The Infinite Monkey Cage - Solar System

Episode Date: February 2, 2015

Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by comedian Jo Brand, planetary scientist Professor Monica Grady and NASA scientist Dr Carolyn Porco as they discuss some of the most exciting and technically ambitious explorations of our solar system. They'll be looking at the Rosetta mission that has, for the first time, landed a probe on a comet, and the Cassini-Huygens mission which is bringing us extraordinary information about Saturn and its moons, and what these explorations of the far reaches of our solar system might tell us about our own planet.

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Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. Enjoy it. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. And I'm Robin Ince. And this is the Infinite Monkey Cage. We're going to start with some history today, and these are key historical dates.

1987, introduction of nuclear-powered engines, ion and plasma systems. 1990, foundation of the World Community Research Council. 1998, WCRC, North African Space Research Centre, is now operational. 2004, the first space freighter, Colonial One, enters service. 2005, Brian, work starts on Lunar Station. Let me finish. We're not even up to 2014 yet. And this goes all the way up to 2096, because it's proper history. Robin, this is fiction, isn't it?

Well, this is the... 2015, Martian Queen makes first commercial passenger flight to Mars. We might do it! This is a proper book. It must be, because it was on that show Human Universe, whatever that is. And this... This is Spacecraft, 2000 to 2100 AD, which came out in 1978 with its predictions of where we would be.

Because both Brian and I, we are of that generation of incredible excitement. I mean, Brian is in fact older than me. I know, it's appalling, isn't it? He has existed, unlike me, from before the time that a human stood on the moon. Also, they send him around the Large Hadron Collider

very fast, once a year. That keeps the skin very tight, really, for racing. Although we only landed on the Moon 45 years ago, writers, philosophers and bishops have been fascinated by human journeys into space for centuries. Serrano de Bergerac's comical story of the states and empires of the Moon, Johannes Kepler's Somnium, HG Wells' first man in the Moon. When the first space race was

over at the end of the Apollo programme, public excitement seemed to cool. But lately, curiosity has stirred again, with the landing on a comet, a new generation of Mars rovers, and the steady stream of spectacular images from Cassini in orbit around Saturn. So anyway, to discuss current and future missions into space, we are joined by an incredible panel who are... Monica Grady from the Open University reading Planetary Science. Well, you told me. You said an introduction as if it was a university challenge. No, no, no, it's fine. Also, I wondered if you have any hopes at all for the next 10 years in space research. Well, it's really interesting what you're saying about the Martian queen going off to Mars because really my hope is for

continued Martian exploration and obviously the finding of life on Mars. Or life on a comet. Or life on an asteroid. Or life on Earth, really. I'm not fussy. But life somewhere. I am Carolyn Porco and I am the leader of the imaging team on the Cassini mission for

the past 25 years. And my hope is that, like Monica, we get ever closer to finding life somewhere off the earth. I think that's where we're headed. I think that is the most profound, most beguiling question we could ask. And I just really want to get closer to answering it. My name is Jo Brand. I am a small planet. They're called dwarf planets now.

I'm a dwarf. Jo, Jo, you're a star. Oh, my. Thank you. Star. Oh, my. I think I've lots of things. When it comes to dinner, I'm a black hole.

I'm here to add ignorance to the show and ask the questions you all want to ask, but you're too embarrassed because you think you might sound a bit simple. I'll do that for you. And this is our panel. Monica, we'll start with you. You were involved in the Rosetta mission and there's fantastic footage of your excitement at that pivotal moment.

We're landing! But that is a fantastic scene, to see that passion there. And why is it important, though? Why was landing a probe on a comet... Why? Why all that hoopla? Well, no space agency had ever done it before. It's something... The mission had taken ten years to get there. I mean, Carolyn can empathise with this

because it took a long time for Cassini to get to Saturn. But then we were doing these amazing manoeuvres to get there. I keep saying we. I had nothing to do with it. It was all the engineers behind. I just took the glory, which I think is fair enough. But it was just... Prior to the launch, I had been involved in helping to build an instrument and raising the money to build the instrument.

So it had been sort of 17 years in the making when we landed. And it was due to land at two minutes past five. And from quarter to five onwards, everybody was sort of looking at the control centre, the feed that was coming in there and trying to interpret body language. And was that a smile? You know, is that a thumbs up? And it all really really you know grim and there'd been worries

we'd already known that there had been problems during the night and then suddenly you could see like a half smile and then a look at somebody in another half smile and then a sort of cautious thumbs up and then there was nodding and then smiling and then they they sort of shook hands you know and a bit of a round of applause and so where I was which is where then they sort of shook hands, you know, and a bit of a round of applause. And so where I was, which is where the sort of glitterati, for a better word, rather than the actual scientists, you know, we just went ape. It was just an absolutely fantastic atmosphere.

