Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Visiting the Birthplace of PlanetVac

Episode Date: March 7, 2018

Space is hard.  Sample collection and return is harder still.  That’s why the radically-simplified PlanetVac system from Honeybee Robotics is so intriguing.  Join Planetary Society Chief Scientist Bruce Betts and host Mat Kaplan on a tour of Honeybee that includes a PlanetVac demo. Bruce returns for this week’s What’s Up jaunt around the night sky.  Planetary Society Digital Editor Jason Davis share big news about the LightSail 2 solar sail and the next SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch. Learn more about this week’s topics and see images here: http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2018/0307-planetvac-honeybee-tour.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi everyone. Our Panoply transition is complete. I hope we didn't leave any SoundCloud listeners behind. Please let me know if you've experienced any bumps as we made this big change by writing to planetaryradio at planetary.org. There's one more change ahead in two weeks. It's something we are taking on as part of joining the Panoply Network and because it will enable us to make Planetary Radio even better. Like nearly all of the most popular podcasts on the web,

we're going to start bringing you short advertising messages. Okay, for those of you who didn't just delete us in disgust, please give this a chance. We've already been paired with a sponsor whom I'll be proud to work with. You won't hear a lot of ads, and we promise that they won't change what you love about Planetary Radio, except that it has been free of commercials. Now, of course, you've been listening to our Planetary Society public service announcements for years. That's it. No more big surprises in store, at least none that I know of. Thank you for sticking with us. Here is this week's show. Join us for a visit to the birthplace of PlanetVac, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure

across our solar system and beyond. PlanetVac, a way to collect samples on other worlds that uses little more than compressed gas and one moving part. Bruce Batts and I will drop by Honeybee Robotics for a tour with two of the young engineers that are creating this cool new device, and Bruce will rejoin us for What's Up Naturally. Have you heard? The Planetary Society's solar sail may rocket into orbit as soon as June of this year. Jason Davis is the Society's embedded reporter in the light sail project. Jason, there is exciting news about light sail 2.

Looks like we're getting closer. Yes, we are getting closer. This kind of infinite delay cycle that we've been on waiting for the Falcon Heavy to launch finally ended. And now we have an early launch period. We found out recently that the launch is tentatively scheduled to occur during a 60-day period that starts on June 13th of this year. So yeah, we're getting close. It's on June 13th of this year. So, yeah, we're getting close.

Now, you use the phrase launch period. That is as opposed to or quite different from a launch window, right? Yeah. So, as I understand it, and Bruce, our director, Bruce Betts, our director of science and tech, was quick to point this out. Usually when we say a window, we mean the specific time period in which the launch is actually going to happen. And that can be like a day- day scale of a couple hours. In this case, it's a period. And this means kind of the range that the Air Force has booked the launch pad and the launch range. I was trying to avoid using the word range twice there. This refers to the time that they're going to try to launch it. And essentially, it's during this 60-day period.

And it could happen early on in that period or later. We don't actually have a specific target date yet. And of course, as we always say, it could slip beyond that. Well, I'm glad to hear that I wasn't the only one becoming somewhat impatient. But I guess with that brilliant success of the first Falcon Heavy, things were looking good. Yeah. You know, there was a question of whether or not we were going to be the second flight or the third flight. And that seems to have

been resolved. You know, things started moving quickly. Light sail and Prox-1 have to go to Albuquerque and get integrated there. That's where the Air Force Research Lab is. And that's who has the primary payload on this flight. They started throwing out dates pretty fast to get the team moving, which was great news for us because the spacecraft has really just been sitting in storage all this time. Remind us, where is LightSail right now? Right now, it's back up at Cal Poly in storage there. Starting next week, I believe that the working date

they're working with right now is Monday. They're going to put the spacecraft in the actual peapod, and that's the little spring-loaded carrier that will push it out into space. And that whole carrier goes inside PROX-1. So they do that first at Cal Poly, put it in the peapod. Then they're going to ship the entire unit to Albuquerque, and that's expected to happen the same week, next week. And then they'll plug it in there. After that, it goes through some final integration testing and some environmental testing, and then they kind of pull the spacecraft out one last time to make sure it survived and it's still alive. As soon as late April, the entire unit Proxmoin and LightSail could ship to Florida.

