Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Your Personal Photoshoot on Mars?

Episode Date: March 15, 2010

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Your personal photo shoot on Mars, 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 of the Planetary Society. It's the highest resolution camera circling the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It's the highest resolution camera circling the red planet, and now you may be able to point it. Alfred McEwen returns to our microphone with an update on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE imager and the new HiWISH program that invites everyone to suggest sites on Mars for a snapshot. Our own Emily Lakdawalla got her high-wish nominations turned in a few weeks ago.

Listen in as we find out from Alfred if she's a winner. Emily's Best of the Planetary Society blog feature is just a few seconds away. President Barack Obama has scheduled a space summit for April 15. Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, is looking forward to that discussion. And Bruce Betts will join me for a look at the night sky. We've also got a very special prize for the winner of the new space trivia contest. Emily Lakdawalla is the Planetary Society's science and technology coordinator. If you've visited planetary.org, you know she also does amazing work with the Society's very popular blog. That's why we call her up every week.

Emily, another look at the blog this week, and in particular, a couple of images which are not exactly current missions. I mean, they're both going back into the archives. Absolutely, and they're the examples of the kinds of things I really like to feature on the blog so much because there is such a wealth of data in the archives that really very few people have taken the time to look at or used modern computer processing methods to bring out their beauty. Let's start with one that came from Galileo, that Jupiter orbiter that ended its life some years ago, and a beautiful image of Europa. That's right. Galileo really focused on Europa a great deal, in part because Voyager definitely

did not. Galileo took a lot of very close flybys of Europa to try to understand how it could have such a youthful and active surface. There's numerous mosaics from the Galileo mission showing this amazing fractured, cracked, and ridged terrain on Europa. I just picked one of seven that a guy named Jason Perry put together and tossed up on his blog last week. Just as beautiful. We're going to jump over to Venus. And this is one that you pulled up out of the Magellan database because of something you heard at LPSC, the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. That's right. I saw this one talk that was given about a lava flow on Venus

that the author of the paper thought might have some excess heat flow, indicating that it might be a relatively recent flow. I think the jury's out on whether that's true, but I thought the flow was really beautiful. And because Magellan data is near and dear to my heart, it's what I studied when I was in graduate school, I knew exactly how to go find this particular flow in the old data, and I pulled it up, and as I remembered, it really was as spectacular as I imagined. Lava flows on Venus. They're made of the same kind of pahoe hohe lava that flows out on the surface of Hawaii. They're very smooth and reflective, and as a result in radar images, they look very dark against a much brighter background. And you would swear that this is a visible light photograph, but it's a radar image like the ones we've seen of Titan.

That's right. And that's one thing that makes interpreting Magellan images so hard, because your brain wants to see the kinds of things you would ordinarily see in optical images, but they are very much not optical images. Bright means rough on the scale of decimeters. Dark means smooth or a slope that's facing away from you. It's a very different animal. All right, we've got just a few seconds left for what may be the most spectacular. And this is worthy of anything that James Cameron would want to put in a movie. And what a great lead-in to our guest today, Alfred McEwan, the principal investigator for

HiRISE, that camera over Mars. That's right. This has got to be one of the most spectacular 3D animations over Mars I've ever seen. And the crazy thing is that it was produced in real time using this animation engine developed like for video games. But it goes over Kandor Chasma, which is a landscape that has lots of these pyramidal hills and racetracks formed by eroded, folded rocks. It's just stunning. And the animation is like you're flying over the landscape in a helicopter. And we'll have the link. It's just stunning. And the animation is like you're flying over the landscape in a helicopter. And we'll have the link. It's simple.

Planetary.org slash blog is where Emily does her work for the Planetary Society. Some of it, anyway, because she is the science and technology coordinator with other jobs to do, too, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Emily, until next week, take care. You too, Matt. Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, vice president of the Planetary Society. And I can assure you that the Planetary Society is very interested in what's going to happen on the 15th of April in Florida, in the United States.

