planetary Society member, but that's okay. And this has been so much fun. And thanks for coming on to share some of that joy about this launch with me and everyone listening, because this has been something we've been working for for years. And we feel like we finally put the society in the Planetary Society. So quite a moment. Absolutely. I agree. And thank you so much for having me. And I hope to see more members come in. And if you haven't joined just yet, I'm excited to meet the members in our digital community. And I'll see you on the digital realm. See you there, everyone.

Thanks, Amber. As we said, you can find our member community in the app stores. If you're already a Planetary Society member, you can also access the community on your web browser at community.planetary.org. Another SpaceX Crew Dragon has recently delivered four astronauts to the International Space Station. The SpaceX vehicles and the Russian Soyuz capsules are currently the only human-rated craft visiting the ISS. That's something that may soon change, as Matt Kaplan, the Planetary Society's Senior Communications Advisor, reports. The NASA-SpaceX Crew-6 mission is actually the

ninth time a Crew Dragon has carried humans into orbit. Remember the Boeing Starliner? Otherwise known as the CST-100, NASA originally expected both vehicles would be put to work at about the same time. Now, nearly three years after the first Crew Dragon's success, the space agency and Boeing are making the final preparations for the Starliner's first crewed mission. Here's Steve Stich, NASA's manager of the Commercial Crew Program. We're about 80 percent, I would say, through that work, and we'll continue to work through that. And then really the next big event with Starliner on the vehicle is loading propellant in the service module. If you remember, we have kind of a 60-day window we want to go launch within once we load that propellant. And so

we'll have a decision in early March relative to when to target loading the vehicle and then how we proceed toward launch. Stitch was part of a February 17 briefing about the upcoming mission. With him was Mark Knappe, Boeing Vice President and Program Manager for the CST-100 Starliner. So we're excited about the CFT mission. We have some incremental decision points ahead of us based on the ISS availability and the work that we have going forward. We'll continue down that path. And like Steve said, we're going to take it very slowly and make sure that we address everything that needs to be addressed. Nappy described five areas of development or swim lanes that have been addressed since the Starliners troubled first flight.

that have been addressed since the Starliner's troubled first flight. That was back in late 2019 when the uncrewed capsule failed to rendezvous with the ISS. It would be two and a half years before Boeing would try again, this time achieving an almost completely successful mission. The company and NASA are satisfied that they can safely put two astronauts on the next flight. Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams will be at the controls as an Atlas V rocket carries the craft into low-Earth orbit. It's important to remember that this is, like Steve said, the final stage. You know, we've done our designs, we've tested this hardware,

the analysis is all done, so now this is the kind of, let's wrap it all up in a bow and make sure that we did what we said we were going to do and we have all the artifacts to prove it. And that's what we're going through at this time. If all goes well, the first operational Starliner mission will happen sometime in 2024 with just one flight per year following it, unless NASA contracts for more. For Planetary Radio and the Planetary Society, I'm Matt Kaplan. Here at the Planetary Society, we believe that space is for everyone. No matter where you come from, your level of understanding, lifestyle, or abilities,

we all deserve to share in the passion, beauty, and joy of space science and exploration. Our guest this week, Dr. Kim Arkand, and her colleagues at the Boston Area Chandra Labs are working to find new ways to make space images more accessible to people with low or no vision. Their new album, Universal Harmonies, is a collection of sonifications of deep space objects observed by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This space telescope observes some of the most extreme objects in the universe. Black holes, exploding stars, and clusters of galaxies, to name a few. Sonification is the process of representing data or information as sound.

This technique allows people to convert data that's usually presented visually into an auditory form. Sonification is used not only to make data more accessible, but to explore and understand complex datasets. It provides a different way for us to explore the wonders of the cosmos. Kim Arkand is a visualization scientist and emerging tech lead for NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, headquartered at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. With the help of her colleagues, NASA, Harvard, the Smithsonian,

the Canadian-based group called System Sounds, and their producers at SUA Sounds, their new album Universal Harmonies was released on March 10th. Hi Kim, welcome to Planetary Radio. Thanks Sarah, it's really great to be here. Congratulations on the release of Universal Harmonies. It just came out last Friday, so this is a perfect moment to talk to you about this. Yeah, I'm super excited for sonifications to have more of a moment, if you will, out there in the world.