I'll never forget it. It was a complex landing, wasn't it? I mean, it bounced very high, so I think it took hours to come down. But then I'd heard that it rolled and it was really high so i think it's a good hours to come down but then i'd heard that it rolled and it was it was really very fortunate that it managed to get any data what's interesting is you know so we'd we'd heard it had bounced and so we were all going fantastic but actually the people in the control center and and there were a whole new swag of people this was in darmstadt but there was a whole swag of people in Cologne who were actually the instrument scientists

and the rest of the Open University team were there. They could see straight away that there was something wrong because one of the instruments should have been touching ground and it was sensing space. So they knew straight away that it had bounced and they could tell how high it had bounced and then, you know, it went up a kilometre and then it came down and they reckon now

it bounced possibly four or five times and rolled and then came to rest under an overhanging cliff. Sorry to be thick, was that meant to happen? No, it wasn't meant to happen. Very careful. It was meant to land, alright, like this, land. Well, that was a good question

though because, you know, some of our Mars rovers, that was the style of landing. It was meant to land and just be there and it had thrusters to push it down and grappling hooks to grapple in a harpoon because the comet were there whales there no that was not a good question no that was a bad question duck shaped rather than rather than whale shaped okay so the idea was that it sort of landed here and it stuck itself in, but the harpoon didn't work, the grappling hooks didn't work and the thruster didn't work. None of those worked.

So it was a miracle that it bounced and then came back again. So the way we're playing this is actually we've sampled four different locations on the surface of the planet. Just to finish, the lander got all the data back that you'd hoped it would take. Yes, it had a battery which was scheduled to last for 60 hours. It actually lasted for slightly longer than that. We got practically all the data which had been planned.

There was a drill that was supposed to drill down into the ice. It couldn't because it was basically pointing in that direction, so we didn't get the drill samples. But we are hoping that when Feli wakes up again, possibly in April or May, we'll get that science then. Because what happened is, because it was under an overhang, its solar batteries couldn't charge up. And if anybody was following this on Twitter,

it was just like, it was so sad there was all these talks about the battery dying and it was just like some some saga of olden times and night night little feline feel i would tweak back i'm going to sleep now and it was just like it was so sweet i mean it just really was i've never followed a space mission on Twitter before, obviously because we haven't had Twitter, but I'll always do so from the future. Is it for certain that it will wake up again? I thought it was kind of not clear.

Oh, it's not clear. I mean, we're just hoping that as the comet moves towards the sun, the strengthening power of the sun will charge up the solar panels. Can I just ask what you've brought? Because you've brought, obviously the radio listeners don't know, you've brought a lump of... Last time you brought something, you brought a fantastic piece of Mars. It was... I think all pieces of Mars are pretty fantastic.

Absolutely. I'm quite excited by them. And I was in awe of it, and then Patrick Stewart was on, and he brought out one of his communicator badges, and he totally trumped you, and I was very... I was really angry. Can I just ask, are there any Star Trek geeks in? Yeah, a few.

One or two. Actually, when I started doing stand-up in the 80s, pretty much every male stand-up had five minutes on Star Trek. I don't know if you remember, Robin. And it used to really piss us off, all the other people that didn't like Star Trek. And I can remember one night night someone trying out some new material and it was dying really badly and we were thinking,

oh, God, poor guy. And someone in the audience shouted out, it's comedy, Jim, but not as we know it. That just finished him off. Carolyn. You mentioned Star Trek and, of of course the first Star Trek film has something which you were genuinely involved in, which is the first Star Trek film, the end of it is the idea of Voyager

becoming a kind of sentient god. But you were actually involved, one of your first major pieces of work was working on Voyager. How did that start off? I graduated with a PhD in using Voyager data. I happened to be very lucky and be working for someone who was on the Voyager imaging team. That's very often how it happens. And I happened to do my research, my thesis research, on the very kind of rings and Saturn's rings that encircle Uranus. These narrow eccentric rings,

and they had been discovered around Uranus just a few years before Voyager got to Saturn. And so the Voyager imaging team leader after I graduated offered me a job to work with him and he put me made me a member of the imaging Voyager imaging team and so it was my job to join the people who were planning the ring sequences for Uranus and then later on Neptune. And you know know, the rest is sort of history. That was really an incredibly defining moment for me. And that whole mission was so historic. I mean, really, you know, everybody loves their planetary missions.

I can hear it in you, right? You love it. They're just so enormously inspirational to be part of something so magnificent and so much bigger than yourself and really something that allows you to touch, you know, in a real sense, things that are so, so far away. But Voyager was historic and it was romantic. It was a romantic adventure. It was like a Homeric odyssey, you know. You'd spend a few weeks in the vicinity of some planet and it'd be just outrageous discovery and conquest. And then it's like back in the boats, few weeks in the vicinity of some planet, and there'd be just outrageous discovery and conquest.

And then it's like back in the boats, oars in the water, and years until your next port of call, and then you're at Uranus. And then years you're at Neptune. And look, it's still going. Some of the instruments are still going, and we only just recently entered into stellar space. It's a terrific engineering achievement, isn't it? Because it was launched in 1977.

Yes. So it was, what, Jupiter in 79? Yes, Saturn in 80, 81, Uranus in 86, Voyager 2 in 86, and then 89 for Neptune. Yeah. And just some sense of the difficulty of communicating with that spacecraft now and building a spacecraft to last over 40 years.

