Science Friday - Wiring Rural Texas, Visiting Jupiter and Saturn. Aug 9, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: August 9, 2019

High-speed internet access is becoming a necessity of modern life, but connecting over a million rural Texans is a challenge. How do we bridge the digital divide in Texas' wide open spaces? It turns out the Great Red Spot might not be so great—it's shrinking. Plus, other news from the giant planets. 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 Texas Public Radio in San Antonio. Later in the hour, a trip out to the giant gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn. But first, time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national importance and us being Texas Public Radio in San Antonio, chances are you use some of the internet services each day all over Texas.

Maybe you get your entertainment there. You communicate with friends and family. Use it to buy things. You know, it is an ever-growing part of people's lives and businesses. But here in Texas, where everything is bigger, almost 2 million people are without access to high-speed Internet, and the size and wide-open spaces of the state can make wiring rural communities something of, let's call it, a chat.

Challenge. Joining me to talk about it is Paul Flav, Technology and Entrepreneurship Reporter at Texas Public Radio. He's here with me in San Antonio. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having us here today. It's nice to be here. So, okay, let's talk about how big the digital divide is. What's the population of Texas and how much, what percentage of those people? Yeah, so it's about 28 million people in Texas and around 2 million are without internet access or access to high-speed internet. And they estimate about 80% of those are in rural. areas. Where would rural areas be in Texas, for example? Oh, all over the place. All really all over the place. I mean, there's some big hubs like, you know, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, but all of West Texas, a lot of East Texas, you know, once you get past Houston and North Houston. So it's a big swath of the state. So we might not really not know how many people the exact numbers are. Yeah, because of the way that the FCC collects data on who has access and who doesn't,

It's ISP provided, so it's the AT&Ts, the Verizon's of the world, tell us how many people they think have access. And it's broken down by census block. So if one person in a census block has access, they say the whole census block has access. So the estimates have been kind of widely discredited, and the SEC is trying to figure out a better way of collecting all that data. They just voted to change that last week. And, of course, everybody's trying to figure out a better way of getting Internet service then. Absolutely. to the rural areas, what's the problem?

You know, from an outsider's point of view, why don't you just string some more cable and get everybody covered? Absolutely. Well, you know, we rely on, you know, for-profit companies to make those things happen. And the equation just doesn't work out in a lot of these communities when you're talking about a service that has a lot of a cost associated with dragging a fiber optic cable along these poles,

the people that don't get, getting the permission of property owners, things like that, and then providing service for maybe a handful of people, just doesn't add up. So it's a question of money. It's always a question of money, right? Often it is, yes. Because everybody has private lands. The whole state is private lands and no room for public access ways. That's right. There's a lot of, a lot of Texas is private, and getting the permission to to cross people's land has just recently changed for some of these rural cooperatives, electric cooperative so that they can they can actually get permission they can just send out a notice hey we're doing this and only if a landowner a landowner who may or may not be in the state opts in or ops out

do they have to worry about it okay let's talk about what we like to talk about the technology fix sure oh let's put a satellite up let's wait for 5g put more towers in absolutely i think 5g's been talked about a lot but 5g especially in rural areas is a real big question mark because 5g has to be a lot more densely populated, and they all connect to something. They all connect to a fiber cable, and if there's no fiber cable, then there's no 5G. For satellites, you know, you're talking about the SpaceX's and Amazon's and one web of the world. They collectively want to put up tens of thousands of these broadband satellites. It's unclear how fast they'll be. There are some satellite options now, but they're pretty slow. That's the complaints anyway. In your series, you reported

it on how in many ways, this is like the drive to rural, electrification in years past, and they accomplished that with rural co-ops. That's right. Tell us about that. Yeah, so, I mean, so now 80 years ago in the 1930s, the federal government decided that they wanted to invest in electrifying these communities to give them options for, you know, running water, powering pumps that can run water, electric stoves, things like that. And they thought that that was a worthwhile thing.

They put money into these cooperatives so that. that local communities could run their own systems and they would be responsible for kind of making sure they were maintained as well as that, as well as just keeping them running. And it will seem to work. And now you've got those same real cooperatives form with federal loan dollars reaching millions

of homes with electricity are stepping in to take on broadband in Texas. So there's, I think there's four million broadband user, four million electric co-op customers and about 30,000. thousand of them right now. So less than 1% are broadband, but it's growing. And you spoke with the head of one of these. I have a clip here of these rural cooperatives about why they do this. It's not about making money. You're not doing this to make money. You're doing this to allow your

