Science Friday - Chasing Pluto, Space Warps. May 4, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: May 4, 2018

In July of 2015, the world was stunned to learn that Pluto, a tiny, distant dot that some didn’t even consider a planet, was a dynamic, complex, and beautiful world. But for scientists in pursuit of Pluto’s secrets since the late 1980s, it was a long wait. The mission faced political hurdles, budget battles, technical challenges, and near-disaster even as it was days away from speeding past Pluto. Alan Stern, the mission’s dogged principal investigator, and astrobiologist David Grinspoon have written a new book about the decades-long effort to visit Pluto. Last week we asked you to help us spot galaxies magnified by other galaxies—a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Over a million galactic glimpses later, we're ready to reveal what we found, including a galaxy more than seven billion light years away, and what appears to be a rare triple galactic lens. In this wrap-up segment, Space Warps co-founder Aprajita Verma and Zooniverse co-lead Laura Trouille share their favorite finds, and suggest a few other projects for armchair astronomers to dig into next. Plus, the end of net neutrality seemingly benefits corporations and harms consumers. But for small towns with slow internet speeds, this may not be the case. What does it mean for slow internet in rural Kansas?  And Rachel Feltman of Popular Science tells Ira about coral reefs and other science headlines in this week's News Round-up. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iraf Plato. Later in the hour, Alan Stern and David Grinspoon talk Pluto. But first, how did seaside vacation make seem calm and relaxing, right? But under the waves, there's a lot of going on and going on under the air. Healthy Carl Reef is a surprisingly noisy place a new study finds that when Reef is in trouble, it gets quiet, too quiet. Joining me to talk about that and other selected short subjects in science is Rachel Feltman, Science Editor at Popular Science. Welcome back.

Thanks for having me here. If I stumble through the introduction. Thank you. Nice to have you here to bring some cohesion to this. We have some recordings that the researchers have captured about a reef. Okay? You helped out with this. So let's listen to our first recording.

Sounds like my eggs in the morning. Yeah. What is that? So those are the sounds of all the little clicks. and whistles and pops that fish make to each other. You know, we think of fish as being quiet, but that's just because we don't speak fish. And shrimp are like clacking their little legs.

So a reef is like an urban center in the ocean. And, you know, a healthy reef is full of all of these noises. And to researchers, we're curious about how that's changing now that coral reef are suffering. And they compared noises a few years apart, basically looking at before. a few major bleaching events, which is where the algae that are symbiotic with coral die, leaving the coral pretty much helpless and dead. So that recording with all the pops and cliques was a healthy reef. That was a few years ago.

Right. That was recorded. And so if we were to listen to one now, we would not hear it the same volume going on there. They found it's about 15 decibels quieter. That's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And what's more disturbing is that then they did experiments with fish larvae.

to see if they were more or less attracted to, which recording they found more attractive. And they found that fish are actually less likely to want to go to a quiet reef, which kind of makes sense. I mean, it seems like a pretty dead neighborhood. So unfortunately, it indicates there's kind of a negative feedback loop

that, you know, we have these bleaching events because of warmer water, pollution, industrialization, and then that actually makes animals less likely to try to habitat the reef, which further contributes to its destruction. And it's just a really important reminder that it's not too late to save our coral reefs and to save these ocean ecosystems, but we really do have to start fighting carbon emissions, you know, other influencers of climate change.

We have to stop polluting the ocean. We have to try to – we have to actually put in the work to protect the coral, or it is going to be too late pretty soon. You're preaching to the choir here. But there's other coral news that Hawaii is banning some populous. Sunscreens? Yeah, so oxybenzone and octinoxate, which are two chemicals that are in basically every chemical sunscreen. So a sunscreen is either chemical, which means you absorb chemicals that help protect you from the sun's rays or it's mineral, which means it creates a physical barrier like zinc to protect you from the sun.

And so most sunscreens are chemical because they tend to work better. And most of them have these chemicals. There is some research that these chemicals are very dangerous to coral. that they keep them from photosynthesizing properly, that they're toxic to their DNA. And there's also research that they get into the waterways, basically anywhere where you're wearing sunscreen and you shower. You know, this stuff is going to end up in the ocean.

So it's not even a question of whether you're putting it on before you go to a coral reef. So Hawaii's been trying to ban them for a while, and they just, now it's official, the governor signed it on Tuesday, I believe, that by 2021, they will not be selling sunscreens that contain these chemicals. which isn't a bad thing. You know, it is true that the research we have,

even though there should be more studies on it, the research we have indicates these chemicals are not good for reefs, so we want to avoid them. Unfortunately, there are only a couple mineral sunscreens that have good consumer reports scores. Mineral sunscreens tend to not provide the SPF protection. They say they do. So consumers do it to be careful to make sure they are continuing

to protect themselves from sun damage. And the other thing is that some people feel this is kind of a feel-good measure. It's true that it's better to not expose reefs to this, but it's kind of a drop in the bucket compared to the warming water we have because of climate change. The acidification. Right. You know, construction near coast. And also just the fact that people are visiting reefs, you know, there isn't really a healthy way to go visit a coral reef. So if you really care about them, you shouldn't go snorkeling there.

