Date: October 7, 2011
Title: What’s up in Planetary Exploration in October 2011
Podcaster: Emily Lakdawalla
Organization: The Planetary Society Blog
Link: http://www.planetary.org/blog/
Description: Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society takes a spin through the solar system, following the planetary missions and their latest discoveries, as well as highlighting upcoming launches of new missions.
Bio: Emily Lakdawalla is a planetary geologist and writer who works for the world’s largest space interest group, The Planetary Society, as its blogger, web writer, and contributor to the weekly Planetary Radio podcast. She is also a contributing editor for Sky & Telescope magazine. She lives in Los Angeles with a 3-year-old who can list all the planets for you, a new baby who has yet to learn their names, and a husband who likes to pretend he doesn’t know anything about space.
Sponsors: The sponsor of this episode of “365 days of Astronomy” asks that you “Look up, open your eyes, and enjoy”.
This episode of “365 Days Of Astronomy” has also been brought to you by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in honor of International Observe the Moon Night, happening on October 8, 2011. Find a NASA Night Sky Network astronomy club to see the moon through a telescope in the United States or check the International Observe the Moon Night website to find events around the world.
Transcript:
What’s up in planetary exploration in October 2011
I’m Emily Lakdawalla and I keep an eye on the robots that are exploring our solar system for the Planetary Society blog. You can read it at planetary dot org slash blog. Today I’m going to take a look at what’s going on with the spacecraft exploring the solar system during the last three months of 2011.
In November, the launch window for Mars opens. Mars launch windows only come around once every 26 Earth months. That’s because Earth orbits the Sun a little bit faster than Mars does, and launch windows open up every time we start catching up to Mars from behind. There are two missions that were originally supposed to launch to Mars in 2009, but they weren’t quite ready in time to launch before the window closed, so they’ve had to wait around for 26 months for the window to reopen. The first to launch will be Russia’s Phobos-Grunt. Phobos-Grunt will go into Mars orbit and then put a lander down on Mars’ inner moon Phobos. The lander will take a sample of Phobos’ dusty surface and pack it into a sample return capsule, which it’ll launch back to Earth.
That sample return capsule carries an experiment that we, the Planetary Society, contributed to the mission. Phobos LIFE is a hermetically sealed capsule containing several different types of Earth microbes. The Phobos LIFE capsule will travel to Mars and back. You might be wondering why we’re doing this. It’s to see whether life really can be transferred from planet to planet, and survive the journey in viable form. Some scientists think this really could have happened in the early solar system, that life could have started on Mars and been transported to Earth on a space rock blasted off by a large asteroid impact. The experiment is also a tiny first step toward understanding what dangers human astronauts might face during a long cruise to Mars. You can learn more about this project at planetary dot org slash life.
Another passenger on Phobos-Grunt will be Yinghuo-1, a small orbiter built by China. Once it’s gotten to Mars Phobos-Grunt will release Yinghuo-1 into Mars orbit.
The other mission getting ready for the Mars launch window is Curiosity, also known as Mars Science Laboratory. This is the next-generation Mars rover, and it’s much bigger and heavier than the Spirit and Opportunity rovers that came before it. The reason it’s so huge is because it’s carrying two analytical laboratory instruments of a type that geologists on Earth use all the time for analyzing rocks, but nothing like them has ever been sent to Mars. Curiosity will gather samples from rocks using a rock-grinding tool and deliver them to funnels that will send the samples on to the analytical instruments. One of them, called CheMin can directly identify the minerals that make up the sample. The other, SAM, determines the molecular chemistry of light elements like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur. These are the atoms that combine to make organic molecules. It would be a scientific jackpot if Curiosity found and studied organic chemicals on Mars.
Launches aren’t the only thing going on this fall; there’s action across the solar system. Right in our backyard, the Moon will soon have a new pair of orbiters, the twin spacecraft of the GRAIL mission. They’re equipped with ultrastable clocks and radio transmitters — they’ll send radio signals to each other and use the tiny shifts in distance between the two spacecraft as a very sensitive probe of the Moon’s gravity field. That, in turn, will tell us about how the Moon is structured, deep below its surface. There is now a contest open for American students to propose better names for the GRAIL A and GRAIL B spacecraft.
Meanwhile, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter continues to send back amazingly detailed photos of the Moon’s surface. You can see into skylights that open onto underground lava tubes. You can see the tracks left by rolling boulders. You can even see the tracks left by the Apollo astronauts. Most importantly, you can see the Moon’s geology with unprecedented detail.
Closer to the Sun, the MESSENGER mission has just announced their first exciting results from the orbital phase of their mission to Mercury. The most surprising thing I’ve heard is that there are strange pits within Mercury’s craters that seem to be forming right now, through a process that scientists don’t really understand. They also found a great plain that formed when an enormous amount of lava poured from vents near Mercury’s north pole. The eruption covered six percent of Mercury’s surface. In some places the lava is two kilometers thick. These results are inherently cool, but they’re cool also because neither discovery was possible with just the flyby data. They could only be made after MESSENGER became the first spacecraft ever to orbit Mercury, last March.
Let’s move to Mars, which now has three orbiters around it and one rover on its surface. The rover, Opportunity, has finally arrived at Endeavour crater. This is a really big deal, because for more than seven years Opportunity has been looking at the same basic kinds of rocks. But now it’s on the rim of a huge crater. When craters form, the raised rim is made, in part, from rocks that were pushed upward from below, so they came from lower-down and are therefore older than the rocks that Opportunity has been exploring so far. Opportunity may now be studying rocks that formed in water-rich places at a time when Mars might have been a more pleasant place for life. Stay tuned.
Three orbiters continuously fly over Opportunity. They are Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Every day that these three ships continue to operate normally expands the richness of what we know about Mars. And for all the photographs and data that they’ve taken, they haven’t yet covered all of Mars at their maximum resolution — not by a long shot — so it’s worth it for them to keep on with their steady work. Their longevity does allow them to monitor spots on Mars for change over time, and the orbiters have found plenty of examples of new gullies forming on Martian slopes. The jury is still out on whether water is needed for these gullies to form.
We’ll go on from Mars, into the asteroid belt, and get to Dawn. Dawn is now in an orbit just 700 kilometers above the surface of the second-biggest asteroid, Vesta. Dawn’s pictures from Vesta are wonderful to look at but also deeply confusing. Individual impact craters have striped walls with bright and dark material. Grooves wrap around Vesta’s fat equator, but it’s not obvious how they formed or whether they have anything to do with the huge impact crater that occupies Vesta’s south pole. The very first scientific results from Vesta should have been announced between the time that I am recording this podcast and the day that it airs, so check my blog for what scientists think Dawn’s pictures are telling them.
Skipping past Jupiter to Saturn, the Cassini mission is going to have a very exciting few months. There will be three very, very close flybys of Enceladus. Enceladus is a very small moon, only 500 kilometers across, that is continuously spewing water ice into Saturn orbit, possibly from a briny sea beneath its surface. The close flybys will let Cassini taste those plumes, and also see the heat that emanates along with them. And for the first time it’ll use its radar mapping instrument to get a detailed view of that moon. Because Cassini is orbiting Saturn in the same plane as Saturn’s rings, it also gets lots of opportunities to watch moons dance past each other.
So it’s a really exciting time for science in the solar system right now. There are several active missions I didn’t even mention, and several more that are cruising toward new destinations. I write about them all on my blog at planetary dot org slash blog. Go check it out to see some awesome pictures and the latest news from space! This has been Emily Lakdawalla for the Planetary Society. Thank you for listening.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Astrosphere New Media Association. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow…goodbye.