Science Friday - Telescope Decisions, Grape Plasma, Israeli Moon Lander. Feb 22, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: February 22, 2019

The American Astronomical Society meeting is the largest annual gathering of astronomers and astrophysicists. It’s not known for drama. But this year, the buzz in the room wasn’t too different from the nervous energy during an awards night. That’s because there is a competition underway for what will be NASA’s next big space telescope—the next Hubble or James Webb. There are four nominees, and eventually there will be a winner. Science Friday assistant producer Katie Feather reported on the event from the not-quite red carpet. Learn more about the nominees here. The painter Georgia O'Keeffe is known for her bold paintings of landscapes and flowers. Recently, scientists took a closer look at those paintings and noticed smaller details that O’Keeffe did not intend to include. They found “art acne”—small pock marks—on many of her paintings caused by age and reactions of the pigments. Marc Walton, co-director of the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts at Northwestern University and Art Institute of Chicago, talks about the chemistry behind the “art acne,” and how these paintings might be conserved in the future. From tenured physicists to home experimenters, many researchers have been plagued by a question—why do grapes spark when you microwave them? More than a few microwaves have been destroyed to answer this top physics question. A team of researchers decided to rigorously test this question so you don’t have to. Physicist Aaron Slepkov, an author on that study, tells us how grapes are able to harness the energy of these home kitchen waves and what this can tell us about the field of photonics. During the last sixty years, only three countries have sent landers to the moon: the U.S., China and the Soviet Union. Israel may become the fourth. On Thursday, SpaceIL—an Israeli company—launched the Beresheet spacecraft. If the spacecraft does reach the moon, it will be the first mission completed by a private company without the financial backing of one of the big space agencies. Jason Davis, digital editor for the Planetary Society, talks about what this mission means for lunar science and its implications for nonprofit and commercial companies sending missions to the moon. This week, talks between California state and federal government officials concerning rules for car fuel efficiency standards broke down. Under the Clean Air Act of 1970, California had previously been given special permission to set higher standards for mileage and fuel economy—but now the Trump administration says that only the federal government can set those standards. Lauren Sommer, science and environment reporter at KQED, joins Ira to discuss what that decision means, and what might come next in the confrontation. And finally Ryan Mandelbaum, science writer at Gizmodo, tells Ira about the Japanese mission to shoot a bullet into an asteroid and other top science headlines in this week's News Roundup. 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 Ira Flato coming to you today from the studios of KQED in San Francisco. Later in the hour, we'll be talking about art acne. These little dimples that are all over Georgia O'Keefe's famous paintings. But first, last night, Japan's Hayabusa II spacecraft made contact with the asteroid Ryugu, part of a plant to collect material from the asteroid's gravelly surface and eventually return it to the earth. Ryan Mandelbaum, science writer at Gizmodo is here to talk about the mission and other short subjects in science. Welcome back, Ryan. Hey, Ira, how you doing? Let's talk about this mission.

What's the goal here? Yeah, so they want to sample material from this asteroid Rugu and bring it back to Earth. So it's an exciting mission. It's really hard to land on an asteroid. So give us an idea of the sequence that's going on. Right, so just last night, so last night, right, they were orbiting this asteroid, and then they came in close. They shot a bullet made of the element tantalum at the surface, hoping to kick up some of the

gravel and then capture it in a little sampling horn. If they were able to actually get any of that sample, then they're going to fly it back to Earth and drop it off for us to go pick up. This has been kind of frustrating until now, right? They had a first mission that didn't go so well. That's right. So this is Hayabusa, too. Hayabusa, the first one, had a couple of mishaps before.

dropping off a capsule with some dust in it. And then this time around, they actually arrived at Ryugu, and the surface was the wrong texture. They thought that it was going to be powdery and it was more gravelly. So they had to go back to the drawing board and test this tantalum bullet on a new mixture to see if they could still pick up some of the stuff. So did it look like, as you say, it did knock up some dust from the asteroid? What's the timeline now for bringing it back? Yeah, so it worked in the first round of experiments. We won't know how much they picked up until it drops off the capsule, which should be in late 2020.

Oh, so we'll have to wait. We've got to wait. That's exciting. It's exciting, yeah. It's going to be awesome. Let's move back in time now. There's news this week about what may have led to the demise of the dinosaur. You know, it wasn't just the asteroid.

The asteroid idea is sort of getting modified lately, isn't it? That's right. In India, there's this enormous deposit of solidified lava called the Deccantraps, and people think that the Deccantraps might have been formed by a 66 million-year-old volcanic eruption. A volcanic eruption that big probably would have sent atmosphere, you know, gases into the atmosphere that could have partially led to the demise of the dinosaurs. So what's the mechanism by which the eruption would have killed off the dynos? Right.