They step on them. I know. I've been on the scuba diver. You know, people just step right on the reefs. They don't care. Right. So as tough as it is, we probably should protect these reefs every way we can at all levels of policy, you know, including lowering our carbon emissions. And we also probably shouldn't visit them.

You know, lay people should not be going snorkeling at reefs. Yeah. And finally, you have a story about an endangered albatross. Yes. So I think this is a great story. So they're the short-tailed albatross. They're the most endangered albatross species in the Pacific. And they are mostly, there are about 4,200 of them, mostly around islands near Japan.

But they occasionally show up at this reserve called Midway, which is technically part of Hawaii. And there was this one named George. He was 15 before he found a mate, Geraldine. And they seemed to have an egg. And so that made everybody in way really excited. They thought I think it would have been the fourth short-tailed bird to hatch in the U.S. in known history. Right. But when the egg hatched, it was not a short-tailed albatross.

It was a black-footed albatross, which is another species. Disappointment all around? Well, not quite. I mean, it's true that they would have loved to see, you know, short-tailed birds reproducing on this island. But apparently albatross are pretty bad at having eggs, successfully and raising chick successfully. So the fact that George and Geraldine are practicing on this adopted egg could still help conservation efforts by making them more likely to successfully raise a chick next year.

Parenting. It's tough. It's tough. Thank you, Rachel Feldman, Science Editor at Popular Science. Now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. For W.WIS Public Radio News. Local science stories with national impact.

Earlier this year, the Federal Communications Commission voted to end rules ensuring net neutrality, which prohibit Internet service providers from privileging some content over others. There were millions of public comments in opposition to end net neutrality, but Commissioner Ajit Pai said doing so could be a boon for rural America, where Internet access and broadband speeds continued to lag. Well, my next guest wanted to find out if this was true in his state of Kansas. Could the absence of net neutrality benefit rural customers and allow ISPs to expand service? And here with that story is Ben Kiebrook, a reporter for a Kansas News Service, and High Plains Public Radio.

He joins us from Garden City, Kansas, and you can read his reporting on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash broadband. Welcome, Ben. Hey, how's it going? So what's it like for people trying to use the Internet in rural Kansas? Give us an idea. Yeah, so I sought to answer that question that you just brought up of kind of what does net neutrality have to do with rural broadband. So I went down to this small town, Ulysses, Kansas, and I talked to Catherine Moyer there. She's the CEO of Pioneer Communications, which is kind of the, it's like a local nonprofit ISP there.

And I asked her, you know, I said, Adjit Pye is kind of making the, this case, is there anything to it? And she told me this really shocking number. So she told me 42% of their network's bandwidth is going towards a single company, and that's Netflix. So it's people streaming videos on Netflix. And she said, you know, one of the things that net neutrality lets us do is potentially we can go to Netflix now.

And we can say, you know, if we give you X dollars a month to pay, to prioritize your traffic, you know, potentially they can get some money that they can reinvest back in their network. Kind of it's a win for Netflix, and it's a win for people watching Netflix as well. But what about the ISPs? What kind of service are they providing? Is it high speed?

Is it high band? What's going on for the average user? Yeah. Yeah. So one of the other places I went, I went down to Plains, Kansas. And there, if you go to the library, you have people sitting in their cars kind of all times of day, all times of night, using the library Wi-Fi, because just the service there is just bad.

And according to the FCC, 40% of rural America doesn't have access to high-speed internet. And the FCC defines that as 25 megabits per second down and 3 megabits per second up. So we know that we've had this big problem of trying to get. trying to get broadband out to rural America and kind of the debate is how we fix that. And so do you get the impression that it is being fixed for all of these rural residents? Well, so I think we're slowly making steps in the right direction. One of the struggles with Internet is kind of we're going to have to continually upgrade it so that people year after year are demanding more and more data.

