Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - We Have Sampled an Asteroid! And the Search for Life Above Venus

Episode Date: October 21, 2020

OSIRIS-REx has done it! We have special coverage of the spacecraft’s successful collection of a sample from asteroid Bennu. Then we talk with Jane Greaves, leader of the team that found evidence of phosphine gas in the atmosphere of Venus. Has this put us on the road to discovery of life above that hellish world? Bruce Betts and Mat Kaplan offer a copy of Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight in the new space trivia contest. Learn more at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/1021-2020-jane-greaves-venus-phosphineSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

OSIRIS-REx says, tag, you're it! And the search for life above Venus, 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. Tag, touch and go, that's what just happened at an asteroid. We have breaking news from Planetary Society Editorial Director Jason Davis about what the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft appears to have accomplished at asteroid Bennu. You'll also hear Dante Loretta, the mission's principal investigator, at the breathless moment of contact. Meanwhile, over at Venus, let's not jump to conclusions. Astrophysicist Jane Greaves is the first to say that we are a long way from determining if living organisms are responsible for the phosphine gas her team has discovered in the Venusian atmosphere.

Stay with us for a fascinating and very enjoyable conversation with Jane. Stay with us for a fascinating and very enjoyable conversation with Jane. Jason, welcome back. We waited till nearly our production deadline so that we could include your report in this week's episode. Tell us what happened just minutes ago more than 320 million kilometers from Earth. Yeah, hot off the press here. NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft just touched down on asteroid Bennu. It's a near-Earth asteroid. It launched in 2016, took about four years to get there and survey the asteroid, find a place to land. And finally, the big moment just happened where it touched down,

fired this little bottle of gas into the surface that hopefully collected some good sample material that will eventually be brought back to Earth. So right now we know the spacecraft is safe and it did its job successfully. We'll have to wait to see exactly how much it got. We'll come back in a moment. But here is OSIRIS-REx Principal Investigator Dante Loretta at the moment of contact with Bennu. He's at Lockheed Martin, I think, in Colorado, where they were controlling the mission. And then a few moments later, as the spacecraft lifted off immediately after collecting the sample. OREX has descended below the five meter mark.

The hazard map is go for tag. Contact expected in 50 seconds. We're going in. We're going in. Touchdown declared. All right. Sampling is in progress. OREC MSA on OREC SOP. Sample collection is complete and the back-of-the-way burn has executed. Here's a program note. Dante will be my guest next week, the October 28th episode of Planetary Radio. Jason, what made this encounter so challenging for OSIRIS-REx and the team behind

it? They designed the spacecraft to be able to sample from a relatively sandy surface. They anticipated different types of materials on the surface, or at least they weren't sure what they'd see. But they figured they'd have at least a lot of room to work with and some pretty fine-grained material. When they got to Bennu, it turned out that the asteroid was very rocky, much rockier than they expected. They had to narrow down, essentially, the size of the sample collection site. It took them a while

to survey the asteroid and carefully select a place they thought they could land. Luckily, the spacecraft turned out to be performing exceptionally well at Bennu. It was much more accurate in its navigation than they'd even hoped. So they were able to select a much smaller sample site, and they found this area that does appear to have had some fine-grained materials in it that they can collect. So hopefully they got some. Absolutely fantastic performance. Of course, everybody always wants to know, where are the pictures? Where are the pictures? But I guess it may be a little while before we see those. Yeah, I'm not sure whether we're going to see any later today or by the time this broadcast

airs tomorrow. But yeah, the spacecraft has to turn its high gain antenna away from Earth to get into position to collect a sample. So the data rate just slows to a trickle as it's moving into the surface. And they're only getting very basic telemetry data from the spacecraft. So they can tell in kind of text form what it's doing, but beyond that, they can't see anything. So we'll see those pictures very soon, hopefully. Can't wait also for confirmation that there actually is some, there are some little bits

of Bennu inside that container that has just departed from the asteroid surface. Thank you, Jason. Glad we could work this in and I look forward to talking again. Yep, sounds good. Let's hear from Dante Loretta one more time before we go back to our regular programming with highlights

of the most recent edition of The Downlink and my conversation with Jane Greaves. Here is Dante summing up moments after the encounter. I'm a little overwhelmed right now, Michelle, I have to say. It's been pretty intense several minutes here.

