Science Friday - Three Missions To Mars, COVID Fact Check, Solar Probes. July 24, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: July 24, 2020

As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, your news feed is likely still overflowing with both breaking research and rumors. Virologist Angela Rasmussen of Columbia University joins Ira once again to Fact Check Your Feed, discussing everything from two vaccine trials’ hopeful early results to what antibody production might mean for long-term protection against the COVID-19 virus. They also discuss kids’ response to SARS-CoV-2—a topic of great interest to parents and educators trying to make plans for the coming school year—as well as the confusing terminology around ‘aerosol’ and ‘airborne,’ and research into mutations of the spike protein in one coronavirus variant. Recently, the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter satellite sent photos of surprising events on the sun’s surface. Scientists are calling these swirling areas “campfires,” though no one is quite sure what causes them. Joining Ira to talk about these new images is Anik de Groof, instrument operations scientist for the Solar Orbiter, based in Madrid, Spain. They talk about what kind of data the satellite is collecting, how COVID-19 impacted the mission, and what solar mysteries Anik is most excited to learn more about. This month, three different countries are launching missions to Mars—the first for The United Arab Emirates, China is sending an orbiter and a rover, and NASA’s Perseverance will join the Curiosity rover already on the ground. Amy Nordrum from MIT Technology Review talks about the science that each of these missions will be conducting.  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 Plato. Later in the hour, we'll explore campfires on the sun and help fact-check your COVID news feed. But first, this week, the Chinese entered what's turning out to be a Mars marathon, launching their rover and orbiter to the red planet. It's set to arrive next February. But wait, there's more, as Amy Nordrim, editor at MIT Technology Review, is here to tell us about it. Welcome back, Amy. Thanks, Ira.

This Chinese launch is just one of the... of three, right? That's right. We're in the middle of three launches this month to Mars. United Arab Emirates launched their mission on Sunday. China followed with its mission yesterday, and NASA is set to launch its mission on July 30th. And all these missions are distinct. The UAE sent an orbiter that will move around Mars called Hope. It has a special camera and two spectrometers, and it will focus on studying the composition

of the atmosphere and the famous dust storm. that Mars is known for. And China sent an orbiter, a lander, and a rover to Mars. It could be the second nation ever to land on the surface of Mars. And those missions are expected to arrive there sometime around the start of next year. You know, the Chinese, you know, maybe could have predicted they'd be sending an orbiter or a lander to Mars. But the United Arab Emirates, what are they in this for? Yeah, they are a newcomer and really pulled this together quite quickly. It's just a few years ago. their space program. And I think they approached it in a smart way. They relied on a lot of international collaboration to put this mission together. They launched atop a Japanese rocket

from a Japanese space center. And they worked with a number of collaborators at universities here in the United States to design their spacecraft. So they were able, almost like a startup, to really reach out and find the resources available to them and put together a pretty impressive mission. Yeah, so Mars is going to get pretty crowded after a while. That's right. Yeah, it's a particularly good time to go to Mars. Mars and Earth are closer than usual right now. It's a little bit easier, relatively easier to get there. And those launch windows come about once every two years or so. So Europe also has a Mars mission in the works, but they had to delay theirs until the next window, which will be sometime in 2022. So Perseverance will be NASA's second rover on the ground, right? At the same time, we'll have a couple.

Yeah, NASA is sending the Perseverance mission launching later this month. They're sending a rover, to explore a particular crater there that scientists think once had an ancient river flowing through it. And they've also put a little helicopter on board for the mission. It's called ingenuity. It's going to try to make a flight on Mars as well. It won't go far, but it'll be kind of a neat technology demonstration if it does work. Let's move on to your next story. It's a bit of a microbial mystery.

Scientists find microbes that eat metal. It sounds kind of interesting. Yes, it is. Caltech researchers have discovered two new types of bacteria that can metabolize manganese. So that's a metal commonly found in nature, usually combined with other stuff. And these bacteria use manganese to convert carbon dioxide to biomass, so essentially to make more of themselves. And there are other bacteria that are known to metabolize iron, which is another metal. But these are the first to do it with this particular kind of metal, which, as you say, is kind of neat.

