Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Visiting Worlds Fantastic with Bonnie Buratti

Episode Date: May 10, 2017

Veteran Jet Propulsion Lab planetary scientist Bonnie Buratti talks with Mat about the wonder of our solar neighborhood that she explores in "Worlds Fantastic, Worlds Familiar—A Guided Tour of the Solar System."Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Visiting Fantastic Worlds with Bonnie Barati, 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. Worlds Fantastic, Worlds Familiar, is the new book by JPL scientist Bonnie Barati. We'll tour the solar system with her on today's show. With every solution comes new challenges, says Bill Nye. He'll explain as we talk about accessing the Internet from anywhere on Earth. And Bruce Betts will help us find the connections among hamsters, Skylab, and gold on What's Up.

Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover, was busily exploring the red planet while senior editor Emily Lakdawalla was on sabbatical. Emily, we mentioned but didn't provide any detail on your Curiosity update that you posted. Now it's been a couple of weeks but still very current. You had a lot to cover. What, two and a half months worth? Pretty much. It was a lengthy campaign that Curiosity took to study the southern half of the Bagno dune field, studying the sand dunes in four different locations, taking a look at the sand, and finally sampling in the final spot. Well, the Gorgiosity, a lot of images in this, begin right up at the top with this beautiful banner looking forward toward those hills in Curiosity's future. But it was another image or really a matrix of images that grabbed

me. Last weekend, I was on the central California coast and I bent over, picked up a handful of sand, fairly coarse sand, and was just really taken with it as I am by these images in this blog post. Yeah, it's four different views of sand from the four different science stops. And, you know, sand, meh, you know, it's just, you think it's just a bunch of little grains. But anytime you pick up a pile of sand and look at it really closely, you realize that each grain of sand is a rock. Every rock tells a story. These rocks are all different colors. They're different little rounded mineral grains. They started out as volcanic rocks probably from some great distance away. They've been sorted into similar size piles by the wind and all rounded

into these round shapes. It's really quite lovely just imagining the whole geologic history behind these piles of sand. And this is the closest that I'll come to holding a handful of Martian sand in my hand. Tell us about the status of the spacecraft. It's still facing some challenges. It is. I think that Curiosity's challenges aren't more than any other middle-aged creature might have because it's several years into the mission. It's a little bit past its warranty. The main problem is with its drill. There is one motor called the drill feed mechanism, and it's absolutely crucial for drilling to work. It's what advances the drill into the ground, and it's suffering.

It's having trouble with its brake so that it's hard to get the drill moving. They've been troubleshooting it for a long time. The problem is intermittent. They think that maybe there's a little grain of some material, maybe a chipped tooth from a gear or something is floating around inside the mechanism, occasionally making it hard for the brake to be released and other times not. They're just having a tough time troubleshooting it because it's so intermittent. And that's prevented them from doing much in the way of sampling activities for quite a while. But the views are great, and Curiosity has lots of other instruments that are keeping busy. And there is so much more to this post about where Curiosity has been and the work it's doing.

But just tell us where it's headed. Well, now that it's finished this examination of the Southern Magnol dune field, it's got about a kilometer of driving, of which it's already done a few hundred meters, to finally get to Vera Rubin Ridge. And that's the name that the mission has adopted to call what they've been calling Hematite Ridge since the beginning of the mission. It's a low standing, but still ridge slightly above the regional topography. And from orbit, there are signs of hematite, which is a mineral that forms in liquid water. And so they're expecting to find some interesting geologic history at that site once they finally pull up to it. I bet they will. Thank you, Emily. It's all from an April 25 post from Emily at planetary.org. Read it and look at the pretty pictures. It's great. Talk to you next week.

Look forward to it, Matt. She's our senior editor for the Planetary Society, Emily Lakdawalla. Bill Nye is the CEO of the Planetary Society, as well as being the science guy. Bill, you were just telling me that you have a vision for the Internet. A vision for the world, Matt. Three things we want for everybody on Earth. We want clean water, renewably produced, reliable electricity, and access to the internet. Now, providing access to the internet, or whatever the future of electronic worldwide

information is called, the co-net. Anyway, we want everybody in the world to have that. And in order to do it, we're not going to be able to run landlines, copper wires, from the shores of Africa all the way to middle of Africa, for example. So instead, we'll probably provide the internet with orbiting satellites. And in order to make it practical, you have to have a short range. You can't use geosynchronous satellites. There's a second at the speed of light, and then there's electronics on the satellite to process it and get it back down. It's just not the way we use the internet.

on the satellite to process it and get it back down. It's just not the way we use the Internet. So instead, we're going to have a constellation, as it's called, of relatively low-altitude satellites. And what is SpaceX talking about, 400 to 4,000 of them? 4,000-something little birds. If you like to worry about space debris, this is a great one. I mean, so if we had two or three companies each putting up 4,000 satellites, you're going to have a lot of debris. But it'd be okay, I guess, as long as we have a

means to de-orbit them. But this space debris thing, Matt, this is a big deal. And people say we need a paradigm shift. We need a disruptive out-of-the-box thinking. We need game-changer technology, which may all be true. But we don't have that right now. And we want to provide internet to everyone in the world. So this problem's really got to be solved. In other words, I don't want to solve one problem and create another. I don't want to get access to the internet for everybody without having a means to deorbit these satellites. Well, Bill, if you had more brains working on it around the world, then maybe they'd come up with a way to deorbit the satellite. And you may be right. You may be right. But we got to figure

out this deorbiting thing. And so the first thing I think, Matt, is to have international treaties that require spacecraft to be able to drag themselves down or retro rocket their way down. If they were drag, drag brought down, perhaps we could use something akin to the solar sail, like light sail one or two. Planetary society is the future, Matt. The fiendish plot of the planetary society to become the essential player in low earth orbit. Just kidding. Sort of. Thanks, Matt. I've got to fly! He is Bill Nye, the science guy, you know, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Up next, a great planetary scientist, Bonnie Barati of GPL.