I can tell you that everything went just exactly perfect, which is kind of the hallmark of this team. We have consistently beaten expectations over and over again. We have overcome the amazing challenges that this asteroid has thrown at us and the spacecraft appears to have operated flawlessly. We made it down to the asteroid surface. We were in contact, the gas bottles fired. We don't know how long we were in contact with yet. That's some reconstructed information

that we're gonna have to put together over the next few hours as the data come in. We backed away successfully from the asteroid surface. The team is exuberant back there. Emotions are high. Everybody is really proud. And we have some work to do. That was Dante Loretta, principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission

that appears to have successfully made its first collection of material from asteroid Bennu. And speaking of Bennu, a great image of that lonely space rock tops the October 16 edition of the Downlink. Looking at its boulder-covered surface makes me even more impressed by what OSIRIS-REx has accomplished. Dante Loretta and his team had already announced discovery of carbon-containing organics scattered across the asteroid. In other news, Europe and Japan's BepiColombo probe has made its first close flyby of Venus. It will do this again before five flybys of Mercury, all so that it can slow down enough to enter orbit around that small world in 2025. And three astronauts arrived at the International Space Station last week.

Their Soyuz capsule had lifted off from Russia's spaceport just three hours earlier. Aboard was Kate Rubins, who is likely to be the last American to reach the ISS in a Soyuz before commercial flights by Crew Dragon spacecraft begin later this year. Much more is waiting for you at planetary.org. There is a chance that we have detected some kind of living organisms in the clouds of Venus. That was how we began our September 16th episode. Astrophysicist Jane Greaves of Cardiff University led the team that had just announced its discovery of phosphine gas in the Venusian atmosphere. We shared excerpts from the Royal Astronomical Society media briefing

that included Jane and several of her colleagues. Like many of you, I was thrilled, and I knew I'd want to make her our guest on Planetary Radio. And here she is, direct from the United Kingdom. Jane Greaves, thank you so much for joining us on Planetary Radio, and congratulations on this, I was going to say earth-shaking, I'll call it world-shaking, maybe neighboring world-shaking discovery, or at least the data that indicates such interesting things happening in the atmosphere of Venus. Welcome to our show. Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here. It is hard to believe that it has only been a bit more than a month since this big announcement

was made and the publication of your findings in Nature Astronomy. Where were you and what did you do when you first saw data that indicated this find, this big dip that you saw in the data coming back from the James Clerk Maxwell radio telescope? Well, let's see. We didn't really get the data live because they have to be taken at the telescope and that's all done remotely. And then the data was sent to us and I spent ages thinking there was nothing there. And then I was actually making a research visit to Cambridge University in England. And that gave me some extra time to do projects that were a little bit on the back burner, however exciting. And there was one evening I was just kind of pushing the data around. And then suddenly I realized they came together and showed us this absorption line.

They showed us at this particular wavelength, the light of Venus had dipped at this particular part of our spectrum. And that just blew me away. I'm like, there really is phosphine doing this. There's no missing it. I mean, it really is a pretty impressive result when you look at that graph. Yeah, the first one from the James Cartman Maxwell Telescope, you could kind of attack it in various ways and go, maybe it's not quite as good as it looks. And then we got follow-up data with the network of telescopes down in Chile, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array.

And we had the power of 45 telescopes working for us then. And then I think after we'd processed that, that really jumped out and hit us in the eye. One of the things that we will link to is that overlapping of this data from these two great telescopes. And it really is very, very impressive, as so many people have commented. I have no right to be, but I'm always a little bit proud when I see wonderful data coming from ALMA because I was there for the dedication of the telescopes and was actually up there at the high site among the dishes for a few oxygen-starved minutes. Oh, wow. I'm always delighted.

I'm really jealous of you. I've actually never traveled there. I've worked with several ALMA data sets they've taken for us, but I would love to go. It's amazing, right? I highly recommend it. And it's just such an amazing place to be, even if you don't go up to where the dishes are, but bring your little can of oxygen if you go up. I'm used to that from working in Hawaii, which is a bit lower. It's 14,000 feet, but you're certainly wondering where the oxygen went.

Yes. So I've heard, and I haven't made it there. Someday I'll get up to the top of that mountain. Oh, you should go there. That's a very special place. I'm looking forward to it someday. I definitely will. Were you looking for phosphine when you started pointing this great radio telescope in Hawaii at Venus? I mean, you did have it in mind, didn't you? Yeah, the observation was designed to do that. So you don't get very much bandwidth with typical radio telescopes. You can't just look for all sorts of chemicals whose transitions would be at a whole different bunch of wavelengths. So we had to request this and we had to say why we wanted

to do phosphine, this pretty much not thought about molecule. So I proposed that very much as a search for a biosignature. And I kind of admitted this sounds a bit crazy. You know, Venus, you know, you have this call out for people anywhere around the world who say they've got a project that can be done in less than eight hours. And the staff can basically do it for you and send you the results. Staff can basically do it for you and send you the results. And I said, under this thing that you offer, can we have a go at this? Because it looks technically feasible, regardless of what you think about the likelihood of finding a biosignature.