So we're getting close. Wow. It really is very exciting. Thank you, Jason. We'll continue to follow your chronicling of the LightSail 2 mission at planetary.org. And of course, I hope you'll be visiting here on a regular basis too. And then comes the launch. Boy, I sure hope I'm down there in Florida to witness those 27 Falcon Heavy engines doing their thing. Yeah. Yeah, me too. We should all go and we'll breathe a sigh of relief once that thing gets off

the pad. And how Jason Davis, he is a digital editor for the planetary society. And for our purposes today, far more important and significant that he is our embedded reporter with the light sail project from the planetary society. Thanks, Jason.

Thanks, Ben. Sample return. It is the holy grail of planetary science. It's also very hard to accomplish. You have to reach another world, which is no small feat. Then you have to come all the way back to Earth. In between, you hope and pray that your sample collection system will work as planned.

They don't, always. So when Honeybee Robotics conceived of a radically simple way to pick up loose material on almost any surface. The Planetary Society became intrigued. The name PlanetVac almost says it all. So it was just a few days ago that I jumped in the car with Planetary Society chief scientist Bruce Betts and drove the 10 minutes it took to get to Honeybee's Pasadena facilities. By the way, Bruce took a lot of great photos during our tour. You can see some on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio.

Hey, Matt, look around. We're at Honeybee Robotics. And look, there are people to meet. And this is a part of Honeybee that I've never been in. You guys have been growing. Introduce yourselves. I'm Justin Spring, Senior Project Engineer and Main Engineer for PlanetVac right now. I'm Catherine Luchek. I'm a regular project engineer, and I'm helping out with PlanetVac and Masten testing as well.

Where are we headed? We're going to head right now into the main shop and show you guys some cool hardware and some PlanetVac prototypes. Excellent. Let's go. I'll follow you. Oh no, it's gone. It's gone you it's gone where'd they move it

what's gone someone stole planet vac the planetary deep trail used to be right here I know you guys helped us out with that I always like to show that off it's kind of fun to walk through the door and say now turn around and there it is but it's gone I bet they put it in the other building

so we'll have to go find that later on our extended tour Now, turn around, and there it is. But it's gone. I bet they put it in the other building. So we'll have to go find that later on our extended tour. We probably should check the Smithsonian. I got a great photo of your boss and me holding a deep drill up somewhere around here. Nice shop. Thank you. So, as we said, we do have a bigger drone. It's right there. Oh man, that is a big drone. That is a big drone. So we use this one for collecting sample for far off places. You can see we've got the scoop there on the bottom that we made.

It's kind of like your claw game, except instead of a crane, you have a sky crane, if you will. You fly to the destination you want. You look through the camera, see a material you want to pick up, grab it, fly it back. The idea for this is say there's a place that you want to take a sample from and it's dangerous or it's too far off like a volcano, a geologist working in that kind of environment. Just fly the drone in, grab a sample, bring it back. We've also considered stuff like search and rescue for stuff like this. Fly it off, see if an area has radiation in it by grabbing a sample, pulling it back to analyze instead of sending humans in.

We put that up there for the dramatic effect. My parents are so lucky that you guys didn't develop this till now because if I had seen this as a kid, I would never have given up telling them I want one. Well, if you want one, there's a hefty price tag on that guy, but they are commercially available. This model here is usually used for film industry. They put a big, hefty camera on it,

and there's some cool videos online of it like chasing a car around a parking lot. It's pretty cool. So we're gonna bring you over here into the restricted zone. We're special. You're very special. Our group here, we do a lot of pneumatic sampling, not just specifically for PlanetVac, but for other projects. And so because we're working on other projects back here that are, we'll say, sensitive, we get the nice black curtain that hides us from everyone else. Here we have our box O PlanetVac, which is full of various iterations of the sampler.

And actually, we'll go down and see one that I've been testing even up to this morning. Yep, that's a good one. That's a good one, too. One of the things I love about PlanetVac now, this iteration, are the colors. I half expect you to tell me that Dyson vacuum cleaners has called you up, and they want to see if they can license the design and the color scheme. We can see here kind of a time progression of General Planet Vac technology. So if you look at this one on the left, it looks like a tube with small holes in the center. This is like the one from, what was it, 2015, Bruce?

