We’ve launched a live video show on Twitch called NASA in Silicon Valley Live! This is an audio-only version of our premiere episode that streamed on Jan. 12. In it, we talk about going back to the Moon with NASA rock stars Jim Green and Greg Schmidt.
Check out https://www.youtube.com/user/nasaames if you want to watch the video version!
Transcript
Matthew Buffington: Hey, folks. Thanks for joining us. We’re going to jump into an intro in a little bit while we wait for some people to jump online. But don’t be shy. Jump in the chat, and we’re going to be looking for your comments. But I wanted to start it off. We were chatting earlier, Jim. We talk about this NASA in Silicon Valley Podcast. Jim has his own podcast — so there’s a plug for that — called Gravity Assist.
Jim Green: Right.
Host: And the thing that I get a kick out of is, at the end of the show, you always talk to the people of like: “What was your gravity assist to landing at NASA or working on space?”
Jim Green: Yeah, absolutely.
Host: So I’m going to pivot the question to you.
Jim Green: All right.
Host: What was your gravity assist? How did you end up at NASA?
Jim Green: Well, I was always good in math and science. And I actually watched all the Star Treks from the very beginning. This was with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.
Host: Nice.
Jim Green: And really enjoyed that, but I ended up working in an observatory. I ended up having a 12-inch Alvan Clark refractor at my beck and call. I was able to build the instruments on the back end of it. Then I started doing a lot of astrophotography and then developing my own film.
Host: Nice.
Jim Green: The high-school chemistry teacher just opened the doors. I had the keys to the school. I was trusted.
Host: Nice.
Jim Green: Here’s the keys to the school. Go down and observe whatever you wanted to, et cetera. And then some of the stuff actually got published in Sky & Telescope. So when I left high school as a senior, I knew exactly what I wanted to do: I was going to be an optical astronomer.
Host: Okay.
Jim Green: And then I went to University of Iowa and took Astronomy 101.
Host: A shout-out to Ames, Iowa. Not the same location, but we constantly get it confused.
Jim Green: Yeah, Iowa has got some really great schools. But I’m talking about the Hawkeyes, not the Cyclones.
Host: Nice.
Jim Green: So I had Astronomy 101 from James Van Allen, and the place was packed — 400 or 500 people crammed in there. And at the end of that, I got an A. There was a certain number of people that got an A. And then the second semester he didn’t teach it, but he went on to other things. I picked another course called Readings in Astronomy. It was taught by staff.
Host: Okay.
Jim Green: Room 701, Van Allen Hall. Show up. So I walk in there, and it’s a store room. There’s tapes everywhere and bookcases and printout. I’m going through the course catalog: “Am I in the right room at the right time for Readings in Astronomy?” And Van Allen leans behind a bookcase and says: “No, Jim. You’re in the right place, and you’re my only student.” And that was my second gravity assist.
And what I did was I used the observations I did with the Alvan Clark refractor — I took a picture of the sun every day for six months, and I did sunspot rotation. I made measurements of the sunspots. I wrote a scientific paper. He was the reviewer. And I understood, at the end of that, what research was all about. And I was [hooked]. And so at that time I was on their 54th experiment on their satellite. And so for me doing astronomy, I could do it from spacecraft. And it was just a normal evolution to just get involved in that.
Greg Schmidt: Well, and Jim, also the Van Allen that you mentioned, a lot of people probably don’t know who he is and what’s named after him, too.
Jim Green: Well, he is our really first true space scientist. He developed an instrument that went on Explorer 1, and that was launched on the 31st of January 60 years ago. We’re coming up to the 60th anniversary, so 1958. The spacecraft goes up and enters these high-radiation environments, and they figure out what it is. And by May of that year, he announces the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts.
Host: Oh, wow.
Jim Green: Yep.
Host: Well, so I’ll pivot on —
Greg Schmidt: Kind of cool.
Jim Green: Very cool, yes.