And pretty much in my mind was like, we're going to get a limit. We're going to not see it, but we'll be able to rule out a few hypotheses about the cloud vex. And that's interesting enough. And so they agreed and they gave it a go. Tell us about this odd, simple little molecule. I watched a video on the Royal Astronomical Society site, an interview with you, in which you called it ammonia's evil cousin. Yeah. So the chemical formula for phosphine is pH3. So that's one phosphorus atom.

And if you think of it as like when those ball and stick models you played with as a kid or did in chemistry lab at school, you've got three hydrogen atoms sticking off that phosphorus atom. So ammonia is something we're much more familiar with. It's a nitrogen atom with the three hydrogens sticking off it. So if you think of things that produce ammonia on Earth, that's kind of atom with the three hydrogens sticking off it. So if you think of things that produce ammonia on Earth, that's kind of, you know, stinky and toxic. But phosphine with the heavier phosphorus atom is actually much worse. We're really lucky there isn't a lot of it in our environment because it is very poisonous to larger creatures like us.

And yet it seems on Earth, I guess, it's produced industrially, like so many other toxic things, but it's also a biomarker on our planet. And that is the suspicion, right, on Venus, or at least the possibility that it is serving the same purpose there? Yeah, that's why we did it, because it's such a distinct biomarker, as we could call it, on the Earth. I wondered if it might also be true on Venus. So in both planets, there isn't a lot of free hydrogen around. So something that's pH 3, you're not going to naturally get a lot of. So it's been found on Earth, like you say, in factories for various reasons. It's used in fumigation, but it's found naturally in places like swamps,

which are kind of fairly oxygen-free environments as well as hydrogen-free. But there are bacteria there that don't need oxygen and they don't like oxygen even. So they have a completely different life cycle to things that we normally think of like plants and animals. And they put out phosphine gas possibly as a waste product they're just kind of shedding something that's part of the way they operate and so you can detect their presence by looking for this phosphorus bearing gas and so that we kind of thought well if there's these some kind of very distant analogs to such organisms floating in the high clouds of Venus they might also put out phosphine.

So why not use a very small amount of telescope time to look for it? How much phosphine has actually been detected in this work by your team? They're in very low quantities. The number of phosphine molecules is about 20 for every billion other molecules in the atmosphere. And that would mostly be carbon dioxide and a few other things. So it's a really small amount. I absolutely marvel at our ability now from tens of millions of kilometers away to point instruments at the atmosphere of another world and detect something in such small amounts.

I mean, does it also, even though you do it for a living, does it also amaze you? It does amaze me. And just kind of the amounts of energy we're talking about. So radio waves carry energy around as any kind of light or waves does, but it's pretty small and radio technology is just really sensitive so we can pick up these tiny signals so venus is like a radio object a radio planet if you like is kind of bright as these objects go compared to i don't know distant black holes in the universe or something a planet next door to us is kind of a radio bright object but because of the very small amount of phosphine it was just producing this tiny dip in the light.

It's about one ten thousandth at this narrow range of wavelength. So we were looking for a pretty small effect. And it does amaze me we were able to detect it. Yes. From what we know of the Venusian atmosphere, how stable are long lived would phosphine be in this this hellish environment? would phosphine be in this hellish environment? I mean, even at the altitudes where you think this exists, which we should also talk about, it's a pretty nasty place. Yeah. So we think the molecules, whatever their sources, eventually drift upwards. And that's a reasonably quick process. And once they get really high in the atmosphere, like maybe 80 kilometers,

50 miles or so above the surface, then they're subject to sunlight really strongly. And that probably splits them apart and they don't exist anymore. So at that height, they probably only last, oh, maybe 15 minutes or something. So we're still looking in detail about how long they'd last at the altitudes in kind of the middle and upper clouds, where we're thinking maybe they originate. So that might be a bit of a longer lifetime, but not so long that they could be there because of some very long past event,

you know, millions of years ago or something. That won't work because they will be destroyed. So we do need a reasonably active source of the phosphine for it to be there for us to observe it. This makes me think of the search for sources of methane on Mars and those findings, which are inconsistent, but it seems pretty clear that it would have to be produced on an ongoing basis. And do you see that parallel as well?