That's unprecedented, isn't it? Particularly with that technology, 1970s technology or 60s technology. They usually don't let missions last that long. I mean, even on Cassini, we've been already, we launched in 1997, got into orbit 2004, and we will terminate the mission. We will terminate the mission September 2017 by sending it into saturn so it really could go on probably longer if we had designed it that i mean if we had wanted but

you know other missions are waiting in the queue so and there are other things to do in terms of those cameras you think about the the let's take neptune let's say and the photographs of the moon you know triton this is remarkable object out there. It's not bright out there, is it, Neptune? How difficult is it to fly past at the speed of a bullet or more and actually take what are quite beautiful pictures of Neptune in that low light? Yes, so sunlight at Saturn is 100 times fainter than it is here at the Earth. And Neptune, my God, I'm forgetting, I think it's three times farther away,

so that's another factor of 10, let's say, so 1,000 times fainter. But, you know, we know before we go there, we have a good estimate of how bright an object is. And so you develop the software tools. You know, you just do the calculations. Actually, I'm thinking now, in forage days, we didn't do that. We did it on our hand calculators. But you figure out

how bright the thing is going to be. You know the detectability of your detector and the camera system. And you calculate how long the exposure times have to be. The cameras, which are basically just telescopes, are built to gather enough light, and the detectors are made sensitive enough so that you can take an exposure in a reasonable amount of time. But it is remarkable when you think about it, especially on Voyager, which had this, you know, the way we stabilized the spacecraft, it was always constantly moving.

And so you had to take that into account too, It was always constantly moving. And so you had to take that into account too. And there were algorithms for figuring out how to compensate for the motion of the spacecraft relative to the body. And on Cassini, that's all programmed into the guts of the spacecraft. You say, I want you, Cassini, to point to a point on Enceladus and stay there while we speed by. And it's already worked out. Algorithms are on board. The spacecraft does the calculation to keep the bore site fixed on this point.

So it does this as it's flying by, right? Well, on Voyager, those calculations had to be done on the ground, and they had to be sent up to the spacecraft. It was far more complicated. So we've gotten very, very good at imaging moving targets in the solar system. This is a spacecraft that's not only less powerful than an iPhone, it's less powerful than Robin Ince's phone. I've got quite a rubbish phone.

Are you going to say it's an Android? No, it's some kind of old antique Nokia thing. I do have a proper kind of grandmother's phone, the phone you buy, just in case you do need to have an emergency, grandmother, here's your phone. Thank you very much. Texting, that's too much for me. I remember, I know we talked before, I don't recall the exact numbers, but I think it's something like 16 kilobytes of memory or something, Voyager, isn't it? And really slow, slow processes.

So the fact that you can control that spacecraft with that accuracy is, to me, a remarkable achievement. Well, it took a lot of work. It was years and years of planning. And, you know, we didn't take the amount of data from the Voyagers that we've taken from Cassini. It was like several tens of thousands of pictures, and there's other data, of course, but just to talk about the pictures,

tens of thousands of pictures in about two weeks' time. And now with Cassini, it's just endless, just streaming data all the time. The one picture of the surface of Titan, though, from Huygens. Oh, lots of pictures. Excuse me. There are lots of pictures. And thank you for saying that, because, you know, as I hear you, as I heard you talk about how remarkable it was to see the spacecraft land on the comet, I remember Huygens. And Huygens was sweet for me, personally sweet.

So that's the landing on Titan. This is the European part, the solely European part of Cassini. They built a probe that was deployed to Titan. This was soon after we got into orbit, a few months after we got into orbit. And it landed on the surface. It was an aerodynamically shaped device, four meters across, outfitted with something like six instruments. And it took two and a half hours to get down to the surface.

It took lots of measurements on the way down. It had cameras on board, of course, and it spun as it fell. So it took panoramas of pictures all the way down. And this was not a part of the mission that I was involved in. So when we first got into orbit to go six months earlier, all the eyes of the world were on me and my team because everyone's waiting for the pictures. So it was like tremendous pressure. I didn't sleep the night before. I look like crap in the press conference. I can barely talk. Lots and lots of pressure at the Huygens landing, which was monitored at the European Space Operations Center.

And I was there as a guest. I was like any member of the public and it was, that was far more fun for me to be there and to see the pictures of the surface of Titan, which unambiguously showed something we were scratching our heads about. Was there liquid flowing on the surface? And there was this dendritic drainage pattern that it couldn't have gotten any better. You know, it was clear that liquid flowed on the surface. And it felt like me before the Huygens landing, I lived in one universe. And then after we saw those pictures, I lived in another.

Jo, I was going to ask you, which is when you were just... No, don't ask. I have no idea about... No, you are, both you and I, by the fact that we haven't been involved in any space missions, I realise we're on the back foot on this one, right? But I was... When Carolyn was just saying about that idea of going to sleep in one universe and waking up in another, some of the images that I'm sure you've seen,

which have come back from these missions, or indeed even other things, like, for instance, images from the Hubble telescope, do you ever get that sensation of you see an image of the universe that we're in and you think, this has changed the perspective of of being on the planet earth oh god absolutely i mean i think it's it's magical but to me it's kind of um my horizon's quite narrow because i find it scary you know i mean

when for example they're advertising recently weren't, for a married couple to go on a mission to Mars. It's Mars 500. It's a one-way ticket to Mars. And they wanted people who got on well, so they wanted a married couple. Well, that's not me and my husband. That's weird, isn't it? I was thinking I might apply,

and then at the last minute run down the steps and let him go on his own. That kills a lot of birds anyway um yeah i i am fascinated by it and i do i don't understand a lot of it but i still think it's it's amazing and interesting um and i think it's a shame in a way that um for example someone like Branson who's sort of advertising trips to the stars is just doing it for people who are

hugely wealthy I mean in some ways if they all disappear into space and never come back I'd be quite pleased but you know in other ways I would like to see you know a group of kind of fairly ordinary people you need to know, in other ways, I would like to see, you know, a group of kind of fairly ordinary people. But you need to know that in the beginning of aviation, airplane tickets were also very, very expensive.