Is this the first time that we have found microbes that eat metal? Well, there are microbes that do the same process called chemosynthesis with iron, but these are the first to do it with this particular metal called manganese. And the researchers found this bacteria in drinking water, and they think that it could help explain clumps of manganese oxide that are often found in municipal water drinking systems. It's a kind of black goo that can build up and plug pipes, and it results from this process of chemosynthesis that the new bacteria go through,

but it's not thought to be harmful anyway. Were they looking for this, or were this some sort of discovery they made while they were looking for something else? This was an accidental discovery. There's a researcher who had filled a container that had substance containing manganese in it with water and just left to soak because it was tough to get the substance off. And then it came back and he saw those goo had built up, and he was wondering what had happened and suspected that there might be microbes at work with this process of chemosynthesis.

So when he took a closer look, he indeed found several. That's cool. Let's go on to a study that looks at the carbon footprint of households in the U.S. What did they find there? Well, researchers from the University of Michigan this week published this very large analysis of carbon emissions associated with millions of individual U.S. homes. And they were trying to answer questions like what kinds of homes emit more greenhouse gases and where in the United States do homes use the most energy?

And they basically found that some of the biggest drivers of emissions associated with your home are the size of your home, which you might expect, but also the climate that you're in and the age of your home. So older homes tend to emit more. And homes in the Northeast, for example, which require a lot of heating, also emit more than homes in even the south, where there is a lot of air conditioning, but that's not necessarily as energy-intensive an activity.

They did find that homes in certain regions, especially in the Northeast, that require more heating and are perhaps older, were more energy intensive than those in other areas. And they also looked at trends based on income. So they found that the carbon footprint, for example, of wealthier Americans is about 25% higher on average than low-income residents. A lot of that has to do with the size of the home and perhaps the age of the home to some extent as well. And so that's interesting because here in the U.S., we're already one of the highest per capita emitters compared to other countries throughout the world. But there's also these large disparities within the U.S. between who is emitting more or less.

That's interesting. Does this tell us something about how the U.S. can reduce its carbon footprint? Well, they were looking at this bigger question of decarbonizing the electrical supply, so whether we could move toward renewable sources of energy and then, you know, perhaps get closer to some of the goals with emissions reductions, for example, that the Paris Agreement spoke to. And so they found that decarbonizing the electrical supply would be a very important step in that direction, but couldn't get us all the way there. So we'd have to do more beyond just the residential sector to really achieve some of those goals. So we'd have to address things like transportation and industrial building stock as well.

Yeah, those are some big numbers there to be at. Let's move on to your next story about tiny cameras for blood. blood vessels. Yes. Tell us about that. Yeah. Researchers in Australia and Germany this week reported what they say is the world's smallest imaging device.

So this is an indiscope, which is a medical tool or camera that physicians can use to look inside organs and other parts of the body. And this particular one that they made can fit inside of an artery, where it can help physicians look around for plaque and try to figure out whether you have harmful plaque or a plaque that's okay built up in there. So they made this tiny, tiny, tiny indefiards. by using a 3D printer that can print really small stuff right on top of an optical fiber. So it's no thicker than a human hair.

So they're not going to send this into the body, are they? It's just going to explore around or does it have a defined purpose, I'm supposing? Yeah, it's only been tested in mice so far. Their hope is that this would be a medical tool that physicians would use on human patients someday. But right now, there's only one printer like it in the world that can make this particular device, and so it's a proof of concept, and they would need to scale up their manufacturing abilities. But they do think that this kind of tool would be really useful in helping physicians figure out where to place a stint, for example, or how at risk certain patients are for heart

disease or heart attacks. That is quite interesting, because, you know, we find all kinds of secondary uses for these kinds of cameras. You build it for one thing, and it shows up somewhere else when someone says, hey, I've got a great use for that. Right. I mean, it could end up on Mars Sunday, We don't even know. I like the way you're thinking. Let's talk about in Germany, there's a giant scientific instrument buried under the ground. It sounds like something from the Avengers or a comic book. Tell us about it.

Yeah, this instrument is called a ring laser. It's the only kind like it in the world, and it's named Romi. It's really a collection of four lasers and mirrors that are used to point the lasers in a kind of inverted triangle shape. and then photo detectors that measure changes in the path of the lasers that are caused by outside forces. So this was built really to help seismologists measure rotational forces that are associated with earthquakes, and it's been doing that for the last couple of years. But this week, geophysicists reported that it can also apparently help research in another area involving the measurement of the rate of the Earth's rotation and the position of the Earth on its axis.