Yeah, the methane on Mars is a fascinating problem. well? Yeah, the methane on Mars is a fascinating problem. So as I understand it, if there's a biological source, it's probably also some kind of simple bacteria, microorganism, probably below the surface where it's safe from radiation, which comes rather easily through Mars's thin atmosphere. So different amounts could be just bubbling out according to what some subsurface colony is up to. And then that does make it really hard to reconcile because some of the measurements are like you see the planet at once. And some of them, if it's a kind of sniffer experiment on a rover, you're seeing only a tiny part of the picture as you trundle across the soil. So that's a really complicated problem to analyze, although it is fascinating. problem to analyze, although it is fascinating. And the Venus one is complicated in a similar way because the clouds, even if microorganisms have anything to do with it, they're probably not

packed with like a solid, you know, like volume of microorganisms. There might be colonies shifting and evolving and blowing with the winds. So in detail, a picture that's going to be quite hard to understand. By the way, I actually prefer the pronunciation of methane that you folks in the UK use. I really should get into that habit. I have enough trouble with aluminium, aluminum. I just want to make sure I'm being understandable. Yes, fortunately, we speak more or less the same language. That's Jane Greaves. She'll be back with more about the exciting discovery of phosphine at Venus in moments. This is Planetary Radio. Where did we come from? Are we alone in the cosmos?

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Our mission is to give you the power to advance space science and exploration. With your support, we sponsor innovative space technologies, inspire curious minds, and advocate for our future in space. We are the Planetary Society. Join us. How were you able to get an idea, or did the team get an idea, of where you are detecting this phosphine, even if it's not being created at that altitude above Venus? We do have a rough idea because we know at the wavelength we were observing at, which is radio waves with a length of about one millimeter, we know they don't get out from lower in the atmosphere.

The atmosphere is itself opaque. So we've got this kind of opaque layer at about 55 kilometers up from the surface. So that's, I guess, about 30 miles. So any molecules we see doing this absorption, they have to be above that. So that gives us an idea of what the temperature and pressure and so on are like, where the detectable phosphine molecules are. And that's interesting because the temperature is up to maybe 20 or 30 centigrade. So 30 centigrade, I think is about 85 Fahrenheit. That's kind of a, you know, a nice day. Pressure is something like maybe up to about half that at the surface of the earth, half a bar.

So these seem reasonably nice conditions that wouldn't be too hostile to organisms. It's everything else there that's hostile. So the very high winds and the high level of acid. emits phosphine as a waste gas. Has there been speculation about why living organisms on Venus would also be emitting phosphine? I mean, it possibly also was waste, but is there other speculation? Yeah, this is also new and we are trying to be very careful and saying like, we really have no direct evidence it's life it's just a fascinating possibility and as i said a super challenging place it might turn out to be a place that's totally sterilized and the phosphine comes from something else and then one of the surprises to me in this project is that we don't really understand phosphine production on earth and that may be because

it's not been a super interesting thing to study. I mean, you can use it to trace that there are organisms, but the idea as to why they produce phosphine is still pretty unclear. And it's not sure if some of that is also chemical. So there's been a suggestion that phosphides compounds dissolved in water that some part of the origin of the swamps say might be not biological. As far as the organisms and you can certainly culture them in the lab and measure the phosphine coming off it's still not really clear because you can't really ask a microbe what it's up to um so it might be a waste product

and there have been some ideas it's kind of useful for um i believe what's called signaling between microbes and i don't quite know how that works. Also to do with some processes like capture of metals. Chemically, it could be useful. Or even because it is toxic to a lot of other stuff, maybe you can poison your next door neighbors who are some different kind of bacterium. Something I really hope somebody is out there in a swamp bravely figuring this out.

Well, I was about to ask, have you heard from any astrobiologist colleagues who now are putting together expeditions out into swamps with the incentive provided by your findings? We actually haven't yet, but possibly they're in the swamp not doing anything. And some of the places you do this work are quite remote. So some of the places where anaerobic bacteria and phosphine have been measured are places like deserts in Namibia, a very different environment, but apparently a very productive one. And I believe those experiments, those field trips are really tough. You know,

they take a long time in the planning to get to these very unique environments. And of course, at the moment with coronavirus, that's really not something people are going to be doing. It's just not a safe activity. No. We talk periodically on this show about extremophiles, and we have heard about living organisms that manage to live in these places on our own planet where no human would want to be caught for very long, including ones that are very acidic, but really nothing that compares to the Venusian atmosphere. I mean, I've seen some speculation about how would something living manage to stay alive where there is so much more acid than anything that we found on Earth where anything is living? I mean, don't you have some of your colleagues on your team who are thinking about this? Yeah, we have been thinking about this and we fully recognize that this seems like crazy in