The president of the United States, one can say the world's most influential man, most powerful man, is going to hold a summit. We're going to talk about the future of space exploration in the United States, which affects all the space exploration all over the world. The thing is that NASA canceled the Constellation Program. This would be the idea to build a new rocket that was going to take the United States back to the moon. There's a whole contingent, and as you may know, I am among the whole other contingent that thinks that spending resources to go back to the moon for the United States is not in our best interest. Instead, we need to be going to new and exciting places. Well, people who live in Florida, people live in Alabama, where the space shuttle was built

and maintained, they're very concerned about keeping their jobs. Well, I say, well, let's look farther to the future. Farther in the future, the space shuttle will be retired. Farther in the future, other organizations, other governments are going to go to the moon. Instead, the United States should take our workers and start building something new and cool to go to asteroids and eventually onto Mars. Speaking of asteroids, using an infrared telescope, astronomers have discovered several very large and potentially dangerous objects that you can't see with visible light very well. They discover them with heat, with infrared light. Now, if one of these objects were to hit the Earth, well, that would change everything forever for everybody.

So look, everybody, let's go to the future. We'll be there. The Planetary Society will be there on April 15th. I hope you're among those who follow the Planetary Society on the web, and we'll give you a full report. But in the meantime, let's all focus on the future, out into deep space. I get to fly. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. The active human presence at Mars, robotic though it may be, is something to be very proud of.

robotic though it may be, is something to be very proud of. Three orbiters continue to observe the planet, Mars Express, Mars Odyssey, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO. There are six science instruments on MRO, and each has returned superb data. Alfred McEwen is the principal investigator for one called HiRISE. That's the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment. And when they say high resolution, they mean it. HiRISE regularly picks out details on the surface that are less than a meter across. Alfred last talked to us two years ago. High time we got him back on the phone for a HiRISE update. But we also wanted to ask about a new program Alfred and his colleagues at the University of Arizona call

High Wish. As you'll hear in a few minutes, it has resulted in a major and very pleasant surprise for Emily Lakdawalla. I caught Dr. McEwen a few days ago in his Tucson office. Alfred, welcome back to Planetary Radio. It's a great chance for us to talk once again about HiRISE, that most amazing of cameras that is circling the red planet right now. Although I note that we could talk to you, and I think we should talk to you about some other things sometime.

For example, your coordination of the imaging of Titan out there circling Saturn. But we'll stick with Mars. And one project in particular that I hope we'll get to is High Wish. But first of all, how are things going up there circling Mars? They've been going fantastic the last few months. We're at peak data rate, so the data is pouring in at a very high rate. There's some 20, 25 new images a day to try to look at. some 20, 25 new images a day to try to look at.

And the figure that everyone loves to use about this camera is that it has returned more data. Is it more than every other spacecraft at Mars or more than every other spacecraft in deep space? It's every other spacecraft that has been in deep space except maybe LRO. LRO hasn't caught up yet, but I think the LRO camera, LROC, has surpassed HiRISE since there are several other big data users on MRO. So we have to enjoy our record while it lasts here. You have been able to share with the rest of us on this planet some of the most magnificent images that I think have ever been taken by a spacecraft. In fact, I think they rate with some of the greatest natural photography that I've ever seen taken on our own planet. They really strike so many people as works of art. I totally agree. It's wonderful.

Nature is a wonderful artist, and Mars is, of course, completely untouched by the human, almost completely untouched. There are these little rovers that move around and things like that, but otherwise it's all just physics that make these patterns, and they're beautiful. Do you have favorites? I mean, are these images, as your children, do you try not to play favorites?

Or are there some that you particularly want to mention? I definitely have my favorites, but it's a long list. See, I really like the bedrock exposures because I'm a geologist, and you always look for the bedrock exposures when you're out in the field. That's where you learn the most. You don't want places that are covered with soil. So places like in Ballas Marineris and the cliffs where the bedrock is exposed in the relatively fresh impact craters, those are some of my favorites.