So it would have deposited gases like CO2 and sulfur. and then it could have disrupted the food chain, perhaps caused plants to photosynthesize less. But the real thing here is that it's actually two teams, one of which is detecting this huge pulse of lava right before the impact happened. And the other is detecting that maybe a quarter of the lava came out before the impact and then most came out after. So there's this disagreement of just how much this volcanism leading to atmospheric change might have actually contributed. So the timing is important, plus you also have people who are not so on board with this idea to begin with. Yeah, it's right. Timing is everything here.

And I think that a lot of the folks, some of the folks at least who I spoke to did say, well, I'm going to think it's the asteroid until I have absolutely concrete evidence. So it's still going to be some more measurements until we have a yes or no for sure. And we'll never know. Well, that's the thing, you know. There are some scientists who love the idea. They love the chase more than actually figuring out the detail. That's right. And, you know, something that happened 66 million years ago, I mean, we're really piecing together a puzzle with a lot of the pieces missing.

There's a story this week about shark genomes. That's right. Shark genomes. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I mean, we all love the great white sharks, right? And one thing that people, one, I guess it's a urban legend. I don't know where this came from, but people think that sharks are resistant to cancer. Now, that's not true, but sharks actually do have this amazing,

genome that they sequenced. Where's Lauren? It's 50% bigger than the human genome. And a lot of these genes help it heal quickly. They repair cell damage. And there seem to be genes that help prevent cells from growing out of control. And what else is weird about this shark's gene? Well, I think that the weirdest thing here is just simply the fact that it's A, so big, and B, so, you know, just has all.

of these weird properties that make it so, you know, resistant to disease and to, well, sort of cancer, things like that. So we could, you know, probably make use of for people knowing about the shark gene. Yeah. If you study something like this long enough, maybe we'll come up with some, you know, wild new way to cure cancer. We don't know for sure yet because this is just step one is sequencing the genome, but from here, you know, more research ensues, right?

Right. And finally, in other health news, the FD is the FDFECD. has a warning for it. That's right. Don't inject yourself with young blood. This is a thing, right? This is a thing that people do. Yeah, it is a thing.

It's, there's this, you know, there is preliminary research in mice that shows that if you, the blood of younger mice is different from the blood of older mice and that it did seem to help the health of these older mice if they injected the younger blood, if they infused the younger blood into the older mice. But that's not, that doesn't say very much about us as people. This isn't something that's been clinically, you know, that hasn't gone through rigorous clinical trials and there's no proven benefits yet. And so you have people who, it's shady.

People are like, oh, come join my secret clinical trial and we'll, you know, inject young blood into you and you'll live forever. And everybody's like, yeah, that sounds great. But don't do that. And the FDA has a warning for companies that are trying to sell this idea. That's right. You know, people are seizing on the sort of the nascient but inconclusive science right now. So they're basically saying don't fall for this yet.

Yeah, wow. Thank you, Ryan, for keeping us up to date and further warning. Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me again. You're welcome. Ryan Mandelbaum, a science writer at Gizmodo. Now it's time to check in on the state of science. Science.

This is KERNO, St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance that we think are really important to talk about. And one of them is this. For decades, California has set its own tailpipe emission standards for cars at level sometimes higher than federal standards. So many cars are driven in California that the standards it adopts are used by 13 other states. So you have a total of 40 percent of all. all the cars driven using California standards,

and this week talks between California and Washington concerning rules for car refuel fuel efficiency standards broke down. The White House said that the Trump administration had decided to discontinue discussions with the California Air Resources Board, the state agency charged with regulating air quality. This is just the latest in the series of challenges that California has brought against the Trump White House. And joining me now to talk about what all that. that means and what might happen next is Lauren Summer, Science and Environment Reporter at KQED. Welcome

back, Lauren. Yeah, hi, thanks. So what's the backstory here? Why did California have different fuel efficiency standards and whatever other than the national standards? It goes back to 1970, a long time ago, right, where in California had a really serious air pollution problem. I mean, people saw pictures of L.A. back then where you literally couldn't see the skyline at all. And so when the Clean Air Act was passed by Congress, it gave California special permission to have tougher car rules to help clean up their air. And it's been going on ever since. And these standards are not, as I say, used just by California, right? No, I mean, obviously since California is taking on some very ambitious climate change goals, and many other states have been supportive of that, as well as kind of this

tougher air pollution. So a lot of states signed on to California's rules. And under Obama, he actually signed on to California's rules, too. So there was kind of this marriage of California and the federal government, and now that marriage seems to be breaking up. Give us an idea of how much tougher were they than the federal standard. Yeah, well, it's a little different. California does it by tailpipe because only the federal government is technically allowed to regulate fuel economy. But what the Trump administration is proposing is that instead of having the fuel economy standards gets tougher year over year all the way to 2025, he wants to freeze them starting in 2020. So essentially, they would not be getting stricter.

