Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - We're Back! Bill Nye Describes the LightSail Project

Episode Date: November 16, 2009

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Bill Nye takes us light sailing, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you sailing on the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. So much to talk about this week. Rather than bring us her regular Q&A segment, we'll hear from Emily Lakdawalla about two of last week's big events in the solar system, the confirmation of water on the moon, and the beginning of Mars Exploration Rover Spirit's attempt to free itself from a Martian sand trap.

Then we'll turn to Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, for the details about LightSail, the Planetary Society's ambitious plan to fly as many as three solar sails, with the first targeting a 2010 launch. Bruce Betts will also be along for our regular What's Up look at the night sky this week, including puppies. It really was a busy week. Rosetta, the European Space Agency's comet mission,

had its last close encounter with Earth. The spacecraft swung past our planet to pick up speed for its 2014 rendezvous with comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Check out the cool images in Emily's blog article. We've got the link at planetary.org slash radio. While you're in the blog, you can read about the big announcement from the LCROSS mission leaders. There really is water hiding in shadows on the moon. You may remember our coverage of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite a few weeks ago. Emily Lakdawalla

covered an LCROSS press conference last week. The Planetary Society's science and technology coordinator also attended a briefing on plans to get a spirited little rover rolling across Gusev Crater once again after six months of immobility. Emily, let's start with the news about Spirit, which is actually now trying to extricate itself from the sand trap. Yeah, I guess by the time this airs, it will have been issued commands to start the first drive to get out of the sand trap. This is not going to be a quick process, I read.

It will be very, very slow. The first command will be to tell Spirit to drive forward five meters. And, of course, that won't result in five meters of motion unless there are some little Mars aliens sticking rocks under spirit's wheels. It will result in the wheel spinning, but who knows if spirit will move at all out of its sand trap. But we'll see. Let's all hope that it does. And this is all based on these simulations that they've been doing at JPL? Yeah, although I think it's kind of funny that after months and months of simulations, they still wound up with the same idea for getting Spirit out of the trap that they used for getting Opportunity out of the trap, which is basically to just go straight back out the way they came in.

How much trouble is that non-functioning wheel going to be? Well, it's actually kind of a mixed bag for Spirit because, I mean, it's never good to have an anchor, to have a dead wheel. And the dead wheel does serve as an anchor. But the other thing that the dead wheel has been doing is staying on top of the surface where the other spinning wheels have been digging down. So it acted as sort of a reverse anchor in a sense that it kept at least that one wheel on top of the Mars soil. Has there been any discussion of how this kind of situation can be avoided? I mean, God forbid, spirit should get itself out of this one sand trap and drop into another one a meter or two away. Yeah, that was actually my main question for the panel. And they have

learned something about how they got into the situation. They couldn't have foreseen it. But now, in retrospect, having gotten a better look at the data and a better understanding of what happened, they realized that Spirit's left side wheels are actually inside a crater, a crater that is so subtle they couldn't actually see it until they looked at it in topography. And looking at it in photos, it's not obvious. But it looks like this very shallow crater about five meters across got filled with this very, very soft, loose, uncohesive, sulfate-rich sand. And then a crust formed over the top, what they call dura crust on Mars. And Spirit's left side wheels just broke through the crust, kind of like breaking through the icy surface of slightly melted snow to a very powdery layer underneath that it's just having a

terrible time digging out of. The right side wheels are outside the crater. And so they're on firmer ground. I think I remember a very pretty image of this little topography that they've created in Spirit's immediate neighborhood. Was that in the blog? That is in the blog. They made this image from Spirit's actually, the camera data taken from a position before Spirit got into the trap. And the key thing they had to do to make that picture was to remove a regional slope. The crater is not at all obvious in a normal topographic view, but if you kind of tilt the topography and remove this regional slope, then all of a sudden the crater pops into relief and you see it. And they can do this for the rest of the terrain that Spirit is headed toward

and hopefully avoid the same kind of trap in the future. All right. Much more on the blog, of course, and other details will show up at planetary.org. Our colleague, AJS Rail, continues to follow the progress of both rovers, Mars Exploration rovers. Let's get to LCROSS and this confirmation of water at the North Pole of the Moon. Yeah, I'll say it's definitely exciting, but it's also an enormous relief that LCROSS found water in the plume data, because this was a