Absolutely. This project has been years in the making. How would you describe this album? The project of Sonification in general has, I feel like, been kind of a long time coming. For me, it was a slow journey to get here. I've been working for NASA's Chandor Observatory for almost 25 years and spent the first few years of my career really just working on images and started moving into like 3D modeling and 3D printing to be able to make it more inclusive and more accessible. But we were still really missing an important piece of that accessibility and also like that translation. And so when I started working with my colleagues at System Sound to create two-dimensional data sonifications, which is just the process of taking the image and turning to sound, I really felt like that was a moment where we had finally sort of

filled that last gap that we had. So it has been a journey, but it's been a really fabulous one. And I found the sonifications in this album to be really kind of calming and ambient, you know, something that might be good to listen to while you're meditating or working, which gave me a really good laugh because then I read articles about specifically the sonification of the Perseus Cluster. And they described it as this, you know, cosmic horror and this terrifying howling of outer space. And I guess that really depends on, you know, what object you're listening to. howling of outer space. And I guess that really depends on what object you're listening to. It does. Yeah, we've heard lots of different feedback about these sounds because some of them are, like you said, quite relaxing and calming. And some of them are a little bit more

peppy and joyful, and some are perhaps a little eerie and strange sounding. And we actually did a survey, a sonification study, if you will, on these pieces about a year and a half ago. And that was pretty much the feedback we got. It was very much across the spectrum of this made me feel calm. This made me feel relaxed. This made me feel interested. This made me feel excited. Right?

All of those emotions. And I think that really speaks to the power of sound and music in general. It embeds itself in your imagination and in your mind in a different way. And I think that's an exciting thing for astronomy to be a part of. When I was in college, I took a class on the politics of music. And something that really stuck with me was the professor's description of how before humans had even invented language, we were singing songs and bounding on things in the wild. Like that music is deeply embedded in our ability to communicate and imagine. And I always think of that when I experience things like sonifications of space, like what a journey

from the beginnings of human music to something like this, where we're taking music and making it scientific and accessible. It's fantastic. Yeah, that class sounds awesome. And yeah, it's this idea, you know, we're taking data that has been collected by these satellites that orbit the earth, right, that are out there looking at these things so far away from us, millions, if not billions of light years away, and we're able to take that data and translate it into sound. And it is really exciting. It's like a lovely merge of the science, the technology, and a little bit of the art. How did you originally get interested in sonification and how did that lead to the creation of this album? There's like a few different steps that

I had to take. First, it was the introduction to a very dear friend of mine, Dr. Wanda Diaz. She's an astronomer and computer scientist. She went blind when she was a teenager. And she's talked about how she would be in classes and professors would just be writing math equations on a board. And she felt like she could not be a scientist in that way. And so her PhD thesis was essentially on the fact that scientists, that people can learn to become better listeners of scientific data. And that's always been an inspiration point for me. We started working with my students in a lab before COVID on how to take virtual reality

and attach data sonification to it in that sort of geospatially aware way. And we were working on that and then COVID hit and it just kind of, you know, everybody went home and things were just changing. And that's when I contacted my colleagues, Matt and Andrew from System Sound, because I had met them at a conference a few years prior. They were doing interesting work on turning two-dimensional images into sound. And I thought, well, maybe that's where we could go right now, right? It's a pandemic. Things need to be sort of simplified. Let's see how we can do this. And that's where we started. And I had a list of like my favorites, my best hits, if you will, the greatest hits that I was hoping would really translate well from, you know, the Chandra X-ray image into like a Chandra X-ray sound and all the other NASA data involved as well. And we've just been going through that list and really trying to create something new that adds value, hopefully for people in an interesting way.