And that's a really big problem for California is what they're saying. So there is California is now sort of in another. squabble with the White House? Yes. So, I mean, reports had been that California and the Trump administration's had been talking to see if they could kind of come to some agreement. The automakers want that to happen, actually. They don't want two different sets of standards where it's maybe states, some states do

some, and then... They have to build two different cars, right? It's a nightmare for them. It's a lot. And so they're asking, actually, for fuel economy to get tougher, which is not what the Trump administration wants to do. But so then California has been trying to talk with the federal government to work it out, and that doesn't have seemed to have worked at all.

Because this week, the Trump administration decided it was done negotiated. It was done. And the Trump administration is now telling California it doesn't want California to go its own route, which has never happened before. California has certainly had disagreements with the federal government over this. But now the Trump administration is saying, well, even if we don't have stricter fuel economy, we don't want you to have your own separate rules. And California is very much threatening to sue over that right now. And of course, this is not the first suit that California, the first,

challenge California's making to the federal government. But you're saying, like these other suits, they're going to wind up in court. Courts will be deciding this. For sure. This is going to be a really, I think I've even lost track of the number of environmental lawsuits, California plans to file. But what's interesting is the science is really going to be important here. The Trump administration is saying that these kind of less stringent fuel economy rules are going to save lives. It's some kind of interesting process where they're saying that people will drive more if fuel economy is tougher. And so what's interesting is that the scientists that are actually cited by the federal government

have come out and said that they don't think their research is being used the right way by the Trump administration. And so what the numbers are behind these fuel economy standards and the science is going to be a big point of contention going forward. Why are we not surprised? I feel like I've talked about this before. And we'll have you back next time. Thank you.

Thanks. Lauren Summers, Science and Environment Reporter at KQED. We're going to take a break, and after the break, a question that has been plaguing scientists for years. Maybe you, too. Why do grapes create a fireball when you microwave them? Do you know about that? It's all over YouTube and scientists have been talking about it. We'll be right back and talk about the science behind this.

This is not something you necessarily want to try at home. So wait to hear us talk about it and then decide how many ovens you want to get rid of. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Physicists work to answer some of the biggest questions out there, like, what is dark matter? Can we unite relativity and quantum mechanics? And why do grapes produce a fireball when you microwave one?

What, you haven't heard of that mystery? Yes, if you microwave a grape, it can explode in a violent, dangerous fireball in your microwave oven. And there are dozens of YouTube videos and scientists. who have wondered about this fruitful question. Now a team of scientists, having experimented and destroyed several microwaves in the process, has an answer. And we do not recommend that you try this at home. Their results were published this week in the journal,

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. My next guest is one of the authors on that study. Aaron Slepkov is an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having, Mara. You know, I had no idea that. How many physicists have been thinking, especially you, about this question for what? Over 20 years?

Well, I've been thinking about it for over 20 years. I was an undergraduate at a small university in 1995, and I saw a website in 1994 that mentioned this. We've been playing with it kind of ever since as a party trick, but we haven't been doing research on it for very long, only about five years. So your team decided to finally put this to... to the test? I wouldn't say we decided. I'd say we kind of fell into it. The project really started as a make-work project for some undergraduate volunteers

to keep them away from my laser in my laser lab. And they made headway right away, and it's blossomed to a project that involved over seven undergrads in the last six years or five years, and now we take it pretty seriously. You destroyed a couple of microwaves in the process. A grape can do that. Well, some were destroyed on purpose, and some were destroyed simply in the process of taking the measurements. A microwave oven doesn't like to be run empty. It's a cavity that builds up energy, and so usually you need some kind of load, you know, a bowl of soup or a steak.

And so if you just run a couple of grapes in the microwave, it can hurt the magnetron in the microwave after a while, but we've run thousands and thousands of trials before a microwave. You know, it doesn't really break. It just becomes less powerful, and it might. into the food room. So what did give us the answer? Why does the grape explode so violently? Well, so it turns out that water is very special as an optical material at microwave frequencies.