communities to survive and to be here 20 years from now. Absolutely. That was Bill Hetherington, CEO of Bandera Electric Cooperative, just north west of San Antonio. And, you know, that's the, that's the, how they talk about this. This is not something that is optional. This is something that has to happen if these communities are going to survive. And they, from the quote you played, that they do feel a community spirit. It is not a money issue with them. It is something that, you know, this is, this is the future of the country is heading this way. We have to help out. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's, it's something that people have, it's kind of become this mission for a lot of people. And when it is your, I mean, he lives there. This is his community. So that's kind of the beauty of the co-op model is that there's an

incentive for them to do it. But also, it has to be, it has to be approved by members and the customers, so they have to decide to go into that business. And you talked about how 80 years ago, this was the cooperatives were formed to put electricity in. Today you would never argue, or today, 80 years ago, you would never argue, hey, who needs electricity? But today, internet service is about as, you know, needed it or people depend upon it as much as electricity was. I think we're at a moment in time where the idea of internet and high-speed internet as a luxury is over. It's changing. And I think in those communities, they are demanding it. You talk to local economic development people as well as just city council people and they're getting asked,

where's the internet. So is the state, the state of Texas putting money into this? Is the federal government putting money into this? The feds have a lot of money tied up in this. $20 billion. I think they just passed over 10 years last week for the Rural Opportunity Fund. And then the state of Texas is not currently funding it with any legislative or grant funds. There was just a session, and they didn't pass any bills that had any money attached, but there were a couple. But it would seem that in certain places you could not survive. I mean, physically and communally, let's say, for example, hospitals, don't hospitals have to be wired to the Internet? Yeah, there's a big question right now about hospitals.

And there are programs that specifically target libraries and schools and critical places like hospitals that try and get them funding so that it'll bring down the cost of high-speed Internet to these places. But in Texas, I think we've lost about 23, 24 hospitals in just the last five years in rural communities, which is often the thing that they say is going to replace that when we talk about rural communities and aging in place. is telehealth, but a lot of these places don't have the infrastructure. Yeah, if you can't get to your doctor or you live in a rural community, you know, you may be able to send your symptoms in by telephone or by the internet. But if you don't have that internet connection. Yeah, if it's not reliable, you know, in the course of doing some of this reporting, there was at least one couple in Cork in Texas I talked to that were lamenting just how

unreliable their internet connection was and how even just a basic doctor's appointment requires you log in and sign up for. a slot. You know, we've heard about the digital divide in the rest of the country between have and have not schools. So this would also be affecting school children, learning how to become fluent in the coding or the internet. Also, you're going to have a section that cannot do that.

Absolutely. I don't have any hard data on how that impacts them, but you do hear from basically everyone, every one of the communities I've visited to talk about this. at least one person will bring up the fact that kids are hanging out in the parking lot of the library after it closes to get access to Wi-Fi. They're going to McDonald's, not for the burgers, but for the free Wi-Fi access. So is it becoming a political issue at all, or is it still something on the peripheral? I mean, it's hard to say if it's becoming like a political issue. Obviously, like, it's not something people are running on in Texas, but we just saw the Warren campaign

publish a big broadband plan that allotted 85 billion. dollars in grants for for this issue as well as you know would preempt a lot of states laws that prevent them from having municipal broadband so if you think that the democrats may think that texas is in play during this presidential election they might come and use this as an issue as something it might be i mean it will i think having those conversations with the war and campaign being the first it may very well be uh be that they push a lot of other communities and other leaders to start introducing this kind of legislation. And as far as the long-term outlook, does anybody believe that sooner or later this is not going to

come out to the rural neighborhoods? I mean, it's hard to say that it's inevitable. I think there's a lot of people working on, and I think I've never kind of seen it get as talked about it as it is now, and just in the last 18 months. So I think we are at a special moment in time where everyone is sort of paying attention to this. And, you know, even banks have a stake in this with, you know, wanting to reduce their brick and mortar shops and being able to invest in these programs with Federal Reserve CRA stuff. So, yeah, I think there's a lot of interest. And it's hard to say, though, whether or not it's going to absolutely happen.

Yeah. Do people say, hey, you know, you choose to live out there in the ranches and the far places? Heck with you. I'm sure they do And that's what, you know, that's one of the big things That's one of the big draws of living in these communities Is they don't have some of these these things that The traffic and the things of the of the cities But you know, that's what it's we're already at a point where these communities realize that people are passing on their towns

Living in them locating businesses in them because they don't have high-speed internet So yeah, that's quite interesting. Thank you for taking time to be with us. This is really interesting topic Paul. Thanks so much. Paul Flav, technology and entrepreneurship reporter at Texas Public Radio. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. I want you to come back with me now to the summer of 65. Oh, 1665. Astronomer Giovanni Cassini is peering through a telescope, as one does on summer evenings. A friend has just tipped him off to an unusual spot on the planet. Jupiter. Cassini observed, and concludes that this spot seems to be permanent. A giant spot spinning like a cyclone in the southern tropics of Jupiter.