From way back then. Was it earlier? Well, and all of these must be later generations than where we started, right? With the little one that was in the vacuum. I don't recognize any of this hardware. Well, we actually started with you and a straw. But then we moved on and Honeybee made it more official. But yes, there's been a lot of progress and a lot of development of these pneumatic samplers from Honeybee Robotics.

Yeah. So as I mentioned, Honeybee in general has over a decade of research behind pneumatic sampling. So this one looks like an extra large version of, I guess, 2013's version that was in the vacuum chamber. Other versions evolved to this kind of unidirectional sampler, and you can see that this one's big and fat and clunky. We had another project that did something similar, which shrank it way down. This one's only about four inches long and had a sample container. Again, very colorful. I won't tell you what we called this one, the sample container, but you can imagine if you hold it like this, what it might look like. There are some of these similar to this on sale at certain shops in the neighborhood near me.

There you go. They may or may not have green signs. At any rate, this over here, this was a first iteration for this Masten project where we took, you know, knowledge from all of this, basically took this guy, sized it up, and started the process of iterating. So this was an early sampler. We barely tested this. What we found the problem with this one was, was this opening was way too small for no good reason. This was designed for a tube, so you could take from the front cone, kind of looks like a horse hoof, out of the back with a tube that would go up to a sample bin. From there, though, we decided, well, we're not going to use a tube. We're going to put the sample container right next to the sampler. Improves efficiency substantially, and there's really no good reason why not to. Instead of moving from, you know, here up a tube two meters to a sample container,

might as well just go right there, and then you can pull it out from here. This is actually a prop piece from your planet. Okay, so listeners, there is actually a regolith, earth regolith, inside this chamber. Looks like sand. It's beach sand. We definitely use beach sand here a lot as kind of a first step to sampling, especially for regolith type materials. It's very easy to get. It's universally available, and we like to use it as an initial baseline. I can show you in the other building where we've used a baseline test for sand, and then we moved on to our Mars simulant that we're testing with right now. This is about 100 grams of sample, and if you've seen the graphic online,

that's roughly the size of a tangerine. A tangerine, right. Yes, I have seen that. And the video that you mentioned is this really cool video made by our colleague, Merk Boyan, our video guy, starring this guy right here, Bruce. Yeah. Yeah, we'll put a link up to that on the show page. I really do love the colors, and these sure have the look of things that came out of a 3D printer here. Yeah, we have the printers actually right outside Justin's and my desk upstairs.

Yeah, we have the printers actually right outside Justin's and my desk upstairs. And so we've got all the different colors of filament, so why not use it for PlanetVac? I love it. And these are just, they're so pretty. I'm glad you guys did that with the color palette. So where to from here? So I'll show you just this guy sitting here on the desk. This is an old piece of equipment. We actually designed this initially to be a high-pressure air cannon. We were doing a project that required testing of a blade to be penetrated into the surface of, well, let's just say a planetary surface.

And we needed it to go at 90 meters per second. And we went, how the heck are we going to do that? And we thought, you know, high-powered motor, high-powered spring, and then somebody said, why not like a cannon or something? And so you can see these scuba tanks. They are actual scuba tanks. We bought them from a scuba store. That was the only way that we could get a high-pressure container off the shelf because nobody would sell us custom ones.

As soon as we told them we were making an air cannon, they said, nope. So this system has been modified and this is going to be a breadboard for the pneumatic system that's going to be on the Mastin Lander. It'll probably be one of these, about half this size, but it'll be a scuba tank that provides pressure to the sampler for our test. Excuse me for a second. Could they build the t-shirt cannon that you and I have always wanted? I think so, yeah. We should talk to them about it. We'll make a note. Okay, sorry, go ahead. If you want the t-shirt cannon to break concrete, then yes. That'd make PlanDry Radio Live a lot more exciting. Yeah, especially for the people at the show. The principle remains the same, right? You can do this stuff on virtually any surface, even in a vacuum, because you're

bringing along your own gas to stir stuff up and suck it up into the sample compartment. So it doesn't necessarily matter what the atmosphere is like. The basic concept of this is just like your vacuum cleaner at home. You have an area of low pressure and an area of high pressure. High pressure wants to flow to the low pressure. So in your vacuum cleaner at home, your pump in there is making an area of low pressure to suck up the material into your bag or bag list if you have it. Here in PlanetVac, if we have it in a vacuum chamber, well, the low pressure is already provided. And all you have to do is provide the high pressure, whoosh, goes to the low pressure, done.

