Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Yale’s Debra Fischer and the Ever More Precise Search for New Worlds

Episode Date: October 14, 2014

It’s terribly hard to find exoplanets that look like our homeworld. The search requires development of astoundingly powerful and precise instruments. That’s the job Debra Fischer and her team have taken on.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Music Deborah Fisher and the ever-expanding search for new worlds, this week on Planetary Radio. Music Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Ace Planet Hunter Deborah Fisher of Yale University is back to tell us about her team's work on an astounding new instrument. She's joined this time by post-doctoral associate Tyler McCracken. Bill Nye takes a break this week so that we can get a space policy and budget update from Casey Dreyer.

And I hope you'll stick around for the little green man of this week's What's Up segment. I had to catch Emily Lakdawalla on her cell phone. The Planetary Society's senior editor was spending the day at the Jet Propulsion Lab. Hi, Emily, what's going on today at JPL? Well, I'm at the Mars Comet NASA Social, and Matt, I just saw an ion engine working with the blue glow. It looked like a lightsaber. It was so incredibly awesome. I've never seen that before. It was great. Now, I happen to know that you said that the guy who runs that lab listens to Planetary Radio and invited us to come by. So tell him I will be there shortly.

I will. Tell us, speaking of comets and other stuff out there, in this case asteroids, what did Don learn at Vesta? This is something you've written about, terrific article, posted to the blog on October 9th. Don learned a lot at Vesta. After all, it's a class of body that's never been visited by a spacecraft before. It's really way too big to call it an asteroid, but it's a bit small to call it a planet, so it's somewhere in between. Some of the things that Don learned are confirmation of what we predicted we would learn.

Things like Vesta is differentiated. That's the word for when you have a gigantic body that separates by density into a denser, maybe even metallic core and a lighter rocky mantle. We predicted that and Don confirmed that. That was cool. But then there are a whole lot of other things that Don found that were not expected, including the strange dark material that seems to be full of minerals that contain a lot of water that could not possibly have condensed at Vesta's current distance from the sun. So that tells us that stuff got delivered to Vesta. A lot of stuff got delivered to Vesta from much farther out in the solar system.

So we've learned a lot, and there's actually still quite a lot more to learn. There's still a lot of data being processed, particularly on things like the gravity field of Vesta. So there's a lot more yet to learn from Dawn. Well, that's about it for this very quick visit, because we're going to let Emily get back to comets there at JPL. Again, you can take a look at the October 9th entry in her blog at planetary.org. And while you're there, look at the October 10th one, and you'll see what a lunar eclipse looks like from Mercury. That's pretty incredible. Thanks, Emily. Thank you, Matt.

She is our senior editor and planetary evangelist. That's Emily Laktawalla, a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine as well. Up next, not Bill Nye this week. We're going to visit with Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's director of advocacy. Hey, Casey, happy new federal fiscal year.. AKC, happy new federal fiscal year. Hey, Matt, happy new federal fiscal year to you. It just rolls right off the tongue. Doesn't it?

It's kind of a mouthful. The only problem is there isn't really a budget yet, is there? At least for NASA. There is not, and not actually for really any other part of the U.S. government. We are in what's called a continuing resolution. That's basically a stopgap measure where Congress couldn't agree on a budget in time for the new fiscal year. They passed a temporary extension that will extend last year's funding until December 11th. So they give themselves a little bit of time basically to go back to their districts and get reelected.

But again, this is way better than last year where, if you remember, the whole government shut down because they couldn't even pass the stopgap measure. So we're a little bit ahead of where we were last year, but still without a real plan and approved spending for NASA or any other government agency next year. And, of course, lots of unknowns as we are now three weeks or less, as people hear this, from knowing who's going to be running the Senate next year. Yes, absolutely. Right now, the Democratic Party controls the Senate, could switch to the Republican Party. Most senators don't have a big amount of focus on space policy or what NASA's doing, but there are real impacts that that could have, good and bad,

for our priorities in planetary exploration, in commercial crew. Usually, Matt, luckily, NASA tends to be a bipartisan organization, gets a lot of strong support from both Republicans and Democrats. But it's something we're paying attention to very closely. So that's deferred news. How about some good news that we haven't talked with you about? And that's a whole bunch of missions that are going to be seen right out to the end. Yeah, so NASA finished its senior review of all of its planetary science missions. This is something that they do every two years for every mission currently operating beyond their what's called its prime mission, its original plan.