But then also the polar regions are just really fascinating. That's where all the activity is, where the CO2 frost comes and goes and the water frost comes and goes and things change. So that's like a different planet than the equatorial Mars. Some of my favorites I know include the ones that have these images of frost. I think there's one, was it a high-rise image of a crater with beautiful collection of what appears to be snow? There's an often-reproduced Mars Express image of a crater with a bright blue patch in the middle.

That's Laos Crater, I think it's pronounced. And we can't image the whole thing at once the way the HRC camera does, but we have quite a few images of that that are higher resolution that are also quite interesting. And that's a typical polar layer deposit, yet it's at 70 north. So it's much lower latitude. It's like an outlier, and it's probably shrinking. So we've been monitoring that spot.

This brings up an interesting point, which do you ever wish that you could sometimes trade high resolution for a little bit of a wider angle shot, or do you rely on these other cameras to work with you as a team? Yeah, we have these other cameras including the Context

camera at 6 meters per pixel and 30 kilometers swath that's on MRO they recently passed 50% of Mars in coverage and they typically get a context image or image associated with each high-rise image so when we want to see the broader view we can you know you mentioned Mars Express and of course earlier Mars global surveveyor, which was active for so many years. How does HiRISE fit into this panoply of orbiting spacecraft that have been telling us so much about this planet? Well, HiRISE has the highest resolution of any

orbital imaging, and it has color at high resolution. And this is not only important, it's very important to me for the geology and for the beauty of it, but it's also very important to the Mars Exploration Program to find and certify landing sites. So it's a very key instrument to the future exploration of Mars. I think some of the most incredible images that you've picked up are not natural, really. It's the part that you've been able to play in the work of the rovers down there on the surface. Yes, those are

always favorites. It's always fun to see something that you can relate to, and then you get a real sense of scale on Mars. And the image of the Phoenix lander descending on its parachute is also one that people really relate to. Yes, we talked about that on this show and had links to it. Just amazing that you were able to grab that shot. I'm looking forward to imaging the Mars Science Laboratory hanging on his sky crane. Let's talk about that, because the expectation, certainly the hope,

is that MRO is still going to be doing its great work when this much bigger rover, the Mars Science Laboratory, descends in that interesting way down to the surface. That's right, and in fact, MRO is the main data relay for MSL. So very much there, depending on MRO, continuing its activity, and we hope to continue acquiring remote sensing as well, of course. That's Dr. Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for the HiRISE imager on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. He'll be back to tell us about the new HiWISH program when Planetary Radio continues.

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Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen is giving us an update on the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, otherwise known as HiRISE. HiRISE is one of the six science instruments carried by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that is four years into its investigation of that increasingly familiar planet. I know MRO had a, there were a couple of hiccups reported, maybe more than a couple. Is the general health of the spacecraft good? Yes, although we still don't understand exactly what caused those hiccups. We took something like four months off without any

science the last fall. They discovered in the process of investigating these hiccups, they discovered a vulnerability, a worst casecase scenario that could end the mission. And so they took great pains to eliminate that vulnerability. But we expect to have more hiccups because we haven't still understood that. In some ways, we're surprised now we've gone three months without seeing it recur. So that's good news. But it's safe now. These things happen. It'll happen. We'll

safe and then we'll come back and go back to business. So otherwise, the spacecraft and the instruments are very healthy. Before we run out of time, let's get to a new part of the program for HiRISE. You're allowing anybody to suggest to nominate a spot on Mars to get a high-resolution image of. That's correct. We call it HIWISH. We have a whole suite of acronyms that begin in HI. That's been quite popular. We've had some 3,000 people register to use the tool, approaching 1,000 suggestions at this point. And I was just looking.

We have a list here of public suggestions that have either been acquired or are scheduled to be acquired, and there's something like 20 of them now. So we are acquiring these images. I guess I have to put in a plug for my colleague, Emily Lakdawalla, who is a planetary geologist, and I think she was one of your first customers there with HiWish, and is hoping,

keeping her fingers crossed, about getting her suggestion as one of the choices. Well, she has a suggestion that is scheduled for March 9th. No kidding? Nope. Does she know that yet? No. Oh, that's fascinating. You know, we will have to let her Nope. Does she know that yet? No.