She's got a new book out. Bonnie Barati was just two years past achievement of her Ph.D. at Cornell when she went to work for the Jet Propulsion Lab near Pasadena, California. She's now been at JPL for more than 30 years. Along the way, she's worked on many of the missions we talk about on this show, contributing some of the best science to come out of those efforts. NASA awarded her its Exceptional Achievement Medal a few years back. Now she has captured the spirit and wonder of planetary science in her new book, Worlds Fantastic, Worlds Familiar,

a guided tour of the solar system published by Cambridge University Press. She recently made the drive across town for the great conversation you're about to hear. Bonnie, thanks so much for coming down to Planetary Society headquarters to talk about this book, this great book, World's Fantastic, World's Familiar. I really enjoyed it. It's really great to be here, Matt.

Thanks for asking me. You opened the book. Your introduction has a poem from Walt Whitman, which I'm going to read. I should have had the page open. I love Whitman, and I bet you do too. He's my favorite poet. Yeah, he's right up there for me. When I heard the learned astronomer, when the proofs the figures were ranged in columns before me,

when I was shown the charts and the diagrams to add, divide, and measure them, when I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room, how soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick, till rising and gliding out, I'd wandered off by myself in the mystical, moist night air, and from time to time looked up in perfect silence at the stars. We both love Walt, in perfect silence at the stars. We both love Walt, but he was dead wrong, right? Completely wrong.

In fact, I would present the counter-argument to that poem, and that is William Herschel. Somebody asked him, why do you do astronomy? And, you know, we get that a lot today as astronomers, we astronomers, you know. Well, isn't it kind of useless? Herschel just said, I don't understand how anyone can look up at the beauty and wonder of the night sky and not want to be an astronomer. I love that quote. It's just, there's a beauty to science and math that I think just surpasses the numbers. And if you can get there, it's an experience like poetry or art.

like poetry or art. And yet, I always make the comparison to going to an art museum and knowing something about French Impressionism, that it helps you to go even deeper with the amazing beauty, the genius that you see on the walls. There's a parallel to astronomy, isn't there? The more you know, the more you're impressed. But I think that even a person who's not a scientist can get a flavor of that wonder just by finding out about the discoveries that we've made. And, you know, what NASA has done is really the heritage of the American people. They have supported it. I'm privileged to be kind of a child of Sputnik that I've gotten caught up in this, but it's really the taxpayers that have supported us. You know, it's not like some little personal, you know, venture I'm on. I wanted to, in my book, bring the whole contributions that they've made back to them. That is really the number one reason

why I wrote the book. How much has our understanding of the solar system evolved over the last half century or so? It has, I would say, been immense. I mean, basically, the planets were just pinpoints of light. I mean, there were a couple little things you could see on Mars and the red spot of Jupiter. But for the most part, we have transformed these pinpoints of light to geologic worlds. And not only geologic worlds, but worlds that are,

as I call them, worlds familiar. Worlds that have geologic formations and processes that are like those on Earth. There are just amazing things, the volcanoes on Io, the plumes, the active ice volcanoes on Enceladus, the liquid lakes on Titan. Now, they're not water. They're liquid hydrocarbons. But a lot of the features we see on Titan. Now, they're not water. They're liquid hydrocarbons. But a lot of the features

we see on Titan are uncannily like those we see on Earth. Lake Powell looks just like the lakes we see on Titan. So they really are fantastic but familiar. That is kind of the thing. Scientists are beginning to look at things that happen on the planets as processes, you know, not just, oh, let's study Mars, let's study Titan, let's study Pluto. We see the common processes, geologic, things that happen on the planets and the moons that are common. That's where we've come now. As we've heard many times on this program, studying the heavens, the other planets, the other worlds in our solar system, we learn about ourselves. This is true.

There are a lot of processes that we see. Global warming, for example, was discovered by my mentor, Carl Sagan. I was Carl Sagan's student. Fabulous mentor in person. It was discovered. He was the one that first pointed out that the oven-like, plus oven-like temperatures on Venus are caused by the greenhouse effect. We also see some of that on Titan.

