Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - You Can Search for Stardust!

Episode Date: August 7, 2006

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Will you be the first to find real stardust? This week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. He's back, and he needs your help. To the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. He's back, and he needs your help. Andrew Westfall of the Stardust at Home Project wants you and your sharp eyes to help find microscopic dust particles that have come from beyond our solar system.

He'll tell us more in just a few minutes. Bruce Betts is pretty excited that Stardust at Home is open for business. He's also anxious to tell us about the night sky and the surprising answer to our latest trivia contest. And he'll provide yet another chance to win a Planetary Radio T-shirt in this week's What's Up. Feeling cramped? Don't think there's enough room for all your galaxies, quasars,

and cosmic dust bunnies? Then show your gratitude to a team of astronomers at Ohio State University. In an article about to appear in the Astrophysical Journal, they say we've been using the wrong number for the Hubble constant. If they're right, the universe is about 15% larger than most scientists thought, and a couple of billion years older, too. Other researchers are impressed, but aren't quite ready to revise their maps to the

stars homes just yet. Space shuttle Atlantis made it to pad 39A last week. The four-mile trip from the Vehicle Assembly Building took almost eight hours. That's about a half mile or less than a kilometer an hour. Six astronauts will travel considerably faster as they bring an 18-ton solar power array to the International Space Station. The launch window opens on August 27. Speaking of solar power, things are looking up for spirit and opportunity as the sun begins to climb higher in the pinkish Martian sky. The Mars Exploration Rovers are at the summer solstice, so they can expect more light and more watts of electricity. They'll also get a charge from the new software that has just been uploaded, version 9.2. You can learn much more about what they've been up to during this long winter

in a comprehensive article by my colleague A.J. S. Rail. It includes some of the latest images. You'll find it at planetary.org. Include some of the latest images. You'll find it at planetary.org. One more time, everyone, a rousing congratulations to Emily Lakdawalla and her brand new addition to the universe. We're happy to report that Mom, Dad, and baby Lakdawalla are doing just fine. With her maternity leave still getting underway, we're about to hear another of Emily's great Q&A segments from the past. I'll be right back with Stardust at

Home's Andrew Westfall. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, are there planets that have icy crusts? One must be cautious these days about what one calls a planet, but there are certainly plenty of worlds in the solar system whose surface materials are composed of ice. In the inner solar system, it's too hot for ice to persist on planetary surfaces, except at the poles. Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, and Mars all have solid surfaces that are primarily composed of rock. But the story is quite different in the much colder outer solar system. Solid surfaces on the worlds orbiting the giant planets are, almost without exception, composed of water and other ices.

We even know that Pluto and the other worlds in the Kuiper Belt have surfaces composed of ices of water, nitrogen, and methane. How do we know what the surfaces of these worlds are made of when they are too small for telescopes to resolve them? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. There was so much to do. After all, no one has ever had the opportunity to look for interstellar dust particles before, so no one has ever had to figure out how to include thousands of volunteers in such an effort.

Finally, Stardust at Home is ready for primetime, and Andrew Westfall hopes you'll join the search. You may remember Andrew's first appearance on Planetary Radio. We heard his exhilaration as the Stardust sample return capsule streaked across the sky of the western United States. He is a senior fellow and associate director in the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley, where he has been working around the clock to get the project underway. We talked with him just a few days after the August 1 grand opening.

Andrew, thanks for coming back on the radio show with us. Crazy days up there? Oh, it's been crazy. Yeah, we launched Start Us at Home on Monday, and we were expecting to have both major and minor glitches, and we sure did. The first thing that happened was we just got slammed with traffic, which is great. You know, it's great to have such problems. Yeah, that, problems. But it was, we had to cope with it. And we had a hardware failure. And in fact, we're, as we speak, we're actually down for about an hour or so to fix another hardware failure we've had. We also had a little bit of a glitch where some, as I think some people noticed, some sort of unexpected images were displayed in the movies. We understand that problem, and that's been fixed, so that won't happen again.

But, you know, for the last couple of days, things have been running pretty smoothly. The Stardust at Home website is holding up, handling the traffic, and we're just absolutely delighted. We've had, as of a couple of hours ago, over a million field of view that have been examined. Wow. I should say, we don't even have that many, but that's how many searches have been done. So that means a lot of these images have been looked at several times, which is great. Oh, that's amazing. Already.