mission where, let's say that the Centaur had impacted and they looked at the plume and they didn't find water, you wouldn't know if there wasn't any water at the pole or if they had just hit a dry spot the same way the Galileo probe went into a dry spot on Jupiter. So I have to say it's a tremendous relief, I think, to the entire community of scientists interested in the moon that they did find water, and a decent quantity of it. You say a decent quantity. Is this the kind of deposit that people have been hoping for all along, or is it a little more moderate? Well, yes and no. I think that for finding water, worst case would be finding water that was only bound chemically to the minerals. But the principal investigator said that the band strings, the way that they measured the water, they saw a strong enough signal that they're pretty sure that there actually is water ice mixed with dust grains, which means that if you could put a bunch of this rock into a vessel and heat it up, you'd actually get water dripping out of it, which is really good news.

And they had some pretty amazing images that they revealed. They did, but the most amazing things were really in the spectral data, what they called the squiggly lines, kind of self-deprecatingly. Geologists, people who like to use images, always dismiss these as squiggly lines. But the squiggly lines, as I've been told by a spectroscopist friend of mine, the squiggly lines are your friends. And they actually do contain a lot of information in those little squiggles. And a spectroscopist can look at the squiggly lines and say, hey, I see a water band. There's definitely water there. It turns out that the squiggles are so complicated that there's evidence for a ton of other materials in there. And they're

just not quite ready to say yet what all those other minerals are. But they did divulge that the spectra don't look all that different from the spectra of a centaur or a trojan, an outer solar system sort of asteroid-y kind of body. So there's probably a lot of organic materials, sulfur dioxide, who knows what all is in there, but there's a lot of interesting stuff in there. All right, much more news to come, and probably the best place to follow that, that I know of, is the Planetary Society blog, primarily maintained by Emily Lakdawalla, the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society. Emily, we'll talk to you again next week. All right,

thanks, Matt. We've got links at planetary.org slash radio to Emily's coverage of both Spirit and the discovery of lunar water. Don't go away. In just one minute, we'll learn about LightSail from Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the

secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. It was just last week on this show that Andrean helped us announce LightSail, It was just last week on this show that Andrean helped us announce LightSail, the Planetary Society's new plan to sail through space powered solely by the light of the sun. You demanded details, and we've got them, especially at Planetary.org. Bill Nye was on Capitol Hill November 9th for the unveiling of LightSail.

As vice president of the Planetary Society, Bill has taken special interest in the organization's drive to build and fly the first solar sail. The former aeronautical engineer is probably still best known for his beloved Bill Nye the Science Guy TV series. He is also an author and public speaker. Want to learn algebra? Disney's Solving for X series is hosted by the inimitable Science Guy. Of course, you can also hear him right here on PlanRad, providing a weekly commentary, but not this week. So, Bill, I guess it was your pleasure to host that little party last week.

Yes, I was the emcee, the master of ceremonies. And you had a good turnout. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We had several people from congressional offices, so-called staffers. And we had Annie Drian, the chairman of the board of Cosmos Studios. And, of course, Carl Sagan's wife. She is the same. Her daughter, her son were there with their significant others and wives. And it was great. It was really a great event because everybody who spoke was so passionate about both the solar sail and Carl Sagan himself.

This was the 75th anniversary of the birth of Carl Sagan. It would have been his 75th birthday. And how very fitting it was, it is, that we announced the Light Sail 1, or the Planetary Society's next solar sail adventure, on his birthday. His sister was there with her husband. It was great. It was really nice. So the idea is the Planetary Society, through the great support of some benefactors and all of the members, has enough money to try to build a spacecraft. It's just a very unusual thing for a non-governmental organization, not for profit, to build a spacecraft. And wait, wait, there's more. This is a spacecraft that has no rocket motor. Once it's deployed, it's going to be pushed through space

just with photons. The plan right now, at least, and a pretty firm plan for LightSail 1, calls for quite a bit of smaller spacecraft than good old Cosmos 1 from nearly five years ago. And yet, and yet, a higher performing spacecraft.