I really think it's not the similarities we see, the processes, the similarities between the Earth and the planets. That is one reason why we study the planets. But I think the main reason is because discovery leads us forward. We never know where and when the next discovery is going to be made. I mean, a nation that leads in science, that leads in space, is going to lead in science, and it's just going to lead in general. I would make the argument that the technological revolution of the last 20, 30 years came out of

the space program. The miniaturization of electronics, the robotics, a lot of what we're seeing now in technology came directly out of the space program. Certainly a very large slice of it, yeah. Speaking of that discovery that your mentor made on that, what was once thought to be a sister planet, a twin planet of Earth. Go back in your chapter about Venus to your first experience with what we thought, scientists thought, might Venus be like. Very different world than the hellhole it turned out to be. I can remember this very vividly. I was only in the third grade, so I guess I was seven. And I was at home with the measles. Now, this was before the MMR vaccine. Okay, so just so you know, you know, I'm not an anti-vaxxer. Speaking of science, yeah. Yes, I'm not an anti-vaxxer. The vaccine

just didn't exist back then. And so I know what anti-science can do, because one of my classmates died with measles. Okay, so, but I had the measles. Fortunately, I recovered, but I was in my room. I got this book that my parents bought with me. It was by Dotton Sy Barlow called A Child's Book of the Stars. And I just remember, you know, the first page had this caveman looking up at the stars. Again, that wonder of the heavens, you know, even back then, you know, in our earliest, the dawn of history, we were wondering what it's all about, you know, and looking up and wonder at the sky, at the heavens. But on about page three or four, we just went through the planets.

There was this picture, an artist's conception of Venus, and it showed a jungle. It showed a wet tropical jungle. And I looked at that and said, there are worlds so much outside my little bedroom. You know, my bedroom just expanded into this planetary system. This little eight-year-old girl there reading this book. And of course, it's also interesting that I read that when I wasn't in school, although I had a wonderful school. I don't want to put it down near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. My world expanded when I saw that picture, and that kind of had me hooked pretty much for life to space sciences. So you've loved this stuff long enough, and actually the work you've done over your professional career

has put you in enough situations that in a lot of chapters in this book, the story becomes pretty personal. And because of that, I want to jump forward to kind of the middle in this book, the story becomes pretty personal. And because of that, I want to jump forward to kind of the middle of the book and the story that you tell about Enceladus, that moon of Saturn. Because I think telling that story is not just, in part, it tells us not just how planetary science works, but all of science. Tell this story that, you know, started for you anyway on an evening in January of 2005. Yes, I remember that also pretty vividly. I was sitting in my office. It was a Friday afternoon. It was about six o'clock, and of course it was dark out, and I was just kind of dreaming about what I was going to do for the weekend and everything,

and which was probably work. You know, things were pretty busy back then because we'd just gotten into orbit, and we had a lot of data to reduce. And I was jolted by this phone call, and Trina Ray was on the other end of the line. She said, Bonnie, you know, we have this picture of Enceladus, and we think there's a plume. Can I send it over to you and have a look at it? So she sent it by email, and I looked at it, and sure enough, it really looked like some kind of an atmosphere or plume off the side of Enceladus.

Now, scientists had been talking about plumes on Enceladus for some time. This wasn't new because Enceladus looked like it was coated in snow. It's kind of a winter wonderland. It is as bright as newly fallen snow. It reflects nearly all the solar radiation that comes on it. So we were pretty certain that there had to be some active geology. Fresh means active in planetary science. So seeing this plume was quite a revelation, but not unsurprising. So I immediately got to work, and I called some members of the imaging team. I didn't know it at the time, but there was a disagreement on the imaging team about whether there really was a plume on Enceladus, whether there really was active. And, you know, the point, one of the points I make in my book is

this is what drives science. Disagreement drives science. You have to disagree. You have to go out on a limb and say something provocative so scientists will challenge you, so scientists will look at data, not only that would support you, but could refute you. So that's kind of what was happening there. It had already started with the imaging team. And you had some pretty strong disagreements. Yeah, we did. We really did.

The first kind of, I would say, solid clue, Michelle Daugherty, who is the principal investigator of the magnetometer on Cassini, investigator of the magnetometer on Cassini had seen this draping of what looked like an atmosphere of Enceladus around the magnetic field. The magnetic field just seemed to kind of drape around Enceladus. And she had a hunch that there is, you know, maybe not a plume, but an atmosphere. There was something there, you know, because otherwise it wouldn't drape around what is a solid surface. there, you know, because otherwise it wouldn't drape around what is a solid surface. She argued and had the support of the group I was leading that was planning the satellite observations to go to swoop down much closer. You know, most of these flybys are about 1,000 kilometers. But we made the argument to swoop down just to a few hundred kilometers.

And Bob Mitchell, who was the project manager at that time, approved it. And we went down low, and that was when we found the smoking gun. We basically found this boiling cauldron. John Spencer and his team, with the infrared spectrometer, found a boiling cauldron at the south pole of Enceladus, where it should be the coldest part of Enceladus. It was actually very warm. In fact, we know now that the temperature there is very close to the melting point of ice, enabling liquid water to come up. Later on, Carol and Porco had gotten

images of the plume, spectacular images of the plume. And there was a lot of disagreement at the beginning, but we all came to some kind of a conclusion that there is this incredible active geology going on at the South Pole of Enceladus. And we're still studying it, and there's still disagreements about, you know, what causes it, and, you know, is there enough heat, or how much heat is there? There's a lot of disagreement, but there's nothing like it in the solar system. Are we even close to understanding how this tiny world can have so much going on? There's a pretty good understanding.

It has to have a source of energy. It seems to be mainly tidal. There's a tidal pool between Saturn, Dione, which is another moon, and Enceladus, such that it kind of, you know, squishes. It's just like the tides on the Earth. You have a bulge of water that's traveling around the Earth. Well, solid bodies also have the bulge. So that bulge just flexes back and forth, and it dissipates heat when that happens. There also seems to be possibly some radionuclides, that is some radioactive elements in Enceladus, because it has, it's fairly high density. It has a density close

to two grams per cubic centimeter, where water is just one, water ice is just like roughly one gram per cc. So it looks like there's some, maybe some radioactive materials in there. Some, something dense down at the core. Exactly, that's heating it up. A lot of people have come on this show and say all the time, boy, wouldn't it be nice to have a mission specifically to fly through those plumes and taste them with a little better spectrometers than Cassini carries. But we'll come back to that.