So at microaves, which operated at 2.5 gigahertz, water has an index of refraction of 10, which is very, very high. And what that means is that microbes can be trapped inside of a grape. and so a grape is just the right size. It turns out to be exactly one wavelength of microwave radiation long, and outside of the grape, the microwave is much, much longer. So it kind of gets trapped and sucked into the grape. So an isolated grape has these resonant modes inside of it

where it's hottest in the middle and they don't spark. But when you bring two of these resonant modes close together, two grapes close together, they kind of bond. there's an energy hot spot, an electric field hotspot right between them that can be many orders of magnitude higher than the electromagnetic energy that's inside of the grapes. So they kind of form a bonding mode right between them at the point of contact, and that seems to have a high enough electric field to ionize potassium and sodium that's in the grapes. Amazing. I'll have a tweet from Darren who says, okay, serious question, would carrots do this too?

Absolutely. The carrots would have to be sliced or balled up into something roughly the size of grapes. Any fruit that's water rich, really it's the water. That's one of the things that we discovered that grapes were a bit of a red herring. We were able to do this with hydro gel beads, which is just the same stuff that's in superabsorbent diaper material. It grows to about the size of a grape, at which point it's over and, 98% pure water. It's got no skin. And just the water ball alone is able to do that. Well, two of them in contact are able to do this. So grapes are fine, melon, olives, and blueberries. Can people at home safely set this up and try it in their microwaves? So I've been advised not to say yes, because everybody seems to say no. I have done it at home hundreds of times to no ill effect. And tell us exactly what you did that did not produce a smashing success, so to speak. Well, no, I've done it, and it works.

If you're going to try it at home, the best advice is to cut the grape in half and leave a little bit of the skin bridge. Now, that's the traditional way of doing this experiment, and a lot of the scientists over the past few years believe that the skin bridge had something to do with the effect mechanistically. But really, I think what we discovered is the skin bridge is just a way to keep the two hemispheres close together so that the grapes could bond in the same way that two whole grapes do work. But if you just put two whole grapes in the microaves, they're going to roll apart and they're going to separate. As soon as the grapes are more than a millimeter or two apart, they'll no longer form this effect. So we put, in all of our experiments, the grapes are in a little watchglass to bring them closer together.

But if you want to do it at home, just cut a grape in half, leave the two hemispheres. It's kind of bonded with a little bit of skin and run the microwave for 10 seconds. It usually should spark within 5 to 6 seconds. If it doesn't spark after 10 seconds, turn off the microwave. If it does spark, turn off the microwave after about a second or two of forming plasma. The biggest danger is that the plasma, it can grow in the microwave because it's resonant with the microwave radiation itself. And so it can leave the region of the grapes and go higher rises. The hot plasma rises to the ceiling of the microwave.

You don't see it there, and it's burrowing through the metal, and it's doing bad things. But we've never had any explosions or anything. The key is to turn off the microwave right away. Are there any follow-up acts for you on this one? What do you do next? Well, so Hamlet Katak, who is the undergraduate student who brought this past the finish line, he's been doing some very interesting simulations, trying to see if this is a dynamic process that's running away towards resonance

or running far from resonance. The point is that the water, being so interesting, changes its optical properties as it heats up. So the fact that locally, near the point of contact, it heats up differently than everywhere else, could mean that this phenomenon is self-tuning or maybe detuning, depending on the size of the grape. So we're doing some simulations.

And we're also, if you see some of the videos that are online, you'll notice that often the grapes or the hydrogels, they bounce, they vibrate very fast, and so we're investigating this mechanical motion. We feel that there's some very interesting physics in the mechanical motion. So it's really just a pure research project at this moment. Yeah, it sure is. Nothing wrong with that. Thank you very much for taking time to be with us today, Dr. Slopkoff. I'm so pleased to be on the show. Thank you very much for having me. You're welcome. I'm Slepkov and an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.

The painter Georgia O'Keefe is known for her bold paintings of landscapes and flowers. And when talking about those famous flowers, she said, nobody sees a flower, really. It is so small. We haven't time. And to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. She took her small observations and filled the canvases with bright colors and close-ups, so those flowers could not be. missed. But if you take a closer

look at those paintings, there is a detail that you might miss which O'Keefe did not intend. Scientists have found her paintings dotted with pockmarks due to age. Art acne, as it's called. My next guest is here to tell us how those small bubbles

appeared and what it means for conserving these pieces. Mark Walton is the co-director for the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts at Northwestern University and Art Institute of Chicago. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. How are you doing?