I mean, that's in less than four days, basically. Yeah, right. And I am so tempted. Less than four days, basically. Yeah, right. And I am so tempted. I saw this mention of these extraneous images on your website and that that's now been fixed. I'm so tempted to ask about them, but I don't think I will. They weren't little green men, though, right?

No, they weren't little green men. No, no, no. Okay. Tell us a little bit more about the project, very quickly, since a lot of the audience has heard this before, and primarily why it's so important to have all these human eyes doing the work instead of some supercomputer. Right. So, you know, the Stardust mission, which came back last January, was really two missions in one. It brought back the very first samples of material from a comet.

And, in fact, it did bring back, I keep putting it in the future tense, it did bring back the first solid samples of material by a spacecraft from beyond the moon. So it brought back these cometary samples, but it also brought back, we think, the very first samples of material from the galaxy as it is now. This is in the form of interstellar dust particles that are streaming into the solar system at all times. The Stardust spacecraft carried a collector, which was two-sided. One side collected the cometary dust, and that's been wildly successful, and people are analyzing these samples now in over 100 laboratories all over the world.

But the other side has these interstellar dust particles. And these are much more of a challenge to analyze after we've found them. But the first order of business, of course, is just to find them. And we know about how many of them there should be because of some instruments that were on the Ulysses and Galileo spacecraft, which actually detected this stream of dust coming into the solar system in the first place. We know that there should be somewhere between 50 and 100 of these interstellar dust grains, but we just don't know where they are.

And so what we're doing is using an automated microscope that we developed several years ago for a completely different project. It turned out a high-energy astrophysics project. We've adapted it to this purpose. That automated microscope is now in the Cosmic Dust Lab in Houston at the Johnson Space Center. And our colleagues Ron Bastian and Jack Warren are running this microscope. And, in fact, it's really quite amazing, a little piece of historical information. Jack Warren, who is one of our colleagues in Houston, was the first person to open one of the boxes coming back from Apollo 11.

Oh, no kidding. Yep. And so here he is now looking at the first samples of interstellar dust. It's really great. So I'm really jealous of him. Anyway, and he's a really neat guy, by the way. And Ron Bastian is also working on this, and he's a delightful colleague. And I guess the virtual microscope was largely developed by another name that some of our listeners know,

David Anderson of, what am I trying to think? City at Home, that's right. Geez, I couldn't think of it. know, David Anderson. What am I trying to think? Steady at home, that's right. Geez, I couldn't think of it. Yeah, Dave Anderson came up with the design for this. And when he first proposed it, I said, there's no way that's going to work. That's nuts. But it works great as people, at least when our site isn't overwhelmed and we're having any other little glitches, it works wonderfully.

It's just amazing. You look at the digital images that this automated microscope collects, and you can focus up and down using a slider just as if you were sitting at a real microscope, except it's a lot more comfortable because you can just sit with your laptop in your lap, you know, or whatever. You don't have to be peering down through some eyepieces. And we will give the website now, but, but of course we'll put it up on our website where this radio show is heard, and that will be at planetary.org. But here's the site, stardustathome, that's at A-T, not just the at symbol,

stardustathome, no spaces,.ssl.berkeley.edu. And we'll give that again before the end of the interview. Andrew, I was just on the site before we started talking. That interface for the Microsoft is so cool. Isn't it? I mean, I don't want to make your traffic even worse than it would be by telling people who aren't going to be looking for these specs, who aren't actually going to be contributing to take a look,

but it is just terrific. And I do encourage people to take a look because once they see it, they may decide to become one of your volunteers. Right. I certainly think at this point, please take a look. I mean, we're now set up, we think, to be able to handle the traffic that's coming in. So you're most welcome. And this is not SETI at Home in that SETI at Home is using your home computing power or wherever you're running the program.