So we've had this same problem with kind of rural electrification and with rural telephony of kind of getting connections out to people's houses. But it's a little bit different with internet because kind of over time we keep wanting more and more internet. So I think we are making some steps in the right direction. So that Kansas legislature, they decided to make this task force where they're going to investigate different ways to fund rural broadband and also kind of do a, do a comprehensive study to really look at what the speeds are kind of across the state and what we can do, you know, what places need the most investment. Because actually there's not that good of data out there right now. So this has become a political issue then in Kansas,

or at least the parts that you've looked into, that they feel the heat from the public and they've got to decide that they better do something about it? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, really, internet is a need now that kind of the way this guy I talked to, I think, put it really well where he said kind of, you know, if someone was living without electricity right now, you know, you kind of think they're crazy or something. And we've kind of gotten to that point with the internet where maybe, you know, there's government forms that you can only fill out online or to, you know, for your kids to do their homework. They've got to be Googling stuff and looking it up. So internet has really become a need, but we haven't figured it out a way to kind of make sure that everyone has access to internet. And it is more expensive to bring internet out to these rural places. It just takes more cable to get it there.

All right, Ben, Ben Kiebrick, reporter for Kansas News Service, High Plains Public Radio from Garden City, Kansas. Thank you for joining us today. We're going to take a break when we come back, New Horizons, Oh, it took nine years to get there. We're going to have the authors chasing New Horizons. Alan Stern and David Grinspoon are going to be here to talk about that challenge. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Three years ago, NASA's New Horizons probe finally sped past Pluto on its moon, Sharon. We got stunning photos, surprising geology and chemistry, a possible subsurface ocean, and are still naming its many mountains. Pluto, far from a dead. dead chunk of rock appears to indeed be an active, really interesting world. But it took a Pluto scientist decades of campaigning, near misses on budgets, and nail-biting technical

challenges, all to make it happen. The spacecraft even lost contact three days before flyby, and the team had to frantically re-upload huge amounts of crucial software before they finally got the data they so wanted. How long have you been waiting? Longer, I might care to admit. That's principal investigator Alan Stern talking to his days before the New Horizons reached Pluto in 2015. He and astrobiologist David Grinspoon have a new book out with the story behind the dogged pursuit of the ninth planet. You can read an excerpt on our website, chasing new horizons inside the epic first mission to Pluto. And Alan Stern and David Grinspoon are with me here in the studio.

Good to see you. Good to see you. Good to see you in person. We talked over the phone or on something. We never get to see you guys. It's great to be here, Ira. Yeah, thanks a lot for having us on. The first question practically writes itself for the title of your book. What made this mission to Pluto epic?

What was so epic about it? It must be so surprising. I saw the news that was coming in. You know, I think there's several answers to that. First of all, it's the epic farthest journey of exploration in the history of our species. Second, it was an epic challenge, and some would say battle, to get this funded. And it was an epic challenge as well to build this spacecraft in record time to make that Jupiter launch window and to do it for only 20% of the cost of Voyager. Wow, that is epic.

It was a lot of challenges. David, what would you say? What was the biggest? Yeah, well, I mean, to me it's also epic just for the role that it plays in our exploration history. You know, we grow up with the Voyagers and the pioneers and the Vikings and all that stuff. And so we saw the first exploration of a lot of the solar system, most of the planets, but there was this one planet that we had never been to. So it sort of provides this capstone to what Carl Sagan used to call the initial reconnaissance of the solar system.

So it's, you know, it's epic in the way it fills out that, that, that, that has been. historic journey from the stars just being dots to being places that we know. You know, reading this book, I almost lost count of how many times this project got canceled. But in the end, you used the word, and I found out you were not one of the mince words in real life or in the book. You called the head of NASA Balsey when he went ahead and decided to finally launch. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was a technical decision, not a funding decision. Yeah.

And I was referring to administrator Mike Griffin, who has a spine of steel. And what was so difficult for him to make? Well, the issue was that our launch vehicle got a clean bill of health, but a test version of one of the fuel tanks in the first stage, which was being tested to its very limits, burst at a lower pressure than design had indicated it would. So there was some concern whether that might indict our fuel. tank or other Atlas launch vehicles. There was a careful examination of that by NASA engineers. And in the end, it came to a crucial meeting at NASA headquarters in which some of the administrators key lieutenants, like the chief engineer of the agency and the head of safety

and mission assurance voted against launching New Horizons. Others voted for it and argued the case pretty strongly. I did as well. It was a split decision. The administrator had to make the call and Mike made the right decision. He authorized the launch. Our number 8447248255. 8447248255. You can also tweet us at Cy Fry.

You talk about the vote. I'll ask both of it, about the vote to declassify Pluto as a planet to make it a dwarf planet. And you spare no words in that. I mean, no, you know, you almost You said that there was a campaign to sort of vilify, you know, Clyde Tombaugh.