Well, today we know that swirling storm Cassini saw was probably what we called the Great Red Spot. A storm system two planet Earths could fit inside. But you know what? For some reason, after hundreds of years of observation, that long-lasting storm now appears to be shrinking. and luckily we are in the right place at the right time to observe the planet a lot closer than Cassini was. Our observation point, the Juno spacecraft, which just zoomed over the red spot to study it.

So for the rest of the hour, we're going to be talking about what it found and the many new missions in the works to uncover the mysteries of Jupiter, its neighbor Saturn, and there are dozens of moons. And if you have a question about Jupiter or Saturn, you want to sound off on which of the two giants is your favorite because people keep debating this all the time. Give us a call. Our number 844-724-825-844-Sy-Talk, or you can tweet us at SciFri. Let me introduce my guest. Excuse me. Scott Bolton is principal investigator of the Juno Mission and a co-investigator on the Cassini mission named, of course, for Giovanni Cassini. He's also Associate Vice President at the Southwest Research Institute. He joins me here at the studios of a Texas public radio in San Antonio.

Welcome back to Science Friday, Dr. Baldwin. Thanks very much. Great to be here. Nice to have you back. Also with us is Tracy Becker, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and co-investigator on the UV instrument on the upcoming NASA Europa Clipper Mission. She's also here at TPR. Welcome, Dr. Becker. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. Nice to have you. Scott Juno just flew over the red spot a few weeks ago, and the spot is changing? Is that surprising? Shrinking a little bit? It is surprising. You know, especially since it's

been observed since the days of Cassini and maybe it was there earlier. So you've got this great storm sitting there for 300 years or more and now all of a sudden it's changing. So that was a big surprise to us. We're watching it shrink. And we flew over, as you say, just a few weeks ago. We've done it before. This time we were doing a very special experiment where we were trying to detect to see if we could see a sense of the gravity field that might be tied to it so that we could try to make an estimate or constrain how deep that storm went. It's too early for us to, for me to give you the answer to that. We're still coming through the data trying to figure out what it means. But what we're searching for is how deep do that route go? Because it's a ball of gas, right? It could

go pretty deep. It's a giant ball of gas. I mean, it's like a hurricane or a tornado. It must be working differently than that because it's Jupiter and there's no sea or land underneath. But it's a giant funnel cloud of some kind, and the question is, is there some signature? I'm trying to wrap my head around a giant funnel cloud the size of two Earths. Wow. And very deep, so it's going to look pretty ominous if you were flying through the atmosphere. If it's shrinking, is it shrinking quickly? Is it going to disappear in our lifetime, or is it just really slowly? Well, it's shrinking, and I would say that it's quickly in the sense that we can detect it over our, a few decades since the days of Voyager, it's definitely shrunk in size. Is it going to disappear?

You know, there are people that, you know, extrapolate that shrinking and try to make an estimate of when it would disappear. But I think that's a little bit like, you know, getting up in the morning and weighing yourself and say, wow, I lost 10 pounds. So how long before I disappear? Dr. Becker, yeah, let's turn to Saturn now, because one of the things you've been studying is, are Are Saturn's rings? What have you learned about them that we didn't know? That's right. So the Cassini mission was orbiting Saturn for about 13 years,

and it collected a lot of data about Saturn's rings. One of the things that I was most interested in were the particle sizes that make up Saturn's rings, so trying to find some of the smallest stuff. And what we did was we used this really cool technique that instead of staring at the rings themselves and looking at the reflected sunlight, we actually pointed our instrument at a background star,

and let the rings come in front of that star. And using that, we can say a lot about the actual structure of the rings and what the particle sizes that make up the rings look like. Can you say how many rings Saturn has? Is that a trick question? So they're all named. So the main rings are the A, B, and C rings. Those are the ones that you can kind of see with a regular telescope.

And then there's some more diffuse rings, like the D ring, the E ring, the G ring, and a very skinny, exciting ring called the F ring. So there's a handful of rings. I remember watching Voyager go past Saturn and when they discovered the F-ring and how weird it was. Yeah. So the F-ring is a super exciting place where it's kind of at the edge of where Saturn's gravity has more power or less power to destroy objects as they form. So it's kind of at the edge of where the self-gravity can actually start to allow objects to start to accrete. But then Saturn's gravity still interferes.

There's a lot of collisions, really exciting collisions happening in that area. in that particular ring. And so you see all of these collisions and building up of the ice particles. And so you can really see how stuff forms and then gets destroyed in a fun way. So we're, well, let's talk about, why is there stuff?