If you're on a celestial body like Titan that has higher pressure than we already have here, well, then you could do it in reverse. Where, say, instead of bringing a compressed air tank, you bring a vacuum tank. And then you let that loose and sucks it right up. Or you could try to make a higher pressure at the nozzles, which is also possible. Remind us why this is such an attractive solution compared to the many other technologies that have been discussed for sample recovery, sample collection. Catherine? Well, it's not so much a mechanical system. A lot of your sample collection and sample return is very complicated in the mechanisms that they use in order to take a core of a material.

If you're drilling on Mars, we've seen a lot of things breaking down mechanically in places where we can't fix them. And so this is really nice in that there is nothing that's moving. There's no claws. There's no drills. You are putting air into a system to force a sample collection mechanism. So it's really not much more than just a valve, right, to open up the flow from whatever tank you're using. Correct. And that valve could be mechanical, like a solenoid valve. It could also be an explosive valve like they use on many spacecraft, basically pop it once and it's open.

So you can imagine, say, you had a lander like the Masten lander, but all four feet were a sampler, and you wanted to up your chances. Well, you could have four air tanks, each with their own one-time use valve fire the first one does it work yes okay you don't need to fire the other ones well did it not work okay well try another one try another one uh and that could super simple super easy to just strap right on basically any sort of lander we're actually working right now to beef it up obviously these are printed parts uh in, so they break pretty easily. But when we make this in aluminum, it's going to have to be nice and hefty.

Actually, one of our guys upstairs, Steve, is working to iterate and iterate to get this appropriately beefy. So when this very heavy lander lands on one of these feet it doesn't just crumple. Where to from here? We are going to go to the next building. I can show you where we're currently testing the current version of PlanetVac and then after that it's up to you. When we return Bruce Betts and I will go inside Honeybee Robotics giant freezer and hear PlanetVac in action. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, I'm Bruce Betts of the Planetary Society, and I'm here at Honeybee Robotics in Pasadena, California, with Justin and Catherine, who are engineers on the PlanetVac project.

Grabbing dirt and rocks on another world is hard, but it enables profound discoveries about the solar system. What am I looking at? PlanetVac prototypes from quite some time ago all the way up to just a few days ago. PlanetVac, a new reliable low-cost technique for collecting planetary surface samples. Help us take this technology through the next level of testing on a Zodiac rocket, thus enabling PlanetVac's use on missions to Mars and other worlds. Learn more by visiting us at planetary.org slash PlanetVac's use on missions to Mars and other worlds. Learn more by visiting us at planetary.org slash PlanetVac. That's PlanetVac! PlanetVac!

Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, continuing our tour of Honeybee robotics in Pasadena, California. Honeybee has built all sorts of hardware for planetary science missions. It has also spent years developing PlanetVac technology for sample return. Project engineers Justin Spring and Catherine Lukczak were about to bring Bruce Betts and me to another building used by the company. You'll hear not only about PlanetVac, but also about another innovative project the Planetary Society has supported and that Planetary Radio has reported on. That's Planetary Deep Drill. All right, we're crossing the parking lot here. This is, I remember the first time I came here, I was surprised to see this, you know,

cutting-edge robotics company right off the freeway and really mostly a residential part of Pasadena. Catherine, how long have you been here? I've been here about two and a half years now. And what before this? Before this, I was at the University of Michigan. First job after college? First job after college. Your background?

This is my first job after college. I'm a mechanical aerospace engineer as well, master's degree. Where were you? UC Irvine. Oh, fellow anteater. Yeah, you're an anteater? So you're now in the dirty lab. And as you can see, if you glance at the floor, it's dirty. We try to do all of our messy work in here. You can see that the floor is covered in Mars simulant. Is this genuine Mars

Simulant that you guys bought from somebody? Right now we're borrowing this from JPL. Don't tell them that I have some on the floor. But yeah, this is the Mars Mojave Simulant. I don't know why it's called that, but I think it's very fitting that we have Mars Mojave Simulant that we're going to be testing in the Mojave. It's like it's going back home. Yeah, I know that this stuff is kind of pricey, so it's nice of them to loan it to you, but I gotta touch it. And you have a trowel. Yeah, yeah. I mean, might as well if you're going to see the consistency of it. Try not to get my hands too terribly dirty around here. I'm going home with some of this on my hand on purpose. I'm going to track it into your car later, I think. So, yeah, this is very, very sandy.