So it can pretty accurately measure these two things. And they're hoping that eventually this data could help us, for example, make GPS measurements more accurate, which I think we would all welcome. So how accurate is our measurement of the rotation of the Earth now and how much better might it be? Well, it could make it, they say, quite a bit better, but it would require some improvements to the device itself. Right now it's, I think, about 100 times less accurate than it could conceivably be. And so they're hoping that they can make some improvements.

they'll need additional funding to do that to the system. But this test at least showed that it is possible. And with those improvements, I think it could make our measurements more accurate than they're currently are today. Let's talk about another story you're working on, and that is a team of scientists built an uncutable material. This sounds so geeky. I mean, you know, hey, let's just sit around and, hey, hey, let's build something that's uncutable. We haven't, you know, done that before. It's a cool idea.

Yeah, it's a cool. You do it just because it's cool, right? You can imagine ways this might be useful. They had one case in particular that I found interesting having had a few bikes stolen. They think it could make really strong bike locks, perhaps. But yeah, these materials, engineers and researchers in Europe have designed this material that can't be cut using traditional saws or blades or even high-pressure water jets. It's made from ceramic grains that are formed into spheres and placed inside of an aluminum mesh.

And even though the materials they use to build this are pretty cheap and not that strong. on their own, it was able to hold its own against methods that could be used to cut much stronger materials like steel. And this material they made is much less dense and lighter. So they're hoping that it could be useful for a number of different applications. You know what's going to happen, right? Now that word gets out that we have built an uncutable material, the race is on to prove them wrong. Yeah, I mean, it very well could end up someday being cut by something. So they were careful not to say it's impossible to cut, but so far they haven't found any way

of cutting through this material that they built. All right. Thank you, Amy. Always a pleasure. Thanks, Ira. Amy Nordrum editor at MIT Technology Review. A brief program note, something very exciting. Starting Monday, August 3rd, we're hosting our first ever virtual conference for educators,

the Science Friday Summer Institute. So educators, join us to connect your teaching to the stories of scientists, and to collaborate with your colleagues. Here's how to do it. Go to ScienceFriiday.com slash summer institute to learn more and grab your tickets. That's sciencefriety.com slash summer institute.

We're going to take a break, and when we come back, it's time to fact-check your feed of COVID news from vaccine progress to kids and COVID. We'll answer a lot of these issues and little news clips that flood into your social media accounts. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato.

Chances are your news feed is still filled with ever-changing stories related to the COVID-19 pandemic. So what should you be paying attention to? Well, it's time to fact-check my feed with Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, joining me again to help fact-check your feed. for joining us today, Angela. Always a pleasure to be here, Ira. Let's begin with something that's always being asked. That is, what is the state of vaccine developments? There have been some really interesting initial reports this week. Hopeful news? Definitely hopeful news. It's still

preliminary news, but it's very promising. So on Monday, a study was released of the phase one to trial results from the Oxford vaccine. And last week, trial results were released from the phase one trial of the Moderna vaccine. And both vaccines appear to induce robust immune responses. Both of them also met acceptable safety profiles. Neither of these actually show that the vaccine works or that it's effective at protecting people from either being infected or protecting them from severe disease. But it's a very promising start. So it's great news that we can move forward with the phase three trials that will actually show that these vaccines are effective as well as safe. When you say vaccines, do you expect that we might have, if there are successful ones,

we may have competing, or just, if not competing, just different vaccination choices? I think that that is definitely a possibility. So there are over 100 different candidates in the vaccine development pipeline right now. These are just two of them that are furthest along in the process. And this process has been greatly accelerated, to say the least, compared to the clip that vaccine development normally proceeds at. So there's a very good chance that the vaccines that are furthest along may not be the best vaccines in terms of their efficacy. For example, these vaccines may not protect against being infected, but they may protect

against severe disease, which is still a huge public health benefit and would be tremendously important in terms of stopping the trajectory of this pandemic. But that said, for longer-term immunity, we may want a vaccine that is completely protective against even being infected. So I think it's a great idea. Also, in terms of availability, having more than one vaccine that is being manufactured potentially by a different process means that there might be more doses available for more people. And it's really critical that we get a critical mass of people vaccinated. So having multiple options is really a good thing. I don't think it's so much a vaccine race and that there's going to be one winner. I think there may well be

multiple winners of this vaccine race. Speaking of vaccines, there have been some troubling stories that have said that the antibodies from a COVID infection may not stay around for very long. What's the science on that one? So we have seen a correlation with disease severity and antibody titers and people who have milder or asymptomatic infections with SARS coronavirus too, tend to have lower antibody titers in general, and then these appear in some people to decrease over time. I think people have really misunderstood this because this is really the way the immune system works, is that after you become infected, there's a peak at which you have higher antibody tiders, and then they normally naturally decrease.