So basically everything past warranty is up for review and to say, does this still return good science for continuing to fund their operations? As a mixed review, honestly, in some missions, fundamentally, what the review panel said was that every mission in planetary science should continue. They're all doing great science. They're all returning great data. And they said a lot of them are just like having brand new missions for the next couple of years. So fundamentally, very good news. And there's much more good news that we won't have much time to deal with. For instance, the fact that apparently Europa Clipper, that proposed mission to the moon of Jupiter, may be growing wings.

It won't be carrying plutonium if it goes there. Yeah, Matt, isn't that amazing? So classically, every spacecraft does use plutonium to go out deeper into the solar system. out deeper into the solar system. Now it turns out advances in technology for solar panels are getting so good and they can resist that horrible radiation around Jupiter that we can actually use solar panels to power this potential mission around Europa. Also, it opens up plutonium for a lot of other missions to different parts of the solar system. So really interesting news and something people should check out online. And another thing that they might want to look at online is, what is this series from another of our blogging colleagues?

Yeah, Jason Callahan is an expert in space policy and particularly NASA funding history. And he's been running a really interesting series about planetary science funding since 1958, since when NASA began. And we look at the rises and falls and rises and falls of planetary science funding and also correlating them to the really great missions that we all know and love from planetary exploration. So very interesting series. New voice on the planetary website.

We're very excited about it. All right, Casey. And full disclosure, I stole the opening for this piece from Casey's October 1st blog entry where he wished everyone a happy fiscal year 2015, that federal fiscal year. Casey, thanks for joining us. Great to be here, Matt. Thanks. He is the Planetary Society's Director of Advocacy

and you can track what he's up to and lots of other stuff that's happening with space advocacy, planetary science advocacy at planetary.org. We'll be back in a moment with Deborah Fisher searching for exoplanets and now getting ready to do so with the help of a laser the discovery of other planets in our galaxy, now numbering over 1,000,

has to be one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time. And it has all happened in the last 20 years. The work is becoming more difficult as we attempt to find and characterize worlds that are more like our own in both size and distance from their stars. It's a challenge Deborah Fisher seems to relish. The Yale professor of astronomy heads that university's exoplanet group, which has given itself a new challenge called 100 Earths. I called Deborah via Skype a few days ago so that she could share the status of her work.

It includes development of a spectrograph called Express that she hopes will be precise almost beyond imagination. Deborah, welcome back to Planetary Radio. Hi, Matt. Thanks so much for having us. Introduce us to your colleague there, your associate. Dr. Tyler McCracken. He's a postdoctoral fellow that we hired a year ago in our group, and we're really lucky and happy to have him. Not only is he great to work with, but he's also a genius and doing some really cool new stuff. Tyler, you probably couldn't ask for much more than that, could you? No, no.

And you're pretty handy with a screwdriver at the optical bench, I think, at least from photos that I've seen on the Exoplanet Group website. Yes, Matt, I do spend quite a bit of time in the lab putting together setups, alignment, testing, not just on the optical table, also on the computer as well. There is also a very cool picture of you in a couple of places that we'll link to on the show page that people can reach from planetary.org slash radio. And it's you, Tyler, standing in front of this sizable telescope. Tell us about that instrument.

in front of this sizable telescope. Tell us about that instrument. So the instrument is the Discovery Channel Telescope run by the Lowell Observatory near Flagstaff, Arizona. Yeah, it's beautiful because it's a brand new telescope. It's a 4.3 meter telescope, so it's a big enough dish to collect the photons that we're going to need for this project. But what we think is really special about it is that it has a deployable tertiary mirror that rotates between five instrument ports, which means that if we end up with 50 or 70 nights a year assigned to our team for telescope time, we can divide that up into smaller bits through the night. And in the time it takes to slew the telescope to a new star, they can be on a new instrument, which we hope will be our express instrument in two years.