You can see that we have the beach sand right over there for comparison. But the other stuff is very fine powder dusty, and you can just kind of, I can just put the sampler in, and it goes poof, up in the air. So I imagine that with the wind coming off of that rocket, even though we have something to protect the sample in the air. So I imagine that with the wind coming off of that rocket, even though we have something to protect the sample in the sample bin, I think we might lose quite a bit of it. And that's a risk where we're not really want to take right now. So we're using this stuff. So

here's, as promised, this is the one from the video. It became very Nickelodeon at one point. We've got our orange and our lime green sample. That is a good way to describe it. Yes. So I've been testing this guy. Our goal for this sampler was 100 grams, and we're getting 140 right now of this Mars simulant. And that's a good thing. That's a very good thing.

We like margin. And it's just good thing. That's a very good thing. We like margin. And it's just hooked up to an industrial compressor over here. Yep, that's just shop air. When we do the test in the Mojave, we're going to use dry nitrogen. Shop air is only good for a certain amount of pressure. So in order to be able to use our small compact scuba tank to supply air, we need to up the pressure. So this will take just a minute if you just want to hear what it sounds like. I would love to. That would be perfect.

This is radio, radio and podcast, so that would be great. We won't spray any of this around. I don't have dust masks for all of you. But, Catherine, if you want to grab the valve there, we can turn this on and off. Sure. Go for it. That is really spectacular in the headphones. I imagine.

So, yeah, what you're hearing is we've got these three nozzles that are pointing down. Their job is to basically scoop up the simulant. If you look over here in the sand, you can see this kind of oval shape. Yeah. Well, that's where the sampler was. And you can see that there's a crater in the center. So that's what these three nozzles are doing. They're digging into the surface, trying to kick that stuff up. And also, as I mentioned earlier, they're creating that area of high pressure. Did it occur to either of you when you were still in school, not all that long

ago, that you would be out designing vacuum cleaners for other worlds? No. In college, I primarily did CubeSats, which is a very different space-related field. Not me either. I did rehab robotics, so this is very different. But fun stuff. Yeah, yeah, lots of fun. That is a wonderful looking rig. This guy here, you should recognize, this is the Planetary Deep Drill. This is the deployment stage for the next generation planetary deep drill. And actually, you can see it. It's over there on the table. You see that it has gotten beefier.

It hasn't gotten longer. It has two anchors now to help with voids inside of where you're drilling. And they have definitely improved the heck out of this deployment stage. I think it's actually going to be automated, which I think would be really cool. This giant spool here that you see in yellow, they're using fiber optics instead of traditional copper wire. That way, we can go even deeper without any sort of data problems. So what's ahead for DeepDrill? I mean, we were just hearing that there might be some additional tests coming. Yeah, so they're going to test in Gypsum, Gypsum Mines first,

and eventually they're actually going to go to Greenland to do future testing there as well. Ship us out on one of the military cargo planes, because I hear that's the only way to get there. Yeah, and if you need any help, I'm available. I've got a heavy coat. I think we have a few of those by the freezer, too, and those ones are for negative 60, so if you've got one better than that. I've been in negative 26 in Fairbanks in February, but minus 60, I'll pass. Onward to Greenland and onward to Europa. Cross your fingers. And what is the Planetary Society's ongoing interest in deep drill? We supported the previous deep drill tests, as you know,

because we went out to the California desert and hung out with Honeybee Robotics, drilling gypsum with the previous incarnation that's a few feet from us right now. gypsum with the previous incarnation that's a few feet from us right now and we supported the the field tests while there were other supporters of other aspects of the project. Yet another building with our name on it. Once we started getting these these extra buildings people with Fitbit started meeting their step counting goal. This is our

environmental testing lab. This is where our vacuum chambers live. All of them. All of them. And also our freezers. So you can see we've got from very big, this is our extra-large Mars chamber. It's a couple meters tall. You could fit a phone booth inside and still have room for another phone booth probably. They dropped it from about mid-height here into a bin of simulant. If you like fun facts, that bin full of sand is the same bin that the Mars simulant was for the original Planet Vac. Random space fact! back. How close can you come to duplicating the vacuum of space or let's say on the surface of the moon? So this large chamber here, this is a Mars chamber. So we can get down to Mars pressure in about 15 minutes. As far as Mars atmosphere, we can do purges to change the atmosphere that's in there