Smaller is better? Well, we hope so. The thing is, a couple things have changed. We've spent five more years thinking about it. And I remind us all that Lou Friedman, your executive director of the Planetary Society, wrote a textbook about solar sailing in the 1970s. I have an autographed copy. It's quite a thing. So the other thing that we're doing differently, It's quite a thing. So the other thing that we're doing differently, got to thinking about it,

and we're buying or making use of technology that NASA developed for a different purpose. NASA was going to make this very small spacecraft that would hook on to orbital debris, the nuts and bolts dropped off of satellites, pieces of heat shield that are still bouncing around high above the Earth's sky. And it would grab onto these things and would have an umbrella-shaped drag chute. It would have this square-shaped aerodynamic drag maker, which would be made of very thin material on very lightweight struts. And it would drag into very, very few molecules that are up that high and bring these things down.

Well, this deployment system for this parachute gizmo turns out to be pretty nicely suited to a solar sail if you are willing to make your sail square. That is to say it has four triangular sails, so the whole spacecraft is one big square. And the struts, which is a big thing if you have a sailboat, your boom and your mast and your bowsprit, they have got to be strong things. They have to be stiff or your sail is going to break them or become a rag blowing in the wind. Well, get this, everybody. The struts are the same steel as a Stanley tape measure, as a high quality carpenter's tape measure. I love it. Yeah, it's amazing. And this stuff is just ideally

suited for this, even in the icy blackness vacuum of space. So it's got little deployment things that let the springs uncoil. So you wind it up in such a way that it's preloaded. A tape measure is only loaded when you pull it out and then push it back in. But this would be wound up before you leave the Earth. And so these things go, zhig, and can I just add that sound effect, Matt? Zhig. And all four sails will deploy. And then we have got a scheme to have a couple of cameras with fancy upside-down mirrors,

and we'll be able to image just about the whole spacecraft. It was not immediately obvious to me as it was with Cosmos 1, with those big wings, those big sails that could literally be turned on their axis. It's not obvious to me how this thing is going to be steered. It's not obvious to anyone. Not yet, I hope. Yeah, so there was talk of thrusters, talk of a center of gravity moving system. So you'd pull your tape measure springs in a little bit or extend them a little bit to make one of the four sails change shape,

especially change shape with regard to the light source. And we'll see if we have the energy and the resources to do it on LightSail 1. This is also going to depend on what's known as CubeSat technology. Yeah, CubeSat. Which means it's going to be tiny when it's packaged, right? So it's a nanosatellite. So it's a nano satellite and cube satellites, cubicle satellites are an old NASA program used at universities and colleges. And the thing is 10 centimeters on a side. That's a cube.

So if you don't know 10 centimeters, a cubic 10 centimeter thing is a liter, a liter of spacecraft. So ours is a three cube, so it's the equivalent of three 10 centimeter cubes stacked up in a line. So it's 30 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters. That's just about a foot by four inches by four inches. It's not very big, but with the sort of origami style, origami style of folding of these solar sails, which are only five microns. That's about a hundredth of somebody with thick hair. It's about a hundredth of a human hair. And that's thin, everybody. And the reason it's thin is to keep the weight down, keep the mass down, actually, the mass. Anything that reflects this well should, according to any reasonable calculation, reflect photons, and the momentum of photons, although they have no mass, the momentum of photons will gently push this thing along.

Who's going to build this for us? It's Cal Poly, California Polytechnical Institute in San Luis Obispo. SLO, slow, we call it. Oh, but they are fast thinkers. So these are students who are very well tutored and guided by a guy named Jim Cantrell that we, the Planetary Society, has hired to manage this thing. He has a lot of experience in space, well, spacecraft. He has a lot of experience with CubeSats. And the students are very, very good. They know what they're doing. So a lot of this work is done by hand, all very careful with people being careful.