Not having detectable antibody tiders doesn't mean that you don't have immune protection. So antibodies are made by a type of immune cell called B cells. And when you become infected with the virus, you develop memory B cells. These B cells are secreting amounts of antibody over a period of time, and that does decrease after a while, but those cells are still there. And presumably, if you're exposed to the virus again, they will rapidly become reactivated and start making more antibody. So we don't have any evidence that suggests that this type of immunity doesn't last at all.

We also have some more evidence that T cells are probably very important for controlling infection. And people do have memory T cells that are generated from infection, as several studies have now shown. People also have T cells, memory T cells from other coronavirus infections. So the common cold coronaviruses that infect people that can cross-react potentially with SARS coronavirus too. So there's more than one type of immunity. There's more going on in the immune system besides just nutrients.

neutralizing antibody titers. And so far, this evidence, while it's something to watch, and we need to understand protective immunity better for this virus anyways, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are less immune or that you don't have any immune protection against reinfection. There's also no evidence that people are being reinfected. At least, you know, there's nothing documented that shows that people have been reinfected, which does suggest that most people who get SARS-coronavirus-2 infection probably have some level of protective immunity. Yeah, that was my next question, because my feet has been full of ideas of can you get reinfected, stories of people who can, cannot, and you're saying at this point there's no

evidence that people can get reinfected. Yeah, so this is something that has been, I think, very confusing, and it's something we really don't know much about, but there has been some work done to actually determine if people are reinfected. So we have already seen since really since February, there have been reports of people who test negative. They recover from SARS-Coronavirus to or COVID-19, and then they test positive again. And the South Korean CDC actually investigated this. They took almost 300 people who had been negative after recovering confirmed cases that tested positive again. And they did two things. First, they did an epidemiological study where they talked to all the people that they'd been around since recovering and determined that there were no new cases of

transmission that were linked to these people who then tested positive again, suggesting that they're actually not transmitting the virus to anybody. They also did a virology study in which they looked at whether or not these people were actually shedding infectious virus. And they found in zero cases out of, I think, 285 that nobody had infectious virus. So that likely suggests that people who test positive again are just those tests are detecting residual virus that hasn't yet been cleared, but virus that's not infectious, importantly. So we don't really have any documented evidence of reinfection in those cases. There have been reports of people who have recurrent symptoms or who have persistent symptoms that don't go away. And we're just starting to understand why that is.

There could be cases, and we've seen this for other viruses, notably Ebola virus. We discovered during the West African outbreak that in some people, Ebola virus can persist in certain tissues, so-called immunologically privileged sites where they can essentially hide out from the immune system. So we don't know if that's going on with this virus, and it's a possibility that we need to look into. It's also possible that people, the so-called long haulers who have recurrent or persistent symptoms, are actually suffering from, inflammatory conditions that were triggered by the initial infection, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they've become reinfected or that their infection has reactivated or has reemerged essentially in those people. We just really need to know a lot more about it. A lot of discussion these weeks about going back to school and one of the talking points you

often see from people in favor of schools opening for in-person instruction is that, quote, kids don't get it or kids don't pass it as much as others? What do we know about kids and COVID? Well, we know that kids certainly get it. Not only do kids get it, but they can have the same viral loads as adults, including adults in the highest risk group, so adults 80 and over. So kids are definitely not resistant to infection. They are susceptible to infection and they can be infected. The data is a little more conflicting about how frequently children transmit the virus to others. However, there have been documented cases of people contracting the virus from infected children in their household. So kids can transmit it. We also know that kids do have, at least

symptomatic children, have infectious virus that they are shedding in their nasal secretions. So there's certainly the possibility for children to transmit it. We definitely need to have more information about whether or not they transmit it as readily as adults do. And what the basis for that is. But certainly, children are not immune to this virus. They are not resistant to this virus, and they can be infected with it. And in some cases, they can actually become very sick and die from contracting this virus. Also, in my feed, there's a lot of conversation about the definition of aerosol. You know, the virus is airborne. What's the difference? What does the research show? So this has been incredibly confusing, even for subject matter.

experts. Oftentimes when virologists say aerosol or droplet, they might mean something different from what an infection preventionist might mean or what somebody who studies fluid aerodynamics or engineering might mean. But what we do know is that short-range airborne transmission of this virus does occur. And we've known that for a while. So there have been several studies showing situations in which the virus probably was transmitted by inhalation. of particles. Now, what size those particles are, whether they're floating around or whether they're ballistic, meaning that they are propelled from the person who's dispersing them into the environment, that remains sort of an open question. But there's definitely situations. There's a

restaurant in Guangzhou, China, in which virus was probably spread downwind from an air conditioner, an infected person sitting in front of that air conditioner. There was a call center in South Korea that was a crowded office environment in which people in the same office became infected, but people on the rest of the floor did not. And there was the Skagit Valley Choir in which people were practicing physical distancing, but they were singing and presumably propelling a lot of droplets or aerosol particles out into the environment, and a number of people became infected.