And then with time... It's the first step. I mean, you know, you can't suddenly say, right, OK, you know, the 600 people who might go on that jumbo jet to fly to the States, all right, OK, you're going to get on Virgin Galactic and go. You've got to take small steps, and he's a commercial enterprise. It's worrying, though, isn't it? Because if you are saying it's much like your kind of air flight,

it does mean in 20 years' time you go, well, we got to Mars and the holiday was nothing like it looked on the website. And many of the species microbial species were frankly violent you're not seeing the trip the trip advisor review of rosetta when it well you know it's like it's like it's like feel i said that mr rosetta he didn't seem to know where he was going yeah well we mentioned in the introduction that the search for life um so is it possible that will the Rosetta mission have anything to tell us, perhaps, about the origin of life?

Yes, certainly. I mean, the results that were reported last week were about the deuterium-hydrogen ratio in water, and that's interesting because it shows that some of the water, possibly some of the water that we have on Earth was brought by comets. You know, not all of it. We never said all of it was. But we've got to start looking at the organic compounds, and that's what we're doing with the data from Ptolemy

that I'm involved with. We're looking at the organics, we're looking to see... So what was Ptolemy? Is that one of the instruments? Ptolemy is the instrument built at the Open University with Ian Wright. The footballer. That's how they launch it, didn't you realise? Ian Wright is my husband. Sadly, no, not the footballer.

Of course, you lucky thing. Oh, no, yeah, no, yeah. So that's on Rosetta? That's on Fila. It's on Fila. So that data you've got back... We've got loads of data from Ptolemy, all right, and don't tell anybody, but we've found organic molecules

and we're looking at them and trying to interpret what they mean. It's difficult when you're trying to interpret something without having very much context. So that's what we're doing at the moment. We've got data which we're trying to decide, actually, is this like what we find in meteorites? Is this like what is find in meteorites is this like what is in interstellar space so we're talking about things as complex as amino acids well look

we probably don't actually we we might have some nuclear bases we're not certain we we almost certainly have some amides there we almost certainly have some carboxylic acids so these are the the the what you might call the building blocks of life. Yeah, we've probably got... On comets, have you seen them in...? We've probably got H7. Does your instrument... Excuse me, I'm just curious. Does your instrument have the resolution and the dynamic range enough to detect an amino acid,

or you're just seeing what you think are smaller daughter products of a broken- we go from a mass of about 14 up to a mass of about 120 amu amu so you can't see amino acids we can't see a full amino acid but we can see we can see the we can see the fractionation the breakup products the cracking pattern yeah well it wouldn't be it wouldn't be completely crazy to think you had amino acids on a comet because they've been found on meteorites and so on. Oh, no, absolutely. They're found in meteorites. We found dicarboxylic, monocarboxylic acids, all these sorts of things.

We found HCN. So that doesn't mean, I just want to be clear for the audience's sake, that doesn't mean that you have life on the comet. Oh, never. I don't think anybody would suggest that there would be life on the comet. No. But certainly, as far as we can tell, and for heaven's sake, don't tell anybody. I said this because I get into real trouble.

As far as I can tell, we've got the building blocks of life that we've seen on this comet. Can I just ask, how big is the comet? It's about two and a half miles, about five kilometres, something like that. Right, okay. It's not very big. It's a bit bigger than my model, but not much bigger. It's about the size of the length of the runway at Heathrow Airport.

Oh, right. That is quite high, because I thought they were quite small. Well, some of the, I mean, you know, some of them are much bigger. Some of them are much bigger. What's the biggest comet that you've ever come across? Is there one as big as the Isle of Wight? That's what I want to know.

A whale? Oh, yes. Usually whales, isn't it? It's always whales. I'm trying to shift it to the Isle of Wight. A tweet from a friend of mine when Belgium were playing Wales the other week, he said there's a football match between a country the size of Belgium playing against

a country the size of Wales and it was just like well yeah that's the ridiculous sort of things that we work in so a washing machine object fell on something the size of Heathrow I think there's a theory that the Isle of Wight was actually a comet and I think David Icke said that the people

who populate it, I can't remember exactly how it went David Icke actually lives on the Isle of Wight was actually a comet and I think David Icke said that the people who populate it may... I can't remember exactly how it went. But did you know David Icke actually lives on the Isle of Wight? Yeah. Yeah, you knew that, didn't you? And it's good that there's a channel of water that separates him from the rest of the mainland. I can't believe it. You know about landing... They've got ferries now. You're always

just looking up there. You're never looking down there. You're kidding me. No, but actually it is a little bit 1950s, the Isle of Wight, because I was there in the mid-'90s, and I normally do some stuff on local goings-on, so I always get the local paper. And on the front of the local paper, it said,

Huge excitement at the Isle of Wight's first escalator. That's 1995. Maybe it was a space escalator. Exactly, whatever that is. Kelly, we see the building blocks of life, then, it seems, or at least complex carbon molecules all over the place. Yeah, we do. Certainly on the comets.