value, hopefully for people in an interesting way. When I first learned about this, I was actually very moved because I know so many people who are vision impaired, who want desperately to find a way to interact with these beautiful space images. So projects like this are just a perfect way to bring more people into our space family. Exactly, exactly. And I think this kind of public communication project is important because it's like step one. So in that survey that I mentioned earlier, one of the questions was about like, what did this make you think of? And a number of people who were cited who took that survey noticed that this made them think about how other people access information of the universe. And so that was, I think, a really exciting thing that this was a moment that people could just kind of increase their

own awareness of how other people interact with data. And Chandra is a unique case because it's an x-ray telescope. So necessarily, humans cannot see that part of the spectrum. And we have to make changes to how we share that data in order to make it accessible to anyone at all. So this is a perfect segue between taking the images and finding a way to interpret it and share it with more people, make it accessible to more human senses. Exactly. I love that talking point in general. And it's something that I like to talk about a lot because this is x-ray data that no human

eyes can ever naturally see. And that process of translation is important, right? You have to take something that's essentially numerical and translate it into the representation of the object in a kind of light that humans can't detect, in this case, x-ray light, but also even with infrared light from the James Webb Space Telescope or different kinds of light from the Hubble Space Telescope, for example. In that process of translation, it's like taking something and translating it from English into, say, Mandarin. You do have to have choices that you're making as the translator. You're sticking to the story, you're being authentic, you're being truthful, but not every word is going to be exactly the

same in the two different languages, right? So, that process of translation, I think, is really important to consider, not just for the image, but also for the sounds as well. It's just moving something from one form into another, but sticking to that scientific truth. And how do you sonify these images? Because I imagine that there are many different methods to do so. You know, what angle do you take across the image? What tone do you associate with certain colors and brightnesses? How does that work? Yeah, so there are a number of different ways to do this, and different researchers are applying different methods for their own needs, right? I'm actually working on a project with my students, again, where we're taking a sort of auto approach where you upload an image and it just does a very basic sweep across the image from left to right.

But you do have a sort of independent movement to be able to assign, you know, trace the pixels if you were with your location, with your mouse, with your finger, whatever. And that will just create some very simple sounds based on the types of stuff in that image. But this project is a sonification project that I've been working on for the past few years with my colleagues. It's more of a bespoke process. We're doing a mathematical mapping, and that mathematical mapping is done using Python, and then it's brought into essentially a sound engineering platform

where you're then tweaking the sounds based on that scientific story. But what's really important is your input. What is the image that you're starting with? What is the scientific information that you're starting with? That drives every part of this translation. And so if it's a long sort of wide image, we're going to do a pan typically from left to right. If it's a tall skinny image, we're going to pan from either top to bottom or bottom up depending on the data. If it's a circular shaped object, we're going to go from the middle out, right? So there are all of these different techniques that we've been applying to make sure that the science of that object is something that will really make sense. And also working with our partners who are blind or low vision to make sure it makes step along the way, right? To make

sure all of that science-y goodness, if you will, is really being communicated and that there's value being added in that meaning-making process. How do you determine whether or not an image would be good for sonification? Oh, that's a great question. And it really depends that sometimes something you think will make a great sonification kind of goes, you know, bit wah-wah. And so it is a bit of trial and error. So far, we've had mostly successes. I've found at least the Chandra data so far really does seem to lend itself very well to sonification.

And again, I have to give major props to my colleagues that help with all of the techniques and shifting these things from something you can see into something you can hear. But there are definitely cases where it's not quite as easy. An image of the sun, for example, might not be the simplest thing to sonify, whereas an image of an exploded star seems to be quite easier. So there are different kinds of data that will give you different kinds of results. That's good to know, because as I was listening to this album, I was bringing up the images and trying to imagine, you know, what direction are we sonifying across this image? What was the process? So that's really informative. That helps because some of them, it's like, this is definitely different from

the previous song. Yes, yes. And it really is the science story that's driving it. But what we do do, and what I think is important to do, is we always have notes with every object that we release in this form. And it provides that really detailed description of how it's being sonified and like why those choices are being made. So you'll find that sort of like music notes as to the pitches that are being used, and if it's panning one way or another and what kind of musical instruments are being applied, if any, that sort of thing. Most people I've encountered think of sonifications as kind of a fun niche thing, maybe something that's used for accessibility and entertainment, but each new way of expressing data presents an opportunity to catch things you might not

have noticed before. So how can we use sonification for scientific purposes? Yeah, 100%. And I definitely totally understand the skeptics, by the way. This is not going to be for everybody. But the point of this isn't actually for it to be for everybody, right? We went into this project with a very specific mission of continuing to work with our colleagues and our community members who are blind or low vision. And so at the end of the day, that is really a key requirement of this project. But secondary to that, as we talked about earlier, music and sound, your human senses are tuned to those in different ways than they're tuned to sight if you happen to have both of those senses. And there's a power, I think, in leveraging whatever senses you have available, whether it's touch, whether it's sight, whether it's sound. I might stop at taste or smell, but for me, right, having like multiple senses,