Talk about that, would you? Well, you know, Clyde Tomba did something utterly unbelievable in discovering Pluto. Remember, this search had been on by various observatories, some of the best people in the world at the time for a quarter century. Here he came off the Kansas farm, hired to Lowell Observatory, and knocked it flat in one year. He discovered the planet they'd all been looking for for 20, 25 years, he never had a false alarm. He simply was a sharpshooter, and he found it. And in doing so,

he was really two generations ahead of his time. He discovered the Kuiper Belt. And no one else could until the 90s see other objects out there. And what the IAU did was essentially to start the erasure of his legacy. And I think it's more than unfortunate. I will mince my words and stop there. But I'll say that it's been made even worse by those who think there may be another large planet out there. And I suspect there are more planets out there, but I think that it is again another incredibly insensitive step in erasing Clyde's legacy to call that planet nine. David, does it matter? Well, there's a level in which it matters because it's obnoxious and it's confused a lot of people. in the long minute it doesn't matter. It's not the most important thing. What's important is the nature of Pluto and the fact that we've learned so much and explored it. But it was a mistake, and that's becoming more and more clear, the way that they attempted to redefine planet. It's just, it's not logical. They defined a planet in a way that ignores the properties of a body and just describes it in terms of what's orbiting around it. So it leads to these absurd contradictions, the

Earth is not a planet, according to that definition, if you move it out to the asteroid belt. And they also said that planets around other stars aren't planets. You know, the exoplanets. They said a planet orbits the sun. So they just, it was sloppy. They didn't do it right. So people in our field, planetary science, kind of ignore that. And we refer to Pluto as a planet just because that's what it is.

And so in that sense, it doesn't matter. But I think ultimately that definition will kind of be ignored, and ultimately they'll probably fix it. Alan, what made originally, what made Pluto such an obsession to explore? I mean, this tiny little dot out there. Well, you know, it was a combination of things. First of all, we had found all these fascinating attributes. You know, Pluto is a binary planet. We'd never seen anything like that.

It had an atmosphere. It has a moon that's half its own size and the balance point, like binary stars, between the two bodies. That's a science fiction planet. We don't have anything like that. in our solar system. It is in a very unusual orbit that is indicative, in fact, of being in the Kuiper belt, you know, its location. It has an atmosphere and a very complex surface composition. And these things all conspired to be scientifically seductive to many planetary scientists. But also there was the beck and call of exploration. You know, there was unfinished

business. We had explored all the planets from Mercury to Neptune, not Pluto. And even, you know, And what really made the difference was the discovery of the Kuiper Belt, because then the National Academy of Sciences ranked this mission at the top because we realized there was a whole new class of planets, the dwarf planets, that deserved exploration as had the giant planets and the terrestrial planets. So why was it so hard then to get the mission okay? Well, read the book. It's a great book. When we started, we didn't think it would be so hard. And a number of things happened. First of all, senior people in the field at the time in the 90s, you know, they said, you know, we should be doing more Mars missions.

It's closer. Why will we fly something out there that takes 10 or 15 years? I had a very senior scientist say to me after I made a presentation. He said, 2015, everyone will be dead by then. So, you know, and then we had other twists and turns. David writes it very well. One time, we were on the verge of getting a new start from the agency in Congress, and a Mars mission blew up just before arriving at Mars. I remember that.

And the money was taken to replace that, and we were set back to square one. This kind of thing happened again and again. Describe how hard it is to get something okay. Yeah, well, it's always a challenge. I mean, one reason I like this story is because people know that we've explored the planets, and they're excited about that, but they really don't know the backstory of what it takes long before you get to the launch pad, the challenges you have. And there are all these hurdles of you have to get to.

get your community of scientists behind it, so they rank it high enough so that, you know, it's competing with all these other missions. And then, of course, you have to get Congress to fund it. But for this mission in particular, because it took so long, the rules kept changing, and the players kept changing, the people that had to approve it. So finally, they get, you know, what's called a new start, which is Congress has allocated the money and it looks like it's going to happen. And then we get a new presidential administration, the Bush administration.

And they say, no, we're changing our priorities, and they cancel it. So, you know, you're not even dealing with the same powers that be. They keep shifting, and you have to start over. Now that explains why today we see so many different administrations coming and going and different directions to NASA, planetary exploration. Are we in that same sort of? I think we're in a better place now, actually. With the decadal survey process that was invented in the early 2000s,

it's become much more orderly. Our number 844-724-8255. They can also tweet us at Cy Fry. Okay, let's go back to the mission then. July 2015, we made it, and we got beautiful pictures, a year's worth of data. Pluto became this really living, breathing world for a lot of us, active geology. That heart-shaped spot, we all saw it. Now you can't get it out of your mind, right?

