Date: November 24, 2009
Title: On the Screen: Science Fact vs. Science Fiction
Podcaster: Jane Platt and Kevin Grazier
Organization: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Description: Some science fiction movies and TV shows are just that: fiction. But you can find nuggets of science facts in some of them, including some based on actual space research and space missions. In this conversation, scientist Kevin Grazier of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who works on the Cassini mission to Saturn, explains how some science observations and space lingo influenced his input into “Battlestar Galactica,” when he served as a science advisor for the series.
Bio: Jane Platt is News Chief of the Media Relations Office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. During her prior career in broadcast journalism, she was the West Coast correspondent for ABC Radio Network, and a reporter for other networks and radio stations. She covered such varied stories as earthquakes, fires, high-profile trials, riots, Academy Awards, Space Shuttle landings, the Voyager Neptune flyby, and a total solar eclipse. Jane draws on this broadcast news background in her current job, providing information for journalists covering JPL missions and science discoveries, and creating and producing podcasts for JPL.
Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by Melanie Avion- for my daughter Lilah on your birthday, to remember your China Mum who saw you into the world under the same moon that I waited by. The same pearl moon now ties you to each of us and us to each other
Transcript:
PLATT: How does science affect science fiction?
I’m Jane Platt with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. And I’m here with Kevin Grazier, an investigation scientist with the Cassini mission to Saturn.
He’s a mild-mannered scientist by day, but by night—in his free time, well, he was the consultant on Battlestar Galactica.
So Kevin, thanks for joining us and why don’t you start off by explaining exactly what your role was as a consultant for the series.
GRAZIER: As a consultant, my job was to do my best to make sure that the science is depicted correctly. It’s done several ways. Some of the writers would actually talk to me beforehand and ask what can we do to make the science right in this episode. And in some cases, in the less tech-heavy episodes, sometimes I would just get the final script or the first-draft script and red-pen it to see if there’s anything I can try to add.
PLATT: OK, and how do you balance that because as a scientist it’s kind of your job to be extremely accurate and precise, but to make good science fiction sometimes you have to stretch things a bit, so how did you reconcile that?
GRAZIER: What I did was I provided them the facts and how are the facts played out in this scene? How would the science really be? In some cases my job was done when it was, “Please don’t say this.” You know, when they didn’t say something that was originally in the script. However, I would also sometimes provide alternate ways in which we can bend the rules a little bit. But for the most part, to be honest, on Galactica they listened to me. For the most part, when I made a suggestion, they listened to it and took it. It was very rare when they said, “No, we really can’t do that.”
PLATT: So tell me a little bit about how the actual work on the Cassini mission ended up appearing in some form or another on Battlestar Galactica.
GRAZIER: You know, in the first season we had an episode, it was actually a two-parter, “Act of Contrition” and “You Can’t Go Home Again.” And one of our pilots, Kara Thrace , Callsign Starbuck, gets shot down on a Titan-like moon orbiting a Saturn-like planet. And that episode occurred, that was one of our first episodes, and one might be tempted to think that I had something to do with it. Did Cassini have something to do with that? Absolutely. Did I? Absolutely not. Interestingly enough, one of the two writers, Bradley Thompson, has been a space fan for years and was, actually both of them, David Wittels as well was also a space fan, but Bradley was following the Cassini mission with keen interest and they decided it would be kind of cool to set one of our episodes in part on Titan. So being a big fan of Cassini, that influenced these two episodes, but that was not my idea, that was already done, that was already in place before I was on the project.
PLATT: Anybody who works at JPL or has been around a space mission knows there are a lot of acronyms, there’s a lot of terminology, some of that apparently worked its way into the series.
GRAZIER: Oh, yes, one of the requisites I think for working at NASA is you have to love your TLAs, your three-letter acronyms. And on Cassini, I’ve sat in missions, or sat in meetings and asked myself if I didn’t work on this mission would I understand what they’re speaking as English and the answer was no. But a couple of those TLAs, those three-letter acronyms, did make their way into Battlestar, I believe we used the term ORS in one episode, that’s optical remote sensing, in episode “Torn,” Boomer refers to the SSR, which is a solid state recorder, a device on the Cassini spacecraft. Oh, in fact, there’s one not term but one concept that made its way into “Scattered,” something called Live IVP Update. When we are going to take images of a moon whose position isn’t well known, we will just before the imaging run, we will uplink its best known position of the spacecraft. The lack of a similar update was kind of the source of the drama for the episode “Scattered,” in which Galactica during an intense period where they expected to be under attack, Galactica jumps one place, the fleet jumps somewhere else and the question is how do we get back there, that was motivated by the concept of a Live IVP Update, or the lack thereof.
PLATT: So you said that you were pretty happy with the way things were incorporated. Again, as a scientist, and obviously as a science fiction fan as well?