Why is, if Saturn is a gas giant, why is it, rings have stuff that are made out of what, ice or particles? Or what are they made at them? Yeah, so the rings look like they're this place that maybe you could go ice skating, but that's not the case. It's all made up of individual particles

that range in sizes of micron-sized dust up to house-sized boulders pretty much. And then a handful of objects that are a bit larger than that. And at first there was always this thought that maybe these rings formed right around the time Saturn formed. But recent results from Cassini at the end of the mission started to really show that these rings probably formed only about 100 million years ago. So some sort of breakup of maybe an icy moon or some comets that came by. So if you were a dinosaur, you could have seen that. That's right. If they had figured out how to use telescopes or binoculars, they could have seen it happening.

And do we know where this stuff came from? Was it captured by Saturn or where did the material come from? So that's sort of the underlying question still is, was it a moon of Saturn's that kind of moved in its orbit and somehow got disrupted by Saturn's gravity? Or was it incoming comets? Those are still sort of areas of active research. You know, there was a paper published maybe last week or week ago about the Earth and the Moon. And maybe at one point our Moon was formed as it started out as a ring around the Earth.

possible? Well, yes, the leading idea there is that there was some sort of a collision event that happened with the Earth early on. And so that would have spewed out a lot of material, probably did form some sort of a disc before it was able to coalesce into the current moon that we have today. That is quite interesting. Scott, why is it that Saturn has such spectacular rings, but Jupiter has such wimpy, wimpy. Uranus has a ring, too, kind of wimpy wings?

It's true. And very little about Jupiter. is wimpy. But the ring might be... No insult meant to... The ring might be one of them. No, I'm not... I've worked on Cassini, too, so I like both planets.

Do you have a favorite? I don't... My favorite's actually Earth, and it might be, you know, sort of, you know, tied to the fact that I'm here. But... And I also, you know, like to ski and surf and snowboard, and we got it all. But anyway, you asked about the ring.

Right, get it back to the ring. So, you know, there's a theory that was proposed some time ago called Ring Rain, which Cassini at the end has sort of seen some evidence of. And it has to do with the magnetic field interacting with the ring and causing things to get pulled out of the ring and back into the planet. And the question is, is, you know, how much of that material disappears? and we saw some evidence at the very end of Cassini, we sent the spacecraft into the upper part of the atmosphere, and we were able to measure with the ion and neutral mass spectrometer.

Some of this material, and it looks like the ring-rain idea is possibly true. And what that ring-rain idea has, it sounds like you would just say, well, I'm raining stuff out of the ring, which is exactly what you're doing, but it's all connected to the magnetic field and the tilt of the magnetic. field and the strength of the magnetic field. And Saturn, I mean, you know, Jupiter's strong sometimes and wimpy in other ways, like the ring. And Saturn is a wimp with respect to the magnetic field. It has really a weak magnetic field perfectly aligned with the body. We don't understand that. We have no theory that really explains how that magnetic field comes about like that. But the fact that it's so aligned and so weak may be tied to why it is able to sustain a ring. And if you had that kind of

if it had a magnetic field like Jupiter, that ring might not be there. Quite interesting. And that's one of the reasons why with Juno, it dives in from millions of miles away to just a couple of thousand miles of Jupiter and then goes back again because that magnetic field is so strong. It might destroy. Well, it might, but that's not why we do it. It's tied to the magnetic field. Because of the strength of that magnetic field, Jupiter is surrounded. rounded by radiation, really incredibly high radiation, particles that are moving very close to the speed of light. Those are really dangerous to a spacecraft.

The magnetic field is as well, but it's the combination of those two. The magnetic field enables this force field, you know, that's super strong, packed with radiation, you know, weapons, you know, basically to a spacecraft or life. And so we dart in and dart out as fast as we can. You know, we come screaming through, barely touch it if we can. and then go out where it's safe, lick our wounds, and then go back in for another shot. We have listeners calling in.

Let's go to the phones. Let's go to Joe in Florida. Hi, Joe. Hello. Hey, there, go. Yes. Why are the outer planets, gas giants, and the inner planets, Rocky, small planets. I'm curious.

Good question. We want to tackle that one. Why are the other ones like us, Rocky, and the other one's gas giants. So that's a question that people that are trying to study solar system formation ask all the time. And one of the reasons is the inner planets like us may have started with a little bit bigger of a gas envelope, and we lost it because we didn't have enough mass, and we were closer to the sun, so things were warmer, and the hydrogen and the helium would have escaped,

whereas Jupiter was big and massive, and so were the other outer planets, and they were able to hold on to it. That's one idea. But there's other reasons in the sense that Jupiter may have formed first and then the outer planets form, and they grab all this material, this gas. And, you know, we may or may not have started that way, although I would not be surprised.