these multiple modalities can be really important. I've found it myself, like even with some of these objects that I have made the images for, I have stared at this data for years and years and years, and I know these pixels inside and out. And the first time I'll hear a complete sonification, I'll find something new. light, it's got infrared light, it's got like a near infrared optical light, and then it's got the x-ray light. And all three different kinds of light are sort of working together to show us a glimpse of the inner 400 light years of our Milky Way's core. And when you look at that image, it's beautiful, but it's very dense, it's very rich, there's a lot of activity. This is a very hustle bustle kind of region of space when you listen to the sounds your ears can process things slightly differently right and you can hear these moments where one or two of the different types of light one or two of those different sounds are

just harmonizing beautifully and then in the next moment you'll hear a solo and I'll have to look at that image that I know like the back of my hand and be like I've never noticed that before. So there is a whole area of research where this is being used for scientific study and they are actively working not only to understand how it can help the scientists, but also what kinds of different data produce different results that we can learn in different ways. It's all about this idea of delivering data differently, as a colleague of mine has said, and what the power in that might be. I think it's young days still, but it's, to me, a very exciting field. We'll be right back with the rest of my interview with Kim Arcand after this short break. Ready to level up your space game?

Hi, I'm Amber, Digital Community Manager for the Planetary Society, and we are launching our brand new digital member community. This is a place that's built exclusively for Planetary Society members. Here you can connect with fellow members from around the world, join live events you won't get anywhere else, and delve deeper into the wonders of our cosmos and the missions that explore them. It's all about putting the society in the Planetary Society. If you're not yet a member, now's the time to join at planetary.org forward slash join. I'll see you on the digital frontier. After so long listening to these sonifications, can you recognize different regions of space or even different space objects by their sounds? Yes, now I can. Yes. I have a good oral memory, I guess. But yes, I am definitely very well attuned to them now. It's pretty exciting, you know, because I think there are just different types of objects that we can do

really cool things with. And, you know, for research, for example, variable stars is one area where these stars that are changing all the time, and there are all these plots that you can look at to understand them. But when you can listen to that data, your brain can process it a little bit easier and a little bit faster, right? It's like that cocktail party effect. You're at somebody's home. You've got somebody sitting next to you on the couch and there's a conversation going on, but you can also hear someone in the kitchen. You can hear a dog moving around by the entryway.

You can hear somebody sitting down at the dining room table. table, your brain can process all this data, kind of remove what you don't need and focus on the conversation that's going next to you or what's happening, these cues that you might need elsewhere in that party. And I think it's really useful for us to harness that potential when we're trying to understand this big wide universe, this big wide world. Can you tell the differences between like a black hole and a galaxy? What's the sound difference there? Well, yes, because usually when we're sonifying the data from, say, a black hole, it's going to be really close in and you can kind of identify it by the sort of pulsing sound that you get. It's a different kind of rhythmic sound. When you're sonifying something like a galaxy, that's going to have a lot of stars in it, right? Quite literally billions of stars in it. And so all of those little points of light are typically going to be picked up in a

sonification. And so it sounds very staccato, right? Like there's a lot happening there. When you're looking at sort of an area of star formation where it's pillars of gas and dust or waves of gas and dust, it has a very different sort of feeling to the sound that more of like waves of sound versus just the staccato of a galaxy or the sort of rhythmic pulse of a black hole. So yeah, these objects, they do tend to have their own characteristics. Yeah, I remember listening to the sonification of data from LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory. That's a mouthful. For anyone that's not familiar with that instrument, it measures gravitational waves and the collisions of compact objects like

black holes and neutron stars. And just listening to the sound of it, it's one thing to explain the collision and the physics of these objects, but hearing them get closer and faster and spiral in toward each other, that felt like a more accessible way, even for me, to understand that data. So I'm really excited for everyone to get a chance to listen to Chandra data as well. Absolutely. And I think the Chandra example of the Perseus galaxy cluster is a great one here. That is a re-sonification of something, right? So it's this very supermassive black hole at the center of a cluster of galaxies, and it's sort of burping out into the surrounding hot gas, a medium, if you will. And because there's that medium, those burps are pressure waves, which are causing sound waves. And you can use lovely math,