This really does depend on us humans. Absolutely. That's right. Yeah, it is similar to SETI at Home in that we're asking for volunteers from all over the world to help us. But this is quite different in the sense that people are actively participating. We need the eyes and the brains of people to help us find these things. It may be possible at some point in the future to program a computer to look for these things automatically. But frankly, we just don't know how to do it right at this point. Maybe

because we're just not smart enough. That's very possible. But anyway, but this approach is, I have to say, just in the last couple of days, we've been looking at some of the samples, some of the things that people have identified. And while I can't say yet whether we found any interstellar dust grains, I can say that people are incredibly sharp-eyed. They're finding things that are just what I would want them to find. Excellent. You know, and I've been looking at aerogel for years. So it's working great. I mean, I think regardless of what we find out, you know, and this is, after all, research, you know, so the outcome of this project is highly uncertain. But no matter what, I think this

technique is really working great. And you even have a tutorial on the site so that people don't go in cold. They're actually trained to recognize these telltale tracks. That's right. When you come to the site, you can read about the project, and then you'll go through a tutorial showing examples of tracks, examples of things that might look like tracks but really aren't. And then you take a test, and if you pass the test, it's an 8 out of 10 passing grade,

then you can register and go right to it and just immediately start working. And it may be that the images that you're looking at are the first time anybody has looked at this aerogel since it's traveled 3 billion miles and come back from space. So, you know, this is not just something that we made up just to involve the public. This is our science team of thousands of people are really participating in this project as real collaborators. And I have to say, you know, we have an open forum on the site. People are absolutely wonderful. You know, they're collegial, they're friendly. They've been giving us a lot of constructive criticism,

but in a very friendly and constructive way, you know. And so far, I think it's the best collaboration I've ever had. We'll hear more about Stardust at Home from Andrew Westfall when Planetary Radio returns. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars.

We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first ever solar sail. We didn't just build it. We attempted to put that first solar sail in orbit and we're going to try again. You can read about all our exciting projects and get the latest space

exploration news in depth at the Society's exciting and informative website planetary.org. You can also preview our full-color magazine The Planetary Report. it's just one of our many member benefits want to learn more call us at 1-877-PLANETS that's toll free 1-877-752-6387 the planetary society exploring new worlds welcome back to planetary radio i. I'm Matt Kaplan.

We're talking with UC Berkeley Senior Fellow Andrew Westfall about the Stardust at Home project, now open for business and hoping you'll join the search for tiny particles of interstellar dust collected by the Stardust spacecraft on its long voyage. If somebody, or more than one somebody, because you'd have to have multiple observations of a suspect particle, let's say that somebody finds something that looks like what you're hoping to find today. How soon would it be before you would be prepared, able to responsibly make an announcement that, yes, here is a little bit of, a little speck of dust from beyond the stars?

Well, we're going to be very careful. You know, I was writing into work with my cousin who's visiting from Canada, and he's a carpenter. And he said there's a very wise saying in carpentry, you should measure twice and cut once. Oh, yeah, I know that one. So that's what we're doing, is we're going to be very careful because we don't want to say, aha, we found something and then have to say, oh, well, not really. And so we're being very careful. And what that means is that we're going through

images even right now that people have identified. We're going through multiple levels of analysis. So the first thing we do is we just look at them and say, okay, is this something we already know about? And it's not something interesting like a crack or a piece of dust or any number of things that they might be. But I have to say, there aren't a lot of those things. People are being really, really good about not just clicking on anything. really good about not just clicking on anything. Then the next level is to look at very high-resolution images of these things. Then we go actually, not we, but our colleagues in Houston will actually look at these things with eyeballs,

not with digital imagery, but through a microscope. They'll look at these things and make an assessment. And then the next step is going to have to be, it will depend on what it is, and make an assessment. And then the next step is going to have to be, it will depend on what it is, but the next step is probably going to be to actually extract these things physically from the collector. That's going to take a little while because we have to actually develop some mechanical fixtures and things to be able to do that. So people need to be patient, I'm afraid, with this project. But I hope we were being upfront in in our original announcements and in email and on the website

that this is a long-term project, and it'll take quite a while for us to finish. I think that you were up front, and I think we're continuing to do that in this conversation today, and it's well worth the wait. Besides which, you said 50 to 100 particles expected, and you're going to take, what, about 700,000 of these Focus movies. Yeah, that's right. In fact, well, it depends on how you count. We're actually deciding now that we're going to be doing not only looking at these images as they are now, as they're presented, but we can get higher resolution versions with much smaller fields of view out of each one of these things. So, in fact, at the end of the day, it's going to be more like more than 3 million fields of view that will be searched.

