Instant Genius - Monica Grady: What is the future of space science?

Episode Date: October 2, 2019

Today on the Science Focus Podcast, we’re talking to Professor Monica Grady, planetary and space scientist, ahead of World Space Week. World Space Week runs from 4 to 10 October, and this year’s theme is ‘The Moon: Gateway to the Stars’. Events to celebrate World Space Week are being held in the UK and across the world, including Monica’s talk at the Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh. Monica’s research spans to the Moon and beyond, and Asteroid 4731 is named Monicagrady, in honour of her contributions to the field. Here, she speaks to editorial assistant Amy Barrett about working in the industry and the challenges faced by current and future space scientists. Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: How do you launch a successful space mission? – Mark McCaughrean Why is the Moon landing still relevant 50 years on? – Kevin Fong The mindset behind the Moon landing – Richard Wiseman What if the Earth’s magnetic field died? – Jim Al-Khalili The most mysterious objects in the Universe – Colin Stuart What NASA’s InSight will tell us about Mars – Bruce Banerdt Follow Science Focus on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Flipboard Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello, I'm Sarah Rigby, online assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine. Today we're talking to Professor Monica Grady, planetary and space scientist, ahead of World Space Week. World Space Week runs from the 4th to the 10th of October, and this year's theme is The Moon, Gateway to the Stars. Events to celebrate World Space Week are being held in the UK and across the world, including Monica's talk at the Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh. Monica's research spans to the moon and beyond, an asteroid 4731 is named Monica Grady, in honour of her contributions to the field. Here, she speaks to editorial assistant Amy Barrett about working in the industry and the challenges faced by current and future space scientists. When did you first decide to pursue a career in planetary and space science?

That's a sort of difficult question because it came upon me gradually. I did geology and chemistry for my first degree, which I really, really enjoyed. And I sort of wanted to continue doing that. And then I saw this advert for a PhD for somebody to work on, lunar samples and meteorites. And so I thought, oh, well, that sounds pretty interesting. And it just went on from there. And what was it about the PhD that really, really struck you?

And why did that make you want to change your entire kind of career journey? Well, up until that point, I hadn't got a career journey because I had no clue what I wanted to do. I knew I didn't want to go into sales or marketing or anything like that. And, you know, you've got to remember this was 1979 and, you know, the internet hadn't been invented. And, you know, things weren't so easy to get hold of and to find out about the range of jobs that were available. And so I thought, well, I don't want to do sales. I don't want to do it. Oh, I suppose I better stay on, do research.

but I knew I didn't want to go out in the field and get wet and stuff like that. So I was just basically looking for anything. I was looking for a job. And I saw this advert for a PhD and it was in Cambridge. And that's where my boyfriend of the time had got a job. So I thought, oh, well, you know, this looks really good. I'd already done a module in my final year at Durham about the moon and moon rocks. And I'd seen them under the Microsoft.

scope and they were absolutely fascinating. And so I thought, right, okay, well, you know, let's keep on doing these. And that's how it came up. So it wasn't really a change in career direction or anything like that because I hadn't had one up to that point. And what do you think you've learned over the years it takes for someone to become a space scientist? What kind of qualities do you see as a benefit to that kind of career? The qualities you need are you've got to love it. And that's, I think, the quality that you need for any job, any career. You've got to really enjoy what you're doing. Because if you enjoy what you're doing, then you'll do it, you know, not just for the salary,

but for the enjoyment, for the people that you meet and for the things that you're learning and the places that you're going and just basically the stuff you're doing. And you enjoy doing it. It's not a real turkey to get out of bed in the morning to go to work because you really enjoy what you're doing. And I think if you're not enjoying it, then you're possibly doing the wrong sort of thing. And you maybe need to look for something that you do enjoy. And I think that's the biggest, I think that's the biggest quality I would want for, you know, for somebody to have for a job, to really enjoy doing it and want to do it. Well, plus also, you know,

have the right qualifications so you can do this. And would you say you're still enjoying it What makes it so enjoyable for you today? Oh, I'm still enjoying it now. I mean, I am eligible for retirement. If I wasn't enjoying it, I would have retired. There's just so much going on and so much left still to do and to be part of. So, I mean, there are new space missions, you know, going to Mars and to the moon, and we're going to be getting the samples back from a couple of asteroids soon.