some ways because nothing on earth has ever needed to adapt to this kind of environment change. So we don't know if it can be done at all. So there are organisms on earth living in up to about 5% acid and that's, you know, incredible. That's really acidic. That's if you're used to thinking of pH that you did in your school lab, and the number goes down to like one or maybe zero for acid, the numbers beyond that actually have to be negative if it's a lot of acid. So we don't know if something could evolve if the proportion of acid kept getting higher and higher. And in the clouds of Venus, we're trying to point out you are talking about 90% acid. So the reason the pH

scale doesn't work is because it was designed for a bit of acid in a lot of water, not a little bit of water and a lot of acid, which is the situation in droplets that are supposed to exist in Venus clouds. So maybe that's just crazy much corrosion. It's not possible. We're not sure about this. So one of my colleagues went and found some pure sulfuric acid, and we did a laboratory experiment where he poured it on a cactus, a succulent plant, and actually it shed it because the leaves

have a very waxy coating. But after an hour, it wasn't entirely still as good as it was to start with. But this does give us some ideas that there are some coatings that are naturally acid resistant. So I believe graphite is one. Elemental sulfur would be another one. And sulfur is pretty common, very common in the clouds of Venus. So it's possible an organism could hide, make itself a little sort of shell of sulfur. But we have no analogous organism on Earth that would have to do that. And so we don't really know the answers to the questions like, well, then how would it get its nutrients inside if it sealed itself in a shell? And how would it get its waste products,

like maybe phosphine gas out? So yeah, I would love to hear from more people who are like real biologists some ideas on that. I probably have listeners who are tired of hearing me say this, but it's a quote from that great scientist Jeff Goldblum in the movie Jurassic Park. You know, life finds a way. Yes. Well, that was a bit scary because they mostly got eaten, I think, after the dinosaurs found the way but

i think i mean we can certainly do experiments to show that life doesn't always find a way so there was an experiment um to see if microbes could travel on space rocks and they did that by taking an impact experiment that was going to land a kind of large probe type thing on the surface of the earth and see what happened. And as part of that experiment, they were allowed to put a coating of microbes on the outside and life did not find a way because the temperatures were so great.

The surface was essentially either crushed or turned into a kind of melted glass. So even if you'd survived a little bit deeper down, how are you going to get your way out through the glass? So they found nothing had survived. So we do want to caution. We're not saying just because life can find a way, it's going to find a way in 90% acid. Maybe it can't, but that's still a very open question. Yes. And one which I certainly hope a lot of people are investigating. You know, I heard several other researchers since this announcement was made who have made skeptical comments in one breath, immediately followed by their admiration for your team's work and the elimination of other possible sources like lightning or volcanoes.

lines for our website. But it is impressive to see the respect that your work has gotten, even as other scientists have brought to it, the very appropriate skepticism. I mean, is that how you feel? Yeah. We put the paper out in as open a way as possible. We said we really want other people to work on that from different angles we really did mean everybody so we attached the spectral data to the paper in a format that anyone who can work an excel spreadsheet or a table at home can look at just members of the public and we asked the journal nature astronomy if they would make it completely free to access you don't have to be a subscriber and they immediately did that so we really do want people to work on this and generally yeah people have been really positive um we've had a few um so we have this new term instead of mansplaining we have this term chemsplaining where people write in and say um

i saw a chemical reaction on wikipedia which would clearly work and then we're like we clearly explained why this wouldn't work. We literally wrote this down. So, you know, but mostly people are, you know, really reading what we wrote and thinking about it. It's been great. We had some fascinating suggestions. I suspect that some of that chem-splaining was also mansplaining, but...

Speaking of your team, if I counted right, there were 19 investigators listed at the top of that nature astronomy paper. And kudos from me as well for making that free to the public because it meant I could look it over as well. I was impressed by how many members of your team really provided important key contributions to these findings. key contributions to these findings. It really seemed that lacking any of these major contributions might have kept this discovery from being so startling. I mean, they brought diverse skills and talents and knowledge to this, didn't they? Yeah, that's very much true. And it would have been very much lesser without that. I mean, I am an astrobiologist coming from an astronomy background, but it's the first time I think I've really worked so closely with people who are biochemists, for example, or lab spectroscopists. You know, vital parts of it depended on knowing it was

definitely phosphine, not some other molecule, and looking at how many other sources we could rule out, you know, like the chemistry of volcanoes or something. I wouldn't have had any idea where to start. And we had to explain each other's language a lot. I was like, what does that word even mean? You know, back and forth. And I think that really helped because you have to say, all right, this is how I would