Yeah, tell us about this instrument, which you are currently piecing together with some technology that we will also talk about. That's correct. The front-end module will be bolted on the telescope, and then we'll use a fiber-optic cable to take the light down to the mezzanine level, where our spectrometer will be bolted on the telescope and then we'll use a fiber optic cable to take the light down to the mezzanine level where our spectrometer will be located. And, you know, I think what's different about this telescope and spectrometer combination is that we're really trying to do something new. We've been pushing for the last 10 years now trying to figure out what has been keeping us stuck at one meter

per second precision. We've figured out a lot of things and we're now with this instrument aiming to go to 10 centimeter per second precision. So a factor of 10 better than we've been able to do so far. And that number is critical because if we were going to detect an analog of the Earth, that's the precision that we'd need. And that would be at what kind of distance from our solar system? Might you be able to do that with that kind of accuracy? Yeah, we're interested in our nearest neighbors. So we like the idea of spying on those stars for a bunch of reasons. First of all, we can do more science with the close stars.

They're brighter, so we get more signal for our instrument. But then if we find something interesting, it's much easier to follow up with other instruments to do things like eventually imaging the atmospheres of these planets and looking for signs for life. So we're focusing on stars that are, you know, closer than 10 to 20 parsecs away or closer than in light years, we'll have to multiply by 3.26. So 30 to 50 light years. And in some cases, quite a bit less than that number. And we'll come back to talking about your ongoing, shall I call it, obsession with the Centauri system. That's right. That's fair. And for that minority of our audience that may not be aware of what you're talking about,

when we talk about this one meter per second dropping down to a tenth of that, perhaps, why is this so important? How does this fit into the kind of search you like to conduct for planets elsewhere in the galaxy? Right, right. So when we look at a star, we have to be very patient. We're measuring the velocity or the speed of the star over time. And if there's a planet that's orbiting the star, that planet is going to tug the star around a common center of mass. And so paradoxically, you know, we don't ever see the planet with our technique. We see the effect that it has on the star, the reflex velocity from

the star. And so with this technique, sometimes people call it the wobble method. It's really the Doppler technique. We've detected hundreds of planets orbiting other stars but most of them have been gas giant planets similar to Jupiter and Saturn we're now getting down to planets the size of Neptune and Uranus which are you know sort of 15 times the mass of the earth we know from the Kepler mission which was launched by NASA that in fact the really small planets that are one to a few times the mass of the Earth are the most common planets in our galaxy, and yet we've missed them with the instruments that we have. And we think we understand now what we have to do to really push the precision down so that we can start to tap into this incredible reservoir of rocky

planets that we think are good places for life. That's Yale University's Deborah Fisher and her postdoctoral associate, Tyler McCracken. They'll both be back with more about the search for distant worlds when Planetary Radio continues in a minute. Hi, this is Casey Dreyer, Director of Advocacy at the Planetary Society. We're busy building something new, something unprecedented, a real grassroots constituency for space. We want to empower and engage the public like never before. If you're interested, you can go to planetary.org slash SOS to learn how you can become a space advocate. That's planetary.org slash SOS. Save our science. Thank you.

Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water in the search for life to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together we can advocate for planetary science and dare I say it, change the world. Planetary Radio, I'm Matt Kaplan. The hunt for exoplanets continues at many of humanity's observatories, but continued success will depend on ever more sensitive instruments. Deborah Fisher heads the Yale University Exoplanet Group, where she works with a team that includes postdoctoral associate Tyler McCracken. They were telling us before the break about their work to

break through to a new level of precision in their measurement of a star's wobble, movement caused by the not yet visible planets that buzz around it. Debra is not new to this effort. It has been a pretty steady progression, I guess, until this recent sort of plateau. But talk about some of the success you've had in the past. I'm thinking of this Chiron instrument with its fiber optic elements built into it that has been pretty successful down in the southern hemisphere. Exactly. We built Chiron with NSF funding, and we did it for a fairly modest amount of money. Some of our colleagues are spending several million dollars to build instruments.

And we really were trying to build a prototype that would push technology. So we built Chiron. We put it on a modest-sized telescope, a 1.5 meter telescope. To be honest, we commissioned the instrument and it was doing well, but not very, you know, not as well as we'd hoped. So we went back to the drawing board and we said, okay, let's, you know, pull out the stops and figure out what we can do to really improve things. And so we made several upgrades to the spectrometer, to the instrument, and we then began collecting data. And we have unprecedented precision with that little spectrometer on a small telescope, on a very modest telescope. And so we thought, this is golden, we're seeing a half a meter per

second precision. And then the longer we were looking at stars, the worse things became. We began to see very coherent signals that would creep into our velocities, but they didn't look like planetary signals. So we now think that we're seeing velocity flows on the surface of the star. You know, when you look with much greater precision, you see things that you didn't know really were there. That's delayed us a little bit, but we now have a beautiful two, almost three-year data set on three stars that are really unprecedented, and we're going to have some exciting announcements to make about astrophysics and how you get to higher precision. Excellent. Well, I look forward to getting you back on the show for that.