When we go out into the outer solar system, I know your great research focus has been this moon of Saturn, Enceladus. So could you describe Enceladus and say why it's so exciting, so interesting to you? Okay, so let me start with Voyager. In Voyager days, the flybys of Saturn, we took pictures of every moon. That was part of the plan.

And we took pictures of the moon Enceladus. And Enceladus right away stood out. It's as white as white gets. It's the brightest object, and the solar system reflects all the light that falls on it, pretty much. It's the size of Wales as well, isn't it? No, it's the size of the UK. So is it brighter than Europa?

Oh, yeah. It's the brightest object in the solar system. So it's a small world. It's a small world, but like I said already, the brightest object in the solar system. It's a small world. It's a small world. But like I said already, we could see in the Voyager pictures that parts of it were smooth. And it was, again, it was just one of those head-scratching things like, what's such a small moon? How could it have been geologically active? So people started to look into it.

And it is in a resonance. And so people were trying to figure out could there be liquid water inside, and no one could actually get it to theoretically work out. So it remained a puzzle, and because it remained a puzzle, it was really a focus of the Cassini mission, and our team especially had images planned to take a look at the surface at very high resolution, and we also had images planned, if truth be told, to look for plumes coming from the surface

because we thought if it is geologically active, there may be plumes, just like the volcanoes on Io, for example, or on Triton. So long story short, we found them, and once we got a whiff that, my goodness, there's something going on at the South Pole, we see a big plume of material, we completely rejiggered all our planned observations of Enceladus, our planned flybys, to make the spacecraft go closer, to make it go closer to the southern polar region. And that's what we've been doing for ever since we found what we found there, which was early 2005.

And again, long story short, after all these years of studying Enceladus, we now know that there is an ocean, a sea, under the South Pole. The sea is about 10 kilometers thick. It extends down, we think, to about a latitude of about 55, excuse me, yeah, 55 or 45 degrees latitude. So that would be approximately going from the South Pole to maybe around Tierra del Fuego. Okay, that whole entire region on Enceladus, which has to be shrunken down, but nonetheless, is a cap sitting on top of a sea. And the south polar region, if you look at our pictures, is characterized by four very deep gashes in the surface. And we have 101 geysers shooting out of those gashes.

It's the most outrageous place in the whole solar system. I calculated there are 10% of all the geysers that we know of in the solar system exist at the south pole of Enceladus. Half the geysers exist at Yellowstone Park. And the other half are distributed around the surface of the earth. So we could take Cassini, fly through this plume, and there are instruments on board that can scoop up the material and measure the composition of the vapor and also the composition of the ice particles. Because what we see is vapor and tiny, tiny, tiny ice particles. And what we have found is largely water vapor, trace amounts of organic compounds, and the icy particles are salty.

They have the salinity of the Earth's, comparable to the salinity of the Earth's oceans. And with repeated flybys, we've been able to determine just exactly the configuration of water to ice shell above it. And so we now know, I mean, we have tremendous confidence that we have a subsurface ocean with organic compounds and salty water, which means it's in contact with a core, and that it's gushing through these fractures and it's there for us to sample. It's a geyser's extending tens of thousands of kilometers,

it turns out. So again, don't let anybody know, but I am a part of a team of people that are right now thinking about how we get back to Enceladus with a small mission, because all the large mission slots are spoken for for decades into the future. decades into the future, all we need to do is get back there with an instrument or two or three that can sample this stuff coming out of the South Pole with sufficient resolution and dynamic range to say, do we have compounds of biological interest there? I have a lovely mass spectrometer that you can put on a penetrator and fire into the plumes. Well, we can't do that because that would make it very much more expensive you said that you said there i mean the obvious question we should get straight so you said compounds of biological interest is it possible

just possible there's life on an enceladus in that ocean um it's as possible as uh having life on mars or or once having had life on Mars, having life on the ocean, on Europa. I mean, who's to say? David Bowie. David Bowie. Okay, well, you've got to get him on your next show if he's got the answer.

It could save us a lot of money. It was a remarkable thought, isn't it, Joe? I mean, life, you've got to get him on your next show. If he's got the answer, it could save us a lot of money. It is a remarkable thought, isn't it, Joe? I mean, life, potentially, on one of these small... But I don't understand why we treat life so badly on a planet where there's loads of it, and then we go, let's find some more and crush it. You know, there's sometimes... Why do you think it is, Joe, that we're so fascinated

with finding life somewhere out there? Well, we're obviously a bit lonely, aren't we? I don't actually think it's such an unusual thing. I just think, why shouldn't there be, really? Because it's here and look how much of it there is. So I

don't find it a big issue at all. I think eventually we are going to find it. It's just the scientists don't we're not content to just say oh sure it's there we want to make absolutely sure and we want to study it if it really is a second genesis like completely independent beginning of life than we had on earth then there's a tremendous amount to learn about it by studying it how does it differ from life here yeah how do we know it's the second genesis?