as our colleagues, Andy Fabian, et al did back in like the 2000s, to be able to understand that that's one of the deepest nodes in the universe that's being created. It's a B flat, about 57 octaves below middle C. And so, that sound is out there in the universe, but this is, you know, hundreds of millions of light years away, and there's not enough stuff between us and it. So we can't ever hear it directly. It's too low. It's hundreds of piano keyboards below what humans can hear. But now, because it's on vacation, we can take that note and bring it back up 57 octaves into something we can hear and to be able to perceive to explore to understand an object like a black hole through sound is i think a very exciting thing because these are things that you know the gravitational pull is so strong that we

we cannot see any light of a black hole itself right right? Because there is none. And be able to instead understand it through something like sound is, I think, a very unique opportunity, as you said, to make something that's so esoteric feel a little more accessible, perhaps. Do you have any favorite tracks on this album? Yes, definitely. I have a couple favorites, and actually two of them I've already mentioned. Perseus, for sure. That one just blew me away. And the Galactic Center was one of our first ones. And it's a very, I'm a former band and choir geek. So the Galactic Center just, I don't know, it just gives me chills still. It's an interacting galaxy, the Whirlpool Galaxy. It's a beautiful spiral structure. And we've got four different kinds of light all layered together, optical, x-ray, ultraviolet, and infrared. Each layer is played individually and then together. And it's with a choral sound. It reminds me a little bit of Eric Whitaker's music. I don't know if anyone's a fan here on the radio.

Love Eric Whitaker. It's right, beautiful choral moments. And we can't quite compare it to that. But it has these moments of these, you can hear these little diva moments of solos and that upper, upper, ultra high soprano sound because these are synthesized choral sounds. And you've got these beautiful, rich bass notes coming in from the infrared. And it's just, when you hear it all together, it's whoa. And when you hear all of the individual components, you can pick up different facets of what that sound is telling you. You can hear the stronger spiral structure in the optical. And then once you get to the x-ray, you're getting more of those like staccato bits, right?

Those little diva moments from that ultra high soprano because you're picking up things like X-ray binaries, two stars kind of like dancing together, exploded stars, smaller black holes, that kind of stuff. And you can hear that in the data. And I think that's really exciting. So that one is definitely a favorite. And the other favorite, if I could pick one more, is the Tanner Deepfield South. It's an image that like a scientist can love, but it's hard to communicate the excitement of that image when the image itself looks like, you know, you've taken a black canvas and splattered some colored paint on it. The story of it that, you know, we pointed Chandra at a patch of the sky for an awful long time. It's the deepest X-ray image we've ever gotten. And Chandra found thousands

of black holes just hanging out there in the universe, you know, way, way back in the early days of the universe. When you hear the music, it kind of reminds me of Imogen Heap. I don't know if you like her music. She's an artist from the UK. And it's got that sort of lovely, melodic, I don't know, almost like a blurriness to it. And the sound is based on the energy levels of each of the black holes that were detected or the galaxies that have supermassive black holes at their cores that were detected in that image. And you can just hear, it's just like a choir of black holes all hanging out together in the universe. And I think it's quite lovely. That's beautiful. I loved that deep field.

Listening to it was just such a wonderful experience. I think for me, though, just because of the timing of it, the supernova 1987A track, because I was born just a few months after that happened. So, that's cool. One of my favorite space moments. yeah that's cool and and i like that piece too because well i love that supernova i'm very partial to supernova remnants for sure but we actually used a bit of sound from our colleague christine malek she is an amateur astronomer she's a colleague that works with us she's blind she's been blind since birth and she's a musician as well. And we used some of the sound from her music as the piece going around Supernova 1987A. So that one was very special as well. But I guess I feel like they're all special, clearly, at the rate

I'm going. Can't pick a favorite child, I guess. I know that each of these tracks comes with little details, but are there any specific little moments that you wish you could explain to people as they're listening? Oh, gosh, yeah. I mean, all of them have these absolute moments of awe for me. And I love to be able to talk about that, like the Pillars of Creation, I think is another great one. That image is very famous, right? Everybody kind of loves the Eagle Nebula. And the story that there are these tall columns of gas and dust detected by Hubble where baby stars are being born, I just think is lovely, right? And I think the tallest pillar might be about four light years tall, if I recall.