Do you see similarities between the discovery of those plumes on Enceladus and the discovery of, you know, really much hotter eruptions on Jupiter's moon Io? There is a lot of discovery, similarities between these two discoveries. One of the similarities is that there was superb scientific thinking predicting these discoveries. In the case of Enceladus, it was mainly astronomical observations. You know, we saw that it was very bright. Voyager saw that it was very bright. There was this E-ring, this tenuous ring around Saturn. A Taurus at the orbit of Enceladus. It seemed to be something coming out of Enceladus. So all these little pieces put together. With Io, this also happened. There was

also a torus of sodium. And although it's mainly sulfur that comes out of the volcano, sulfur and sulfur dioxide. But there was also this mysterious thing that happened on Io called post-eclipse brightening. Whenever it came out from behind the shadow of Pluto, of Jupiter, sorry, I'm going to crack mine here, yeah, of Jupiter. I'm just thinking it is a planet, okay. So when Io went behind Jupiter and was in its shadow, when it came out, it seemed to brighten up. And this was very mysterious. And it looks like we were just observing maybe some thin atmosphere that was condensing, a thin atmosphere that was due to these volcanoes. Now, there was a prediction by Stan Peel and his colleagues.

Stan Peel just recently passed away, University of California. He made the prediction that there would be volcanoes on Io and made that prediction in a paper in Science just a few days before encounter. And I tell the story in my book about how Linda Morabito, Linda Morabito Kelly, had actually discovered these plumes on a navigation picture. It was a picture, an image from the camera that was designed to look back at Jupiter, her just trying to trim up the spacecraft trajectory. And she saw this, it looked like a moon behind a moon.

It couldn't be an undiscovered moon because we would have seen it from the Earth. So she very carefully basically stayed up, you know, a couple nights and worked with the NAV team and discovered that this was a plume coming, a volcano that was on the surface of Io. And this was the first time that active volcanism was discovered outside of the earth. She told me this story, I interviewed her recently, and she told me this story that when Ed Stone came into the room to look at this volcanic plume, his first words were, this has been a great mission. Because apparently, he kind of knew right away what it was. He had read the paper, and Linda

Morabito was working, she's an engineer, and she actually told me she didn't know about this paper. So she was just working from the most conservative point of view she could you know that it might be an artifact on the image it might be what's known as ghosts you know it's just like a little after image of something bright that was on your the decon your detector she was working on that assumption but she eliminated all those things and when ed Ed Stone walked in, it just all came together. I wish I had been in that room, you know? Me too. As if Ed Stone had to worry about anyone, forever believing Voyager was a great mission, even if it hadn't discovered volcanoes on Io. Maura Bito Kelly was a colleague of mine years ago here at the Planetary Society. I was always kind of in awe of her.

But as you said, she was an engineer. So here was somebody not really looking to do science, but the science presented itself. Well, I kind of have the opinion that engineering is art, too. Oh, yeah. You know, I mean, I think engineer, there's really not a strong boundary between engineering and science. Engineers tend to like have, they're not as exploratory, you know, you have an answer, and you have to be right. And it is more based on calculation, where science, I think a lot, there's a lot of inspiration. But it just, it also has, has a beauty. There is some

kind of existential place that you're in, a zone that you're in, when you are performing engineering as kind of a cutting-edge art. No question. I agree with you. And so would my boss, the engineer who's known as the science guy. That's right. That's right. Bill Nye is an engineer. That's correct. That's absolutely right, yeah. JPL senior research scientist Bonnie Barati will return to talk more about her new book and the world's fantastic She and It Explore.

This is Planetary Radio. I'm Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy. In the last five years, our members have helped to achieve pretty much every single advocacy priority we've had. It's been amazing. NASA's planetary science budget is above one and a half billion again, and it's growing. We have new missions to Mars in 2020 and Europa. We've sent over 400,000 letters to Congress and the White House in order to achieve this. And your generosity has enabled us to grow this program up to three full-time staff dedicated to space policy. But we have a new Congress, a new president, and soon a new NASA administrator.

Decisions are being made right now that are going to impact the future of NASA for a generation, if not more. So we need your support now more than ever to build on the momentum we've created here. So please, join us. Invest in our advocacy program. Go to planetary.org slash advocacy. Thank you. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, this week talking with astronomer and planetary scientist Bonnie Barati about her new book, World's Fantastic, World's Familiar. The JPL researcher has had a hand in much of the hard work and thrilling science she describes. Let's go to a different moon.