Host: If you’re just joining us, you’re watching or listening to the — it’s either the 76th episode of the NASA in Silicon Valley Podcast or our first ever episode of NASA In Silicon Valley Live. So folks, if you didn’t know, this is a conversational podcast to meet with the various researchers, scientists, engineers and overall cool people throughout NASA and here at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. So if you’re a fan of the audio podcast, obviously we’re doing something a little bit different: We’re doing, for the first time, live on video and on Twitch TV.
But first and foremost, a shout-out to the live audience who is watching us. And on the chat I see a lot of shout-outs coming through. We’re going to start things off by chatting with folks. We’re going to talk about the moon. We have some cool things to show you guys, actually — at least virtually online visiting different locations on the moon. I’m your host, Matthew Buffington. And if you notice me looking at my laptop, it’s because I’m looking at the chat room as much as possible. And so when I’m looking over here trying to find questions, my co-host, Abby Tabor, is going to be moving things along.
Abby Tabor: Yes. Yes, exactly. So maybe right now I could introduce our guests to the audience. So we have here, all the way from NASA Headquarters, Dr. Jim Green, who is the director for Planetary Sciences. And also more locally here at Ames, we have Dr. Greg Schmidt, who is the deputy director or NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute.
Greg Schmidt: A mouthful.
Abby Tabor: Is that it?
Greg Schmidt: Yes, you got it.
Abby Tabor: SSERVI.
Greg Schmidt: Right, SSERVI.
Abby Tabor: I’ll call it SSERVI.
Host: And there’s a bit of a lunar back story to just that name and to the institute altogether.
Greg Schmidt: There is. There is, yeah.
Host: But before we get into the good stuff and we start talking about the moon, a little bit of housekeeping for the old audio and the new Twitch audience. This is basically a new format we’re trying out. We’ve never done this before. We’re figuring this out as we go. We’re going to continue to do this for the next couple weeks on twitch.tv/nasa, basically doing this podcast but on Twitch and going through the chats.
But basically the plan is for us to keep talking to some experts, take questions from everybody. If you can’t catch us live, that’s no big deal. You can find us on youtube.com/nasaames and also on RSS podcast services throughout the Solar System and beyond. And I think our plan is we’ll have those up by Tuesday. So we talked about Jim’s Gravity Assist. Greg, tell us about how you joined NASA, how you ended up in Silicon Valley.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah. Well, the story starts a really long time ago. And I’ll do a quick fast-forward because when I was already at NASA, I was over at my mom’s house one day and she says: “Greg, I want to show you something.” She shows me this little thing drawn by a 6 year old who turned out to be me a really long time ago, and it was a drawing of a few spaceships. And it said: “When I grow up, I want to work for NASA.”
Host: Nice.
Greg Schmidt: This was during the Gemini program. And I remember the Mercury program, too, although I was really, really young then. So I guess it was probably in the 31st chromosome somewhere in here, you know, kind of destined to be. My dad also was here. My parents met here at NASA Ames Research Center.
Host: Nice.
Greg Schmidt: My wife and I met here at NASA Ames Research Center. It’s kind of the family business, I suppose.
Jim Green: Did you get married here?
Greg Schmidt: We didn’t.
Jim Green: No? Oh, well. There’s a big wind tunnel you could have . . .
Greg Schmidt: Yeah. That would have been a nice setting, yeah. I would have had to convince my wife, I think. So my dad was the guy that proved that it was possible to navigate to the moon during the Apollo era. This was right around 1960.
Abby Tabor: Really?
Greg Schmidt: Yeah. Yeah. And so fast-forward a little bit to my teen years. Like Jim, I was good in science and math and whatnot. I built my own observatory. We have a family ranch about an hour and a half from here. And I built an observatory, ground my own mirror and everything —
Abby Tabor: No kidding? Wow.
Greg Schmidt: — and used that for a few years. And then when I was out of graduate school, I just was talking with someone who happened to work here, and she said: “You need to come by and meet some people.” That was 33.5 years ago.
Host: Oh, wow.
Jim Green: It starts by looking up —
Abby Tabor: Yeah.