So, you know, light years is the distance that light travels in a year, so about 10 trillion kilometers, so say 40 trillion kilometers. And so with that image, the Chandra data is kind of like the slightly older stars that are around it. And so we really wanted to contrast the difference, the texture of those star formation regions of gas and dust from Hubble, and then those sort of beeps and boops from Chandra. I love to be able to talk about the whys, because I think it really adds to the story, right? Like when you're scanning across that pillar of gas and dust,

it really changes. You can hear that sort of dimensionality of the structure through the sound, which I think is really quite lovely. And then for it to be offset by all of those more robotic sounding beeps and boops from Chandra, it's very otherworldly, I guess, pun intended or whatever, you know, it was just, yeah, it's a very special moment. As you said before, sonification is just one way that you're trying to make space more accessible for people. You recently came out with a book about 3D printing space imagery, which I love because I'm super into 3D printing. It's called Stars in Your Hand, A Guide to 3D Printing the

Cosmos. What will people find in that book? Oh, thank you. So kind of you to mention that. Yes, What will people find in that book? Oh, thank you. So kind of you to mention that. Yes. So 3D printing has been a love of mine for a while. We started this project, well, back in 2008, I think. We first started working with three-dimensional data, and it was a very new topic to me. I really didn't have a ton of experience in it, but essentially you're trying to figure out which of the light is moving away from you, which of the light is moving towards you.

And there are a number of different techniques that you can do that, but using the Doppler effect is a really great way. And so we were working with a scientist, Tracy Delaney, back then on Cassiopeia A to kind of move it into this three-dimensional world. And we had the 3D model from her, but we really wanted to 3D print it. And we figured it out, we learned how to do that. And that kind of started a love affair for me with 3D printing. And I've been very eager ever since to move more and more objects into 3D. And in the book, it's essentially a collection of all different kinds of objects from colleagues all over the world that have done really cool things to be able to make these objects interesting through a 3D process and also accessible through that tactile quality. It's great to have these

like 3D prints when you're working with kids, for example. Kids love to touch stuff. And so, it's so fantastic to be able to 3D print a portion of the moon. You can feel all of those dents and bangs from all of the beating up that's occurred to the poor moon over, you know, many, many millions of years. And having those different ways of understanding information through texture, through tactile quality, is a really another, I think, exciting way to just deliver your data in a different way, deliver your data in a way that can make people think about it in a new way, perhaps that can make people excited to even explore it in the first place. So yeah, there's a number of different objects in the book from,

as I mentioned, colleagues around the world, different kinds of exploding stars, tactile plates of galaxies, a lot of solar system objects, because those are, as the nearest objects to us, they are the easiest to figure out in three dimensions. So it's kind of like a little tiny guide to all of the cool stuff that's available in 3D and astronomy these days. I'm gonna have to get this book because I love 3D printing space objects just for fun. It's fun, yeah.

There was this moment for me after the last total solar eclipse in the United States. I was working at Griffith Observatory after having experienced what was just visually one of the most beautiful moments of my life. It was so moving. And I encountered a patron at the observatory who was vision impaired and wanted desperately a way to experience this thing that everyone was ranting and raving about. So I went home and I 3D printed a simple like a lithophane actually. was just you know a little bit elevated in the places where it was brighter and I never encountered that person again but I carried it with me for about two weeks after that and people's reaction was wonderful just being able to give that to someone was such a beautiful moment and I love the idea of finding what else is in there to share

with people. 100% I can actually say I carry a 3D print of an exploded star in my purse at all times. I am never without at least one or two 3D prints, 3D models, because no matter where I am in the world, no matter who I'm talking to, I can guarantee you I'm going to crack one of those models out and be able to talk about it. And I love being prepared to talk to people no matter where they're coming from, no matter what their perspective is, whether they're sighted or not. And it just makes me feel great to have the capability to be able to do that. And so yeah, 3D printing has just been a tremendous gift to how I approach things because it just, it's made it so much easier for me to be able to explain things and to be able to offer connections. Yeah, I really love that.