That shows us that short-range airborne transmission of the virus is something that occurs, and it's more likely to occur in enclosed or crowded indoor spaces. The good news is that long-range aerosol transmission probably does not occur, or at least does not occur frequently. And this would be an example of this would be something like measles, where if you are secreting infectious particles, they can get into the HVAC system or the air ducts and be transatl, transmitted over long distances through the air. It doesn't appear that this virus is transmitted in that way. We have no epidemiological evidence suggesting that people in one room are capable of producing droplets that infect people in another room that's connected by the same HVAC system. So the good news there is that we can essentially take the same precautions that people have been recommending since the spring. And that is to avoid enclosed spaces, to avoid crowds, practice physical distancing, where,

mask and practice good hand hygiene, all of those things should still be effective at reducing transmission risk. Just a quick note that I'm Iroflato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC studios. There have been stories that there are multiple strains of the virus circulating, and maybe that's why it affects people differently. What's the science about that? So this comes from a pretty sensationalistic media coverage of a paper that was recently published that showed that the dominant variant of the virus circulating in the United States has a mutation in the spike protein that's called D614G. And all this means is that there was a mutation in the virus genome that caused an aspartic acid in the spike protein to be replaced with a glycine. This is not in the receptor

binding domain of spikes. So this has no effect on how the virus. gets into cells, we don't think. But nonetheless, the authors of this paper suggested that this mutation is making the virus more transmissible. And since then, a few studies have come out in cell culture suggesting that this mutation confers a benefit for infectivity, meaning that in cell culture, viruses with G instead of D or glycine instead of aspartic acid, are more capable of infecting cells in that cultured dish. What this doesn't mean is that this virus is somehow more transmissible. And that was really the crux of the initial media coverage of this, that because this strain or variance is dominant in the U.S. and Europe, that means that there's

some sort of evolutionary selection occurring that is giving this virus an advantage by making it more contagious. Oftentimes, viruses behave differently in cell culture than they do in the real world. So while this is something certainly to look for, there are other explanations for why this is dominant. For example, we know that there have been a number of importations into the United States from Europe, and this strain was dominant in Europe. It may be what we call founder effects, which is just that because more of that virus started the epidemic here in the United States, there's just more of it. So this is something that we really need to look for. And really the best way to do this probably is by looking at transmission and pathogenicity or the ability of this

virus to cause disease in different animal models. That's how we can really determine if in vivo, in humans or in animals, that this mutation confers any kind of difference in transmissibility or pathogenicity. We also heard the president say, again, again, that one day the virus might just, quote, disappear. I mean, the viruses just disappear, and I guess as an extension of that, do you think that we should expect this virus in one form of another to just hang around for months, days, years, and maybe get lessening of power over that time? Well, I think that's an excellent question. And the second part of that, we just don't know. It's possible that this virus may become endemic if we develop a safe and effective vaccine, which obviously there's a number of vaccine candidates in the running right now, that will change things.

But viruses don't just disappear. Even when we are able to control an epidemic and a virus doesn't reemerge, and a good example of this is SARS Classic, SARS Classic didn't just disappear. It went away because we employed active epidemiological interventions to prevent the spread. spread and we were able to contain it. It has not reemerged and we're not really entirely sure why that is, probably because it, you know, somebody has not come into contact with the reservoir species that is circulating SARS Classic in the wild. So viruses can go away, but they don't just arbitrarily disappear. They usually go away because we employ active public health measures to get rid of them. And a key tool in this is going to be vaccination. The only viruses that we've successfully

eradicated smallpox and rinder pest, which is an agricultural pathogen, has been through concerted vaccination campaigns. And so if we want this virus to just disappear, we're going to have to do work to make that happen. We've also heard in my inbox has been full of debate about whether they want to take a vaccine, a new vaccine, whether they would trust a new vaccine, given their distrust of the government these days? I think that this is a huge concern, and it can't be understated the damage that has been done in terms of sewing distrust between public health officials and the public. I firmly believe that you can't have public health without the engagement of the public,