And so we're very hopeful. The key, or the next thing you've got to have, which went wrong with Cosmos 1, you've got to get a ride. You've got to have a good rocket. Right now, we have several offers. The primary candidate, the first one everybody's thinking of is the Minotaur, which is a standard military and commercial, put a communication satellite in orbit style booster. There's a lot of rockets that are shot off all the time that we don't hear about because it's routine. Space exploration with small satellites is routine.

This is, and this is one of the most exciting things about this program, is that it's a program. It doesn't stop with LightSail 1. Oh, that's right. And this was, I think this is mostly Lou's idea, but I'm not sure. Our executive director, Jim Cantrell, the project manager, may have also realized that really the best thing to do is to do this in stages. With Cosmos 1, we, if you will, pun intended, shot the

moon. We tried to do it all in one spacecraft, steering, twisting sails, inflatable struts, giant thing. This is a much more modest spacecraft, and there'll be one that's somewhat bigger, and then one that's somewhat bigger after that. And the idea is, this one, the first one, light sail one, we just want to prove that a solar sail will get nudged through space by sunlight. That we get some orbital energy increase. Then on the second one, we want to orbit the Earth for real. And the third one, if things go really well, we'd go from the Earth to the moon. We got about a minute left. I don't think we would need to remind people of how personally inspired you are by this project.

But go ahead and do it anyway. Remind us. Oh, so ever since I was a kid, ever since I was in engineering school, I read Lou Freeman's book about solar sailing. There was a proposal to catch up to Comet Holly with a solar sail, and that didn't come into being because, I think, because of the Vietnam War, people were tired of spending money in space. But this would be inspirational, people. This would be the first spacecraft ever powered without a rocket,

and we would do it by our understanding of this subtle, subtle thing in light where it has momentum but no mass. And this is done not by a government trying to win a Cold War. This is done by people like you and me who just support the Planetary Society and we got enough money and enough expertise together

to build our own privately funded, brand new technology spacecraft. Making use of old technology, for sure, but the principal idea is totally new and cool. And this is not the last word you'll have about LightSail. Thank you, Matt. I hope not. Thanks for joining us today, and we'll have you back sail. Thank you, Matt. I hope not. Thanks for joining us today, and we'll have you back next week with the regular commentary. Thank you, Matt. I've got to fly.

Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. There he is. Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy, also known as the Science Guy for many, many years. He is the Vice President of the Planetary Society, and just last week, on the 75th anniversary of Carl Sagan's birth, he hosted, moderated, emceed the event at which the world first heard a really big edition of Planetary Radio than with What's Up?

And Dr. Bruce Batts is here. He's the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. So I guess you've been somewhat involved in all the news this week as well. You said you were just on the local news talking about Lunar H2O. I have. It's been kind of a fun week. I did the moon story and the lunar crater. And then we've been talking all week about light sails. So when Lou Friedman's trapped under a rock, then I've been taking interviews with various press outfits and radio and print. A big week ahead, too, at least in the night sky. Tell us about it.

Big week. Well, I don't know about a big week. We'll see. Can I interrupt for a second? There are puppies, there are dogs running around us here, which is oddly appropriate, as we will learn. It's true. We had to rent these dogs.

They're prop dogs. Come on, bark. Bark. us here, which is oddly appropriate, as we will learn. It's true. We had to rent these dogs to get them. They're prop dogs. Come on, bark. Bark. Woof. Woof. Woof. Why should they bark?

We're doing it for them. Well, I was talking to you anyway. For those who catch this podcast or radio shortly after it comes out, I'll mention the Leonids. Frankly, I hadn't bothered to mention the Leonids because they're a weird meteor shower. Every 33 years, they have a huge spike when we go right through a big clumpy part of the comet temple tunnel debris field. But that happened a few years ago. So now they're usually typically pretty feeble, meaning 15, 20 an hour. But I guess there are some predictions that on Tuesday morning, the 17th,

there will be up to 100. Or if you're in Asia in particular and hit right at the peak in the pre-dawn hours, you may get as many as 300 to 500. Oh, my goodness. But this is still a little not exactly precise. So probably for most of the time, it'll be tens of meteors at best. But still, no new moon. Something to look forward to. I will give you the longer look, though.