Greg Schmidt: It starts by looking up.
Jim Green: — and being fascinated by what you see.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a message that I think we can share with everyone out there. You don’t have to work at NASA, of course, to be interested in this stuff. There’s a lot of people interested, and there’s so much cool stuff to see out there.
Jim Green: What’s really unfortunate over time is many of our big cities, it’s hard to see beyond a few stars and maybe a couple planets.
Greg Schmidt: It is, yeah.
Jim Green:But getting out, finding an opportunity to just go out where there’s no lights, and lay in a field and look up, and look at the Milky Way.
Greg Schmidt: Uh-huh. Yeah.
Jim Green: It looks like the sky is on fire.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah. Yeah.
Jim Green: And recognize that the history of humankind went through the era where the sky played a dominant role in their thinking and their culture.
Greg Schmidt: That’s right.
Jim Green: The identification of the planets had been known, at least six out of the eight or nine depending on your persuasion. And that’s such a fascinating part of our life here on earth: the sky is included.
Greg Schmidt:Yeah.
Jim Green: And now we have an opportunity to go out and visit those objects that we see, like the moon.
Greg Schmidt: It’s so cool. And the very word “planet” comes from the Greek planetos, which means “wanderers.”
Jim Green: That’s right.
Abby Tabor: That’s right.
Greg Schmidt: And these were stars that didn’t behave like the rest of the stars. They actually moved with respect to the background, and the ancients didn’t know why that was. It wasn’t until relatively modern times, just a few hundred years ago, that people finally figured that out.
Jim Green: That’s right.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah. And not until our generations here that we actually have been able to send probes to them through Jim’s program at NASA Headquarters.
Jim Green: Yeah. So in time, there’s been just a number of revolutions in the way we think. Copernicus, as an example, was the one that really proposed that all of these planets moved around the sun. And then, of course, Tycho Brahe observing the planets in really precise ways and giving that data to a mathematician, Johannes Kepler.
Greg Schmidt: Yes, totally.
Jim Green: And Kepler then really figured out what was happening. In fact, he did it with Mars. And he was able to do it because Mars’s orbit has a nice little eccentricity about it, and it was hard to fit that. And that forced him into a mathematical construct called an ellipse. And then once that data was ordered in that way, things just fell right into place and created the laws, Kepler’s Laws. And we use those today. And we’re starting that next set of revolution[s], and that is using those equations, building on the past, getting out into the Solar System by those equations.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah.
Abby Tabor: Awesome.
Host: Well, giving a slight shout-out over to the Twitch chat, there was — let me look at this. Droptimus Prime said: “No. Don’t look at the Twitch chat, for the love of God.” And then another person, [Snid Ramayone], says: “Good luck going through the chat to find real questions.” So we’re going to try our best. Don’t be shy with the feedback. We’re trying to figure out how this whole thing works and [crosstalk].
Jim Green: But it doesn’t matter. We’ll give real answers.
Host: Exactly.
Greg Schmidt: We will. We will.
Host: But let’s pivot on over to the moon. We call this “We’re going back to the moon.” In a lot of ways, we never really left.
Greg Schmidt: Correct.
Host: But it is about putting astronauts on the moon. But you guys have just wrapped the [lunar science and landing sites workshop].
Greg Schmidt: Right. Yeah, yeah.
Host: So why don’t you guys talk a little bit about what was that workshop, what did you guys do? It just wrapped up two hours ago.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah, it did.
Host: So tell us a little bit about that.
Jim Green: So it was just really, I think, a seminal event in terms of what will happen next in the exploration of the moon. As you point out, Matt, we’ve been to the moon the whole space era. Right now, for instance, we have an orbiting satellite. It’s called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. It’s a fabulous, fabulous spacecraft. And it’s very healthy, with all kinds of spectacular instruments. In fact, it’s got one instrument on it that is a high-resolution imager. If this table sat on the moon, it could see it. All right?