Do you have any favorite finding? What's your favorite? I'm sure you've been asked this question. Sure, and I have lots of favorites. It's like your children, right? It's like your children, you know. But unlike my children, I can talk about my favorites. Okay.

And the one that I really like to point out, the discoveries about liquids. We have strong evidence that there's a global ocean under Pluto's surface like Europa. A water? A water ice ocean, thank you. A water ice ocean like Europa or Enceladus. And we see places on the surface that look like liquids flowed, or at least slurries flowed. We see evidence for a liquid layer under that big heart-shaped region, which is the giant glacier called Sputnik, made of nitrogen. And there's even a place with a 20-mile-long, apparently a frozen lake in a mountain valley.

It's amazing. My jaws are undropping now. How could that exist so far away in a liquid state? Well, the dominant volatile material on the surface is nitrogen. And the current conditions on Pluto's surface are below the triple point, meaning. the pressure and temperatures are too low to allow liquids to stand on the surface or to flow on the surface. So these are clues. It's like an episode of a CSI or something, right?

You know, apparently Pluto had a thicker atmosphere in warmer surface conditions with higher pressures at least once, but we actually think cyclically in the past due to polar tilt shifts called obliquity cycles or Milankovic cycles. David, is an astrobiologist. I know you're nodding your head up and down, like, yeah, maybe there's life in those ocean? As an astrobiologist, I'm totally thrilled by the results of New Horizons. First of all, just for the way that it illuminates this whole new type of planet, and once again surprises us and busts our paradigms about the range of types of planets that are out there and the range of types of environments that are out there.

But specifically, it looks as though Pluto probably does have a liquid water ocean underneath its surface. And, you know, as far as we understand the conditions for life, what do you need? You need water, you need organic molecules, you need energy. Pluto probably has all of them, and so it has to now be added to the list of places in the solar system where there could be life, and that's pretty exciting. And where we should do a real search for that, and that calls for going back with an orbiter. I'm Ira Flato.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you just joined us, we're talking to Alan Stern and David Grinspoon, authors of Chasing New Horizons, Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto. And I have to say, you know, I read a lot of science books. The writing in this is just wonderful. Thank you. Well, thanks a lot. And I know, David, you've done a lot of writing, so it shows.

Yeah, well, you know, Alan's a really good writer, too. And this was a real collaboration. I mean, I wrote a lot of the first drafts, but that was after conversations with Alan where he, you know, he opened up his brain to me, and there's a lot of good stuff in there, a lot of memories. But then we really workshop the chapters and rewrote each other stuff a lot in it. So it's the result of both of our minds applied to this. Okay, I agree.

Let's go to the phone. So Gary in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Hi, Gary. Hi. Go ahead. Yeah, I have always wanted to know how it is that we fly these very fragile spacecraft through the asteroid belt. Well, that's a good question. And by the way, go Packers.

But, you know, the asteroid belt, when you see a textbook or a magazine article, it usually looks like it's some sort of shooting gallery. Or a Star Wars movie where they have to go through the asteroid field. Exactly. But it's actually very empty place, and the odds of getting hit are very low. The main thing that is out there that poses a danger are small micrometeorite particles, the size of grains of sand or maybe pellets of rice. And you may not know this, but NASA spacecraft that crossed the asteroid belt, light new horizons, actually, wear a Kevlar shield. A bulletproof shield made the same stuff as a SWAT team's bulletproof shield. Kevlar. Yeah, you say one of the biggest dangers that you face the unknowns was actually

that maybe there are hidden moons of Pluto that you don't know about and debris around there. In our case, we started to find more and more moons of Pluto using the Hubble while we were on approach. We were worried that if there were unseen moons, they could generate rings and that flying through that kind of debris really could be too much for the Kevlar shield and could take the spacecraft out. We have tweets, lots of tweets coming in. Mark says, what do you hope to find with New Horizons flyby of the Kuiper Belt? Well, on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day this coming year, New Horizons is going to conduct

another flyby, a billion miles beyond Pluto. It's unimaginable almost. But we've been traveling fast for another three years, and we are going to one of these building blocks, Kuipur belt object, building blocks of small planets like Pluto. Nothing like this has ever been explored before. We really don't know much about it. We don't know what to expect except it's ancient. It's been cold and kept in the deep freeze since formation.

We're going exploring. What is the Kuiper Belt? The Kuiper Belt is the third zone of the solar system. It's a disc or a belt beyond the orbit of Neptune of comets, planetesimals out of which planets were formed in dwarf planets. that is kind of the solar system's attic, if you will, leftover bits and planets from the formation days of the solar system. So there could be lots of things in there.