So what's next for you? Are there any other projects you're working on or images you're working to sonify right now? Yes, yes and yes. So we are working on new projects. I'm actually working with a young composer right now. Her name is Sophie Kastner, and we're taking some of these sonifications and translating them into something that can be played by instrumentalists. Small ensembles, for example, that could play the galactic center. So, you know, picture flute, oboe, violin, cello, and some percussion, being able to play this data of our own Milky Way's core with our own instruments, because that's a request we get a lot.

There's always, always a musician in the audience who wants to know, can I play these sonifications? So we're working on that. And we have some other projects, too. We're still continuing with the sonification. We've got some really exciting new sonifications that will hopefully be releasing a little later this year and other stuff too. It's been a bit of a wild ride. I feel like I've been rewarded tremendously for trying these things. And part of me feels like I'm just having fun with this. And so the response, the public response to these projects has been overwhelming, overwhelmingly positive. And when you're rewarded like that, well, it's like, OK, of course I'm going to keep doing more.

Right. Because this is giving some people joy. This is giving some people new ways to learn. This is giving people new ways to access data. This is giving people a new way to explore a universe. Like, why wouldn't I want to keep doing this kind of fun stuff? And I'm sure there are a lot of people who cannot wait to listen to Universal Harmonies. Oh, thanks. It's been really exciting to be a part of that project. Having the ability for someone to make a record out of these sonifications so that you can play it on your own turntable it's a whole other level the first time i heard the sound on the turntable i was blown away by how warm and like immersive it sounds very different from the digital sound i was used to on my computer because i'm not like a total sound aficionado here as far as like you know i don't have the best headphones and all of

that stuff and so having that moment of just listening to it on the album, one piece after the next, oh, it was very, very cool. And yeah, I was sold. I'm now sold on vinyl. I get it. I get why it's so neat. I get why people love it. Kim, you've led such a distinguished career. And I want to thank you for everything you've done to make space for everyone. It makes me so happy. And there are so many more people that are going to be able to experience this data because of your work and your colleagues' work. So thank you. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much. This is not just me, though. This is hundreds of colleagues around the world that all sort of lend their talents, their data, their skills. And yeah, I couldn't do it without any of them.

So it's a group effort. Always. Thanks for joining me. Thanks, Sarah. I loved that conversation with Kim Arcand. The intersection of music and science is always beautiful, but when it provides us new ways to share and explore space together, it's even better. Now it's time for What's Up with Bruce Betts, the Chief Scientist of the Planetary Society. Hey, Bruce, I'm back from outer space. And by outer space, I mean back from recovering from COVID. Oh, sounds awful. And yeah, no, I guess that was worse than leaving me with Matt.

But anyway, I'm so sorry that you went through that and are still, I guess, recovering. So I'm also very glad to be seeing you two-dimensionally. I'm so grateful that I managed to come through it, you know. But as Matt said last week, I received just a huge number of messages, people wishing me well, hoping I got better. And it was just, you know, a light in my life as I was laying in bed, unable to really do anything. So I really want to thank everyone that wrote me. I haven't been able to respond to everyone yet, but know that I read your messages and I really appreciate it. Oh, that's nice. you know what we should talk about uh the sky

um sure still there saw him last night super bright venus below it uh bright jupiter dropping dropping dropping as the days pass it'll be disappearing soon catch it while it's hot or something anyway still looking stunning Mars still pretty high overhead, hanging out in the general region of a bunch of bright stuff, including Orion. Maybe a little premature, but if you're really into Saturn or the horizon just before dawn, visible very low in the east before dawn,

Saturn's starting to come up, but it'll just be getting higher and higher, and eventually we'll reach a point in the sky in a few months where I'll be able to see it without waking up in the middle of the night. At this point, I'd be glad to go out at that hour to go see some stars. I've been inside quarantine for so long. I miss that beautiful moment with Venus and Jupiter close to each other in the sky. Hey, I took pictures. It looks like, you know, two dots. Two beautiful, shiny, bright dots. Oh, and I actually got three other little dots in my pictures, some Jupiter moons. Oh, awesome. That's something. Anyway, that's the night sky. On to this week in space history.

1958, the U.S. launches Vanguard I, which was one of the early successful spacecraft. Next successful one after Explorer 1, but it holds the record for being the longest object in orbit around the Earth or in space that was sent by humans. It's still up there from 1958. Another object to mention, an object? Sure, Mercury. 2011, Messenger became the first spacecraft ever to go into orbit around Mercury in this week in space history. I love those pictures. So few times have we had an opportunity to get a good glimpse at Mercury.