And that really . . . It’s an enabling capability because we then can use that to be able to study the moon in high-resolution detail that allows us then to pick out places we want to go to do all kinds of different science and land safely. And that’s what’s really critical. In fact, LRO has been observing the moon for quite a while and has observed many of the Apollo sites. In fact, you can get on the Web and do a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter sort on that and look for Apollo landing sites. I think we’ve got one that we just pulled off the Web you can take a look at. It’s from Apollo 17.
Greg Schmidt: Seventeen, yeah. Uh-huh.
Jim Green: Yeah, the last time humans were on the moon.
Abby Tabor: Do you continue studying those same sites? Is that why you brought it up today?
Jim Green: We do, and we do that through a variety of mechanisms. One way we do that is through the samples they brought back. They brought back about 850 pounds of material, both rock but also loose soils, the regolith. It may be a little less than that, but on that order. We’re interrogating those, and we’re learning all kinds of things about those, which is really fascinating. Another way we actually still use those sites is they also put out a series of retro reflectors. This enables us to fire a laser beam, hit that, and then have it come back. And all we do is time it.
Abby Tabor: Huh.
Jim Green: And since a lot of early physics work was done in terms of determining the speed of light, we can easily then take that knowledge and figure out how far away the moon is. By the time we emit the light and receive the light, it travels at the speed of light, and we can calculate it. And of course, that’s about 2.5 seconds all the way up and back. And we can calculate it to just a very small fraction of difference. And what we’re finding out in those 40 years that those laser-reflecting stations have been there is that the moon is moving away from us. Very slowly, very slowly, but it is doing that. It’s on the order of a centimeter or so a year. And so after 40 years, it’s clearly measurable.
Host: And during the course of the whole workshop you guys were all just hanging out talking about this, or [crosstalk]?
Greg Schmidt: We were talking about — yeah.
Host: That’s great. How did it all come together? I know you had a lot to do with formulating it together, pulling it . . .
Greg Schmidt: Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And boy, I work with just the best team in the world, I think, one of them being this gentleman back here. I don’t know if we can get a camera on him or not.
Host: Yeah, Dave has our cloud cam. You can see Clive is waving.
Greg Schmidt: Clive Neal from Notre Dame University. He and I co-chaired this wonderful thing. We had people from all over the world. We have quite a significant Japanese contingent. They have a big interest in the moon. We had some Europeans. We had people from everywhere. Jack Schmitt, who, along with Gene Cernan, were the two last people to walk on the moon — Jack was here. He’s in his eighties.
Jim Green: Remarkable man.
Greg Schmidt: He is sharp.
Jim Green: Unbelievable.
Greg Schmidt: Oh, my gosh.
Host: Also a former senator, right?
Greg Schmidt: A former senator.
Host: Yes.
Greg Schmidt: Yep, yep, yep. He was there when the latest pivot to the moon was announced by the White House. One of the really significant things that’s going on right now is lunar commerce. There’s a brand-new industry they haven’t yet launched, but they’ve been working on this for a few years, a number of the companies. What they want to do is deliver stuff to the moon. They want to do that for NASA, of course, and for other space agencies. But they want to start a whole industry up there. And that, to me, is incredibly exciting. And the way I see it is we are just on the edge of really having the moon be another planet for humanity.
Host: Exciting.
Greg Schmidt: It’s nothing short of that, yeah. That’s going to be a tough place to live, right? There’s no air. We have found that there’s water, though —
Host: Exactly.
Greg Schmidt: — on the permanently shadowed craters on the poles and elsewhere. And so we think that there’s the resources to build domes, build habitats for ourselves, and to supply water that we need, to break it into oxygen that we can breathe, and break it into hydrogen and oxygen for fuel. And so we think that we have all the resources that we need. We just need to go there.
Host: Well, I can jump in on the chat. There was a question from Mellow Canuck — right on — who was like: “Would a base on the moon be surface or subterranean, or a mix of both?”
Greg Schmidt: Oh, that’s a super-good question. So I don’t know if . . . I could take it first or whatever.