That's the thing, because there's so much interplanetary transfer of materials. And there's been a lot of talk, I mean, particularly for Mars. Meteorites come from Mars to land on the Earth. In the past, meteorites could have gone from the Earth to Mars. You know, we don't know where we seeded from Mars, because Mars was a better place for life to get going 4.5 billion years ago than the Earth was. I'm glad you brought this up because that problem

is going to hamper. I'm sorry, I'm just going to say this. It's going to hamper any attempt to find life and know that it got started on Mars. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. But it's not going to hurt Saturn because that transfer of material out to Saturn is very, very improbable. It's quicker and cheaper to get to Mars than it is to Saturn. I know, but you guys are going to be digging for eons. We can send people to Mars eventually.

We're going to come back with the microbe that... Hey, you two, right, just calm down. How long does it take to get to Saturn compared to how long it takes to get to Mars? It takes nine months to get to Mars when Mars is at its closest. Right, and depending on how big a launch vehicle you have, I mean, it took us seven years to get to Saturn. It's quite a long journey, isn't it?

It's quite long, yeah. It doesn't matter, but when the goal, when the prize is finding out whether or not you have life on another body, it's well worth waiting. So the next mission to Mars, the UK are now leading the rover project, I think, aren't they? They are, yeah.

It's ExoMars. It's ExoMars, and ExoMars is in two parts. There's a trace gas orbiter which launches, oh gosh, I can't remember, 2016, I think, which is going to orbit Mars and is going to look at methane and atmospheric compositions. And then there's the ExoMars lander, which is going to have quite a big rover on board, which is not going to, I can't remember, they keep changing the date, I can't remember when it is. I think it's about 2020 or even 2022, I can't remember. They keep changing the date. I can't remember when it is. I think it's about 2020 or even 2022. I can't remember. That's a biology mission, isn't it?

Yes, yes. I mean, its big thing is it's got a drill, a big drill, deep drill, built by the Italians. They like to drill holes in things, the Italians. So it's going to drill sort of at least two metres down Italians. So it's going to drill at least two metres down through the regolith, the broken surface,

and to actually go down into the bedrock, the solid bedrock, to look. And why is that important? Well, it's important because the stuff that's on the surface has been changed by the solar wind, by cosmic radiation, by weathering, by the wind, by bombardment, by dust particles.

And so it's changed a lot. It's destroyed organic compounds. And it's destroyed because you've got, in the same way as you can get sunburns if you go outside without a sunblock on, the whole of the Mars' surface is sunburned because the ultraviolet radiation destroys the organics. And so you've got to go deeper down to get that. But it's possible now that there's life existing subsurface on Mars today? Yes, it's entirely possible.

Only if you go deep enough. Yes. And they're not really sure what the conditions are there. Is there enough water? By the time you get deep enough to be protected from the elements so to speak. But there's caves. There are cave systems and you've

also got intrinsic high vapor pressure between the grains. So if you're only looking at microbial life, you know, the stuff like the cryptendoliths in Antarctica. I've been told by people who are knowledgeable about these things that the best chance for finding life on Mars, current life,

would be under the polar ice caps, where they've been protected from... It would be protected from the UV radiation. I would be very, very surprised if they found living life on Mars. I would be less surprised if they found um living life on mars i would be less surprised if they found dormant life some microbial spores or something like that i would still be still be surprised less surprised um it would be fantastic if they found fossils fossilized life but the chances of that are you know well you mean The chance of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, of course, Jeff Windy. But just to clear it up, by fossils,

I mean, are you really suggesting quite... Small microbial fossils, not anything large? Not dinosaur fossils. No, no. It's not even multicellular. It could be multicellular. Brian, the kind of thing that they thought they had found in the Allen Hills meteorite back in 1997.

Six. Remember... Whenever. Remember the big... Sorry, Caroline. This is getting very Celebrity Big Brother house at the moment, isn't it? Monica, you've decided to vote off... Sorry, sorry, sorry, Caroline. So there have been these rather controversial claims that there have been fossils found in meteorites. I mean, the way sorry, sorry, Caroline. So there have been these rather controversial claims

that there have been fossils found in meteorites. I mean, the way I describe it, and the people who are involved in this description, I mean, two of them, or at least one of them is now deceased, Dave McKay, who was the first author. I mean, they were good friends of mine. Everett Gibson is a really big mate. But the way I describe it is that scientific opinion is divided. Dave McKay and his

team think they found life on Mars the entire rest of the scientific community think they didn't. So this was fossils in a Martian meteorite? In a Martian meteorite so in little nodules or little rosettes of carbonate which is the stuff that makes up limestone and corals on Earth. And they found, looking in an electron microscope image, they found this little thing that it looked like a segmented worm, but it's only 200 nanometres long. And at the time, there was a lot of discussion from biologists which said, well, hang on a minute, that's far too small for you to get all the right,

all the stuff that you need in a cell, you know, the nucleus and all the other stuff. And people said, well, yes, but fossilization shrivels it all up. And then it was an impetus to do a lot of work, actually. I think astrobiology was born around that time when biologists started looking and trying to understand that there was the possibility of life beyond the earth. You know, it wasn't just science fiction. It became relative, you know, it became respectable.

Well, I think it became respectable before then. But the denouement to this story is that the people who said it wasn't said that it much more was, it was more likely that it was the result of the process by which they prepared the meteorite. Yeah, breaking the breaking sample, yeah. I don't know if they used lasers or something to do things, but it looked like it might have been carvings in the rock produced by... I mean, it was a broken chip, and the problem with that is...