Okay. Back to Saturn. What's so strange about this world called Iapetus? I kind of know the answer. You ever have one of those black and white cookies they love in New York City? Yeah, I love them. Yes, they are actually my favorite, the black and white. Yeah, you can only get the real ones at the... They're hard to find on the West Coast. Yeah, they're starting to make their appearance though. Actually, it was Cassini, the man,

the one that the Cassini mission was named after, who recognized shortly after he discovered Iapetus that half was black and half was white. Because when it was on one side of Saturn, it was very bright, and then the other side had basically disappeared. Just like the moon, it keeps the same face towards Saturn. Tidally locked. It's tidally locked, so that when you are looking at one side, you see the dark side, and then when you're looking at the other, when it's on the other side of Saturn, you see the dark side, and then when you're looking at the other,

when it's on the other side of Saturn, you see the bright side. And he could see this 400 years ago or so. Yeah, he realized this very early on. But then he went on, if you go back to the original paper that he wrote, he goes on to make some wild speculations. But he was right about this. So one side, what we call the leading side, that is kind of the ram direction,

like if you think of a car kind of going against, kind of collecting bugs, okay, that's the ram direction. So Iapetus is going around Saturn, and the direction of motion, that is the hemisphere that's like very, very dark, it's black. So it seemed to astronomers anyway, that it was sweeping up some dust somehow. But the theory that was favored by geologists was that it had some kind of eruption on its surface of some dark material, lava that came out, something that came out and darkened the surface. So astronomers and geologists could not agree on this for the longest time. There were models.

You make a really good point about that, using this as an example of scientists tend to find phenomena within their own expertise to explain what they see. That's right. That's right. The other example, just to be brief about this, in my book, the origin of life has really changed throughout my professional career. or you'll see the Miller-Urey experiment where you have a shallow sea and it's zapped by some lightning and amino acids form because it's rich in hydrocarbons, and somehow amino acids form and then life. That was kind of the model. That was when I was in graduate school.

Later, when I was at JPL, it was these thermal vents in the oceans that formed primordial life. We're not exactly sure how, but that's where they formed. Well, I was telling my friend Penny Boston, she said, oh, no, that's all wrong. Life arose in caves. Well, she's a cave expert. She's a cave person. Yeah, she's a cave expert.

So, yeah, you tend to, you know, whatever your area of expertise, that kind of gives the answer to what you're looking for. So geologists like, you know, lava coming out in Iapetus, whereas astronomers like the sweeping up notion of the origin of this dark side of Iapetus. I mean, the dark side is like tar. Didn't you do some of this work that demonstrated just how different the two sides are? Yeah, yeah. In fact, that's some work I did with Carl Sagan, Steve Squires, and Joe Reverke. We published a paper on that showing how the thing that we showed is that it seems to be very darkest at the center of motion, what we call the apex of motion, kind of the nose cone of of iapetus as it's going through this dust coming in. Sort of the leading edge if it had an edge. Yes, exactly. So that was the darkest.

And we thought that this was good evidence that it's just sweeping up this material. And the material was hypothesized to come from Phoebe, which is this outer moon, a fairly large outer moon, a dark outer moon of Saturn. And we now believe it's a captured Kuiper Belt object coming from the outer regions. a captured Kuiper Belt object coming from the outer regions. So you haven't read the Expanse novels where they say that Phoebe is actually an alien weapon launched toward Earth billions of years ago. But that's for another show. Yeah. I'm sure Carl Sagan wouldn't like that. But science fiction is fun.

Extraordinary claims. Yeah. Yeah. I do like science fiction. So if it's all in fun, it's OK. It is. Yeah. So the problem was there was really no solid connection to a source of the dust.

And the kind of facts all came together when Ann Verbischer, my colleague, had actually, using ground-based instruments, an infrared telescope, had actually, the Spitzer telescope, along with her colleague and husband, Mike Skreski, had discovered, and Doug Hamilton, discovered a ring, a torus, right at the orbit of Phoebe. Really hard work. It was incredible hard work, incredibly hard work that she did because it's very faint. She just had to take a lot of images and register them and look at them. And you don't exactly know how dense it's going to be or how broad it's going to be. It was a very nice piece of work, I think,

really major. There are other wonderful worlds we could talk about, and you do in the book, that are circling Saturn. I'm thinking of Hyperion, for one, which is the moon that kind of gives me the creeps because it has that wasp nest appearance. But we'll move on. Asteroids and comets, what are we learning from them? Are they telling us something about the origin of the solar system? Well, I think one of the things that I found most amazing was the Rosetta mission, which I've also worked on. Which you're part of.

Yeah, I was privileged. I mean, it's kind of a sad story because after Claudia Alexander, who was the NASA project scientist, passed away before her time just a couple years ago, I was asked to step in and be the NASA project scientist. I agreed to do this at JPL. This was another opportunity and privilege to be kind of in the front stands here, the front row seat, and it is, again, one of the most amazing missions because if you look at, and it's run by ESA, the European Space Agency,

but NASA has very important contributions. We've talked a lot about it on this show with a lot of those great ESA scientists and engineers. Okay. The scientists, what I found most amazing is how primordial, how ancient this asteroid is, 67P, Tridium of Gerasimenko. I won't say that once. And you said asteroid. Oh, did I say asteroid? You did.

You know, I didn't even notice that. It's terrible. Okay. It's a comet. In some, but they have a lot in common, right? They do. They do. They do.

We're not quite sure how. They're small bodies through the building blocks of the solar system, the things that were left over, the debris that never formed planets. So we're looking back at planetesimals, at things from the origin, the primordial objects. So the thing about 67P is that it just is two primordial planetesimals stuck together. It looks like if you even go down deeper, you know, we found these things called dinosaur eggs, which looks like they're even like smaller planetesimals. So you have a hierarchy of,

finally you get a little planetesimal, maybe baseball-sized, you know, and they start glomming together. And as soon as you get something that's gravitationally stronger than its surrounding objects, it kind of accretes all these objects. And you have a hierarchy where they all kind of come together and eventually planets are formed.