and, you know, it's just new stuff coming along all the time that I just want to be part of. So what are you part of at the moment? Well, the main thing that I'm working on at the moment is Mars, and I'm part of a joint European Space Agency NASA planning group, and we're putting in place the sort of rules, if you like, for what to do when samples come back from Mars and the sort of experiments we should do

and who should be doing them and how it's all controlled. Because you can't just, you know, these samples that are coming back from Mars, you know, we've got to make sure that they're not bringing any nasty bugs that will infect the Earth. And we've got to keep them clean as well so that we, you know, if we're looking for life on Mars, we don't want to find terrestrial life there because we've contaminated the samples. So I'm involved in all that, which is really good. And when you bring samples back from Mars, I wonder who owns those samples? How does that...

Now you've touched on a really, really interesting and very, very difficult question. Who owns samples? Well, they're going to be brought back by a joint mission from Issa and NASA. so I guess they will be jointly owned by Europe and America. And is that how they'll be split up in terms of given to scientists? Well, they're not going to be split up. I mean, there's only going to be a relatively small amount come back, and they're not going to come back until 19, 19, 2032 at about the earliest.

And so there's going to be one sample return capsule. So there'll be one canister of samples. And they'll all go to the same place, probably in America. But then once the capsule has been opened and we know that they're not going to infect us all with bugs, then people will be able to, scientists will be able to. to apply to get some of the samples. And like I say, what we've been putting in place is the review procedures that scientists will have to go through to get those samples.

You can't just sort of phone up and say, send me a gram, you know, because I want to look at it. You've got to have a detailed plan of what you're going to do with it and why you're going to do it and why is it important and how you're going to do it and what you're going to do with the results and all that sort of stuff. And is there any kind of guesses going on at the moment about what we might find in the samples? Oh, there's all sorts of guesses, you know, ranging from, you know, sort of superbugs to nothing. So we know a lot about Mars from the rovers that have been there and the orbiting spacecraft.

But we haven't, and we've sent sophisticated equipment there. on Curiosity rover, but it's not sophisticated enough to be able to give a complete answer for whether there's life on Mars or not. And that's why we need to bring a sample back. So we're talking about World Space Week because that's coming up in October. And World Space Week was initially launched to celebrate the contributions of space science and technology to the betterment of human condition. And I wonder what contribution that you'd say has had the most benefit to us? I think, well, the benefits are a bit intangible, really.

I mean, people talk about spin-offs from the Apollo program being, you know, non-stick frying pants and stuff like that. And there are so many technological benefits that have come from space exploration that people really, really don't realize. And I think it would be fantastic if we have. had a day when we switched space off. So people realize how much we rely on space and space technology. Because space, you know, it's not far away. It's where all our satellites are orbiting. And so if you say, right, okay, no orbiting satellites. That means no television,

no weather forecasting, no bank transfers, the financial market would crumble. You know, it would be utter chaos, really utter chaos, if those satellites were wiped out. So that's near space. For far space, for outer space, I think just some of the pictures that have come back from things like the Hubble Space Telescope, pictures from Curiosity of Mars, where it just looks such a, the landscape looks in some ways really familiar and in some ways really alien. I think the idea that images are opening up the worlds around us so we can see them and start thinking more about how they've been formed and changed and thinking about whether there are

similar sorts of planets around other stars, things like that. Really, I think, fly the imagination. And so we've had the technological spinoffs and we've had the things that fire the imagination. And I think they're the real benefits of space exploration. Absolutely. And that's the kind of thing that I can imagine could be quite inspiring for someone to go into the space industry. But there are some struggles that we see in, you know, the wider STEM community with getting a more diverse workforce to represent the diverse population. But what do we need to do to get more young women, more BAME people into the industry?

Well, I mean, it's really interesting, isn't it, that this year they announced for, I think there were more women going into science courses in university following A levels than there were men. But if you took out the biological and medical sciences, there were many, many more men going in than women. So it's getting over the idea that women can't or shouldn't or aren't able to do physical sciences. You know, chemistry and stuff like that. It's so fascinating. But I think the ethnic diversity is even worse than the gender balance. Because you see, again, you see a lot of people from,

ethnic minorities, going into medicine, which is, you know, great attraction and fantastic. You know, it's essential that we have as many doctors and nurses and medic type people as we can. But, you know, medicine isn't the only science. You know, there's so much, you know, if we could get the same proportion of, you know, male, female, you know, minority. ethnic, you know, majority ethnic, going into physics and physical sciences, as goes into, as it goes into medical sciences, you know, would be laughing. But I don't know how we get that across. I mean, that has to come across from school ages upwards and, you know, primary school, get people enthused at primary school and keep that enthusiasm going through those difficult years

of ages sort of 12 to 15 when you're choosing your GCSEs and you're terrified. of what your peer group are going to say if you decide you want to do this instead of that. You know, it is very, very difficult. And I think if more resources were put into that 12 to 15-year-old age group to get them over, to get them over the GCSE hump and through into the A levels and T levels and all these other things that the government are bringing to us.