and this is a huge problem. I'm very concerned that people might not get the vaccine, and not only people who are really staunch anti-vaccine advocates, but also people who are just concerned about the speed and the accelerated approval process that these vaccines are undergoing. Well, as always, I want to thank you, Angela, for taking time to help fact-check my feet. It's my pleasure, Ira. Anytime. Dr. Angela Rasmussen is an associate research scientist and virologist at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University in New York. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, the first close-up pictures of campfires on the sun. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short

break. This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. With summer here, most of the news about our home star, the sun, most likely will involve sunscreen, right? And that's something we should all be paying attention to. But scientists are also paying close attention to the surface of the sun, because despite it being so ever present, we still have a lot to learn about the sun. And they have just announced that the solar orbiter, a satellite orbiting the sun, has just sent back some photos of surprising events on the sun's surface. Here to talk to us about these new images is Anique de Groove, instrument operation scientists for the solar orbiter. She's based in Madrid, Spain, and joins us today by Skype. Welcome to Science

Friday. Hello. I believe that these are the closest direct images of the sun's surface, is that right? That's correct indeed. There has never been cameras actually observing the sun from that close. So we have had satellites going closer, but never with images, never with telescopes. So tell us this being a radio program, when you looked at those images, what was that surprising thing you saw on the surface of the sun? Well, so first we were really excited to see these first images because these are really the very first data we got from the satellite. So it's even just test images still, but we could already see new features. So what we saw mainly was in the EUB imager.

So that is a telescope that is looking at the sun in extreme ultraviolet light. You cannot see that from Earth, because the atmosphere is blocking it, but we can see it from space. And so there we see part of the atmosphere of the sun, the solar corona. and that atmosphere is currently very quiet. There is not that much activity on the sun, but now it turned out when we were zooming in that we see very little eruptions,

which are much, much smaller than ones we can usually see. And so this was quite of a surprise because we have never seen these features before. And they were called campfires, if I'm reading this correctly. Yes, because indeed they look like these little flashes or flames of light. And actually, they look like the mini, mini-brothers of solar flares.

And solar flares are much bigger eruptions of radiation from the sun. And sometimes they also cause clouds of solar plasma, so solar material that leaves the sun. And so this seemed to be a microflare, so to say. So very small eruptions. That's kind of interesting. Do we know anything about these small eruptions? and how do we study these further?

Well, so that's one of the strengths of solar orbiter that it does not only have this camera. It has many different telescopes in total six, which will all observe the sun a different wavelength. So you see slightly different temperatures on the sun and slightly different layers. So the next bit will be to analyze these new features in all those different types of light

to find out what exactly is happening. And then we also have sensors which are measuring the environment of the spacecraft, and they can see what's actually coming out of the sun. So the effects of this little activity on the environment of the sun and later also on Earth. So tell me, though, what mysteries you are most interested in in finding out more about? What keeps you up at night? Well, one thing that we are really excited about is that, solar orbiter will also look at the solar poles. So the north pole and the south pole of the sun.

And we have never, ever seen this before. We also don't know whether there's any activity going on there or how the sun is structured at this north and south pole. And this is important to understand how all these activity works, because the sun has an activity cycle. So it's not always as active. It has times several years where it's quite quiet, which is now, the period we are in now. And then we expect in two or three years from now, there will be more solar activity. There will be some what we call solar storms. So this is the time when the sun is very active. And then it will go back to a quieter stage. And we don't really understand how that works. And we think that one of the keys lie with the solar poles. So that's the part I'm most excited about.

You know, I never thought about the sun having poles. I know that the Earth has poles. What creates the poles on the sun? Well, so when I talk about poles, I talk mainly about the magnetic poles. So the sun has a magnetic field, like the Earth has a magnetic field as well, with a North Pole and a South Pole. But on the sun, it's all much more complicated. because this magnetic field gets completely tangled, and this is actually what causes the activity and what causes this cycle in activity. Very interesting.

Let me go to some questions from our listeners who tweeted us. Tony asked, I understand the sun is warmer on the surface. Is that true? Do we know why? Yes, it's slightly different. So the sun indeed has its own energy source, of course.

that's the fusion in the core. So obviously there it's super hot. And then when you move closer to what we call the surface, and the surface is what we see with the naked eye from Earth, then the sun there has cooled down quite a bit to about 5,500 degrees Celsius. But then what we see is if you move higher in the atmosphere, and these layers we call photosphere, chromosphere, and then corona, then the sun is heating up again.