But some of the debris does not become planets. It becomes these, what were the building blocks that just stay as they were from day one, 4.6 billion years ago. So they do have a lot to tell us about where we come from. They do. And I think one of the most interesting results of that mission was that we found molecular hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen, which show that it formed at very low temperatures, like 30 degrees above absolute zero, 30 degree Kelvin above absolute zero. That is exceedingly cold. And that's where it formed in a very cold part of the solar nebula. There is so much in the book that we have been able to discover because

of these missions throughout the solar system. Also, of course, the improvement of observation from here on Earth. I wonder what you're most looking forward to, you know, the stuff that's already in the works in the next decade or so, roughly. Well, I think two things. First of all, to go back to some of these amazing worlds. You mentioned Enceladus. But I think a mission to Titan, because I think in many respects it's the most Earth-like planet. Well, it's not a planet, I know. It's a moon, but it's the most Earth-like body.

It's got lakes. It may have caves. It's got these what we call fluvial features, which are landforms formed by flowing hydrocarbons. So I think going back is very important. But also there's the whole draw of new exploration. The New Horizons mission, which explored Pluto, wow, it's almost two years ago, is going on to this smaller Kuiper Belt object. And whenever we've gone on to a new object, a different object, we just could not predict what it was going to be like. We always get surprises.

We always get surprises. So this, even though it's just a little, it's even smaller than Phoebe, this 2014 MU69 doesn't have a name yet. We don't know what we could find. So there's exploration and there's going deeper. It's those two things that drive us. OSIRIS-REx? That's the other thing. I mean, that is another primitive body, a C-type, what's known as a carbonaceous-type asteroid. And it's a rare—now, that really is an asteroid.

It's a rare type of carbonaceous asteroid. We're going to get a sample and try to see what the processes were that formed the solar system from the very beginning. Figures crossed, Europa Clipper. Yes, that I think is going to be our next, what we call, flagship mission in the outer solar system. Of course, there's the Mars missions, which we haven't even had time to talk about, but it does look like Europa Clipper is going to be NASA's priority going forward. I'm going to go back to Titan

as we get more into speculative stuff. I mean, what would you like to see there? A boat sailing the seas of Titan? Well, there's two things. There's something that could float, and there are missions that are proposing that, but also there's this balloon mission. During the day, it kind of takes off and roams around, and at night it kind of comes down and goes to the surface and takes measurements. It just kind

of hops around on the surface. That would be a very interesting mission, because the diversity on Titan is quite amazing. What would you think if, you know, you send a mission to the Earth, you were an alien and you send a mission to the Earth and you landed in Southern California and that was all you looked at or you landed in Times Square and that was all you saw? You know, you wouldn't know about the Grand Canyon or about deserts or tropical islands. I think that just like Earth, Titan has diversity and we really want to move around on the face of the moon and learn all about its

myriad of processes. You make me think of, you know, that first close-up look we had at Mars, which you talk about in the book, Mariner 4. It was the blind man and the elephant. It's only because we've sent so many spacecraft there, right, that we are beginning to get an idea of what that world is like. That's right. The first world, the first thing that we saw looked like the moon. There were all these craters. And I can remember when I first saw that as a fairly young child that I was really disappointed. But then when subsequent missions went back, especially the orbiters, the Mariner series of orbiters,

to see things like dust storms, volcanoes. There are even some scientists that think these volcanoes may be active. I mean, they're not active right now, but they've been active like a few million years ago, which is a blink in geologic time. So they could be active in the future. My colleague, Tim Parker, who I talk about in the book, talks about oceans. He has evidence for oceans on Mars. And I think at first this was looked upon as being a little bit off the wall. But again, it drove scientists to look for things, and I think it's more in the mainstream now,

that there were oceans on Mars in the earlier, wetter period. But, you know, as we've discovered more about Mars and looked at different locations, we can see that, I mean, it may even still be a habitable world. I mean, if life arose on Mars, it could have hunkered down below the surface and still be there. So the thrust of our missions is to look for this life. Yeah. Back to speculation, just for a moment as we get close to wrapping up, we'll pretend that there's already a Titan floater, a boat headed out there, maybe with a balloon as well. The new NASA administrator comes to you and says, Bonnie, I got a spare billion or two. What do you want to do with it? Well, I think one of the things I'd like to do is try to understand the whole process of how, on Earth we have a water cycle. Well, on Titan we have what we call a methodological cycle. I would like to understand,

I think this is what other scientists would like to do, is understand how clouds form. Because they seem to form a little bit differently. It's similar to the Earth, but not quite the same. You know, we expected all these temperate clouds to form in the north as we saw spring appear in the north, as summer, spring, and then summer, and we expected clouds to appear. They didn't. They eventually did, but they look so much different than the clouds. I mean, we're looking at weather and maybe even climate on Titan. And I think that's what we'd like to study. It looks like it does rain. How much does it rain? Is there lightning?

Do we even know where to look for lightning? So I think it's even bringing Titan closer to a twin of Earth. We thought that Venus was a twin. Well, it looks like maybe Titan is that twin. So it's even studying further the types of similarities between Titan and the Earth in more of the details. Titan, for sure. But let's assume that that mission is already in the works. Yes.