I'm doing fine. I'm quite fascinated by this. You're calling it Art Acne. Is this something you can spot by just looking at the painting? I love your quote from Georgia O'Keefe because it is the close looking of a painting that actually reveals these things. There are around 500 microns across, a little bit wider than a human hair. And if you look closely enough, you can actually see these protrusions forming. And Georgia O'Keefe herself saw these and commented upon them when she was during her lifetime. And it's been an ongoing problem with these works of art ever since. So how were you called in about these dimples? So I was called in because the conservator of the O'Keeffe Museum, Dale Croncright, was doing a survey of his collection. He realized

that paintings that she painted between 1920 and 1950 all had this distribution of protrusions across the surface. That's what we're calling this art acne, the little bumps that are forming on its surface, on their surfaces. And he wanted to understand more about the material aspects of it, how they're reforming, what are the underlying mechanisms, and then how can he monitor these things over the long run. For instance, he doesn't just want to know what they're going to look like in the next weeks or months, but he wants to be able to see how they're going to deform, change, how their shape is going to appear in the next decades and hundreds of years. Well, speaking of hundreds of years, decades or now, give us an idea of what is happening in the paint that is creating the acne. So this acne is a phenomenon where you produce soaps within the paint film. These soaps are long-chain organic complexes that have a carboxylic end group, which is really a carbon and two oxygens.

It has a really strong negative charge and interacts with anything that has a positive charge. And those things that are in the paint film that I interact with are pigments. Most abundant are things like lead white, which is a lead carbonate complex that will react with. filming a metal carboxylite. These then will transport themselves through that paint film, aggregate, crystallize, exert pressure on the surface of the canvas, and form these protrusions. And have you come up with a way to remove this acne? Well, we're not at that point yet. In fact, we are just trying to look at this, monitor them, trying to understand the underlying molecular mechanisms that are causing them to form.

and then maybe 10 years down the line we'll be able to come up with some sort of treatment. Pretty much we want to be able to put the painting in the best possible environment so it doesn't actually promote the growth of these sort of things. And that would be an environment where it should be appropriate type of relative humidity, light, temperature, oxygen,

to be able to prevent further growth of these protrusions. Does it get worse as the paint ages? Is there something happening there? So, you know, paintings are extremely delicate, surfaces and when they're exposed to the environment, they can undergo lots of different changes. It's a dynamic process. So as that painting goes into a new environment, as it travels, it can actually promote the growth of these things. And so what we're trying to do is really try to correlate when they're occurring, how they're occurring, what sort of environments that they

are going to be more prevalent in, and also what are the underlying material causes, such as maybe there was an intrinsic vice with the materials that O'Keeffe herself was used, and, and also, when she was painting these works of art. And we're trying to chase this down to really understand what are the root causes of the problem. Now, George O'Keefe didn't go to the paint store and make her own paint, just her own type. There must be a lot of other paintings

that have the same soap going on in the paint. In fact, there are many of them. This is something that is a problem on paintings across space and time. In fact, the first painting that this was discovered on was a Rembrandt. It was a colleague of mine at the Merritt's House Museum, in the Hague in the Netherlands, working on a Rembrandt painting in which she first discovered these things,

and that was around the mid-90s when she first made the discovery that this was a problem in paintings. And since that time, around 40 scientists across the world have been working on it, trying to understand it, and unpack what's going on within the paint films themselves. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm also interested in the process. You made a map of the surface of these paintings. You took photos of the surface. Tell us how you discovered them and how you actually made a three,

you could see the 3D of the images. Yeah, this is actually at the core of our research. A lot of people have looked at the molecular mechanisms to be able to produce them, but what we didn't really understand is how we can correlate all these environmental factors that I previously mentioned to the actual protrusions themselves. So we developed a three-dimensional imaging technique to be able to strip away color from the painted surface. and really look at the three-dimensional structure. So I've been working with our Department of Computer Science here at Northwestern,

with signal processing experts to be able to really understand what that surface topography looks like. When we first started down this path, we would have to use really very bulky, complex lighting stages. We would have to transport them down to New Mexico, and then we would have to manually do a lot of processing. And what we've been able to do is pare all that equipment down to a single device, an iPad or tablet, which has all the components already built in so we can create a three-dimensional

image of that surface extremely rapidly with just a consumer-based device. Can you make an app that everybody could use so they can discover it on their own paintings, painting and restoration people? This is what we've done. And we will be releasing this app for the iPad to be able to produce surface-shaped measurements of works of art, and hopefully we'll be able to release this to the conservation, to the museum community within the next couple of months. The idea here is to be able to make

both equipment, software that's readily available that helps museum solve problems of restoration in a more effective way. Other kinds of stuff. Use this kind. For example, does stained glass have this kind of problem also?

We are finding all kinds of different applications of our iPad device. One of the great strengths of it is that it really takes in the specular reflections off of a surface and is able to use those to be able to determine the 3D shape. So we've been using it on stained glass windows as well. We've been looking at Tiffany, works by Tiffany, by LaFarge, which are great stained glass

makers from the turn of the century and trying to understand where they got their glass, trying to trace it back to glass making factories by taking a look at the ripples or patterns in the glass that they used. And there's really no way to prevent this then from the outset, unless you change your paints or? Well, when we go, yeah, for the paints, it's very difficult to be able to prevent it. It's really caused by transport of water through that canvas. What is causing, it produces a hydrolysis reaction.