GRAZIER: Oh yeh absolutely, like I said I was listened to, even on instances when they didn’t use per se what I recommended, I still always felt that they heard me and for whatever reason we really just can’t go in that direction. And there are some things in Galactica, when the hand of the divine has been seen throughout the entire series that are intentionally left unexplained.
PLATT: I have a question for you that’s a little bit of a tangent, but I’m assuming that you’ve had a lifelong love of science and science fiction, did one come before the other?
GRAZIER: Ah, that’s tough because I think from my recollection, I think they both happened around the same time. I mean some of my earliest memories are of the Gemini and subsequently Apollo launches. But also I, I’m probably dating myself here, but I do remember the first run of “Star Trek.” I do remember, a few episodes I remember bits and pieces of. And I hate to admit that, but it’d be true. So they’re more or less simultaneous as far as my recollection goes.
PLATT: OK, and how do you feel when you’re watching, without going into specifics of movies or whatever, in general, a lot of sci-fi movies, TV shows, they do take a lot of liberties. So if you’re sitting in a theater or at home watching something on TV that you weren’t involved in working on, is it sometimes like, are you yelling at the screen?
GRAZIER: Laughter. There are some that I yell at the screen. For the most part, I feel that in a science fiction work, you get two or three conceits. Some place where you expect the audience to say, OK, this isn’t true but I’ll buy it for now, I’m with you and as long as you stay consistent to that, you’ll keep the audience. It’s when you start messing with your own rules that you get into trouble. There’s very few works, and I can think of one movie a few years ago that might have dealt with a Texas-size asteroid heading towards Earth, that I was somewhat less than thrilled with the science. But apart from that, I’m usually willing to suspend disbelief with the best of them.
PLATT: And it’s interesting, because there is quite a link between, I mean, really to do the things that are accomplished by NASA and by JPL and by other entities, where you’re doing seemingly impossible things on other planets and in deep space, you have to really have imagination, so there’s a little bit of a parallel there with science fiction, because science fiction does become reality in the space program.
GRAZIER: That’s true. I think it’s kind of a misnomer to believe that the work we do here is entirely left brain and entirely analytic. There are certainly elements of creativity when it comes to problem-solving. At the same time, in work like being a screenwriter, I think it’s also wrong to believe it’s entirely right brain, there are certainly elements of both brains in both sets of work.
PLATT: OK. So we talked a little bit about the way Cassini and your work on Cassini ended up in the series. Anything else you can think of, I think there was one more you had mentioned?
GRAZIER: Yeh, we have, there’s one Cassini observation, one of our most famous observations, that ended up becoming a major, a fairly major theme in the last season. I was asked by one of the writers, Bradley Thompson, I’d mentioned him earlier, that he asked me, “We need something in space that looks like one thing from one direction and something else from another direction and you have to see it from a long way off. What do you got?” And I at first said, well absolutely nothing, but after I thought, I though back to the old backyard, Cassini. Turns out that Saturn’s rings, when you look at Saturn with the sun behind you, the rings that you see are the big, bright, main rings, the A, B and the C ring. You don’t see much else, because large particles fairly close together, backscatter light. The light hits the particles in the rings and bounces back to your eye. If you’re on the other side of the planet, and the planet occults, or blocks out the sun, you can see very faint rings, because small particles that are spaced widely forward-scatter light, meaning they hit the particle and generally bounce forward. And in December of 2006, the front page of the National Geographic magazine was an image, or a mosaic Cassini had taken of Saturn, showing some very faint rings, and the only reason you could see these is because the planet Saturn was occulted. Now go to Battlestar Galactica—end of season three, Starbuck, who had been thought to be dead for months, suddenly appears in her Viper and right as we’re about to go into battle, and the question is, where did you come from? Never mind, we need you. So we take care of business and then upon landing in Galactica, we ask where she’s been and she says, “I have been to Earth.” And she tells of a vision where she sees a trinary star, a gas planet with rings, and a comet. And when you see a flash of her vision, you see the gas planet, the comet and the trinary star, and you do not see rings. And later, when she’s given a ship, Demetrius, you see her painting her vision, and you see the gas planet and you see the comet, which looks remarkably like the ship of light from the original series, but we won’t go there for now. And then you see the star she paints, you don’t see rings, and that was part of the vision. But later she’s doing another painting with Leobin and you see the gas planet, you see the last of the three stars being occulted, being eclipsed, and you see the rings. So there was your object seen from different orientations, looking differently, and it was kind of a major issue when we first wrote the episode, or first wrote that arc, but like with many things in a script, certain things gain importance and some lessen, that was certainly in the series to be seen, but its importance kind of diminished over time.
PLATT: OK, well thanks a lot, Kevin, for joining us on this podcast, and much continued success with the Cassini mission, so say we all.
GRAZIER: So say we all.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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