Where else would you want to go? Where else would you like to see a mission? Well, I'd like to go back to Pluto because it is just so dynamical. With an orbiter, maybe? Well, here's my... It'd be hard. And this is where I disagree with another one of my mentors, who's Alan Stern, who's a fabulous leader of the New Horizons mission. Alan wants to go back with an orbiter to really study Pluto. What I would like to do is study a few large Kuiper belt objects because I really think that Eris, which is this planet-like object

that Mike Brown and his colleagues discovered that originally was thought to be maybe larger than Pluto, is really the object that kind of dethroned Pluto. It looks like it's extremely bright, like Enceladus. It's covered with freshly fallen snow of some sort. And that was the first clue that gave us hints of activity on Enceladus. And if you look at the active area of Pluto, which we call Sputnik Planitia, that heart of Pluto, it's as bright as Enceladus. It's like freshly fallen snow. It's active through glaciers and frost condensing,

maybe even snow. Well, it looks like Eris is just covered. It's a snowfield. I think there's probably activity of some sort on Eris. I don't know what. Could it be all covered with glaciers? Does it have plumes? We just don't know. So I would like to have a mission that maybe does a flyby of Pluto to look at what's happened in the last 20 years or whatever as soon as we can get out there, and then go on to other Kuiper Belt objects like Eris or other larger Kuiper Belt objects. Because I think that surveying is really important. We looked at how many discoveries Voyager made.

It was in survey mode. It looked at many things for the first time. So if we look at many things, as many things as we can, in the Kuiper Belt for the first time, we're going to get great discoveries. Somewhat similar to what Dawn did, this very reasonable mission that went by two asteroids, Vesta and Ceres, and found another ice volcano on Ceres. And Ceres is a proto-planet. These are planets that somehow started forming, but they didn't, they kind of fizzled out. You know, it's a planet

in the early stages of formation. This is what we believe these big asteroids like Vesta and Ceres are. Do you have any doubt that the solar system holds many more surprises for us? I'm certain that it does. I mean, we really don't even know if we—the big question is, is there life elsewhere in the solar system, either on Mars, hunkered down, or in one of these ocean worlds, the subsurface oceans that are on Europa and Enceladus? Is there primitive bacterial life there? We haven't even answered that question. So, yeah, there are many more surprises. There are many more objects to look at.

And I'm just kind of handing the baton on to younger generations. I've been really privileged to be part of the Sputnik generation and be part of the team that has made these great discoveries. But it's time for a younger generation to step forth and continue. And they are, and they seem to be. So much of what we've talked about and much, much more is in this beautiful book, a real tribute to what's out there for us to find across the solar system and beyond our solar system because you have a great chapter about exoplanets

and even the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Lots of beautiful illustrations, lots and lots, and a nice bunch of color plates in the middle. In World's Fantastic, World's Familiar, it's from Cambridge University Press. Why did you dedicate it to your parents? There are two things that a scientist needs, curiosity and persistence. Those are the things that you need to succeed. And I realized that the curiosity I got from them, the persistence also, more curiosity. Also, my grandfather was, he was a chemist, and he really instilled that in me as well. But I think they're the ones that got me started, you know, that encouraged me. And I think also they put a lot of emphasis on action. They were

big on doing things rather than talking about things. Lead by doing, not by saying. So I think, and I really firmly believe in that. So that's why I dedicated it to them. My mother's still alive. She was 95 yesterday, by the way. Wow. Happy birthday to her. Yeah, thank you. I hope she's very proud. She is, yeah. I'm proud to have had you on the show to talk about this great new book. Once again, world's fantastic, world's familiar. I'm going to put you on the spot. You brought another copy. I've already got mine. Can we give away a copy of the book? Yeah, sure.

I'd be glad to. We'll do that in this week's space trivia contest with Bruce Betts that's coming up next. Yeah, great. Thanks again. Okay. Thanks so much, Matt, for having me. Bonnie Baratti is a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that's operated by NASA, by Caltech, the California Institute of Technology.

She primarily studies icy moons, comets, and asteroids. She's a past chair of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences. And as you heard, she's the U.S. project scientist for the brilliantly successful Rosetta Comet mission. Although she says she spends most of her time now working on Cassini and that spectacular grand finale that awaits us. I look forward to seeing you there as part of that as well, Bonnie. Yeah, it's going to be bittersweet. Yeah, no question.

We last talked to her when New Horizons woke up for its approach to Pluto. You're going to find her name on more than 200 papers along with an asteroid and this great new book. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. He's back to tell us about the night sky and more stuff. Welcome. Thank you.

I have to tell this story to the audience. I just gave you a little preview. I came to the office this week, hadn't been there in a while, found a box on my desk, opened it up, and inside is a brand spanking new audio cable, really nice audio cable, XLR for you techies. And I thought, I didn't order a cable. And then I find the letter. Apparently, the people at this company, Rapco Horizon, heard my rant to you about how much I hate cables. They said, as a gesture of goodwill, please find and close the complimentary microphone cable with special imprint. Kudos on your great radio program. Ad Astra for your listeners at the Rapco Horizon Company. Thank you, guys.

That's really cool. Well, I want to rant about gold because I've just been unsatisfied with the gold that I have. And so I don't know if anyone has great gold, feel free to send it to me. We'll give the address at the end of the show. Thanks. You want them to cover the shipping, right? Definitely.

Actually, I'm willing to cover the shipping. How kind. All right. All right. All right. All right. all right, all right, all right. All right, so I've stopped this. Get down to space. Get up to space. Yes, exactly.