We may have not built a big enough mass at the Earth to grab all of that light element gas because it's hot when it's this close to the sun. and it's moving quite fast, and so you need a big gravity field to grab onto it. Dr. Becker, you're working on an upcoming mission to Jupiter's moon Europa, called the Europa Clipper. Why is Europa of such interest, and what's the mission going to do? Yeah, so Europa is this icy moon of Jupiter. It's one of the Galilean satellites, so it was detected by Galileo back in the 1600s,

and it is, while it has an icy shell, it actually has a liquid water ocean underneath that shell. And there is actually more liquid water ocean there than in all of the Earth's oceans combined. And so whenever we think about water in the solar system, we naturally start to think about the potential for life. And so NASA's Europa Clipper Mission, its main goal is to assess the habitability of Europa. So the idea of could life, at least as we sort of understand it, have lived there, currently live there, or potentially live there in the future in those oceans. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Coming to you from San Antonio, Texas Public Radio, talking about Jupiter and Saturn.

What about, you know, Enceladus? Doesn't it have liquid water on it, too? It does. How do you make the choice between you take a boat? So Europa's ocean has been known about for longer. So the Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter in the 1990s was the one that first detected that liquid water ocean. With Enceladus, we didn't know for sure that there was the liquid water ocean there. until Cassini arrived there in about 2005, 2004.

And when that detection was made, it took a few flybys and a little bit more data to understand that that really was, that there was liquid water. And the way they found it was that it was actually spitting out that water in these water vapor plumes. So basically like water volcanoes on Enceladus. So the works were already there to go to Europa, I think,

first. But there are plenty of people who would love to go back to Enceladus and see if they can better explore that moon. as well. Go to both places. I am for it. You know what I always find interesting when I talk about this, about Jupiter, especially about Jupiter, is how science fiction writers have known that Jupiter is the place to go to, to find the interesting stuff. And most recently, Arthur C. Clark, 2001, you know, when you

went to the moon, they found a monolith. It was beaming its stuff out to Jupiter, right? And in 2010, a quote from the book, all these worlds are yours except. Europa attempt no landing there. You familiar with that? Yes. What is the romance about the planets, the moons of Jupiter? I mean, do you have that same feeling? Oh, yeah, definitely. And with, I mean, all of the moons of Europa, I mean, of Jupiter are fantastic. I mean, you have IO spewing out volcano material as well as the most active volcano world in our solar system. Europa probably also has these water vapor plumes that we've detected. And from early on, you could tell by how bright these moons are like Enceladus in Europa, that they are mostly water ice on the surface. And so

that, of course, just leads to that intrigue of what else is there. And not to leave Saturn out, Tracy, what about the Titan, a mission to Titan called Dragonfly? Yes. How did that get its name? What's going on? Oh, I'm not, so I'm not directly involved in that mission, but the idea, I think, behind the name of it, is the fact that there will be something flying around on Titan. So NASA recently selected that mission to go and explore Titan. It's the largest moon of Saturn. And what makes a lot of it's so exciting is that it has a hydrological cycle just like the earth has, except that it's with methane instead of with water. So it's too cold for water to be in the forms of lakes and clouds and rain, but methane, which is a gas here, is at the right temperature at Titan. And so you actually

have an atmosphere, you have clouds, you have rain, and you have lakes made out of that methane. And so what's the mission? Two, yeah, you can actually, we're going to fly a little robot around? That's right. It's, um... It's enough atmosphere to actually? Yep, and that's what makes it so exciting. So it's sort of like a quadcopter, but there's eight propellers to fly it around. And so it'll be able to explore different, very interesting locations fairly easily because it can pick back up, fly to the next location, and look there as well.

So there's not a companion rover that's going to go any place. You don't need one if you can fly around. That's right, yeah. And how soon do we think this will happen? So, again, I'm not part of that mission. I think the launch date is in the early 2020s. Mm-hmm. It's got 20-30s.

Yeah. All right. Early 2020s. Is that what you said? Yeah. That's close enough. It's a drone, basically. It's basically a drone flying around.

