Date: December 17, 2010
Title: Planetary Science at AGU 2010 Conference
Podcaster: Bob Hirshon
Organization: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) – http://www.aaas.org
Description: This week, the American Geophysical Union held its annual conference in San Francisco and intrepid 365 Days of Astronomy podcaster Bob Hirshon was there. In today’s podcast, he brings us highlights from the sessions and posters, including a planned mission to the rings of Saturn and a chat with a scientist who consults on Hollywood films.
Bio: Bob Hirshon is Senior Project Director at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and host of the daily radio show and podcast Science Update. Now in its 23rd year, Science Update is heard on over 300 commercial stations nationwide. Hirshon also heads up Kinetic City, including the Peabody Award winning children’s radio drama, McGraw-Hill book series and Codie Award winning website and education program. He oversees the Science NetLinks project for K-12 science teachers, part of the Verizon Foundation Thinkfinity partnership. Hirshon is a Computerworld/ Smithsonian Hero for a New Millennium laureate.
Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by Bob Hirshon.
Additional sponsorship for this episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” has been provided by Wayne Robertson, who encourages you to join him in supporting this great podcast.
Transcript:
Welcome to the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast. I’m Bob Hirshon, host of the AAAS radio show and podcast Science Update. I’m reporting this week from the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco, where it is damp and foggy as it should be here in December.
Nonetheless, spirits are high, and not just from the occasional clouds of marijuana smoke wafting across Market Street near the Moscone Convention Center. No, it’s mostly the energy you get from 19,000 scientists gathered in one place. Probably the largest contingent is related to atmospheric science, including climate, past, present and future. And of course lots of geologists and seismologists. But there is also a good size group of planetary scientists. The secretary for the AGU Planetary Science section is Linda Elkins- Tanton from MIT and she’s helping organize the planetary science sessions and posters. She says this year, there are a large number of presentations related to active spacecraft.
Elkins-Tanton:
We have so many results from space missions: European and Japanese, space missions from NASA, we have results from Rosetta, from the European Union, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, of course the Mars Rovers. Looking at the inner solar system, MESSENGER and Venus Express, inner solar system, and then the outer solar system, also Rosetta and Cassini.
Hirshon:
She says there’s been a growth in research related to possibility of life on other worlds, and talks related to the field.
Elkins-Tanton:
We had a fantastic talk from John Eiler from Cal Tech who gave the Sagan Award Lecture about habitability on planets and we have quite a number of different sessions with many, many contributions from researchers.
Hirshon:
While some deal with the possibility that the inner planets do or more likely, once did harbor life, there is growing interest in the potential for life on outer planets and especially their satellites.
Elkins-Tanton:
Icy moons like Mimas and Enceladus and Carolyn Porco has again organized her excellent Enceladus session looking at the stability of liquid water which is thought to be critical for life on Enceladus—
Hirshon:
I’m sorry, what’s Enceladus?
Elkins-Tanton:
This is a moon, a moon of Saturn, which she has been investigating with the Cassini mission. And many other people are working on Enceladus and other icy moons of our outer planets, looking places where life could live.
Hirshon:
Tom Spilker is a Mission Architect at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he has a poster here on his work on the Bidecadal survey—a sort of look back at what scientists have learned about the solar system in the past decade, and a look forward to the next decade.
Spilker:
It’s looking at the science that we’ve learned in the past ten years, what the state of planetary science is in many different disciplines right now, and, notably, what are the highest priority science objectives that we could go after in the ten years that it’s interested in: 2013 to 2022. So the major thing is prioritizing those science objectives and from that looking at what missions would we want to fly to accomplish the highest priority objectives.
Hirshon:
His group’s focus was a potential future mission called the Saturn Ring Observer. He explains that Saturn’s rings are about 300,000 km wide, but only about ten meters thick. The goal for the Saturn Ring Observer would be to get a close up look at the rings from just outside them.
Spilker:
Given that Saturn’s rings look like a very, very old phonograph record, what we want to do is stay just outside of the plane of that record, looking down on the individual particles—watching them collide, watching them get into these things we call waves, get into wakes where the particles collide and form long, thin structures that then break up. And we want to see how do these particles behave? When they collide, how much energy do they lose? It’s not only tied up with how Saturn’s rings work, but it’s also tied up with how planets come together in these accretion disks that form around stars that eventually become planets. So we’re trying to find out how do these individual particles behave, and we’re putting a spacecraft just out of the ring plane—using ion engines to keep us out of that ring plane—looking down at those individual particles and how they move.
Hirshon:
One of the lighter events here at the conference was a reception called Science Meets Hollywood, featuring both Hollywood producers who look to science for inspiration and scientists who work with them to make sure they get the science right. Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, is one of those scientists. He told me that Hollywood is more interested in the science behind their stories nowadays, and he thinks he knows one reason why.
Shostak:
Today, you can watch a movie or a television show on your hand held device or your iPad or whatever, on your computer, and that means if you see something that looks interesting, you can back it up and look at it again and again and again. And then you can get onto your blog and tell the world “These guys really messed up, because this very elementary science fact seems to have escaped the writers.” That didn’t used to be the case. In the old days, you just sat there in the theater and watched the show go by and there was no stopping it and there was no blogging it. Today I think they care to get things right simply because they want to avoid a little bit of bad publicity.
As for films and television serving a useful educational purpose… well, it’s a case of buyer beware.
Shostak:
You can learn science from Hollywood movies—you can learn science from Star Trek and a lot of people do—the trouble is a lot of it is wrong, so what you’re learning—there’s no guarantee. It’s sort of like getting information off the Internet, you know, it’s not warranteed to be a refereed journal. And the science you see in the local Cineplex might be right and then again, might not.
Hirshon:
But it might get you into it.
Shostak:
The thing about science fiction films is that they grab you emotionally, and then you might be “incentivized,” if I can use that word, to go read a book or learn some real science.
Hirshon:
Elkins- Tanton says that incentivizing people—especially young people—to take an interest in science is also something big conferences like AGU hope to accomplish, with events like tonight’s Hollywood science reception, a presentation on climate change by John Holdren, science advisor to President Obama, and a variety of other meetings and events open to the general public.
Elkins-Tanton:
What we need to do with planetary science, and with all the science that we do is make it relevant and interesting and accessible to people who are not scientists. And that’s part of what we try to do here at this meeting.
Hirshon:
For the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, I’m Bob Hirshon.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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