We've only got a couple of minutes left. Tell us what, and I'm going to speak from optimism here, Tell us what, and I'm going to speak from optimism here, tell us what we may learn about the universe when we find these specks of interstellar dust. Well, here's what's fun. We have no idea. Nobody has ever had a contemporary interstellar dust grain, a piece of material from the local interstellar medium ever to study in their hands. We don't know what the typical interstellar dust grain looks like.

So that's going to be the first order of business, is just answering the very simple, basic questions. What are we looking at? The reason that it's important, at least I think, is that this is the stuff that the solar system and planets and we are made of. Four and a half billion years ago, the stuff that's now in the solar system was interstellar dust and gas. So it's really exciting to have this piece of this material.

It's like searching for our own origins, I think. Andrew, we said we'd give the website once again the URL. Here it is, stardustathome. No spaces, and at is 18, not the at symbol. StardustAtHome, no spaces, and at is 18, not the at symbol. StardustAtHome.ssl.berkeley.edu. And we will, of course, as I said, put that link up at Planetary.org. And you can read more about the StardustAtHome project at Planetary.org right now.

There's a nice article describing all of this. And, Andrew, I guess I think beginning the 14th, people are going to be able to hear from you directly because you're going to be one of those stars filling in for Emily Lakdawalla on the blog on planetary.org. That's right. I'm looking forward to it. Excellent. It's going to be a lot of fun. All right.

Well, we will look forward to that, too, and we sure look forward to that big announcement when you guys are confident and ready to make it. And go off and keep those servers cool now. All right. We will. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Andrew.

Andrew Westfall is a senior fellow and the associate director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley, and he is one of the big powers behind the Stardust at Home project. Check it out. And he is one of the big powers behind the Stardust at Home project. Check it out. And stay tuned so that you can check out What's Up this week with Bruce Betts right after this return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla back with Q&A. How do we know what the surfaces of different icy worlds are made of?

It's the same way we know what distant stars are made of, spectroscopy. Spectroscopy is the study of the spectrum of light that is emitted or reflected by an object. Scientists collect the faint light from a distant world and then they split that faint light into hundreds of even fainter beams, each at a different wavelength or color. Human eyes detect incoming light in three different wavelength bands, and that's what allows us to tell surfaces that are red from surfaces that are blue. But sensitive spectrometers can tell surfaces that are red at a wavelength of 720 nanometers from surfaces that are red at a wavelength of 730 nanometers.

This tiny difference in wavelength has identified the presence of methane ice on the surface of Pluto and many other smaller, more distant Kuiper belt bodies. Spectroscopy is even beginning to help us identify the compositions of the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. It's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is here, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. One and the same to tell us about the night sky and maybe a special announcement or two,

along with a new space trivia contest. It's all about the space. I'm so excited I can't speak clearly. Yeah, okay. Evening sky Venus, morning sky Jupiter. That's wrong. Reverse that. What is it that Willy Wonka says? Willy Won says? Yeah, right. Stop. Run that back. So in the evening sky, Jupiter is the brightest star-like object. Easy to see over there in the southwest, looking really bright. And in the pre-dawn sky, we've got Venus hanging out as the bright-looking morning star, so to speak. Very low in the east during dawn. Now Mercury, depending on when you listen to this, you may still catch Mercury up there

snuggling with Venus through mid-August in the pre-dawn sky. If you see something right next to Venus that doesn't have red blinking lights, then it's probably Mercury. We also, again, depending on when you're catching our show this week, we also have the Perseid meteor shower peaks on August 12th. But we'll also have increased meteors for a few days before and after that, but hampered this year by a nearly full moon causing a brighter sky. But you should still be able to see a few additional meteors if you go chill out and look up and watch the night sky and look for little streaks of light as bits of dust and sand just disintegrate in a flaming ball as they fly across the sky.