And, you know, what's great about it is, you know, Titan, we already know from Cassini, which dropped a probe there called Hoygens that the Europeans built. But we saw, you know, coastlines, you know, mountain ranges. And so you're going to have a drone flying around coastlines. I mean, it's going to be spectacular. and it can move around and check different samples and also investigate, you know, the habitability of another ocean world. We're going to talk more with Scott Bolton and Tracy Becker about the ocean worlds of Jupiter

and Saturn and their planets and their moons, I should say. Stay with us. We'll go right back after the break. Don't go away. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato coming to you from the studios of Texas Public Radio in San Antonio. We're talking about exploring giant planets, Jupiter and. Saturn this hour, and we have lots of great pictures of Jupiter's swirling atmosphere,

and Saturn's rings up at Science Friday.com slash planets, and they're really excellent stuff, and we had fun this week. We had a little fun. We asked you to weigh in on the Science Friday Vox Pop app about which planet was better, Jupiter or Saturn, a planetary smackdown. A few of you chose Saturn, like Mendi in Hilo, Hawaii. I think Saturn is better than Jupiter just because of the amazing, beautiful rings. They're the icing on the cake. You can hear the frog chirping in the background. It was great.

Thanks, Mindy. But the real surprise was that almost all our listeners on Science Friday Vox Pop app, wait in for Team Jupiter. Let's take a listen to that side. Jupiter's unequivocally better with all those wonderful bands. and that angry red spot, the storm on the surface. Plus, it's bigger. Saturn is not only substantially smaller,

but its surface is relatively bland. It does have rings. I'll give you that. I think Jupiter is better than Saturn because one of its moons, Europa, may possibly have life on it and has sparked the imagination of scientists and sci-fi authors for decades.

I don't understand how this is even a question. Jupiter is clearly superior. It has the Galilean moons, which showed Galileo that there were things orbiting planets, not just the Earth. Jupiter cleared out all these asteroids, so we don't have to live with impacts every day on Earth. Jupiter has the Trojan groups, which are fascinating and under-explored. The solar system is the sun, Jupiter, and various erratah. Erada like Saturn. Ooh, Errata.

Saturn is in Errata. Tough love from Nathan Hunter in Vancouver, Gibson in Denver, Gibson in Denver, and Peter Barber in New Zealand. And if you want to join in and let us know what you think, are you team Saturn or are you Team Jupiter? Download the Science Friday Vox Pop app and leave us your voice comment. And if there are any diehard Saturn supporters out there, let your voice be heard. Now, on the Science Friday Vox Pop app, now it's time to bring my debate back to my studio debaters

here with me, Scott Bolton and Tracy Becker. Scott Bolton is principal investigator on the Juno mission. He's from the Southwest Research Institute here in San Antonio. Also, Tracy Becker, planetary scientist. She's on the NASA Europa Clipper Mission. Scott, ooh, tough love for Saturn on that one. Yeah, I really felt bad for it there. I have to say, having a backyard telescope of my own

and having looked at Saturn and Jupiter, each one, I mean, I'm not trying to, you know, smooth this smackdown over, but when you look in a nice night, and you can see those Galilean moans of Jupiter out there, you have the same little rush, I think, that Galileo had. They're just sparkling out there, lined up in a row sometimes. Sometimes there's a little shadow across Jupiter. And the same thing with Saturn, when you see a nice tilt,

the rings are tilted just the right way, it's mind-blowing, you know? Yeah, the first time I saw Saturn through a telescope, I could have sworn someone was dangling a little silhouette of a planet with rings, just a sticker in front of the telescope because I couldn't believe how picturesque it was. You thought it was out there with dangling that little, yeah, it's great. Scott, let's talk about Ganymede, another unique moon, is it not? Ganymede's very unique.

It's the only moon that we've actually seen. seen that has its own magnetic field. So in that sense, it's almost like a planet. It has its own magnetosphere. It's the only one we've ever seen that has that. We've discovered that with Galileo when we were flying around and we got close to it. And I was on one of the teams on Galileo that actually detected what looked like a magnetosphere. We were looking at plasma wave signatures and there was. That's cool. Let's go to Birmingham, Alabama. Chris and Birmingham. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, yes. My question is this about, thanks for coming the call, is if the moons are just the major moons around Saturn, are they going to be there forever, like overing the planet, or some going to disappear?

Hmm. So the moon should be pretty stable around all of the planets. So just like Jupiter's moon should stick around for a while, Saturn's rings should also be there for a long time. Well, they were 200 million years for Saturn's rings to get there. So, yeah. So, again, the rings are sort of this unique thing. should be, have probably been there. Most of the moons at least have probably been there since the beginning. And the rings, we did, a lot of people did think that they were there from the beginning

too until some of those most recent results from Cassini. There was the theory, Scott, a while back, and maybe it's still a theory that because the gas giant Jupiter is so big and it has so many satellites that it was a little solar system that never got started. Jupiter never turned into the sun. Is that still thought of that way? Yeah. I mean, they've evolved the theory now that Jupiter used to be if it was just 40% more massive, it would have ignited fusion, but I think now they realize it need to be more massive than that. But it is just shy of being able to have ignited like a star, and we would have been in a double star system. But, you know, even if it doesn't ignite, Jupiter and Saturn are like many solar systems. I mean, they have

these moons. They have really big moons, relatively big moons, close to them that are going around. Jupiter in particular has the four Galilean moons. And it's like a mini solar system. And, you know, when Juno was approaching, we made a movie where we took a picture every 15 minutes for about two weeks and then put it together. And you can actually watch the satellites go around it. It looks just like a solar system. In fact, we don't have any pictures of our solar system like that. It must be the way we look.