This reaction then promotes further growth and interaction with the inorganic parts of the paint. And it's part of the inherent vice of the type of materials that ours use anyway. It's the job of the conservator to be able to make sure that the painting is in the proper conditions, to be able to understand the material composition, to be able to ensure its survivability into the future. and so it can be enjoyed by many people for years to come. So our conservative has recognized this now as a real problem. It is one of the big challenges for painting conservatives right now is to really understand these material changes,

to be able to understand how soaps interact with the overall structure of the paint and understand the underlying agents of deterioration. Yeah, it's a big problem for painting conservators. Thank you for bringing this to our attention, Mark. It's a great pleasure. Thank you for having it. be. Mark Walton is the co-director of the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts at Northwestern University and the Art Institute of Chicago. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we've got a special report on awards season for telescopes. Yeah, this weekend's award season.

We have four nominees vying to be selected as the next flagship telescope mission, and we've got a report from the red carpet of telescopes. Didn't know it had one, huh? Stay tuned. Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. It's awards season, and not just for Hollywood. The American Astronomical Society meeting is the largest annual gathering of astronomers and astrophysicists. It is not known for drama. But this year, you could feel the nervous energy of awards night because there was a competition underway, a competition for what will be NASA's next big space telescope like the Hubble or the James Webb, there are four nominees, and eventually there will be a winner. Our producer Katie Feather takes us to the red carpet. At first glance, the exhibit

hall at the American Astronomical Society meeting is about as far from Hollywood as you could possibly get. Still, I flagged down University of Chicago sophomore Katya Gosman, decked out in conference swag, to ask her that most important red carpet question. Who are you wearing? The necklace is the constellation Lyra Pins. This one is I Need My Space. And then this one is from the Chandra Booth. So do you have any thoughts about the four space telescopes? Which one you're like a fan of or anything like that?

Well, that's a good question. They're all super cool. We spend a lot of time talking to the Lynx Telescope guy. The Lynx Telescope is one of the four nominees being considered in what's known as the Decadal Survey. a chance for the entire field of astronomy and astrophysics to weigh in on its scientific goals. The survey determines which telescope will receive billions of dollars of future NASA funding and shapes the field of astronomy for decades to come. This meeting is the last opportunity these four nominees have to get the word out about their projects.

The last chance to get the academy, I mean the community, on their side. So, without further ado. The nominees for Best Space Telescope are Habex, Origin Space Telescope, Louvoire, and the Lynx X-ray Observatory. Let's get started. Here's Grant Tremblay, aka the Lynx Telescope Guy, and his pitch for your consideration. We're really, really excited about our design for the Lynx X-ray Observatory. It would be by far the most powerful X-ray observatory ever flown by orders of men. magnitude across multiple dimensions, and it would do science from the poles of Jupiter to black

holes at the edge of time and everything in between. Grant shows me samples of the angled mirrors that will allow Lynx to listen to the sound waves being emitted by the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Links isn't the most innovative telescope among the nominees, more like a new take on an old classic, in league with movies like A Star is Born. But is that enough to win best telescope? Look, all of these missions would do absolutely fabulous science, and we're all going to be rooting for whatever mission gets selected, and that is the absolute truth.

I think of it sort of like the Oscars. Like everyone's been nominated, and they're all very happy to be here, yeah. Also, they just did great work. Right, but you're secretly pissed you when you didn't win. A ways down the dingy blue carpet from Team Links is our second nominee, the Origins Space Telescope, with some very impressive special effects, a full virtual reality experience. Can I try it out? I would love it if you try out the virtual reality experience.

And I'm going to pull your strap over the top. Right now I'm in a big galaxy. It's like a blue, there's pink and light blue swirls of stars. Whoa. Like its predecessor, the Herschel Observatory, Origins is an infrared space telescope. It will observe the parts of the universe. that are too cold and too faint to see with visible light. But it will do it one billion times as fast as Herschel ever could.

Snap your fingers twice, and in that time, origins will have already surveyed more sky than Herschel did in its entire year's long mission. As cool as that sounds, maybe the Decado Committee won't have an appetite for a next-generation infrared telescope, the same way the Academy might snub a historical comedy, like the favorite. Which one do you select, right?

what is the right criteria? And then what is comedy, right? Some people prefer slapsticks. Some other people like irony. Some people like, you know, they're different styles. Johannes Stagoon is principal scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the Goddard Space Flight Center. He's team origins.