What's up this week, Matt? No, no, no, no. Don't try and pull that switcheroo. All right. Mars really getting tough, tough, tough to see low in the west shortly after sunset. But you just turn, you look up and the brightest thing out there in kind of the southeast is Jupiter looking super bright. And Saturn being much friendlier to those of us who don't like to get up early. 10, 11 p.m. over there in the east looking kind of yellowish.

And Venus dominating the east in the pre-dawn sky. Oh, that was short and sweet. Well, I had to make up for your rant about... Anyway, this week in space history, we move on to that. In 1973, Skylab was launched. First U.S. space station. It was fun. Yeah, you know what I loved most about Skylab? Were the little pads that you could run on.

Oh, yeah, it was like the little hamster wheel in the front of the circles and then they'd lose their balance and go flying around. And I always wondered, you know, if they ran enough laps on that, did they start the Skylab spinning the other way? They could get artificial gravity that way. Or if they just brought a herd of hamsters. Okay,

you really got me with that one. Hamsters with gold strapped to their backs. Well, yeah. I started thinking about the physics of that and it got weird and I heard. We move on to something more serious like

sort of a sad clown impression of random space fact. Oh, so the Apollo lunar excursion module later referred to as just the lunar module was the first manned spacecraft operate exclusively in the vacuum of space. So it never operated in the Earth's atmosphere, and that's why it got to look all spidery. I never thought of that, but of course that's the case. Well, if you never thought of that, here's the next even more obvious part of it. It was the first and only crewed vehicle to land on a body other than Earth.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hopefully not the last. You'd probably thought of that one. I did think of that one. Let me move on to the trivia contest. What letter is used to classify the most powerful class of solar flares as observed from near Earth in X-rays? Just to be clear.

How'd we do, Matt? This challenged people. It depressed the number of entries slightly, but everybody, everybody who wrote in got it right. I'm delighted that Connie Shee of Knoxville, Tennessee was chosen by Random.org. She says the letter X is used to classify the most powerful class of solar flares. That is correct. They put numbers after it if they want to say it's even more powerful, X1, X2, etc. In fact, we got a note from Gabe Eggers, in addition to some other people,

who said the most powerful solar flare measured with modern methods was 2003. It was an X-28. And that was because that's as far as the sensors could read up. Wow. Wasn't that also a car in the 70s? The X-28? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it was a coupe.

Oh, right. Connie, you are our winner. And you're getting that Planetary Radio t-shirt and a 200-point itelescope.net account. She says, Hi, Matt. I just discovered Planetary Radio t-shirt and a 200-point itelescope.net account. She says, Hi, Matt. I just discovered Planetary Radio on Stitcher and have been listening to all the back episodes. She's one of those. As a lifelong astronomy geek, I feel like I'm a kid in the astronomy candy store.

Thank you for such a wonderfully informative podcast. So now we're a candy store as well. Nice. We did get some other interesting entries. We got a haiku from Samantha Glick in Minneapolis. Magnetic field lines snap to make powerful flares. X-class are biggest. Regular entrant Norman Kassoon, you've heard from him before. He said that as far as we know, the most powerful flare ever.

Do you know about this one? 1859. Yes. Yeah. I remember hearing that this like fried a bunch of telegraph wires. Yeah. I mean, presumably it was the coronal mass ejection associated with it that, yeah, hit Earth and really messed up electronics.

Fortunately for them, there weren't a lot back then. That's right. Unless you count, you know, telegraph code keys. Finally, this, if you think that people haven't actually suffered from these, well, then you don't know Randy DiPasquale of Marlton, New Jersey. He says, I will remember this answer forever because I attended the Antares Orb 3 launch NASA social event, but the launch was delayed due to an incoming X-class flare, and I was unable to stay long enough to see the launch. And then he adds, shakes an angry fist toward the sun. Curse you, son. I think the sun shrugged him off. That's it. We're ready to go on to another contest.

By the way, did I hear that our winner is from Knoxville, Tennessee? Is that near Fort Knox? Is there still gold there? Yeah, we'll see if she can, if she isn't a cow, maybe she can check some out for you. Sorry, a little obsessed. All right, Back to the moon, back to the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module. With legs deployed, how tall was the Apollo Lunar Excursion Module? That's the ascent stage and the descent stage, just to be clear. Together, legs deployed. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Great question.

And I've always thought of it as LEM, you know. I like having the E in there. You've got until the 17th. That would be Wednesday, May 17th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer to this one. You will, if you're chosen and you got it right, you will receive a Planetary Radio T-shirt, a 200-point itelescope.net account. It's worth a couple hundred bucks. American Worldwide Network of Nonprofit Telescopes.

Or Worldwide Nonprofit Network of Telescopes. And, as we were just saying at the end of the conversation with Bonnie Baratti, her new book, World's Fantastic, World's Familiar. I have your copy right in my hand. We will ship that out to you as well. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about what six colors you would use for your personally designed Rubik's Cube. Thank you, and good night. Well, I'd start with infrared and ultraviolet and go on. Whoa,

dude. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, and he just completed his class at CSU Dominguez Hills. You're all done, right? Congrats. I am. I'm all done, but every one of the classes is archived. You can find them at planetary.org slash Betts Class, B-E-T-T-S Class. Check it out. Great intro to astronomy. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in

Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its fantastic members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.