explain it to, you know, my 12 year old cousin You're like, oh, now I understand what you mean. So, yeah, that was really exciting and powerful, I think. One of your co-authors is astrophysicist Clara Sousa Silva. I hope I have her name right, of MIT. Was it her work that helped lead you toward this discovery? Yeah, she was really vital. So she does work on phosphine as a biosignature. And that was actually completely parallel because I was familiar with her work on it as a molecule,

doing all the quantum physics calculations. But I'd never had the good luck to attend one of the talks where she talked about it as a biosignature, which is her more recent work. And in a way, that's good because it shows two people can work on an idea independently. And I think that gives it some extra validity. So we more use the spectroscopy part of her work. And she's an expert on all kinds of quantum transitions of all kinds of compounds. So that was vital in particular that we were able to rule out sulfur dioxide as a contaminant of the spectral feature we saw. That was really important there.

It's a very impressive team. I will only mention one other person, Sarah Seeger, because she has been my guest several times and participated in that media briefing that you did. Another MIT person and seems to have been another important contributor as well. Yeah, very much because she has this great, like bigger picture view of what we're doing with astrobiology the search for life so she brought so much to that and in particular letting members of her team spend time on this project so several MIT people were involved in the end bringing very different and very valuable skills and you know astrobiology tends to be funded by institutions and maybe

charities interested in these big questions. But they're funding like somebody with specific skills to work on a specific project. So it was great. We were just able to tap into some of that essentially for free because we needed some of these answers real quick. And, you know, people were able to go, I have a model for that. Let me just run it overnight and I'll, you know, freely give you the answer. And we couldn't have done it without that. Science at its best. Yeah, it totally was. It's been so exciting.

If you don't mind this, I'm going to repeat a question that I asked during that media briefing more than a month ago. And that is, what are you up to now? I mean, what's ahead? More telescope time? I mean, where is this going? Yeah, certainly more telescope time.

And observatories around the world have got really excited about this. The main issue really is coronavirus at the moment, because obviously everybody's got to stay safe. And telescopes are sometimes in quite remote places that, you know, you don't want a carload of people or even people going on a plane to get to it to take you your new spectra. So that's in a little bit of a quiet and planning phase at the moment but that kind of gives us time to dream so we're doing some more on the chemistry seeing if we've missed something a whole load of actually useful suggestions that

have come in little things that we haven't quite included in the chemistry so far so we're updating that work and dreaming a bit ahead to maybe sending a new space probe to Venus, something that could maybe even survive for a while in the clouds and take modern measurements. It always astonishes me that the last descent probes that made it down and got data back, the 1970s and the 1980s, and so nothing has actually been in the clouds, although there have been telescopes observing from in orbit, which have been very valuable too. But getting something into the clouds, I think that's the dream for the next years, decade, maybe. What would you think of a balloon mission as has been proposed for many, many years at Venus?

Yeah, I'm not really up on the technology of that and how you, you know, acid proof your balloon and so on. But something I've seen some of the beautiful illustrations of these ideas, something that could drift in the clouds for weeks or months and do a really serious experimentation. That would be amazing. I mean, I think that is a longer scale project because you're talking about launching a very complex thing that then has to operate as an airborne instrument, that would be fantastic. As we speak, NASA is at least considering two missions to Venus, both of them orbiters. And there has been speculation that there might be time to adapt their instrumentation to do a better job or make them more capable of investigating this phosphine layer. I mean, do you see, would there be value in orbiters if they did carry the right instruments? Very much so, because a spectrometer floating above the planet can gather an awful lot more signal than we can from Earth. And so could get a very detailed picture, for example,

where exactly the phosphine is on the planet, whether it changes with time, all that kind of thing. Yeah. I'm going to switch gears here as we near the end of our conversation. This was far from your first major discovery. I read about work you've done that ranges from moons to galaxies. It was only a couple of years ago that you led work that points to tiny diamonds as being behind previously unexplained phenomena. I mean, what in the world or what in the cosmos was that about? I'm very easily distracted is what that mostly shows. I was supposed to be working on planet formation, which is my main area. And we had broadband radio signals from these protoplanetary

disks around young stars and there was an odd feature in that that I couldn't explain and eventually I made this connection to anomalous microwave emission that occurs in other environments and it's due to spinning nanoparticles and then I found the circumstellar disk, protoplanetary disk I was looking at, was one of very few astronomical sources that has nanodiamonds. So that was another kind of put the pieces together in a way that hasn't been done before. So that was also a really exciting project. I've got an undergraduate student doing a research project on that at the moment, so we can do more of these spinning diamonds. project on that at the moment so we can do more of these spinning diamonds. And we could go through, if we had time, more of your work. I mean, as someone who obviously very much enjoys doing science, has it been a nuisance dealing with the notoriety that has been gained by this latest discovery, these findings? I mean, you're constantly being bothered by people like me. It's a pleasure being bothered by people like you. No, it's not been a nuisance. It's been overwhelming. It was kind of surreal because the BBC told us they would probably live stream