Excuse me, they used what? A broken chip, and then semi-polished. But the problem is that you get all sorts of image artefacts when you look at something like that. And you can only, it's only when you start getting the quantitative data, how much magnesium's in it, how much calcium, all that sort of stuff. Sorry, what do you mean by an image artefact? What's that? Well, it's like if you look at something, you know, from know from a different angle you know if you look at this from one angle it might

look like something you know good if you look at it from a different angle it might look like something different you know so something that's not yeah so it's not real all right so you might say well actually you know this looks like a duck but from this angle it doesn't you know so you're looking at it from different angles and and it's very difficult to make an interpretation when you're just looking at a picture from one particular direction you you you know you've got all sorts of hidden shadows and stuff it's very very difficult so it is likely that some of the possible life could be ducks or have i misunderstood that or drakes well this is what i find interesting is that there

is you know between the two of you they're talking back for the way and and there is a i wouldn't say pugilistic but there's a you know there's a there's an energy of vibrant kind of fighting that's why i love actually i'm thinking about we were going to talk about you know the possibility of intelligent life on on other planets and before we went up you went do you know what i'm not entirely sure i'm going to be able to understand your accents. So I think once we meet someone who's come from Mars, that's going to be all right. But this is, I'm wondering about how, when there is the battle to where the money goes, what mission, and you're talking here about difference, how, when the scientists get together, those kind of fights about deciding,

right, we believe this is where we should be going. We should be going to this moon because this is where the most interesting information is, or we should be drilling under Mars because... How does that work out? It's consensual. What? It's consensual.

No, it's... I'm sorry. And here we see the difference between the European and the negative. No, I'm sorry. I might even be older than you two. I'm just saying from all the years I've been involved in the space business, it comes down to the P word, politics. Okay? And I've seen these, I've seen, you know,

mission decisions be made solely on the basis of politics. The person in the room with the most power or the person who's going to go in the back room, you know, at the intermission and talk to the guys at NASA headquarters and maybe twist their arm. That's really how it happens. But if you go and you think, right, this is the mission that I really want to happen,

and what is the way that you kind of try, you know, is there any specific, you know, in the years that you've done this, since Voyager, that you've learnt different techniques going, I think this is going to make the big person in the room go with this particular idea? What are the things that excite them? Yes. And, but, you know, you have two situations here we're talking about. Do you continue to go to Mars or do you go to Enceladus, which is the new kid on the block? Do you go to Europa? There's been a large group of planetary scientists

over in the States that have been pushing a Europa mission for decades. Or do you build the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope? It depends which pot of money it's coming from. Where do the pots of money come from? Are they government funds?

Government funds have to be. But NASA is very simple. NASA is one government, all right, and it all speaks the same language, approximately. The European Space Agency is a dozen countries, plus Canada, for some unknown reason and they all speak lots and lots of different languages it also has several different programs and some of the programs every country that belongs to ESA has to pay into but one one of the programmes, it's optional,

so you can pay into it if you want to, and then you can take part in the missions planned by that programme. And compared to ESA, NASA is a miracle of clarity and transparency. I wouldn't call it that. You said that, Karen. I said compared to ESAT. Under your breath, you said they're very expensive. But these missions are not expensive in the scheme of things.

If you think that they're answering questions like, are we alone in the universe, as questions that we should be answering. They're relatively cheap for what they do compared to manned exploration, for example. This is how I put this because, you know, there's different perceptions. Let's just forget individual missions. Let's talk about the NASA budget, which is $18 billion.

And how many times for the past, you know, I mean, the Apollo 11 astronauts, you can find this on YouTube, I think. They all testified before Congress after coming back from the moon. And I remember Michael Collins' presentation. He defended the use of money to explore the moon against all the criticisms. You can guess them. Why aren't we taking this money and solving the problems on earth, right? Because it sounds like such a lot of money. $18 billion sounds like a lot of money. Why? Because we always compare it to our

own personal wealth. That's the first thing you think about. You think, holy cow, what I could do with $18 billion. $18 billion is only a half percent of the amount of money that is spent by the U.S. government, the U.S. budget. So you are right. Even the whole entire NASA budget isn't a lot of money. And when you're talking about these huge, important, paradigm-shifting scientific questions, you and I would say it's well worth the money, and you would never solve the world's problem by drawing the NASA budget. It never gets into the public arena, though, does it? You don't hear politicians with an election coming up going, and we're going to go to the planet

where we saw Peter Stringfellow's dad waving at us. And the problem is, a US presidency lasts four years, eight years, if they go two terms. We now have a five-year... Do we have a fixed term? It didn't used to be. Yeah, year do we have fixed term it didn't use yeah five year fixed term right yeah and it could go on because they can be re-elected you know ad infinitum but a mission planning you know takes a lot longer than the the length of a of a parliament or a of a congress

and that's the problem because politicians short-term, short-term vote winning, and it's very, very difficult. This is why you need to have your budget. And poor old NASA, they have to go and justify their budget. What, every year? At least with the European Space Agency, we get three years of budget. And it's tiny compared to how much the UK, Europe has spent on war and Trident and all those other things and actually built space missions which were going to do peaceful research,

you know, you create jobs, because we pay something like £200 million a year to the European Space Agency, of which about £160 million comes straight back into the UK to provide jobs in the space industry, which is one of our biggest industries. And that isn't particularly well known. And so we have this thing called Just Retour. So for every pound we pay in, we get sort of 80 or 90 pence back into industry in the UK, which is jobs and all the things that come from people having jobs and paying into the economy.