Yeah, so Pluto is about 2,400 kilometers in diameter. The target that we're going to, which has been nicknamed Ultimuth Tully, a Norse phrase that means beyond the farthest frontier, is about 25 kilometers across, 1% the diameter of Pluto. But it may have moons. There's some evidence for that. It may be a binary itself, and it probably holds clues to the formation of the solar system. We're going to fly much closer than we flew to Pluto and have, I think, even more spectacular imaging.

I can't wait. Well, we're going to take a break and come back. I'll talk lots more with Alan Stern and David Grinspoon, offer of chasing new horizons inside the epic first mission to Pluto. And after the break, we're going to talk about should we, a little bit more, should we go back to Pluto, the case for an orbiter to probe, to probe the planet's moons, hunts for an ocean, and more. Why Pluto instead of maybe the moons of Jupiter? Well, lots of ocean, the stuff that we're going to talk about after the break. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. We're talking this hour about Pluto with the authors of chasing new horizons inside the epic first mission to Pluto with Alan Stern and David Grinspoon. And as we were going to the break, we were playing some music that you guys would recognize. David, you want to tell us about that? Yeah, well, and I also have to mention that intro music you just use. I'm your Venus.

Thank you for that. But, yeah, the outro music that you played right before the break, a song called Faith of the Heart. It's actually the theme song for one of the Star Trek series, and that song has a role in the New Horizons mission. And we talk about it in our book, Chasing New Horizons, because when the team was waking up, New Horizons from hibernation. And hibernation is an interesting part of the story because it was an innovation of this mission. Since you're going nine years,

you find a way to put the spacecraft to sleep and then wake it up. It helps in a lot of ways. But when they were waking it up, they decided they need a wake-up song, just like the astronauts is tradition. They have a wake-up song. So they chose this song, Faith of the Heart, and they chose it because it's got a space association with Star Trek, but also it's a story of kind of an epic journey.

and, like, achieving, you know, succeeding against all odds. But it also, it talks about, I've got faith, the faith of the heart. And the funny thing is, when they picked that song, they had no idea that when we finally got to Pluto much later, what's the first thing you see and what's the first thing you think of when you see Pluto, a big white heart. So it turned out to be so much more appropriate than even, you know, they could have imagined when they picked the song for New Horizons.

That's great. In the few minutes we have, let's talk about the future. Let's talk about the idea of sending a probe around? An orbiter. An orbiter around the planet. What would it do? I'm going to give you a blank check now. I know you'll never get another one.

Right. It's going to be the equivalent of Galileo or Cassini for the Pluto system. It's going to explore the surface and atmosphere of Pluto. It's going to dip down in the atmosphere and actually sample it with mass spectrometers and other devices. It's going to have very sensitive radio tracking to find that ocean, how deep it is, under how much ice, It's going to bring radars so we can look through the glacier to find its depth. It's going to map every part of Pluto. New Horizons only mapped about 40% as we flew by one hemisphere.

It's going to make close flybys of all five moons, and it's going to do more. But it doesn't exist even on paper yet. Studies are taking place right now, as we speak, in several places for how to do this mission. And, David, what instrument, what be your dream instrument as an astrobiologist to have on that? Well, I mean, the first thing I want to do with an orbiter is see the other side of Pluto. I mean, you know, with a flyby, you have to pick one hemisphere to fly by. And we did, and one of the innovations on New Horizons was there was this great telescope, this instrument called Lorry, where you could see what is now sort of the lesser-known side of Pluto from a distance.

So we have some idea of what it's like, but to map the entire surface, now that we know what an enticing place it is. But as an astrobiologist, of course, I really do want to know what's underneath and if there is an ocean. So I think gravity monitoring of the spacecraft, which you do just by monitoring its orbit with Doppler very carefully. And who knows, maybe, since you're giving me a blank check, maybe some kind of magnetic sensing of the interior of the planet and seeing what's underneath that ice. You know, we don't usually get offered a blank check, so we're going to now have to kind of redesign this mission. And it's just as fictional as the one in my back pocket. Let me see if I can get a last question before we go. Victor in San Francisco.

Hi, Victor, are you there? Oh, let me try to push the button again. Hi, Victor. Hi. Hi, go ahead. Just a quick one. How are they able to get such high-resolution images and videos from so far away? Alan?

Yeah, well, it's because we're not so far away. We actually go close to Pluto and it's moons, and we have more than just telephoto lenses. The Lorry instrument that David was just talking about has its own telescope, about the equivalent of a very high-tech Celestron 8 or Mead 8, that gives us this tremendous resolution. Could it eventually go out as far as Voyager is now? Oh, absolutely.

The spacecraft is escaping the solar system, so it's going to go that far. It's got enough power in the nuclear battery to operate another 20 years. And we have plenty of fuel on board. We may even be able to find another. fly-by target after Ultimatouli. But at the very least, it could do a Voyager-like mission when it finishes exploring the Kuiper Belt.