while it's under vacuum. So you can imagine you pull it down, you pump in the gas you want, you pull it down again, you pump in the gas you want, you pump it down. That way it changes the atmosphere. Also, you can see these panels with the wavy bits in them. Those are chillers. So we have a chiller over here. It's currently hooked up to another chamber. This can go to minus 90 C. So we can do temperature, we can do pressure, we can do atmosphere for Mars. So Mars surface, what about 1% of sea level at Earth, I think? Yeah, about 1%. So we usually do this in terms of TOR. So 760 is about Earth atmosphere and about 7 is Mars. Sounds like 1%. Okay. And this guy here can do lunar.

I don't know exactly how close it gets. It gets in the militar level, nice and low. It has a turbo pump to be able to do that. Really cool toys. Now you were leaning against, got to be the freezer. The giant freezer with the really tall section to fit the planetary deep drill in is are you serious that is also part of the freezer that goes way up like 20 feet up yeah that's still part of the freezer almost all the way to the ceiling in here so that

we can fit the entire planetary deep drill in here to do testing in ice we open the door here oh man it's so loud it's very cold. Oh, yes, it is. But you can see there's a workbench in here. At one point, that stand there had a drill on it. All of these are for drilling into. They're big 50-gallon barrels full of ice. We even have these clear ice blocks that you can see as you drill into. But, yeah, you can see up in here, that's where the planetary deep drill would go.

And it's cold. It's very cold. In case you were missing the shows. Yeah, if you were missing the East Coast winter, this is the way to get it. Because we have this extra large section going up, when you open the door, humidity from in here gets trapped in that section there. And you can be standing inside and suddenly it'll start to snow from ice buildup that's on the ceiling in that larger part. And it just goes and falls down. I'm coming next year for white Christmas if I can't get up to the mountains.

You were very excited. You said you have a fun story. I do. We worked with a professor at Caltech when I was doing testing in our really small vacuum chamber to see if the potato plant would survive in the vacuum chamber at Mars pressure for 24 hours. That potato plant is now living in her garden and it's fine. No kidding. So the Martian, he could have kept eating taters. Potentially. I mean, I understand it's critical to the timeline of the story, but the pressure and the temperature do not affect the potato plants quite as drastically as in the book. Because if Andy Weir doesn't know this, I'm going to tell him.

If you have that contact, go for it. You bet. I am absolutely. He hates it when people tell him, oh, yeah, you know, all that stuff to make oxygen. We don't need that. Or water. We don't need that anymore. There's water everywhere on Mars.

Now I'm going to tell him the potatoes would have lived. The potatoes quite possibly could have lived. I love it. He's going to go nuts. It was wilted, but it survived. It survived 24 hours at 7 Tour. Excellent tour. Thank you very much. And we are now in your newest building in a conference room. The acoustics are actually worse in the conference

room than they were in some of the places with all the equipment. That's okay. It's live radio. The thing we haven't talked about is what's going to happen, this amazing test that is going to be taking place soon in the Mojave, Bruce? In the Mojave Desert, yes, indeed, outside of the thriving metropolis of Mojave. You're going to strap this thing to a rocket? Pretty much. We're going to go out there and, well, we're going to go out in a couple weeks and test for the simulant, but once PlanetVac is done and ready to go, we're going to go out in a couple weeks and test for the simulant. But once PlanetVac is done and ready to go, we're going to take their rocket. We're going to lift it up.

We're going to pull its feet off and put PlanetVac on. And it's going to become the feet of the rocket. We're going to take it out to the desert to their launch pad. We're going to launch it, translate over into our sample bin, land partially in the sample bin, collect sample, and then lift off again, go back to the pad and land again. You said feet. That's news to me. They're going to be multiple planet vacs on this test bed? So there's only going to be one that we're testing with. The other three are going to be the same shape for just symmetry for landing the Masten rocket,

but they're not actually going to be active. Can you tell me more about the Masten Zodiac, Bruce? It's a rocket, obviously by Masten Space Systems, that's designed to basically hover. So it simulates planetary landers, essentially. And they use it to test various equipment in more realistic environments. So in this case, taking PlanetVac, which has been tested in various forms in places like vacuum chambers, and actually testing it in a rocket environment to demonstrate that it can handle the stresses and the vibration and actually work in that environment, which will get it one step closer to being selected to actually fly on planetary spacecraft.