And that is so important. A NASA administrator once told me that we will get away from this having to justify every four to eight years in the space program on the other side of the pond when it is perceived that the importance of the space program is as critical to national security as the military is yeah and it's it's not there which was of course in the 60s well it was it certainly was a proxy for going to war. Well, why is it we were talking about politics? You were saying, Jo, that, of course, John F. Kennedy famously made a speech,

which is that we must do this. You know, we don't do it because we must. Was it? What's that? You know. Not because it's easy, but because it's hard. Because it's hard. And so what has changed? Is it because there aren't the same things to cover up? I mean, what is it? Because that was, you know, that was... Well, it could be that we did it, you know.

We proved we could do it, and that was the purpose of it, really. It wasn't motivated initially on the basis of science. It was motivated as kind of just an arm wrestle, you know, to see who would do it better and get remember, the U.S. was very threatened. The Russians were kicking our butt. I mean, you know, they sent people into space. Their rockets were doing well. Ours were blowing up on the launch pad. And Sputnik, Americans felt very threatened. And, you know, you have to also give credit to Kennedy. You know, I mean, he could have been a madman.

He could have been someone, even the people who became astronauts thought this guy's out of his mind. But it turned out it was the right thing to do, and everybody galvanized behind it. And I should say that, you know, when you take account of inflation, I did this calculation once, the maximum annual budget of the Apollo mission era was roughly twice, I believe, what NASA's budget is now. So a huge amount of money was devoted to it, to really do it. And then once we proved that we could do it, people weren't interested. Immediately, once Apollo 11 landed, there were plans, okay, we're not going to continue doing this. And then, of course, when Nixon became president, no one can really give me an answer to this. I even asked Neil Armstrong this, and he didn't

know the answer for sure. But it's everybody's suspicion that Nixon, who ultimately dismantled everything Apollo, the means to produce the command modules and the LEM and all that and the Saturn 5. He's the one who really ground everything down to nothing. The suspicion is he did that because he didn't want to have anything, any program in his administration that had Kennedy's name on it.

So it comes down to politics again. Do you think Kennedy might have been worried that he was going to run out of women to have sex with on Earth and he thought there might be possibly some on the moon. And why do you have to lower the tone? Well, because I read that biography of John F. Kennedy. Oh, it's low. Joe,

as the non-space professional on the panel... What? What? I mean, really, so, Vince Cable made a speech the other day saying that he felt that there should be an increase of an extra £9 billion

into the science budget over the life of the next Parliament. So really a big step change in expenditure on science. I mean, what's your feeling as a non-scientist? Would you support that level of increased expenditure in science, space exploration being a part of that? I think it's a really tricky question to answer because I think every single person has compartments in their head and in their life, whether they've got children or they've not got children,

which part of the country they live in, what they think money needs to be spent on. And I think it's a very difficult choice to make. Personally, I would say yes, I would sanction spending more money on it because I think, you know, humans are naturally kind of very curious and we want to expand our minds,

we want to expand further, and I think it's incredibly important that we don't just become stagnant. Do you think people would feel differently if it was impressed upon them how valuable scientific inquiry and investigation has been in bringing them things like microphones, cell phones, heating systems in their house that work, you know, just the technological advances that propel human life here on earth. I think if Simon Cowell said it on The X Factor, they would be interested.

No, but you need populist figures, I think, to interpret what are quite tricky. I mean, one of the things... Don't you guys have Brian? We have Brian, that's right. I haven't got an idea what he's on about, though. But no, that's not true. That's not true. So, this is... We ask the audience questions.

Usually we have a hive mind here, and we wanted to see what their imaginings of the universe today is. And we asked them, where would you like to go to the universe and why? What have you got, Brian? Where would you like to go in the universe? In the universe, yes, sorry. To the event horizon of a black hole so I can throw things in and see what it looks like.

I am a child. Venus, to meet other like-minded women, because that's where we allegedly come from. I read that in my most radio-full voice. I'd like to return to my home planet. As a child... I was terrified of being abducted by aliens. Now I peer up at the night sky in hopes someone comes to get me.

E.T. So Kate is an alien. E.T. Kate Lovell will send this now broadcasting across the universe and hopefully they'll pick up your message. Thank you very much to our fantastic panel, Professor Monica Grady, Dr Karen Imporco and Joe Brand. We have a letter.

Hello from San Diego, California. So, my question. Could black holes be our universe's recycling machines? Could everything just be recycling? Traditional matter, iron in blood, stars, beer, carbon, enters a black hole. It's pulled apart and broken down to its subatomic fundamental parts. The event horizon will break down the matter,

energise it, dark energy, to a higher state, possibly like the Higgs. Gravity still affects the elevated state of matter, maybe called dark matter, which then cools over time, bringing it back to a lower energy state and appearing it as traditional matter, so we see that form stellar nurseries where the process starts again. Brian? No.

So, thank you very much to our panel, thank you for listening, and thank you to our Lord, for being here, and goodbye in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite monkey cage in the infinite

monkey cage you're now nice again this is the first radio ad you can smell the new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's it's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors, like high blood pressure developed during pregnancy, which can put us two times more at risk of heart disease or stroke.

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