our media briefing. And I was thinking like, like you do for the White House. I mean, I'm not used to this kind of thing. So in a way, I had to kind of pretend it wasn't happening and just go with the flow. But there have been so many moments of, you know, great messages from members of the public. And, you know, the excitement has really kept us going. Well, as I told you, all of us at the Planetary Society, and I suspect all of our members around the world, are absolutely thrilled by this work and we congratulate you again i got just one more question it said in your bio uh at the cardiff university site that you use textile art for exploring and engaging in astrophysics that's a quote i couldn't

find any examples of your artwork oh no i think, I think they're on Twitter. Yeah. Sometimes when I'm trying to picture something, I love making it. I tend to do crochet, which is very adaptable. So I've got crochet asteroids, crochet protoplanetary disks. I did the moons of Jupiter for Astrofest, which is a public UK event. Yeah. More on Twitter. I should probably do this a bit more. I should connect you with a geologist friend of mine and former colleague, Emily Lakdawalla, who also turns her science into craft. I've seen some of her beautiful work, yes. She will be delighted to hear that you've said that. I will let her know. Thank you, Jane. This has been absolutely delightful. And once again, congratulations to you and your entire team. And I look forward,

all of us look forward to continued discovery and, how do I want to say, widening of this fascinating discovery in the clouds above Venus. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to talk about it. Carniff University professor and astrophysicist Jane Greaves. She led and still leads the team that announced last month its discovery of phosphine gas in the atmosphere of Venus. Bruce will tell us where to find Venus in the night sky when we return, and you might win a copy of Beyond Earth's Edge. sky when we return, and you might win a copy of Beyond Earth's Edge. It is time again for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. He joins me as he does for every episode of this show. But this, this very segment, this edition of What's Up is the very first official use of my new microphone, my new ElectroVoice RE20.

I know you were impressed. I am, and you just sound amazing, Matt. You've always sounded pretty terrible before, but apparently it was the microphone. It was. All along, it was. I mean, this is the real me that people are finally getting to hear. So I hope they feel the same way you did. No, I'm just retiring a 20-year-old Rode NT1-A for you other microphone, microfiles out there. Is that what you would call it? Anyway, but I do like this new one, and I hope everybody else will, too. Do you remember when you asked people a couple of weeks ago to suggest call signs that I would use?

And when I climb into my F-22, it would be printed on the side of the plane. I'd kind of forgotten that, but I'm kind of excited now that you mentioned it. From Ian Jackson in Germany, he said, why, Ad Astra, of course. Cameron Landers in Texas, perhaps Matt's call sign could be space jockey or radio head or airwave. That last one would also work pretty well for Matt's second career as an American gladiator. You didn't tell us about that. Got to bring in a little bit of income on the side. Hans Christian Nilsson in Norway said the astronaut, I wish.

And then Gene Lewin up in Washington, he actually gave us a fairly long piece about pilot call signs. I'm going to read this. In regards to the additional query on your F-22 Raptor pilot call sign, most call signs are derived from a play on the pilot's name, first, middle, last, specific traits, exploits, feature, or skill. These can be complimentary, obscure, or insulting. And the more someone complains about it, the more it tends to be used. By the way, I should have mentioned, Gene works at an Air Force base. We had a member who was given the name Ralph. His name was Dave.

But someone said he looked like a Ralph, and it stuck. After a while, nobody actually ever called him by his first name. And new personnel thought his name was really Ralph. If you were talking to someone and said, I went downtown with Dave, they'd say, who? You'd have to say Ralph. And they'd say, who? And you'd have to say, Ralph. And they'd go, oh, okay. So the call sign that Gene thinks that he could see his mind would be freak, as in F-R-E-Q. Not bad. But guess what? He's got one for you too. Dr. Betts would be factoid. Roger that factoid. Roger that freak. Freak, great love. All right. Thank you, everybody. We better move on. What's up? Well, freak. Sorry, I've been trying that too much. So it is time for once in a blue moon.

On Halloween, October 31st, the full moon will be a so-called blue moon, the most common definition of that being the second full moon in a month, which doesn't occur very often, hence the term once in a blue moon. Also, on October 31st, Uranus is at opposition. So it is on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun. It is still really hard to see, but it means it'll be rising around sunset in the east and setting around sunrise in the west.