All right, in the few minutes we have left, let's go back to this instrument, which hopefully will be coming online in a couple of years, XPRESS, the Extreme Precision Spectrograph. And I want to talk about one particular element of this. I will give away how old I am by mentioning that when I bought my first FM radio, you used to have to look for FM radios that had a feature called AFC, automatic frequency control, because they drift a little bit and it would have to lock on. And when I read this description of what's happening with the Exo, what will happen with Exoplanet Laser,

it took me right back to buying that that old fm radio am i even close yes yes you are what we're doing is making a calibration spectrum and we're trying to keep that calibration spectrum from exactly what what you're talking about drifting we want to have an an automatic frequency corrector on our calibration spectrum so that once we tune to a line or to a station, that it stays right there. Right. The precision might be a little bit higher than your old... Yes. I suspect, yeah. Optical frequencies and radio frequencies are a little different. Right. So this is where Tyler's working on an instrument

that will be stable to one part in 100 billion. 100 billion. 100 billion. Yeah, exactly, 10 to the 11. Wow. And for that, you need a pretty special laser. This is not the kind that I can buy for $5 and put on my keychain. No, no. It is a special laser, and it's a tunable laser.

And so typically when you buy a laser that you can put on your keychain, you can press the button and one color comes out. The problem is that that color will drift by a very small amount, and we're trying to control that drift. And so the special laser that we get has some mechanisms in there so that we can tune that and keep it at the same exact wavelength, day in and day out. And in spite of this, you still are talking about having, what, three of these units, essentially. It's kind of like Minority Report, where if one of them messes up or even breaks, you've still got a couple there to provide the information you need.

To provide the information that we need, but also as a necessary redundancy, so that if one goes down, if that one laser starts acting up and that's the only laser you have, it's hard to know that it's acting up. The common saying is take one clock or three to see. That's right. So we're going to take one or three lasers to the telescope. That's right. So that the other lasers can tell on the one that's acting up.

Exactly. I love that comparison to marine chronometers. Listen, we're just about out of time. There is much more information about all this, as we said, at planetary.org, including a blog entry from Bruce Betts, who we're going to be hearing from in just a moment or two. And, Deborah, I hesitate to ask because of your tantalizing statement about announcements coming up, but do you have anything to add about that search at our nearest neighbor? Alpha Centauri is on hold right now.

The two binary stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, are too close together. So we're working on it, but we're actually waiting now until 2016 when the stars start to drift apart and they're projected on the sky. So nothing on Alpha Sun yet. But much more to come in this search. Absolutely. And was I right that you said that Express is maybe two years away from first light? That's right.

I'm much more confident. So my instrumentation group always laughs. But no, I say next 2016, summer or winter of 2016. All right, fingers crossed, and I'm sure we will be in touch between now and then, and certainly when the light starts to come through this incredibly precise new spectrograph. Deborah, thank you so much, and Tyler, thank you as well. Thank you, Matt. Thanks.

Yale professor of astronomy Deborah Fisher heads the Exoplanet Group at that university, and Tyler McCracken is one of her postdoctoral associates there, one of, I believe, four working with the Exoplanet Group as they develop ever more precise ways for us to detect other worlds circling other stars. As promised, Bruce Betts is up next with What's Up. Back on Skype with Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. He's ready to tell us what's up in the night sky and about some little green men later. Hey, did you check out the total lunar eclipse? I was going to ask you the same thing because you said you would.

I never said I would, and no, I did not. I hear it was quite bloody, though. I wouldn't go with that, but it was an eclipse that was quite awesome. You didn't see the blood moon? The person I spoke to who saw it said, yeah, it was kind of red, orange, and pretty. It was red, orange, and pretty. I just don't consider blood to be pretty. What else can we look forward to in the sky?

Well, we've got another eclipse coming up, this time a partial solar eclipse on October 23rd. You can check out my blog about both eclipses that occurred on our website about a week ago, planetary.org. We've also got not a night sky thing, but something to be aware of. October 19th, comet Siding Spring will be having a near miss of the planet Mars. There'll be a video about that fairly soon, won't there? Yeah, should be up by the time this radio shows up. We've got a video also you can find in a more recent blog of mine online.