Jim Green: This is what . . . Not every place on the moon is created equal.
Greg Schmidt: That’s right.
Jim Green: We’re finding . . . Because this was all about what are the important sites to go to, we were covering all sorts of fascinating locations. Now, one type of formation on the moon, we call it a pit. But in reality, it’s probably a collapse of either a chamber that was a bubble of air at one time where the ceiling has collapsed after the volcanic material cooled or, actually, a lava tube from which the ceiling has collapsed.
Host: Okay.
Jim Green: And so that is a fascinating . . . There’s 300 that we’ve identified so far already, not only on the front side but also the far side of the moon. And what’s really fascinating about these is, indeed, if humans wanted to go into these, they would have a number of advantages. They would be an enormous amount of protection from the radiation environment that we know exists. And since the moon doesn’t have a magnetosphere, a big magnetic field — although it has remnant magnetic-field pieces on it — and it doesn’t have an atmosphere to stop even the solar wind that hammers the moon, places like these would be really important to be able to have a station or a location. So we’re moving into a realm where it’s not just only surface to be considered. There are places that you could actually go and come down, create an inflatable, and be able to live and work in an area that is a natural protection for you.
Host: Yeah, what are you saying? Some of those tubes, they’re always looking at Earth because they’re locked —
Jim Green: Yeah, because the moon is tidally locked.
Host: We might have been talking about this during lunch, so I remember.
Abby Tabor: Fill us in.
[General crosstalk]
Jim Green: So the moon is tidally locked. Actually, we have a view of one of these, which is really great. If we could bring it up?
Host: Oh, awesome.
Jim Green: All right.
Host: There we go. Look at that.
Jim Green: All right. So that, when you look at it, you may think it’s a crater. But if you really study it, you can determine it’s so much different than what a crater really looks like.
Male Voice: I don’t see it.
Jim Green: And so you have a sun angle, and that sun is shining on one part of it. And so you see the shadow in there. And then you see very sharp edges. And so, indeed, that’s a fabulous pit we call it. A skylight is another term that we use.
Abby Tabor: I’ve heard that.
Jim Green: But because the moon is tidally locked on the near side —
Abby Tabor: That means that we only see one face of it, right? Is that it?
Jim Green: Correct. Tidally locked means one day on the moon is one orbit, also. And that is because when the moon was formed early on, it was actually formed very close to the earth. And as we know and we just talked about, it’s continually moving away. But billions of years ago, one orbit around the earth was maybe five or six hours long. Right now it’s 28 days long. And so that tidal locking means that one side faces the moon, and that’s really caused all kinds of different structures on the moon. There’s major differences between that near side than the front side. But in this particular case, with these skylights, there are some that you can get into and then constantly look up and see the earth. Those would be prime locations for human exploration.
Abby Tabor: I kind of want to know more about that, though. Why do the lava tubes all go in one direction?
Greg Schmidt: Oh, why? Well, one of the things that I wanted to say, and then we can address that question. So the earth is a really nice place to live. We have this really thick atmosphere that shields us from all sorts of harsh radiation from the sun. There’s things called coronal mass ejections, where you have these giant explosions on the sun that send streams of high-energy particles our way. And the earth protects us from that. Our magnetic field protects us from that. Our atmosphere protects us from that. On the moon, you don’t have that. Now, Jim mentioned that there are small magnetic-field areas. We took a look at those at this workshop. And so you have to do something else to protect you. And so this, putting a [crosstalk] —
Host: It’s already made for you.
Greg Schmidt: Exactly.
Host: It’s already there.
Greg Schmidt: You don’t need to get a moon bulldozer and . . .
Host: And drill [crosstalk].
Greg Schmidt: That’s right, that’s right. And so that’s something that we’re looking at pretty seriously.
Abby Tabor: That will simplify [crosstalk].
Jim Green: But you know it has some challenges. I’m sorry.
Abby Tabor: Well, it would simplify living there maybe quite a bit if we don’t have to construct habitats, but . . .