You watch these things and the ones that are closer in are moving around faster, the ones that are further out are moving around slower. And it's sort of what Galileo must have seen in a moment. I mean, he was a brilliant guy. He saw this and he looked at it and realized, oh, my God, these moons are going around a planet, or in his view was these things are going around something else out there. That means Earth's not the center of everything. Changed our perspective of ourselves forever. Interesting. Let's go to Twitter because lots of Twitter folks, a lot of planet geeks are checking in. Helen, for example, asks, does Jupiter exercise a rotational torque? I told you we'll get to the geek. rotational torque on other planets the way Earth does on Venus. Scott?

Well, it definitely exercises a torque and an effect gravitationally, whether it's meaningful enough to stop the rotation of other planets, no, or even interact with it because it's pretty far away. But it does do that to its own moons. And so, you know, just like our moon is kind of locked in, we're always looking at the same face. If you're close enough to Jupiter, that's what's going to happen. happen to you. Let's go to Troy in Gold Canyon, Arizona. Hi, welcome to Science Friday.

Hey, thanks for having me. I'm definitely pro-Saturn, being an amateur astronomer, doing sidewalk astronomy. I get a lot more ooze and awe showing the Lord of the Rings than I ever do showing Jupiter. You don't get turned on by the moons of Jupiter? I do as an amateur astronomer, but from the sidewalk astronomy experience, most people are much more impressed when they see Saturn than they are when they see the moons around Jupiter. Yeah, I actually would have to agree with that. Thanks for calling in with that. I mean, you really can't match those rings, can you? Yeah, I think tilted the right way and you see them. And when you see them up close to you with Cassini, for example, the rings are so broad, but they're so thin, and it's so fascinating to be able to be able to

to see them up close as Cassini was able to do. And earlier we were talking about the idea of the moons going around, Jupiter, kind of looking like a solar system in itself. Saturn's rings also represent this really unique opportunity to understand planet formation. So the way that the ring particles interact with each other, the outside moons, the moons buried in the rings, all of those gravitational influences actually really show scientists how planet formation started, potentially our own. And it also looks a lot like if you look at Alma images of distant planetary,

disks that are forming around distant stars, it kind of looks a lot like Saturn's ring. So there's a lot of cool science to be done there. Speaking of distant, our next call comes from Ukraine. Michael in Ukraine, hi, welcome to Science Friday. Yeah, hi greetings. My choice is Titan. I'm absolutely like gobstruck at the place. It's the most amazing thing in the solar system. It's the only, the only earthlike atmosphere at all in the solar system, nitrogen and whatever. It's one and a half times the pressure. So the only place astronauts wouldn't need a pressure suit. You know, they'd need some real, real good thermal suit because under 80 minus centigrade would, you know, tend to like make you a little crisp.

But, you know, everything about it is just insane. It's like an alternate universe with rocks of ice and rain of methane and ethane and I don't know, maybe nitrogen, oceans of methane. and ethane, it's just, you know, it's almost indefeevable, you know, rains, snows of of mixed organics. I mean, it's just so cool. I mean, I always wanted to go to Europa, you know, and I'd volunteer to go one way, which, you know,

some people might, might cheer. But now I'm really, really hot on Titan. I just think that's so, it's just such an incredible place. Oh, yeah. Thanks for the call. Becker is nodding and smiling. Well, the good news, the good news says we get to go to both. So NASA's Europe, a Clipper Mission will be there in the late 2020s, and then Dragonfly

will be arriving to Titan not long after that. He whacks so poetic about, was he right about Titan, things that he said? Yeah. What he described it? Yeah, it's an incredible place. Yeah, in many ways, it's sort of, you know, showing us the history of Earth when Cassini was going there. One of the arguments was that, you know, maybe this is what Earth was like when life was just

getting started. And it is full of these lakes. They're methane, so it's a little, it's like a barbecue waiting to get lit. Oh, I have a vision now. You've given me a vision that I can take with me. That's quite interesting. We always talk about these scientists like Galileo and Cassini gazing at the planets and the moons, and I'm always wondering, how did they have the spare time to do this?