But I'm not an education expert. I have no clue how to do that. It's just about making, you know, I think STEM an area that's seen as welcoming and encouraging and as an exciting place to be. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, yeah. But, you know, history and geography and art and music, I don't think they sort of make any effort to show that they're welcoming or anything. It just happens. Because the space industry is a relatively new. industry. It hasn't got these sort of hidebound traditions and stuff that other industries have

had. And so, you know, and it's not, it's not hard, you know, it's not heavy lifting. It's not like you've got to be all mussely, you know, like you were going to be doing, you know, hunting great big sacks of things around. You know, a lot of it is, is design, you know, computer-a-ed design, that sort of stuff. You know, really high, high-quality engineering, really high precision. And it's the sort of thing that women, with their eye for detail,

are really, really good at, really good. And to get the message across, that these are sort of, you know, things that, you know, women can do, as well as a minority ethnic, both men and women, I think it's really, really important. You know, you see people going into the, you know, the Great British Bake Off and doing

these really elaborate cake designs and, you know, all the other things that we see on these sort of reality shows. It's like, those skills are so important in the space industry, the creativity, the precision, the eye for detail, really, really important. That's really interesting. You don't sort of think that there's crossover maybe between catering and space, but there's these strange links. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. You know, if you can design a beautiful decoration for cake, you can design a streamlined gizmo for a rocket. It's like, yeah, okay for one you have to understand how icing works and the other you have to understand how metal works and how mathematics works but you know a lot of these things now are programs that have

got all the underlying software in them and it's the creative aspect that is is required so going back to world space week um this year's theme is the moon gateway to the stars uh you mentioned that your kind of your PhD, the start of your career, was on lunar rocks. What relationship have you had over your career and now with our moon? What relationship have I had with the moon? Distant. It's a long way away. I have analysed lunar samples during the course of my career. and I have handled lunar samples. I've helped find one or two in Antarctica when I was there collecting meteorites. And to try and understand the moon is a very important part of understanding the wider solar system

and also understanding the Earth. So studying the moon and going to talks and lectures and hearing about the moon and understanding new series about how it's formed and how it relates to the earth. I mean, I've been doing that, you know, listening to these lectures and things, all my, you know, all my professional life. And it's really interesting to see how stories change over the years of how the moon could well have formed. And I think we're honing in on how it's formed now and we're looking at more sort of subtle effects to see, all right, well, it did form as a result of a collision of another body with the Earth very early on in the Earth's history.

And so as I study meteorites and samples from Mars, a lot of that is based on the work that has come from the Apollo samples. So it's been a, although I haven't spent a huge amount of time analyzing lunar samples directly, just the fact that information is there from the lunar samples has been very, very instructive and necessary for the stuff that I've been doing. Did that have any effect on what you did in the lead-up to fillet landing on the comet? The moon. No, not really.

Sorry, I mean what had come from the Apollo samples. Oh, I see, yeah, because learning how to, analyze the Apollo samples and learning how to analyze meteorize was very, very instructive when the team was making the Ptolemy instrument, although I was one of the science advisors to that team. The instrument was designed and built by people who had analyzed lunar samples and were taking the lessons learn from analyzing those lunar samples and meteorites so that they could analyze gas and ice from the comet. So yes, it was very informative for that reason. Sorry, what was the Ptolemy team working on?