And so the images we have seen here from this instrument is a part in the solar corona that is at 1 million degrees again. And you even have at times of activity, you have even higher temperatures up to 2 or 3 million degrees. And so these little campfires we have seen may be part of the explanation of why the corona is so hot. So we think that indeed having these. these mini explosions omnipresent in this layer of the solar atmosphere may explain partially why

the corona is so much heat. It's why it's so much hotter than at the surface. I find it interesting that we have been around so long and science has been looking at the sun so much over hundreds of years. Why do we still understand so little about how it works? One of the reasons is that from Earth, we are a little bit limited in what we can see. So as you know, the Earth atmosphere is filtering out some of the light. So we cannot see x-rays, for example, or ultraviolet, a light of the sun. And so only when we went into space and we saw the sun for the first time with telescopes with special filters, we saw for the first time this atmosphere.

Because before we had never seen it, only the Earth. during eclipses. So when there is a solar eclipse, most of the visible light of the solar disk is being blinded because of the moon that comes in front of it. And only then suddenly you see this funny layer and these kind of plumes sticking out. And that is the solar corona as well.

But so to see it in its full wealth of activity and structure and features, you have to go out in space. And that's why it has taken as a while to really understand what's going on there. Now, we also have another probe. NASA has the Parker Solar probe, speaking of being in outer space. It's orbiting the Sun also.

How is your orbiter different than the Parker Solar probe? Well, thank you for that question, because that's really interesting. Actually, Parker Solar Probe is going much closer even to the Sun than Solar Orbiter, but it does not have any cameras on board, or at least not cameras that can see straight into the sun, because the environment is really too harsh if you go that close. So on the other hand, Solar Orbiter also has a unique orbit. It is also orbiting quite close, but not so close, but then has the cameras on board.

And so from the beginning, we have been collaborating the teams behind Solar Probe and the team behind SolarObiter, because it's the combination of the two missions that will really be very exciting for solar physics, because we will see the sun from different angles. Also, the Earth will see it from yet another angle. At times, a solar probe will be very close to the sun, and we will be slightly further out, and we can see actually what's happening on the sun

while solar probe is measuring the solar wind. So it's going to be really exciting to have all the data together. Well, tell me about a little bit more about the solar orbiter, what kinds of data can we collect that we don't already have? What are the instruments on board collecting? So you have on one hand the EUV imager, the one that has these images with the camfires. So this is the solar corona in UV. Then we also have an instrument that's looking at even hotter parts of the sun, where the flares will come from. So that's an x-ray imager. Then we also have FEE, which is an instrument looking at the magnetic field on the surface.

There will be very important to understand what is causing the activity. Another instrument, SolarECHI, is looking at the side of the sun, so not at the sun directly, but it's looking at any solar storm or plasma that's flying out of the sun. And then you also have a coronagraph that's kind of an artificial eclipse maker. to say. So it's also looking at what's happening around the sun in the far corona. And so apart from those telescopes, we also have the in-situ sensors, four of them, which are measuring what's happening around the spacecraft. So they will measure magnetic fields, the different energetic particles that we can measure there, and also any plasma waves that are passing by the spacecraft. That's really a, you have a whole

bunch of instruments on there. It's good to see. Yes, it's a very complete suite. Yeah. Well, because it's a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing, right? You put as many things as you can. Yeah, it's one of the main goals, actually, of the satellite to go closer and to make the connection between what we see happening on the sun and what we measure around the spacecraft. So that's why sometimes we want to go close, but we also want to go a little bit further away because we want to understand what in the end is happening close to the earth. So we want to see everything in the middle, so to say, what's happening there. Let me go to some of the questions our listeners have been asking about the sun in general.

For example, Paula on Twitter tweets us, what happens to the material from a coronal mass ejection once it separates from the sun? Does it burn up? Does it fall back towards the sun? What's going on there? Yeah, so a coronal mass ejection is when the sun suddenly loses. a lot of material. So typically you first have a solar flare and then it could happen that indeed it's ejecting a lot of material and then you have a cloud that's traveling into space. So sometimes indeed the cloud falls back to the sun and then we don't really call it a coronal mass ejection yet.