I mean, somebody is picking up their tab for their rent and their food. And, you know, today we think there are great universities or whatever picking up their bill, paying them. Is that the same thing that happened with these ancient astronomers, Galileo, Cassini? Absolutely. Although I don't think it was just their spare time. They were dedicated. Yeah. You know, in the sense of Galileo, he was really the first, right?

He was really the first to take a telescope and turn it into some sort of a scientific instrument, and he pointed it up. Now, that was his game. And what his goal was, the way he sold it was he took something that wasn't very high quality and couldn't use it and was able to improve it so that the optics actually worked and you could see stuff. And he started going to the dojis and the royalty in Venice. At that time, there were big city states and basically said, look, if you pay for this and you help me, you can use this telescope and see ships coming. both the merchant ships that were coming in that maybe they could prepare for the, you know, at that time you can imagine,

they don't even know when the ship's coming and what it's got, so they'd see one coming. But I think more important, they could see war mongers or somebody coming that might be doing some damage. And so he sold it that way and then took it and did what he wanted, which was look up and looked at all the brightest objects, right?

The moon, Venus, Jupiter, it was really natural. And Cassini, it was, Science was already getting started a little bit. And so the scientific method, which basically had started with Galileo, was a little bit on the right road. And so he was really doing science for the sake of science. Yeah. Let me just tell everybody that this is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. So who funded Cassini's work?

Yeah, so Cassini was an Italian astronomer and scientist, mathematician, and the King Louis, the 14th. I believe it was, actually hired him to start up the Paris Observatory and was kind of his astronomer slash astrologer on site. So I think a lot of the funding came from, in fact, the French royalty to actually pay for him to support him through his astrology methods. And then at the same time, he was really getting more and more involved in the astronomy as a result. And ultimately, in the end, sort of didn't really adhere to most of the ideal ideology behind astrology by the end of his career. We only have a few minutes left so much to talk about. Let me see if I can get a phone call and a tweet. A tweet from Twitter says, when I look at the nice guy and see Jupiter, I say a silent

thank you for being our guardian and keeping many large objects away from the earth. I guess that's true, too. Let's go to, let's go to State right here in Texas. Let's go to Natalie. Hi, Natalie. Welcome to Science Friday. Oh, my gosh. Hi. Thank you for me. You're in Del Rio, right? Yes. Yes, go ahead. Okay. So I'm a seventh grade science teacher, and we were gathering information from a couple of videos that we saw,

one strange rock, and we were also listening to the news saying how the French scientists have found that Europa has these currents. And my kids kind of combulate all the information together, and they asked me a really great question. They said, could there possibly be life in Europa? And I said there could be a possibility of life that we don't know yet. Okay, good question.

That's why we're going there, right, to find out the possibility. Absolutely. In fact, that is one of the main goals. We won't, the life that you would see it, Europa is probably under the water, so under the ice shell. But almost everywhere we look at the earth, we see life where there's water. And in particular, you go to these big, you know, deep vents, thermal vents that are coming out of the deep ocean. and you see it's full of water, I mean, full of life, you know, these things they call black smokers. And in Europa's case, the belief is that that water may be in contact with the rock underneath,

which is a thermal energy source. And so you might have something very similar to what we have in the deep seas of Earth. And eventually you need a submarine to go in there. But maybe some of the hints will spray out on volcanoes, water volcanoes, that spray out in the spacecraft like of Clipper may be able to de-eshoe. detect some of the evidence of that. Sounds like some of our best days are ahead of us in planetary exploration. And these are the goals of the Europa Klipper Mission to look at how salty is that water.

Look at if there are these plumes there that we think we've seen, can we fly through them? Can we sense any of the materials that would indicate that there is possibly some sort of hydrothermal activity? I can't wait. You'll all come back to Science Friday with the results when they happen years from now? Absolutely. Definitely. Absolutely. Scott Bolton, principal investigator on the Juno Mission, co-investigator on the Cassini Mission,

Tracy Becker, planetary scientists at the Southwest Research Institute, also where Scott Bolton comes from, and she's co-investigator on the UV instrument on the NASA Europa Clipper Mission. Thank you both for this really terrific conversation. Thanks for having me. Thank you. And next week, we're going to be talking about lightning in all its shapes and sizes and we want to know what question you have. Let us know what you'd like to know about lightning by downloading the Science Friday Vox Pop

app. Tell us what you want to know about lightning. That's Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps. And you asked us your sunscreen questions last week, remember, and we have the answers. Go to sciencefriiday.com slash sunscreen for the science on sunscreen. You can also say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Every day now is Science Friday. I want to thank all the folks here at Texas Public Radio and San Antonio. We'd love to visit your city. And thank you. Thank you for welcoming us and for taking care of us while we're here. I'm Ira Flato in San Antonio.