On to this week in space history. Forty years ago, Matt. Forty years ago. 1966. That's right. Lunar Orbiter 1 launched. It successfully returned images Of possible Apollo landing sites

We also had 1990 Magellan went into orbit around Venus And started its very successful Radar mapping mission Of the planet Venus So groovy stuff Moving on to Rob of Spice Park

Hey Did you know Spirit and Opportunity have been working on Mars for about 900 sols? Those are Martian days. Those are Martian days. So this is 10 times their nominal lifetime of 90 sols. The warranty. They've far surpassed the warranty. Ran out a long time ago. NASA, they bought that extended contract.

That's usually a mistake. See, they wasted our money. Totally wasted our money. Anyway, right now they're totally out of warranty, so it's pretty much off to the scrap shop once they stop working. But they're still working, so yay. Yeah. On to the trivia contest.

We asked you what was the last human spacecraft to have a splashdown? Now, were you surprised by this? Because I got the feeling. There was a subtlety that I had not thought through. There actually was. And a lot of people said it was the last Apollo capsule from the Apollo-Soyuz mission. Right, in the mid-'70s. Not so.

Not so. Not so. It was unintentional. Here's the answer. We will go with Preston Pendergraft's answer, which he sent to us from the University of Alabama. And he said that it was Soyuz 23. And this was not intentional. We got great details from some of the other entrants.

It came down in a lake. And I guess the cosmonauts had to stay in the capsule while they tried to recover it. They couldn't pull it out until ages later, and they were freezing in the capsule because it was like minus 20 or some ridiculous temperature. I guess it wouldn't have been minus 20. They would have come down on ice. But it was really cold. And so apparently that was the last splashdown.

It was not the Apollo capsule. So formally we'd give it to either answer. Yeah. But this was the randomly selected answer. So, indeed, a little splashdown history for you. Yeah, I was picturing the standard intentional Apollo splashdown at the end of Apollo-Soyuz. Let's see if I can find us another confusing question. By the way, it was 1976, which was a year after the Apollo capsule.

I just thought I'd throw that in. Thank you. Another anniversary, 30 years. Oh. What else? So, for next time around, sticking with some of the same gang and things they were up to, how many missions have returned samples from the moon to Earth? How many space missions have returned samples from the moon to Earth?

Lunar meteorites do not count. Ever so slightly a trick question, but you don't intend to do a trick. Yeah, it's not really, but okay. How do they enter? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to send us your entry. I wanted to get through that a little bit quickly because I think you've got a special announcement. I do.

We are proud to announce in our partnership with University of California, Berkeley, that they are debuting Stardust at Home. It is there for you to participate and actually do space science. The Stardust at Home, as I know you've had Andrew Westfall, the director, on, collected Stardust. The spacecraft collected not only cometary dust, but had a flip side to their fancy aerogel collectors that collected, they hope, interstellar dust, dust from other stars. This would be the first time it's ever been collected without being all mushed up,

and really there's little to be learned from the mushy ones. And so you'll be able to check out. You help them out in looking at nearly a million movies. No, you don't have to look at every one of them. That's why they're asking for help. Sounds like Robert Ebert's hell. Thumbs up, thumbs down. I don't care anymore.

Anyway, if you go to planetary.org and you can find links to where you can do that, you can learn a lot more on planetary.org about stardust at home and interstellar dust and stuff like that. But it's a way to make a real contribution and try to find some of the few tens of interstellar dust particles they think are hanging out in those hundreds of thousands of movies. But it's fun stuff. Give it a try. And in the meantime, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about whether you've got any interstellar dust on your mantle.

I seriously doubt it because that whole burning up in the Earth's atmosphere thing, but, you know, give some thought to it. If anybody does, it's on mine. That's true. Thank you and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He's here every week with What's Up. I suppose you'd like to know the deadline for that new trivia contest.

We live to serve. Get your entry to us by August 14 at 2 p.m. Pacific time. That's Monday, August 14 at 2 p.m. Pacific. As always, the details are at planetary.org slash radio. Next week, our guest will be Dr. Ed Stone of the California Institute of Technology, a past director of the Jet Propulsion Lab. We'll be celebrating a milestone for all humanity as the Voyager 1 spacecraft reaches 100 astronomical units, or nearly 10 billion miles from home.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week, everyone. Thank you.