But the beauty of science, of course, then, is we also have an objective regime of things where opinions are irrelevant. Scientific results have nothing to do with opinions. But if you have to decide between, you know, one mission, or the other, that's where the subjective component comes in. Elsewhere on the blue carpet, I make the mistake of bringing up Origins' flashy VR demo with John O'Meara, a member of the third team backing the Louvoire Telescope. You can't beat the Lego thing!

He points emphatically to a two-foot-high tabletop model of his telescope, Louvoire. And yes, it's made of Legos. L'OVois is on track to be the most expensive of all four telescope projects. But most people agree it's also the most ambitious. Louvre is a very large space telescope. The L in Louvre is for large. Louvoire stands for large, ultraviolet, optical infrared surveyor. It's Hollywood's big budget crowd-pleaser, like Black Panther and just as popular.

Its biggest mission will be the search for Earth-like planets outside our solar system, as many as it would take to provide a definitive answer to whether we are alone in the universe. Okay, now I'm going to ask you maybe the most challenging question that you've probably been asked about Louvard. Okay. Are you ready for it? Sure. If Louvard had a theme song, what would it be? The 1812 Overture.

Why is that? Because there's this great big build-up, and there's this theme that keeps running with it, you know, and it gets louder and louder and it weaves in and out of the music, and then at the end there's this giant crescendo, and that's the moment when all this great science suddenly starts hitting. We discover pale blue dots out in the universe. You're seeing the furthest galaxy's ever. We're seeing stars being born and die. It's just all the big hits come in when you turn that thing off. So you're waiting for it. You're anticipating what's coming in, and it's teasing you as the data is coming in.

And then when you look at the data and it's full form, and you see that you've answered a truly amazing question. That's when the fireworks go on. So why doesn't NASA just go all in for Louvoire? Four words. James Webb Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope. James Webb.

James Webb. James Webb. James Webb Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope was the top-ranking choice in the 2000 Decadal survey. And 19 years later, it still hasn't launched. Which is why for this Decadal, the teams are being extra careful, even coming up with a backup plan. We're looking at the kind of cost-constrained. We do this in the simplest, least risky, least expensive way and still be able to achieve this goal.

Scott Gowdy is community chair for the fourth nominee, the Habitable Exoplanet Observatory, or Habex. Habex is sort of an underdog. Netflix's Roma to the rest of Hollywood's blockbusters. Like Louvoir, it will also look for Earth-like planets outside our solar system. Just not enough to be certain that life doesn't exist elsewhere in the universe. Its main selling point is its cheap price tag, but both will give us a shot at directly observing, as in taking a snapshot of, an Earth-like exoplanet.

It would be a game changer. Even if the Decadal Survey doesn't choose one of these missions, eventually a decade-al survey will do this. This is the future of exoplanets. We do want to answer this question, are we alone in the universe? Is there life on other planets? And this is one of the only ways of doing it. There will be another Decatal survey in 2030.

By then, Hubble will be on the edge of retirement. The James Webb Space Telescope will have taken its place. And whichever telescope is selected this time around won't even exist yet. It will be more than a decade before links, origins, Louvoire, or Habex can show us the science they've promised. Because remember, this contest isn't for Best Picture. It's just to get the money to make the movie. For Science Friday, I'm Katie Feather. And you can learn more about the nominees and see them looking glamorous on the red carpet by going to Science Friday.com slash space awards.

Speaking of space in the last 60 years, only three countries have sent landers to the moon. They're the U.S., China, and the Soviet Union. Israel may become the fourth. Yesterday, Space I.L., an Israeli company, launched the Barachit spacecraft aboard an American SpaceX. rocket headed for a landing on the moon. And if it's successful, not only will Israel join the short list of successful moon landings, but this will be the first moon mission pulled off by a private company, most of its estimated $95 million budget coming from private and public donations. What does this mission mean for lunar science and the future of a nonprofit and commercial space

missions. Here to fill us in is Jason Davis, digital editor for the Planetary Society. He's based out of Tucson, Arizona. Welcome to Science Friday. Hey, Ira. Thanks so much for having me. You're welcome. So the Baratian lander wasn't backed by the Israeli government or a big space agency. How did it come about and get its funding? Yeah, so Space IL, the nonprofit you mentioned, they created this mission in response originally to the Google Lunar X Prize. And that was a contact with about $30 million on the line for a private company to launch a spacecraft to the moon, land on the moon, take images from the surface, send them back to Earth, and then move 500 meters. Space I.L. wanted to do this by turning on its engine again and kind of hopping to a new location.