If you want to go after it, you're going to want a dark sight or some binoculars or telescope and a finder chart that you can find online. It doesn't really change that much from one time a year to another, but technically it is the brightest point for this time around of the Earth. Got Jupiter looking super bright over in the west, southwest in the early evening, with Saturn looking yellowish to its left, and Mars coming up around sunset, still looking super bright over in the east and then high up in the middle of the night.

Venus still looking really bright in the pre-dawn. It's good planet time, and you could even notch Uranus on your F-22 free. notch Uranus on your F-22, freak. Just a gorgeous crescent moon not far from Saturn and Jupiter last night. A really beautiful sky. You're welcome. On to This Week in Space History 2001. Mars Odyssey went into Mars orbit amazingly 19 years ago, still doing good stuff. I think Mars Odyssey threw something at the Mars Global Surveyor because it wanted to stand alone in this longevity record.

Oh, my gosh. Suspicion, scandal, a possible spacecraft murder pot. Wow. Battles in the sky above Mars, yes. On to Random Space Fact. I was just thinking the other day, if you take the H from the end of the word Earth and move it to the beginning, it spells heart. Oh, how sweet. But I'm not sure that's a good enough random space fact.

So I got another one relevant to today's show. Phosphine gas, you may have heard of it, possibly discovered Venus atmosphere. You did a show on that, right? Yeah, minutes ago. Okay. Well, on Earth, I don't know if you discussed that on Earth, it's used in fumigation sometimes to kill insects or rodents. That actually did come up. Jane mentioned that. And various other uses. Nasty, nasty stuff, which is a good reason, I guess, not to stick your head under the water in a swamp.

Yeah, that's a good reason. One of many. Well, I'm sorry I didn't know that, not having heard the interview yet. Glad I gave you that all-important Earth-heart connection. Maybe it's two half-random space facts. Make a hole. On to the trivia contest. I had a whole trivia question for you.

How many 25-meter antennas are at the Very Large Array in New Mexico? Kind of tricky. How'd we do, Matt? How about this, with a reference to our poet laureate, but actually came from Alan Weinberg in New Jersey. It is one of the two answers I suspect you would accept or will accept. 27 is the number I found. If I am wrong, please expound. I am not trying to become the next poet laureate. I think you can tell by the rhyme ending this limerick. He added, thanks for the show, and I'm very happy to be an official member now.

Welcome, Alan. Welcome to the society. We're glad to have you. Then the other answer in this little ditty from Martin Hajoski, with one held in reserve, 28 dishes make that Jansky array large. Very movie stars for fulfilling Ellie Arroway's wishes. They catch star signals as they go around. Mary. And I think it's a reference to the fact that they crawl around on tracks. They do indeed on railroad tracks. Technically, the answer is 28, although being only mostly familiar with the VLA, you'd say 27, because that's how many 25-meter dishes they've got out at any given time. But it turns out there's always one rotating into maintenance. So there's a 28 that is in the barn.

Kirk Zorb in Colorado, he supplied 28 dishes, including a single spare. So I suspect he is our winner this time around. Congratulations, Kirk. Yeah, first time winner. He's going to get a Planetary Society Kik Asteroid rubber asteroid. By the way, he also suggests a call sign for me. You're going to love this. You ready?

Yeah. MC Yammer. MC Yammer. MC Yammer. I like that very much. I actually do too. I shouldn't, but I do. I think we are ready to move on

to another contest. Don't touch this dial. Freak. This is Factoid. I've got your new question for you as of october 2020 so you know now how many robotic emphasis on the word robotic spacecraft have returned samples to earth from the moon or beyond go to planetary.org slash radio contest. This, of course, relevant. And you'll be talking soon to the head of the OSIRIS-REx mission about their sampling of asteroid Bennu. We sure will. Next week, we'll be bringing Dante Loretta back to the show.

You have until the 28th. That would be Wednesday, October 28th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And someone is going to win the prize that I should have offered last week. We should have offered Beyond Earth's Edge, the poetry of spaceflight, last week. So now we are. Somebody is going to win a copy of this wonderful poetry collection brought together, edited by Julie Swarstad Johnson and Christopher Coquinos. edited by Julie Swarstad Johnson and Christopher Coquinos, my guest last week,

who joined me along with those nine readers of various poems from this terrific collection, which is published by the University of Arizona Press. Get those entries in. Now's the time. And now's the time to say goodbye. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about M.C MC Yammer wearing hammer pants.

Thank you, and good night. Bolter, bolter, bolterfectoid, come around. Punch out, punch out. That's my wingman. That's Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, who 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 life-loving members. You can live it up with them at planetary.org slash membership. Mark Hilverde is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser, Ad Astra.