The Ptolemy, sorry, that's the team at the Open University that built an instrument that was on the Fili Lambda. And it was led by Professor Ian Wright, who, It's my husband. Right, yes. And so can you tell us a little bit about that experience of the feel I landing on the comet? And how did it feel to see an idea you've been working on for so long condensed into that one moment? Well, I mean, it's very, very exciting, obviously. I mean, there's footage of me going sort of a bit ballistic when it actually landed and getting really, really excited.

which it was. It was amazing because it had been such a sort of tense day waiting for to get the signal that the Fili lander had arrived. And just the sort of release of tension that it landed, it seemed at the time to have landed safely. It was just really great. It's like, right, fantastic. We've had this 10-year journey with the spacecraft, but probably. to that, you know, 10 years of planning and design and build. And it's all come to fruition. And, you know, we've got basically a weekend to get some data. And what was it for those who

don't know, what was the, like, landing on and why was it so significant? Okay, well, there was a comic called 67P, Chorayuma of Grasimenko. And the Rosetta Mission, carried the Feli lander, the Rosetta spacecraft carried the Fiela lander to this comet. And it took 10 years from the launch of Rosetta to actually get to the comet. And then Rosetta orbited the comet for several months before the lander was dropped on the comet's surface. And the thing about comets is they're made of ice and rock. And they've got lots of gases in them, volatiles, which are the building blocks of life, lots of organic molecules and lots of water, water ice.

And so there's a thought that because there are so many comets that have hit the Earth in the past, that perhaps some of the water and the organic compounds that we need for life were brought to the Earth by comets. And so a lot of the experiments on board, both the Rosetta Orbiter and the Fili Lambda, were designed to analyse those molecules to see if they could be related to water on Earth. And what did you find in the end? We found mixed messages, which is like, right, okay, yes, it does look as if some of that water on the Earth could have been brought from comets. But it had a slightly different composition from what we expected, and there was more oxygen in the gases than what we expected. and the comet wasn't behaving in terms of quite what we expected.

So what it means is we've had to go away and think about how a comet has evolved and changed since the 5 billion years since that they were made when the sun and the Earth were made. And you mentioned your reaction which was caught on camera, and you did look so happy to see it land. But I wonder, are there any other moments in your career? where, you know, they might have come close to that kind of excitement that you felt then? Well, I mean, when Beagle 2 was landing, you know, that was very exciting, landing on Mars, but unfortunately it didn't signal back.

So that was, that was like exciting, but then flat, you know, it would have been really, really exciting if we'd seen, you know, got a signal back. So the next most exciting thing that I'm looking at, forward to is seeing the Ex-O-Mars 2020 rover land on Mars, and the NASA's Mars 2020 rover land on Mars. They will be really exciting events. Why are they so exciting? Well, the two next big missions to Mars,

and the Mars 2020 is going to be beetling over the surface of Mars and drilling out bits of rock that are going to be brought back to the earth eventually. And ESA's exomars 2020 is going to be drilling deep, very deep, about two metres, deep below the Martian surface, deeper than we've ever gone before. And it'll be really amazing to see, are there any organic compounds down there that we've never detected because we've never looked that deeply. So thinking about Mars and pretending the moon, and ISS. Space tourism is getting closer and closer to becoming a reality. Would you go into space?

And where would you go? I would definitely go into space if I could. Absolutely definitely. And I would go anywhere. Somebody would take me. I'd love to explore the moon. I'd look to see. You know, when you look at pictures of the moon, it looks grey. You know, it looks very black and white. Is it like that really? Or, you know, are there some more colour? there that you, when you can look at the rocks, I don't know, of course I'd like to go to Mars. Absolutely, I'd like to go to Mars. And just, you know, just look at those rocks, which some of them are so like rocks on Earth. You know, I'd just like to, I'd just like to travel. We do actually sometimes get readers asking us why we're so interested in building bases on the

moon or visiting the outer solar system when we obviously have issues that need addressing here on earth. And of course, we disagree there are our values to every kind of avenue. But I wonder what would you say to them? Well, a question that I've been asked lots and lots of times is, you know, how much did it, how much did the Rosetta emission cost? And couldn't that money have been better spent on Earth? It costs a billion euros, which is a huge, huge amount of money.

And if you'd taken that billion euros, you could have used it to build hospitals and, you know, in the NHS and all that sort of stuff. But that billion euros wasn't just thrown away. You know, it didn't all burn up when the rocket was launched. It was used to pay people's salaries to build the rocket, to build the instruments. And those people who were earning a wage were spending what they earned on food and, you know, new curtains and mortgages and cars and going on holiday and, you know, doing what people do. And the bits and pieces that made up the rockets, they had to be made by other companies and transported. And, you know, and the companies have to employ cleaners and caterers and ground staff and all that sort of things.