Oh, that's fascinating. You know, we will have to let her know. Of course, even that will probably be before our audience hears this program, but I'm going to give her the good news, if you don't mind. That's fine. And now, we try not to tell people because then they want to see the images immediately. Sometimes they aren't acquired. Sometimes it takes time to process and release the data and so forth. So ordinarily, we don't go around telling people advanced. We wait until they're released. She's going to be excited, but she certainly understands better

than most that there is some work to be done even after the spacecraft does its work. But I can tell you, she is just going to be thrilled. How can other folks learn how this works? It's actually quite a simple system for selecting your spot on Mars. That's right. You can go to the HiRISE website and follow a link there, or you can go directly to http://www.uahighrise.org slash suggest. And we will put that up at planetary.org slash radio

for the majority of you who didn't get all those characters written down. And it's a good site not only for making suggestions, but just for browsing the Mars images, because we have targets. You can just see on the maps there the footprints of not only past high-rise images, but mock images, context images. We're going to have the CRISM footprints there shortly, as well as where all the previous existing suggestions lie.

Would you go through some of those acronyms for us, mock and CRISM? Yeah, mock is Mars Overlook Camera on Mars Global Surveyor. CRISM is Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars on MRO. CTX is the Context Camera on MRO. We are just about out of time. What's in the, well, I should say, I guess, in the immediate and the long-term future, other than being a key portion of the Mars Science Laboratory mission? We have lots of goals, but a couple of things to highlight. One is just more coverage of important targets. There's lots of interesting targets on Mars, of the ancient bedrock, ancient Mars is quite an interesting story. But also the ongoing geologic processes,

we're seeing gullies form, we're seeing dune ripples move, and so the more Mars years, the more we see, and this is really important to understand processes and how things work on Mars. So that's, to me, very exciting. It is extremely exciting, and thank you, Alfred, for not just advancing science, but returning images, really gallery-quality images, and so many of them, from the HiRISE

camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Thank you for your interest. Alfred McEwen is a professor of planetary sciences at the University of Arizona. And as you've heard, he is also the principal investigator for HiRISE, the high-resolution imaging science experiment on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Four years now circling the red planet. And he is also very involved with Cassini, specifically. Lots of the imaging that has been done of Titan and contributes to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, specifically the LRO camera.

We can't miss the chance to talk to Emily about her HiWISH site selection success. I got a kick out of letting Emily know that one of her nominations for imaging by HiRISE had been scheduled. Congratulations, Emily. Is this, what, a lot like winning the Academy Award? Well, no, it's not that big. I hope that this is the first of a great many of my high wishes that will be fulfilled. But yeah, it's kind of exciting. It's a little area on Mars that feels kind of special to me because it's a place where the single peer-reviewed publication that I have to my credit was written on. Oh, that's great. So you haven't actually seen it yet. As far as we know, it may have been

imaged by this point, but as we heard from Alfred McEwen, it may be a little while before you know for sure. That's right. Actually, I have heard from somebody else on the team that the image is on the ground, so hopefully it will be coming out in some future data release. And they're still taking nominations from people. What was the process like for you? Well, it's really pretty easy. You go to their website. They have a nice Google Mars interface where you can see where places are on Mars that have already been imaged.

And so you know where to select based on what's been selected in the past. And you can just sort of browse around the planet and find something that looks like a likely spot for a future image. Well, once again, congratulations, and good luck with those other nominations. I'm going to put a bunch more in, because I understand there has only been 1,000 to date. Seems like a lot more people ought to be jumping on this bandwagon. That's what Alfred told us, 1,000 and only about 20 chosen so far. So you've beaten the odds.

All right. Take care, Emily. Thank you, Matt. Bruce Betts is on the Skypline. We're ready to tell you about the night sky, or he is anyway. We have the first of a couple of really special gifts for you prizes in the Space Trivia Contest. But let's get underway as we normally do by introducing the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. Good evening.