So are you actually mapping that out? We are. In fact, very few people know, I'll say it on your show, that although we're making a close fly-by of Ultimuteli, we've studied already about a dozen other corporate belt objects with that telescope, Lorry, and we'll be studying at least two dozen more this year, next year, and in 2020. Is possible to find something as magnificent as Pluto out there? There may be, but we're not going to go close enough to get those kind of surface details.

David, you've given you last word because you're sitting here like, you know, a dog looking at a bone. You're talking about what's going to happen next and in the future and ultimately to New Horizons, and I think it's worth pointing out that no matter what, New Horizons is now on a trajectory that it will inevitably leave our solar system, leave the Sun's gravitational influence, and it will become the fifth artifact of our civilization to forever wander the galaxy. outlive our civilization, even outlive our planet. So Alan and his team created something that not only was a wonderful mission of exploration in our time, but something that, like only other four human artifacts so far, will truly live forever. That's great.

And it's a great book, Chasing New Horizons, Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto with Alan Stern and David Grinspoon. Thank you both for dropping by today. Thank you. Thanks so much for having us. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about space warps, Continuing our space theme, you know, you guys helped us find gravitational lensing out there. We had a million people who were participating in this, so we'll talk about some of the results. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. And as I say, last week we challenged you to help us spot galaxies magnified by other galaxies, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. And the project was a collaboration with the citizen science platform Zooniverse, you know, and then we called it Space Wharps. And you really stepped up to the plate and met the challenge because just an hour after the announcement, you citizens, astronomers already studied 30,000 galactic snapshots to determine whether a gravitational lens was hiding in there.

And those sparkling blue, red, and orange galactic shapes, it's truly been a global science project because we had people helping across the U.S. We also had people in China, in Europe, Australia, and Russia, like super user Dolores Ed, or, Ivan Terenshevik, or Petrovatstak, whom we caught up with yesterday on Skype. My name is Ivan Turingtiv. I'm amazed because I never thought I was able to participate in something like this. And I think it sounds great to try to discover new galaxies because I think it's very interesting and the ability to directly help to the scientific progress. And now with Ivan's help and all of yours, we have, as I say, broken one million classifications. and there were some surprises, the galactic treasures lurking in that data.

You can see photos up at Science Friday.com slash spacewurps. And we have invited back our experts from last week to tell us about them. Laura Truy, Vice President of Citizen Science at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and co-lead of Zuniverse. Welcome back. Thank you. Happy to be here again. We're happy to have you. Apragetta Verma, who is a senior researcher.

NASA Physics at the University of Oxford in England and co-founder of Space Works. Welcome back. Thank you very much. So Laura, run down a number for us. How did our listeners do? It was amazing. So in just one week, this was a really ambitious goal we had set of a million classifications. And we did it. This morning, we passed that one million classification mark. And thousands of people participated, as you mentioned, from all around the world. Right after that announcement last Friday, we had over a thousand people on the site providing hundreds of classifications a minute. And I'm happy to say as the lead of the web development team, our site handled that load beautifully. That's great. Our project, let's talk about some of the most

interesting candidates. Our listeners identified some unusual galaxies lurking out there. Yeah, it's been really quite amazing to see kind of this breadth and scale of images that we've found that are really quite interesting and plausible candidates. So we've got, we've got, we've highlighted a few on the web pages that just kind of display how I think probably the most critical thing that citizens are really flexible in terms of what they discover. So human pattern recognition has been kind of very well executed in this project, something that kind of computers don't really do as well. So, yeah, so I mean, shall we talk about? Yeah, you found a really old galaxy, didn't you?

Yeah, so one of the lenses that we found basically is quite an old galaxy. It's about 6 to 8 billion years old. So that's about two-thirds of the age of the universe. So we're really peering back into the distant

universe. I also saw on the website that there was something called I had never seen before. Maybe you have a triple lens galaxy. So, yeah. There's basically galaxies or galaxy groups that have the potential of kind of lensing not just one background galaxy, but multiple background galaxies. And typically we've only seen doubles, but they're extremely rare.

So the fact that we've kind of maybe identified a plausible one in this first batch of about 70,000 images is really quite remarkable. And Laura Truy, do you have a favorite? I really enjoyed one that was, it's a group of galaxies one that, so you see two arcs. The researcher who first commented on it and talked called it the C3PO lens because it looks like two eyes. But what I enjoyed about that discovery was the subsequent conversation between the volunteers in our, so every project has a discussion forum. And so they were chatting about it. And one of them thought, oh, I think that's been already seen before. and then another responded, like, maybe, oh, maybe it was this one, but no, it didn't look exactly like that.