The Geminids, traditionally basically the most reliable and consistent of the meteor showers, will be on December 14th and under a new moon as well. So we'll remind you of that. But also that that's good if you don't have a chance to check out the Leanuts. We have Jupiter in the evening sky, brightest star-like object over in the west. We have in the pre-dawn sky, you might still catch very bright Venus, very low in the east, or you might not because it's really low, but you can catch Saturn well above it in the east, and Mars actually rising in the late evening sky. Reddish thing getting brighter

through the end of January. Let us go on to this week in space history. 1969. That's like a 10 year type anniversary. Huh? Well it's a multiple of 10. Oh, okay. People get excited about those because we have 10 fingers. Just say 40. All right. The 40th anniversary of the landing of Apollo 12 on the lunar surface, the second human landing on the surface of the moon. And a little bit closer, five years ago, the NASA's Swift spacecraft was launched.

It's been giving us some great results on gamma ray bursts, exploring the deep, deep universe. Yeah, we've talked about that on this show, as a matter of fact. Quite a successful little probe out there, swinging around to catch those big bangs. Speaking of successful little probes, we go on to Random Space Fact! Space Fact! That's too bad you're only on one microphone because the stereo effect would have just been great. Well, just imagine it, everyone. So Vanguard One, we've talked about it before.

It's the oldest human-made object in space. Launched in 1958. But here's your random space fact for the day. It has now completed more than 200,000 orbits of the Earth. Wow. Cool, huh orbits of the Earth. Wow. Cool, huh? That is cool. Racking up more than 6 billion miles or 10 billion kilometers. That is wonderful.

And it's not decaying. I mean, it's basically up there forever. I don't know about forever, but it's at least another few centuries. We won't be worrying about it. Let us go on to the trivia contest. Big contest. Big, big contest. Big, big, huge, giant.

Well, dog-related anyway. So we asked you, Strelka and Belka, the first dogs successfully returned from space, and this by the Soviets. One of them had puppies. One of those puppies was given to some famous American. Who was that? How did we do? Wow, what a response.

And I think, again, I don't know if it was the fact that puppies were involved or that we're giving away a Cosmos One solar sail team collector's item, team windbreaker. But a huge response. So thank you to all of you. one of those puppies we would have accepted either JFK, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, or his daughter, Caroline, who actually ended up with this pup named Pushinka, which is in Russian.

Get this fluffy. Isn't that perfect? Fluffy. And then another Kennedy dog and Pushinka had a little detente thing going on and made more puppies. And JFK referred to those as pupniks. But it was, I'm proud to say it was Philip Espy. Philip Espy in Brittany, France, who was randomly chosen by random.org as our winner this time around. I do want to mention that quite a few people mentioned that there is a movie coming

out, apparently a Russian made animated film, made this year about Strelka and Belka which is going to be released soon in the United States, maybe next month. I've got to mention this as well. Georgi Petrov, who lives in New York City, said that last

winter he saw Caroline Kennedy walking a dog. And he couldn't help but wonder if that wasn't maybe the grand pup of Pashinka. Great grandchild. Great grandpupnik. Yes, right. Exactly. So fun stuff. Anyway, Philip, we're going to send you a Cosmos One Team Windbreaker.

Yes, and we'll be giving away one more of those this next week based on last week's trivia contest. But let's go on to this week's, and what should we give away this week? How about a Hug-A-Planet, your very own huggable Mars? Oh, they're so nice. They're so comforting in a cold Martian kind of a way. Don't stick your tongue on it. That's all. Wow.

Now you tell me. That explains so much. All right. I'm going to do something a little different. A while back, I got a suggestion, and we've gotten these occasionally from a listener. And I'm going to go ahead and go with that. From William Stewart, he suggested this trivia question what is the last mission for which nasa named a backup crew okay they used to in the early days and mercury apollo and how much farther we'll let you figure out they would name backup crews

when what's the last mission that they did that for? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. And you've got until Monday, November 23rd at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. What do you think we should think about, Matt? Puppies. All right, everybody. Go out there. Look out for the night sky and think about fluffy puppies.

Thank you. He's Bruce Betts. He's a big fluffy puppy himself. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California.

Keep looking up. Thank you.