Hey there, hi there, ho there. Up in the night sky, check out in the early evening, Venus. It's just so darn bright that even though it's up there not too long after sunset in the west, it's still super easy to see. It's the really extremely bright star-like object over there in the west. And Mars, still nicely visible and reddish high up in the early evening sky. It is hanging out almost in a line with the Gemini stars, Castor and Pollux. Check it out in the south.

Saturn coming to opposition on March 22nd, opposite side of the Earth from the sun, meaning it's going to be rising right around sunset, setting right around sunrise. You'll see it in the early evening over there low in the east, and then high up overhead in the middle of the night. On to this week in space history. 1965, Voskhod 2 launched and Alexei Leonov takes the world's first spacewalk. 1965, just beating out Gemini, right? Yes, and in 1980, tragedy struck when with a Soviet rocket explosion killed 48 workers

at the launch pad. Oh, yes, I've read about that. It was kept pretty hush-hush at the time, but now it can be told. Happier note, in 1997, 13 years ago, Comet Hale-Bopp, closest approach to Earth. On to random space fact! You know, Magellan, which had a very successful mission mapping Venus and radar, launched in 1989, was the first planetary mission launched from the space shuttle of only a tiny handful.

Also was the first American planetary mission at the time launched amazingly in 11 years. Boy, that was a long, dry spell. It was indeed. amazingly, in 11 years. Boy, that was a long, dry spell. It was indeed. We move on to the trivia contest. And we asked you about the surface area of Jupiter's moon Europa.

How large is the surface area as a percentage of Earth's surface area? How'd we do, Matt? Nice responses to this. And our winner, let's go right to it. I had to do a little detective work here because all he told us is that it's Giles. But I discovered, I'm fairly sure here, that our winner is Giles Pritchard of Australia,

another one of our Down Under fans, who said 0.061 Earths. In other words, Europa's surface is about 6% of the surface of the Earth. So, Giles, congratulations. We're going to send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Excellent. Congratulations. Got a couple of other factoids here. 20% of Earth's land area, leaving off the ocean area, that's what Scott Borgsmiller told us,

or roughly equivalent, apparently, to the surface area of Africa. That from Philippe Espy, one of our French fans. Nice. Let's do another trivia contest. You can tell them about spiffy prizes. But first, let me give the question, which is, who was the first non-Soviet, non-American to spacewalk? So 45 years ago, the first spacewalk. But who was the first non-Soviet, non-American to spacewalk. So 45 years ago, the first spacewalk.

But who was the first non-Soviet, non-American? And what year did they do it in? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter and win this fabulous prize. Take it away, Matt. And you know what makes it fabulous? You're in it. I know.

How would you like to win yourself the complete... Me. Bruce, the complete Bruce. The complete fourth... You don't want that. Why don't you just settle for his voice? The fourth season, the complete fourth season of The Universe. All 12 episodes in either DVD or Blu-ray, courtesy of our friends at the History Channel.

Or Blu-ray, courtesy of our friends at the History Channel. And sure enough, our friend Dr. Betts is one of the experts that you will enjoy on the show. True. In only one episode, but clearly the best. You get to juggle. Exactly. In Blu-ray, high definition, how cool would that be? You got until the 22nd of March, March 22 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us your answer.

And good luck going after this complete season four of the universe. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky and think about avocados. Thank you and good night. I'm allergic. He's Bruce Batts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Did you hear me say that we have two great prizes lined up for the space trivia contest? You've just heard about one. You'll want to enter next week when we give away a brand new telescope. Celestron has made just 1,000 of its 50th anniversary first scopes. The company is

selling these collector's items, but you might win one just by submitting the right answer. We'll have more details next week. And that's not the only big announcement on our next show. We'll tell you how to join us for the first taping of Planetary Radio in front of a live audience. It's going to be more fun than an hour in zero-G. Okay, almost. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible

in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Keep looking up. Thank you.