Jim Green: Correct, but it has another challenge.
Abby Tabor: What’s that?
Jim Green: Some of these drops down to the surface might be 100 meters. And we don’t have a ramp. We can’t just drive down into it. We haven’t found one yet that really . . . There might be some hints of a couple that have that feature associated with them. So many of them are just the collapse of the roof, and so then you have to be able to get down to them.
Now, scientifically these are incredibly exciting. And they are because you see the stratigraphy. As you can go down the sides, you can see the layers that we can’t get into from surface missions. And those layers are — you know, that’s the geological book of the moon: how old they are and what are they made of and how they evolved on an airless body over 4 billion years. And then when you get into the bottom part of that, we don’t know what the cave structure or cavern structure or lava-tube structure really looks like. We don’t know how far it goes or where it goes, but it’s a different environment because it’s been sheltered all this time. We don’t know what we’re going to find in there.
Host: Nice. Is that exciting? Yeah, well —
Male Voice: Folks, we have Reiner Gamma, one of the swirls.
Greg Schmidt: Oh, yes.
Host: Oh, wonderful. Yeah, let’s take a look at that.
Jim Green: So another site, another one of the sites that are really exciting that could be considered for human exploration, are locations on the moon where the remnant magnetic field . . . That means the field . . . The magnetosphere of the moon, which it must have had early on in its life, has gone away. The core is now solid. It’s probably not liquid. It’s not circulating to generate a magnetic field. And so the rocks that were molten at the time, as they solidify they take that field. They take ownership of that field, and then the background field goes away.
And here’s an area, these are called swirls. This is really huge. The central feature off to the left, that’s probably 150 kilometers in size. And then you have what looks like a snaky feature off to the right. That’s also trapped magnetic-field material. And we now know, based on our knowledge of our earth’s magnetosphere, how the magnetic field of our earth has protected us over time. And so we want to be able to drive into these areas. We want to be able to see how that magnetic field interacts with the solar wind, what happens when coronal mass ejections hammer the moon and hits a swirl like that, and how we could be protected because of that field. Now, that field has to be intense for us to be able to make a measurement of it.
Greg Schmidt: That’s right.
Jim Green: But we could measure it from orbit. Well, geez, that’s fantastic. So as you can see, the discoloration on the surface — as you see the light and dark areas — this whole area is just flat. And the difference is how the regolith is organized or how it has been exposed to the solar wind and changes in it over time. And so all that stuff is really fascinating. It enables us to look at how the solar wind has impinged itself in the moon and locked into the moon in certain regions but has not done so in these swirls. That’s why they’re all white.
Abby Tabor: Yeah.
Jim Green:But that whole area is just flat as a pancake.
Abby Tabor: It’s good you say that because I thought it was ridges.
Jim Green: Right. You think it’s ridges, but it’s not.
Greg Schmidt:Yeah. Yeah. It looks that way, yeah.
Jim Green: It’s just a discoloration of the surface.
Abby Tabor: Huh.
Greg Schmidt: And there’s a lot of disagreement now on some pretty fundamental aspects of it: What are the details of the magnetic field? The material that you see that’s light — is that fresh material? Some people think it is. One of the foremost scientists that works with our institute, actually — Carle Peters at Brown University today — said she doesn’t think so. And quite honestly, I love it when science is like that, when there’s a lot of disagreement, because that means that we’re going to find new things. And that means that we send a mission there to find it.
Jim Green: Well, and it won’t be just any old mission. It’s got to be something that can translate across that and make measurements.
Greg Schmidt: Yep.
Jim Green: And so that would be a rover.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah.
Jim Green: So as the commercial groups are planning to land on the moon and look around and have resources — some will be landers and some will be rovers — we want to be able to say: “Hey, these are sites that if you go there, we want to go with you. We want to participate in that grand adventure.” We want to be able to make measurements that not only are important to them but revolutionize our science and our understanding of our closest neighbor, the moon.
Greg Schmidt: Yep.