What is NASA's involvement in this test? NASA has funded a Honeybee Robotics proposal to basically support the Zodiac rocket and pay for that and a little bit of the integration costs of PlanetVac with the Zodiac. And the Planetary Society, as part of that proposal, we said we will help support what NASA won't pay very much for, which is to actually do the modifications to PlanetVac so that it can work with the Zodiac. Are either or both of you going out to the desert to watch this test? I think both of us are going right now. For me, it's almost like a birthday present. It's on my birthday is the day that we are delivering the PlanetVac to Mastin Space Systems.

Very cool present. A colleague of mine and myself have already gone and watched the rocket go, and it is an experience that I distinctly will never forget, and I want more. What do you think it'll feel like if someday you see a spacecraft arrive on some mysterious body in our solar system, and on its foot, or several of its feet, are planet vac descendants ready to collect some of that material, that alien material. That is such an impact on space flight and sample collection that it's almost hard to imagine having. Being in my 20s, like seeing something 20 years from now that I worked on at its conception is almost mind-blowing.

Justin? Well, I get really excited when I see my 3D printed model on YouTube, so I can only imagine how excited I'll be to see it on a real spacecraft. Bruce, thanks for making me part of the road trip. This has been great fun. This has been great fun, and we're always happy to come by and visit with Honeybee and partner with them and do good stuff like innovative technologies for the future of space travel. Thank you, Justin. Thank you, Catherine, for the great tour.

You're welcome. Thank you. So even though we just spent quite a bit of time with Bruce at Honeybee Robotics, here we are online, ready to talk to the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. There's that great new title. Yay. For this week's edition of What's Up. And, you know, we talked with Jason about the news about LightSail.

You must be excited. I am excited. You excited. I've been working on this for years, so we're looking forward to a launch. And we've got this 60-day period opening June 13th is great. On course to make it happen. We'll see if launch slips or doesn't slip. Yeah, and of course, they do slip. Don't hold your breath, anybody, but we are certainly anxious and excited. We're also so excited about the night sky. As well you should be, Matt. You know, in the early evening when you're looking for Venus, super low but super bright in the west, shortly after sunset, you might be able to pick out Mercury in the next several days, a little below and to the side of Venus, much dimmer.

It looks like a bright star normally, but it'll be a little tougher in the sunset glare. Also, Jupiter coming up around the middle of the night and then followed by Mars and Saturn all rising in the east, of course. And on March 10th, you can see the moon between Mars and Saturn. And stay tuned because Mercury is coming up again in a moment or two. All right, we move on to this week in space history. You know what happened in 1781, Matt? That's right. Let's see.

No. William Herschel discovered Uranus. Wow, right in the middle of the Revolutionary War. Was it over by then? I guess it was over by then. It ended that year. I don't think that affected William Herschel too much, but maybe it did. I don't know.

I shouldn't go where I don't know. But what I do know is that he discovered Uranus in 1781. This week, we shall move on to... I think that was a William Herschel impression. Yes, he had a speech impediment. In honor of William Herschel discovering Uranus, I'm pulling out one of my most immature random space facts in a very long time. If you started from your bathroom on Earth, you would need 47.64 billion rolls of toilet paper to reach Uranus. And that's standard size two-ply.

We want it to be comfortable in space. How appropriate, since Uranus is also going to come up momentarily when we get to the trivia question. It's nice for you to say that, but I don't think there's anything appropriate about that. You know, my old astronomy professor, he did say that it's pronounced Uranus. This is not an anatomy class, he added. It's certainly pronounced Uranus for all of us who try to maintain any seriousness about a serious planet with cool stuff that happens there. Not the last time we will mispronounce it, I will warn you up front. But go on, let's get into the contest. All right, I asked you what two planets in our solar system have about the same surface gravity. How'd we do, Matt? It was really split between people who said,

the one I think you were primarily looking for, surprisingly, to me anyway, Mercury and Mars, because Mercury is so much smaller than Mars, right? Right, but it's denser, and so the equations work out. You got the mass of Mars and Mercury being different and the radii being different. But when you do the gravity calculation, they're both about 0.38 Earth gravity, 0.38 G. was one of those who said Mercury and Mars. The other possibility was Venus and Uranus. There were people, of course, who said, how could it be Uranus? It doesn't have a surface. Please explain. Well, that's why I was looking for Mars and Mercury with my statement of surface gravity.