So the money was spent in employing people to build the rocket. And for every euro, every pound that the government puts into the European Space Agency, it gets 10 pounds back in terms of tax to the exchequer through employment and through all these other goods and services and things. So it's, you know, you put a pound in and you take 10 pounds back in jobs and people's livings. And so that is really, really important. It's not wasting the money. It's not like setting fire to it. It's investing it in people and jobs.

jobs, which is really, really, really important. Absolutely. And it's sort of another reason why it's so important to encourage the next generation into the scientific community. Oh, yeah. I mean, we need lots of scientists and technologists and engineers because as the sort of civilization gets more automated, you know, we're going to need people to design new generations of cars.

and transport and new generations of distribution of goods and services and maintenance of them and all that sort of stuff. So we're just going to get more and more technical. So we need more and more technical people. So those skills are going to be really, really important. I wonder if there's anything that you could talk about that really excites you for the next 12 months of the space industry. So we've talked a little about Mars 2020.

Is there anything else going on that really excites you? Well, I mean, there's going to be still a lot of activity around the moon because the Chinese are going to be arriving there to collect some samples. And we've got people here in this building where I am, working on missions to, working on instruments to go to the moon, to drill the moon, which will be happening in a year or so's time. So there's just a general buzz about space exploration about all the things that are happening, which is really great. Are you doing anything yourself for Space Week?

Yes, I am. I'm going to be up in Edinburgh at the Dynamic Earth giving a lecture about it's called 1969 and all that. And it's about all the things that happened in 1969 to do with planetary sciences as well as Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. So, yeah, so I'm giving a talk in Edinburgh. Sorry, just like, forgot. So what else happened in 1969? First meteorites were found in Antarctica and the realisation that loads could be found there and we've had like 50,000 meteorites from Antarctica ever since.

Two huge meteorites fell, one in February in Mexico and one in Australia in September. They were both really, really influential in different aspects of understanding the solar system. Comet 67P was discovered at the first time, the Rosetta Comet. We got some colour pictures of Mars back from the mariner space probe, showing the atmosphere and craters and stuff like that. So, yeah, there was all sorts of things that were going on. Yeah, a fantastic year that almost, you know,

overshadowed, I suppose, but that's not quite the word term for it, is it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was a good year, good year for planetary sciences. So are we still finding meteorites in Antarctica? Oh yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, a couple of thousand every year. For the specific expeditions go there from Japan and from America, from Europe and China, go to different places and have been collecting meteorites. And what excites you most about meteorites? Like why is that so fascinating for you? Oh well because we can get at them, all right, in a way

that you can't get at a comet because you know, comets, we don't, they don't land on earth as much as meteorites do because they've got different sorts of obvious and trajectories. But when you look at a piece of meteorite and you figure it up and you break it in half and you're

looking at something that nobody else has ever seen. You're looking at a rock that's 4,567 million years old, and you're looking at the original bits and pieces that solar system was made from. And nobody else has ever seen this, and you don't know what you're going to learn from it. And it's just really exciting. That sort of being on the brink of, wow, you know, we aren't going to analyze this and what are we going to find? because every meteorite is different and produces something interesting. Thank you for speaking to me this morning.

It's really great to hear about some of the exciting things that are happening in the future. What makes you, I wonder if there's one thing that really makes you hopeful for the future of space science and the industry? Babies keep being born. We've got this potential. It's like, yep, more babies. It's like, yep, more potential STEM professionals, more potential scientists and engineers. It's like, you know, life goes on. And if you look at a child as they develop and they are curious and they want to explore their world.

And we have to keep that sense of wonder and wanting to explore and make sure we treasure it. and that is really important. That was Monica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University. To get tickets for Monica's talk, 1969 and all that, go to dynamicearth.co.uk. For more WorldSpaceweek events, head to www.werew.org. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Science Focus podcast. If you can't get enough of space, why not listen to our episode with Mark McCorkran, senior advisor for science and exploration at the European Space Agency.

You can also pick up the latest issue of BBC Science Focus magazine, where we find out how NASA will intercept an asteroid headed for Earth by sending a craft known as the double asteroid redirection test to crash into the space rock. In the October issue, we'll also chat to bee researcher Samantha Alger about the plights faced by our lovable pollinators and learn how MDMA is being used to treat alcohol disorders. Of course, there is much, much more inside. As always, we'd love to know what you think about the things discussed in today's episode,

so do leave your thoughts in a review or a comment. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal.

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