And so they confirmed that, no, this truly was a new discovery of a new lens galaxy from a group of galaxies. That discussion is just fascinating. It's also fascinating for me as a layperson looking at all the pictures of lenses, is that they all look so different. I mean, is that a project of where the human spotting abilities come from? And we talked about this last week, about how, no matter how good AI is, humans are still better at it. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

So we can kind of tune these algorithms to find these things automatically. But we kind of specify what they should see. So with machine learning, we give them a training set. So really, their performance is only as good as that training set that we provide. And since we only know about, you know, 1,000 lenses, that kind of limits the configurations and the possibilities. But as you can see from kind of the images that you're seeing, there's so much diversity that actually humans are able to adapt.

So they'll take what they've learned from the training images. And for example, if we look at kind of the first object, which is on the list, which is kind of a blue, multiply image quasar, we think, around a red galaxy. And you can look at the second one, which is object number 21043058. That's also, we think, a very similar lens, but it has red point sources rather than blue.

Now, for a human, that's kind of a logical step that you see point sources in the blue, you see point sources in the red. They might be the same object. But for a computer or an algorithm that's been trained probably only on the blue, they could easily miss these kind of redder objects. And so I think there's a lot of strength

in doing these kind of citizen science, projects because not only do we find more diverse lenses, we can also use the fact that we're finding more lenses, more unusual lenses, but also the things that look like lenses but are not to train these machine learning algorithms. So the data set will get back will be a huge advantage. Fascinating. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking about our SpaceWorps project with the Laura Truey and a project of Verma. Our number 8.000. 447-2485. And what we did so well on this

that you've actually expanded the sample set now, right? So there's more classifying. We did it too well for you. I had a bit of a shock this morning when I got some citizens telling me that they were only seeing training images. And I was like, oh, no, we've kind of run through everything that we initially thought we could manage in this first week.

So very quickly, we uploaded a few more data sets. So we have another 60,000 galaxies in the mix now. There's another about 200,000 left to do as well. So there's plenty still to be done. So please keep engaged. And in fact, yeah, well, in fact, if you go to our website at sciencefrily.com slash spacewarpes, sciencefriety.com slash space warps, you can see a lot of these things on there. They're beautiful.

Let's go to William Garner in Sabine, Texas. Hi. Hi, Ira. Hi, William. How are you doing this? Fine. Do you have a question for us? No, sir.

I don't have a question. I was a citizen scientist who helped with the project. Oh, so that's terrific. Tell us what you found. Did you see anything really interesting? Oh, I found lots of interesting images. I may be classified five, six thousand images. it'd be hard to pin down which one was my favorite because just like Laura said last week on the program,

every classification counts, even the ones that aren't of gravitational lens objects. Wow, wow. And did you enjoy the experience? Oh, yes, sir. I definitely enjoyed it. Doing science gives you such a rush of, it's a mixture of pride and accomplishment, knowing that you're contributing to this grand quest humans are on to understand the universe around us. All right, let me see if I can get another member of our citizen science, Paula Anderson in Philadelphia.

Hi, welcome. Hi, great to be here. Tell us what your experience was like. Well, I was listening to the program last week, and this was the first time I heard about the Space Corps program, and I went, and I was actually out with my kids, and I made a note on my phone. And when I got home, I downloaded the Zuniverse app and logged in, and I was able to start going through images almost right away while I was in the room with my kids. It was great because I didn't have to retreat to my computer. All right.

Thank you very much for taking time to talk to us today. And that's about all the time we have. I want to thank my guest, Laura Truy, Vice President of Citizen Science at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and Approjecturemberma, Senior Research for Astrophysics University of Oxford in England, Both of those, my guests are co-founders of Space Warps. Thank you for joining us. And congratulations on a really successful effort. It's been great working with you.

Thanks so much. Yeah, thank you, I, and thanks to all the citizens. Thanks to all of them. One last thing before we go, I've got a pop quiz for all you New York listeners. What has science beer and yours truly making bad science puns all night? It's Science Friday trivia. So join us next Wednesday, May 9th at the Bell House in Brooklyn for a night of geeky science trivia.

Some of our news roundup regulars will be there. In this battle of science wits, we want you to join us, too, so you can get more info and tickets at ScienceFriety.com slash trivia. That is going to be next Wednesday, May 9th at the Bellhouse in Brooklyn, ScienceFriety.com slash trivia. We hope to see you all there. We have technical help and engineering help from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, and Jack Harwitz.

And, of course, we're here all week, all week on the social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all over the place. And one last wish, happy Sinkan DiMio if you're celebrating. I'm Ira Flato in New York.