But indeed, you can calculate the gravitational attraction at any point for a planet. gravitational attraction at any point for a planet. And so if you pick roughly the top of the atmosphere, the top of the cloud tops, say on Uranus, and then do the gravity calculation, it's 0.9 G ish, which is about the same as Venus if you're on the surface of Venus. Tricky one. At least that was the feeling of our winner this week. He's a new listener. We had just heard that he started listening to the show a week or two ago. It's Andrew Jones of Goleta, California. Go UCSB. So Andrew, congratulations. You have won yourself a Planetary Society t-shirt and a 200 point iTelescope.net astronomy account. We got a real breakdown from Claude Plymate, the telescope engineer and chief observer up at the Big Bear Solar Observatory. We heard from him on the show

a while back. He put Venus and Uranus at the top of his list. He was one of those because he said they're only 1.27% apart in their surface gravity, but did list Mercury and Mars as number two. This came from Garrett Kingman. What an intriguing answer. I was certain going in that it would be the mundane answer of Earth and Venus. Excellent choice of questions. Thank you. You know, that was my initial guess as well.

You're a fool. I'm just talking to Matt, not the listeners. No, that makes sense. We always talk about Venus as the sister planet. And, you know, it's not that far off. It's about 0.9 G. But I just I've always found it intriguing since Mars and Mercury are so different that they have a similar surface gravity. From Bob Klain in Chandler, Arizona, Uranus and Venus, WTPH.

What the physics. And finally, because our poet laureate is taking a well-earned vacation this week, we got this from Kay Gilbert in Manhattan Beach, California. Here is a comparison that's not the least bit heinous. The surface gravity is quite close on Venus and Uranus. So if you want to bounce a bit and feel some extra freeness, you'll celebrate your lesser weight on Uranus or Venus. I told you to come up again. You did. You did. I wondered about your foreshadowing and your motifs. Anyway. Well, I'm going to move on to a much more straightforward and probably boring question, but our listeners make every question interesting. How many missions carried humans to space as part of the NASA

Mercury program? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Wow. Okay. Very, very good. This is one that you have until the 14th. That would be Wednesday, March 14 at 8 a.m. Pacific time to win. Get yourself in the contest anyway. I'm not saying you're going to win. Only one person is going to be chosen by random.org, and that person better have the right answer. And if they do, they're going to get a Planetary Society T-shirt. By the way, we're going to go back to Planetary Radio T-shirts before long.

This T-shirt and the Planetary Radio T-shirt both come to us from Chop Shop. You can check out the Planetary Society store at chopshopstore.com. And, my gosh, a 200-point itelescope.net account from the people. Oh my gosh. From the people behind that terrific network of telescopes all over our planet, operated on a nonprofit basis. That's itelescope.net. And you can donate that account as well to your local astronomy club or school or whomever you choose. I don't know who you would choose, but I choose to believe that we're done. I choose to say, hey, everybody,

go out there, look up in the night sky and think about palm trees and the sun. Thank you and good night. Got some right outside my window. Thank you, Bruce. He is the chief scientist for the Planetary Society. He used to be the director of science and technology. I don't know if this is a move up or sideways or, you know. Anyway. It's a new title with more

areas of responsibility. Yay. He joins us every week here for What's Up. I'll be on the road a lot over the next several weeks. First up is a return to Southern Illinois University for the March 24th premiere of the total solar eclipse documentary shot there last

fall. Then I'll join the Yuri's Night Los Angeles celebration on April 7th, once again partying under Space Shuttle Endeavor at the California Science Center. May to 10 brings this year's Humans to Mars Summit from Explore Mars with an amazing lineup of space leaders in Washington, D.C. And then there's the National Space Society's International Space Development Conference, May 24-27 in Los Angeles. All of these are open to anyone.

We've got more information on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its globe-spanning members. Mary Liz Bender is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.