On to... Random Space Fact. Oh, a nice quiet one. That was calming. I didn't want to upset you. Oh, a nice quiet one. That was calming. I didn't want to upset you.

So the constellation Crux containing the asterism, the Southern Cross, below the horizon and out of the view of anyone that now it's around plus 20 degrees latitude that you have to be below that to have a chance to see it. So why? Why did this happen? It was not magic. It was the very weird Earth's precession. So like a top is spinning and its axis traces out a circle as it loops around. Amazingly, Earth does that on a 26,000 year cycle, changing our North Pole angle, but also affecting things like what constellations can be seen from where.

That's awesome. I had to go all the way to Australia before I got to see the Southern Cross. Me too! Well, actually I picked up New Zealand and then Australia. So anyway, there's just a little bit of southern sky for all the times I don't properly treat you well. You can enjoy the Southern Cross this evening for me and for Sarah. Let's go to the trivia.

We got a couple to catch up on because someone wasn't here last week, so we're going to do two answers to contests. We'll start with the oldest question, which was, how many missions to Mars were tried but failed for any reason before Mariner 4 was the first successful mission at Mars? How did we do, Sarah? We did well. And it's actually really funny.

actually really funny. So this question and the question after it from last week, both of our winners are from the UK, which seems cosmically funny to me considering that I caught COVID at a Doctor Who convention. But the winner for this question was Paul Mundy. And the answer is that there were six failed missions that attempted to get to Mars before Mariner 4 succeeded, five of which were from the USSR and one from the United States. So, Paul, you're going to be winning a goodnight oppie 12-ounce thermal mug. Yay! What was our second question? From a robotic sample return mission, so not crude,

what was the largest mass of samples returned by a single mission? How about that one? Yeah, our winner on this one is Stefan Whitehead, also from the UK. And the answer is it's the Chinese National Space Administration's Chang'e 5 mission, which went to the moon in 2020 and returned 1,731 grams of material to Earth. That's a little under four pounds. And it's funny, I'm always such a fan of the Changa missions because, you know, this is a silly reason, but I used to play the moon goddess Changa in a video game called Smite years ago. Her jade rabbit was so cute. I'm such a fan.

Stefan, you're winning a TPS beanie. So we'll send you a nice beanie to keep you warm. You got any more comments for me? Oh, yeah. I'd like to read a couple messages from listeners because this one was funny. Mark Dunning from Ormond, Florida wrote to say, still getting used to nice Bruce. I guess it's just going to take time. Your niceness to me is a weirding people out,

Bruce. Yeah. I was afraid of that. I didn't know. I I've been trying to check what the etiquette is for how long until I can get more abusive. But you played the COVID card. And so now I just don't have the heart.

Sorry, everyone. Sooner or later, it'll happen. And I loved this message, too, from Eric O'Day from Winchester, Massachusetts, who wanted to thank me because in my interview with Minakshi Wadhwa on the Mars sample return mission, I said that they should put a chomper thing on the little helicopters going to Mars and that it made us weak and that NASA should officially use chomper thing as the nomenclature for that. Of course, the helicopters will not have a chomper thing. So, well, I mean, they weren't going to, but now, few people are able to think so far outside the box to put chomper things on

extraplanetary whatever. Anyway, you got more? Should I go on? Let's go on. Alright, we got something a little different. Name all the countries whose national flag has some representation of the southern

cross asterism that is part of the crux constellation go to planetary.org slash radio contest and you have until wednesday march 22nd 2023 at 8 a.m pacific time to get us the answer and if you win we have a really special prize As you heard earlier when I was doing the interview with Kim Arcand, they have these beautiful vinyl LP versions of their new album, Universal Harmonies. So if you win this, we will send you one of those vinyl records. Wow. That sounds pretty cool. All right, everybody.

Go out there, look at the night sky, and think of the terror that is Sarah. Thank you, and good night. We've reached the end of this week's episode of Planetary Radio. We'll be back next week with Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the principal investigator for the upcoming Psyche mission to investigate a metallic asteroid. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by our diverse and appreciated members.

You can join us as we work to make the space community a more welcoming place for everyone at planetary.org slash join. Mark Helverda and Ray Paoletta are our associate producers. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. And until next week, Ad Astra.