Host: So to pivot over to the chat because they were right: It has been blowing up. We’ve been saving as many questions as we possibly can. A while back we had V1K1337, [who] said: “If you read this message out loud, I will be so happy.” So there you go.
[General applause]
Host: And then not only that. Jim, you were getting some love from S4D. [Panda Ah] says: “I love Jim, man.” We all do.
Jim Green: Thank you very much.
Host: But I want to go to [Lucciador 90], who is asking: “Would the moon be a good place for a telescope since there’s no atmospheric distortion?”
Greg Schmidt: Oh. Yeah, yeah. Well, I’d like to talk a little bit about that. So one of our investigators, one of our scientists at my institute is Jack Burns at University of Colorado. He wants to do just that. But the kind of telescope that he wants to put up there is a little bit different than what most people might be thinking of. He wants to put a series of di-pole radio antennas. And so you might think: “Well, why the heck do you want to do that? Why don’t you just do that here?” The problem is we all have our devices and all sorts of —
Jim Green: Phones.
Greg Schmidt: — phones, you name it, that are completely contaminating the electromagnetic spectrum and the radio region. And it turns out that the far side of the moon, since it’s always opposed to Earth, is one of the most radio-quiet areas in the Solar System — the quietest in the inner Solar System.
Abby Tabor: Wow.
Greg Schmidt: And the thing is, okay, then you think: Well, what’s so interesting about this frequency range? As it turns out, you can hear echoes of the formation of the first stars by putting telescopes. This is what we think. We’ve never done it before, but it’s quiet enough that we think we’re going to be able to observe that. And this is what Jack and what we want to enable.
Host: So —
Jim Green: And sci– oh, I’m sorry.
Host: Oh. No, no, no. Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.
Jim Green: Scientists look at various parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and, from that, we make all kinds of new and neat discoveries and look at the universe in new ways. Our atmosphere has prevented us from doing a lot of that, and that’s why our spacecraft are so valuable. That puts our eyes above the atmosphere which then prevents these wavelengths from making it to the ground. And the radio area is just like any other part of the electromagnetic spectrum. If there’s a region we haven’t been able to look at and explore, that’s the new frontier.
Host: Nice.
Abby Tabor: Wow.
Jim Green: And in the 20-megahertz to couple-hundred-megahertz range, even though those radio waves do make it down to the ground because of the radio interference that we have today, we have to go someplace else. And the far side of the moon is a great opportunity to be able to put something there and explore a brand-new region of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Host: So we had a question a while back. And then somebody, this is VT Whiplash, asked: “How bad is the latency from the moon to the earth?” But then there was another question that scrolled through too quickly. I did not see the name on it, but they were like: “If you did a Twitch stream from the moon to the earth, how bad would that latency be?” So . . . ?
Greg Schmidt: So round-trip time is about three seconds or so.
Host: So not that bad.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah.
Host: It could be worse.
Greg Schmidt: So when President Nixon talked with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, when he said “Hello,” it took a second and a half or thereabouts, a little bit less, to get there. Then even if they responded right away, right back, it would take another second and a half to get back. And so round trip it’s at three seconds, yeah.
Abby Tabor: Okay, so a Twitch stream from the moon sounds entirely do-able.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah, yeah. But controlling a robot or something like that, maybe not so much.
Abby Tabor: Yeah. Is that a big challenge?
Greg Schmidt:Yeah, it is a big challenge. At my institute a few years back, we had hosted a centennial challenge. It was called the Lunar Regolith Excavation Challenge, and we got eight tons of regolith stimulant in what we finally called the Dirt Box.
Host: Nice.
Greg Schmidt: And various teams, most of them college teams, got to make robots.
Abby Tabor:Cool.
Greg Schmidt:And they couldn’t be . . . The operators couldn’t be right there with the robots. They had to be in another room. And what they did is they actually put that same latency in, that three-second round-trip latency.
Abby Tabor:Yeah, it would be realistic.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah, yeah. Uh-huh. And so they had to develop systems that would take care of that. But you know what? They figured it out.