Or if it's not there, hang out for a few hours just staring at the screen. All right, we will put up the link to that from the show page that you can reach from planetary.org slash radio. Jupiter low in the pre-dawn east, Mars low in the southwest in the early evening. We move on to this week in space history. 1997, Cassini was launched. 17 years ago, still doing amazing stuff at Saturn. And it's going to keep doing it, fingers crossed, until 2017. At least now we know the money is there.

We'll be talking with Linda Spilker about that mission again very soon. On to random Space Fact! And let me just say, something wonderful is going to happen to Random Space Fact. I cannot say more. Please be satisfied with that hint and stay tuned. A whole new avenue of happy funness. But back to this, the word Arctic comes from the Greek arctikos, meaning near the bear, for the Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the bear constellations in the north.

That's a first-rate fact. I had no idea. Cool, huh? All right, we move on to the trivia contest. And we asked you, what was the nickname given to the first pulsar discovered? Some great responses to this one. Everybody that I saw, and we had a big response, got it right, but there were also just some very funny responses, including one from the person I think is our winner. It's Mark Little out of Port Stewart, Northern Ireland.

He said that the name given to it by the two discoverers back in the 70s was Little Green Men. Indeed. Since it looked like an alien signal, they didn't really think it was, but that's what they nicknamed it because of the very constant pulsing of the signal. LGM. I guess it kind of stuck, but it's also known as what? PSR B1919. And Mark, we are going to send a Planetary Radio t-shirt your way.

He says, so does this provide proof that we Irish colonized the cosmos first? Maybe. This little tidbit came from Nathan Hunter in Portland, Oregon. He said that the seminal band Joy Division, their debut 1979 album, I checked it out, it's true, the album was Unknown Pleasures, on the cover of the album is sort of a spectrograph of the signal coming from this first ever discovered pulsar. Pretty cool. And right in line with that, Rick Kwan of Fremont, California, said that it was discovered the day before the Beatles released their magical mystery tour, which does somehow seem appropriate, doesn't it? Coincidence? You be the judge.

Yeah, right. I like this one from Kevin Hecht, who said that in my family, we call peas, the vegetable, LGMs, although neither my wife nor son are very happy with the practice. That might have gotten me to eat the damn little things. But here's my favorite from Joe Murray in Hoboken, New Jersey. Joe said, always thought that was the hashtag for Bruce and Matt, little green men. It is now. We'll grab it. That's it for this time around.

Next time, what have you got for us? All right. As I've mentioned, we now have more working spacecraft at Mars than ever before at seven. Here's your question. What is the last full year in which there were fewer than five working spacecraft at Mars? That includes orbiters, landers, rovers, whatever is actually functioning. What was the last full year in which there were fewer than five working spacecraft at Mars? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Get us your entry. By the 21st of October, that would be 8 a.m.

on October 21st, a Tuesday. So four or fewer working spacecraft at Mars. By the way, there's another contest of sorts. It's more of a survey that you can enter if you like, and it has to do with our prize this week. Our friend Thomas Romer, the terrific artist for Chop Shop, he has asked for our help with a survey. He has already created a poster for the Voyager mission, and he wants to do two more. But he wants your help to identify the three best, greatest, favorite robotic spacecraft missions of all time. Anything from Sputnik to Curiosity, as it says on our page, where you can put your vote. It's a little bit of a complicated URL, but you can get to it from planetary.org slash radio and then look for this week's show. But it's in the Get Involved section of the Planetary

Society website. We're taking votes right now. We're only doing it for another week or two. By the way, the prize this week, it's one of Thomas Romer's chop shop, beautiful spacecraft, of Thomas Roemer's Chop Shop beautiful spacecraft, solar system exploration, robotic spacecraft posters, which we were given away a while ago, and we'll do it again for the winner of this week's contest. And I think that's it. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, think of the engineering miracle that are ballpoint pens. Thank you, and good night.

Got one right here. There it is. He's Bruce Betts, the director of science and technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week here for What's Up. FYI, Thomas Romer has a campaign underway for his historic robotic spacecraft posters. A search in Kickstarter for Chop Shop will make it pop right up. Me, I voted for Voyager, Viking, and the Mars Exploration Rovers. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary

Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the tasteful members of the Society. Clear skies. Thank you.