So typically when it propagates into space, it may come close to other to planets and then it will affect the magnetic field around the earth. So it's a cloud of energetic particles. You have protons and electrons. And they will interact with the magnetic field on Earth. And they will cause what we call a geomagnetic storm. So the magnetic field of the Earth may be slightly changed. Also, we see very nice events like polar light, both in the north and the south pole of the

earth. And you could also have disruptions in case of a very strong storm. you could have disruptions of GPS signals and even power plants that could be disrupted. But so the cloud then typically still, so part of the energetic particles will be captured by the Earth and the rest of it may still travel further in the interplanetary medium. That's terrific. Let me remind our listeners that I'm Ira Flato and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And in case you're just joining us right now, we're having an interesting talk about the sun

with Anique de Groove Instrument Operation Scientist for the Solar Orbiter, based in Madrid, Spain. I understand that COVID-19 caused some setbacks for the Solar Orbiter team. How do you operate an orbiter when everyone is working from home? Well, nobody knew. But indeed, in case of solar orbiter, the satellite got launched in February. And then normally you have the very first week trying to get the spacecraft in the right orbit and testing out the platform. And then you go into the testing of all the different instruments.

And this takes typically months. And it's all very sensitive. Also, it's all very exciting. but so you want to be really with all the teams together to try out all the little steps for your instrument, to look at the telemetry coming back, to check exactly what's happening, and only then send the next command to the spacecraft. So this was completely disrupted by the fact that after a few weeks nobody could travel anymore. There was even a COVID case at the ESA center where they do the commanding in Germany.

And so in the end, everybody started working through telecoms, through webcams, looking at the monitor with all the housekeeping data coming back. And yeah, we made it work somehow. Just like we're all doing, right? Yes, indeed. I think it's the first spacecraft that has been fully commissioned or tested from people's homes. That's a first you never expected to have, right? No, indeed. We were not really prepared for that.

That is cool. Let me see if I have room for one more tweet from a listener Emma who tweets. Instead of dumping garbage in the ocean, what if we shot it into the sun? It just seems like this would be easily incinerated and avoid the issue of drifting through space. We get this question so many times on our show. What is your reaction to this? This would be a very expensive way to dump garbage, wouldn't it? Yes. The problem is it's not so easy to shoot something. straight at the sun. It's even for a spacecraft, it's not easy to get a spacecraft close to the sun. That's why, for example, for solar orbiter,

we need two years to get into an orbit that is coming only a third or a fourth, almost a fourth of the distance between Sun and Earth. So the problem is if you shoot something in space, it will start orbiting around the Sun or the planet or whatever. So first, you have to already spend a lot of energy and have a strong rocket to escape Earth. And then when you get into an orbit around the sun, it will just stay there forever. It will not fall into the sun.

That's the problem. Yeah, that's the mythology. Just send it up there and the sun will suck it right in. But I'm glad you fact-check that. Yeah, indeed. It will not just suck it in. That's the problem. And the problem is we've run out of time.

I would like to thank my guest, Neek, the group. instrument operations scientist for the solar orbiter based in Madrid, Spain. Stay safe. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you. Charles Berkwist is our director. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis. Our intern is Adabaguerre Rodriguez Benitez. B.J. Leiderman composed our theme music.

And if you missed any part of the program, you'd like to hear it again or send your friends and relatives over. You could subscribe to our podcasts, or you can ask your smart speaker to play science. Friday. Oh, one more thing before we go, our Science Friday Vox Pop app. This is what we're looking for this week. Have you had to navigate pregnancy or childbirth during this pandemic? We want to know how it went. Were there unusual hurdles you had to go through or plans that drastically changed? Tell us about your pregnancy or childbirth during COVID-19. That's on the Science Friday Voxpop app wherever you get your apps. Have a great weekend. Do. Okay, so, oh, so yeah, the restrooms, brand-new restrooms.

Very soothing restroom. Last week, Romeo Regali gave me a tour of his very empty restaurant, an Ethiopian spot in Brooklyn. Music, there's a speaker. Along the bar, there's a row of chairs. And in Romeo's original vision, there were going to be people on those chairs. Yes. We definitely thought we were going to have people sitting. Yeah, thanks for that, COVID. Romeo had grand plans for his restaurant that, A, there would be people in it, and B, that they would eat the food. But it turns out the original restaurants were going for something very different.

The first restaurants were places you went not to eat. I'm Johanna Mayer, and over the next few weeks at Science Diction will investigate the science, language, and history of food. How restaurants became restaurants. how ketchup became ketchup. At its origin, it means, you know, fish sauce. And how MSG went from being loved to loathed in this country. While in Japan... Every house has a MSG shaker on the table.

Plus, the clever little ways that marketers use linguistics to make food just sound delicious. It has totally ruined my ability to look at names in the way that a normal person does. Science Diction is back July 28th to Rumen Food Words for you. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.