There was a deadline of 2018. Unfortunately, none of the competitors were able to meet that deadline. However, by the time that happened, Space I.L. had... secured a launch contract and had nearly finished the spacecraft. So they went ahead and pressed forward with a mission. Like you said, they had private investors backing them, and they also were collaborating with the Israeli Space Agency. And finally, last night, late last night, the mission launched. It was a ride share with a couple other satellites on this Falcon 9 rocket from Florida.

And we just heard this morning that the spacecraft seems to be doing okay so far. It will take 40 days about to get out to the moon and spend about a week there orbiting the moon before it lands. So it'll be interesting to see if they're successful. And what kind of science is the lander going to do on the moon? Yeah, so it has one single science instrument because it was mainly designed to fulfill these goals of the XPRIZE, which was to send home pretty pictures. But it does have a magnetometer on board. And there's an open question about kind of the origin story of the moon and Earth. And one of the ways that you can unpack that is by looking at the magnetic field and rocks on the moon.

The area where it's landing, the Sea of Serenity, and it's actually one of the big dark splotches you can see from Earth when you step out in your backyard, if you look it up. Where it's landing, there have been magnetic anomalies detected, and actually the Apollo 17 mission landed on the edge of it. And by taking measurements in the magnetic field as it lands and then after it lands on the surface, this will hopefully fill in scientists on a piece of the puzzle that kind of tells this story of how the moon got a magnetic field originally and ultimately the origin of the moon and Earth. Amira Flater, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. A lot of this is just bragging rights, is it not? I mean, for Israel and sort of like a nascent space program like the United States had back in the 60s,

where it can use its space race to promote education, science, things like that. Yeah, Space I.L. has been very upfront about saying that one of their major non-tangible goals was to inspire more Israelis to pursue STEM careers. There's evidence that shows there's a decline in Israel of young Israelis pursuing those careers. So they kind of wanted to create this Apollo moment, just like you're describing, and inspire people to kind of take up the baton and get into these careers. But it's also, I guess, we're talking about it as being the only company to land on the moon. It's a private company. But this seems to be the trend that our president and other companies are trying to do there. A lot of private companies trying to get into space now and do major projects.

Yeah, yeah. So that is definitely the other angle of it that this will be a pretty big landmark when if they land successfully that a private company or a private nonprofit in this case has been able to do this. And yeah, like you said, this is a trend and the Trump administration has directed NASA back to the moon. This is, you know, one of many administrations that has tried to get humans back beyond lower Earth orbit. The difference is that they envision commercial companies and private companies playing a major role. role in this. So to kind of understand the background of that, you have to look a little bit at the economics of that. Why are these companies getting into it and who's going to be the main client for all of this? Right now that the majority of the funding would still come from NASA. That's obviously the biggest customer when you want to go to the moon or something like that. But NASA and some of these companies envision that one day you might be able to create kind of a self-sustaining ecosystem on the moon, a self-sustaining new business model where you have lots of companies. And companies and international partners all working together on the moon.

Now, NASA is doing a little bit to spur some of this, and it's a little bit confusing because there are some major NASA-owned components. They have a giant rocket system called the Space Launch System and a capsule called Orion that are very kind of traditional-looking solutions to this problem. They're going to build a small space station in lunar orbit that will have some involvement from the private sector there as well. But where these little companies come in is they want to start sending small payloads to the surface to kind of pave the way for humans. And we're talking about very small landers, kind of on the order of this Beresheet lander that just launched.

And they've already picked some of these payloads that they want to fly to the moon, and they will be essentially choosing private companies or asking private companies to step forward and ship these to the moon. They already have nine companies that they've picked kind of shortlisted for this. And then at the same time, you also have the kind of the flashier new space players, if you will, the SpaceX's and the Blue Origins. They have kind of been able to show that they would like to kind of bypass NASA's methodology altogether. SpaceX has a giant rocket system that they're working on. It's called Starship, and they want to be able to send that directly to the surface of the moon. Blue Origin has promised this Amazon Prime, if you will, kind of delivery system. And so these approaches are kind of, they don't right now fit into NASA's vision for all of this.

So we're still kind of waiting to see how it all shakes out in the long run and what the business model is going to be. Well, thanks for filling us in on the progress, Jason. Of course. Jason Davis, a digital editor for the Planetary Society. That's about all the time we have for this hour. Charles Berkwurst is our director, a senior producer, Christopher Taliatta. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather. We have technical and engineering help today from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, and Kevin Wolfe.

Our thanks to Jim Bennett and all the folks here at KQED in San Francisco. Of course, we're active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all the social media. If you have a smart speaker, you can ask it to play Science Friday whenever you want. So every day now is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato in San Francisco.