Host: In fact, they’re still using that [bed]. And so that’s a shout-out for people if they go to facebook.com/nasaames.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah.
Host: We did a Facebook Live a while back where they’re using this now for experiments of the light: how the whites are super-bright and the darks are super-dark and [how] that means for autonomy and rovers.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah. Yeah.
Host: So if anybody wants to go dig through, that was a couple months ago, people can go through and get a firsthand — well, secondhand they can see people talking about it.
Abby Tabor:No, that was awesome. That was — sorry.
Greg Schmidt: Well, we were interested in that because the lighting is like polar lighting.
Jim Green: Yeah.
Greg Schmidt: And the poles are super-interesting in terms of the moon. That’s one of the places we really want to go because of the resources that are there. We talked about water a little bit earlier. You’re not going to find it on the equator, where every day it would just evaporate. There are these regions called permanently shadowed regions on the moon that haven’t seen sunlight for a billion years. Now, how water got there, there’s a lot of debate about that.
Jim Green: Yeah.
Greg Schmidt: There’s probably multiple processes, perhaps comets landing and things like that. But nonetheless, we —
Jim Green: Of course, they didn’t go like this. They really impacted.
Greg Schmidt: That’s right, that’s right. [Unintelligible]. That’s a good point, Jim. This wasn’t a soft landing.
Jim Green: Yeah, it wasn’t a soft landing. And then that material, if it wasn’t in the pole in the beginning, actually migrates —
Greg Schmidt: That’s right.
Jim Green:— because it’s a cold area, a very cold area. It’s called a cold trap.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah. Yeah.
Jim Green: And so indeed, that sort of attracts that stuff after the impact.
Greg Schmidt: It does. It does.
Abby Tabor: What is it that migrates? What migrates?
Greg Schmidt: The water.
Abby Tabor:The water does?
Jim Green: Water. Water will migrate.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh.
Abby Tabor: Huh.
Greg Schmidt: That’s right. It evaporates, and then it goes down when it’s cold. And once it goes down in one of these permanently shadowed regions, that’s where it stays for a billion years.
Abby Tabor: That’s incredible.
Host:And so — well, we showed it up on the screen, what Brian is working on. We can go to the cloud cam. And so folks, I can introduce Brian Day, the guy . . . Oh, we’ll go to the cloud cam, the other one. There we go. Oh no, not that one.
Abby Tabor:There he is.
Host: Hey! The best beard in Silicon Valley. So folks, if you want more on Brian Day, we have a podcast that we did with him a couple months back. So you can look at that. But he’s been showing a program called Moon Trek. You can literally type into Google or the search engine of your choice “Moon Trek NASA,” and you’ll find exactly what Brian is looking at. But Greg, hey, do you just want to talk a little bit about what Moon Trek is, how that came about? And then you wanted to show us some stuff, some of the landing sites.
Jim Green: Sure. Sure, indeed. Many years ago, as we were contemplating leaving lower-earth orbit, moving out into the Solar System — and the moon was a potential target, of course, and we’re still hanging onto that idea as we move out — we realized that our data sets — and we’ve been launching spacecraft and orbiting the moon and even some of the old lunar-mapping missions that the Apollo era used — that data is becoming now more available to us because we’re digitizing it and putting it into these kind of frameworks.
We decided we needed to be able to bring this data together, co-register it such that it’s all connected to the right coordinate system, and then allow us to peer at the moon in different wavelengths and in different temperatures and, really, in different altitudes. You can see the variation in heights. And that tells us all kinds of things about the structures, a little bit about how they’re put together and what they’re made of, and then of course looking for safe landing spots. So that particular system we’ve been working on for quite a few years, and we made the decision early on that we were going to make it network-accessible so that not only can any scientist get access to it or any of the other space agencies that are looking for how to use LRO data to be able to land. But also everybody in the public can take a look at it.
Host: Even video-game companies can grab this and use real data.
Jim Green: Yeah. Right, absolutely.
Greg Schmidt: And anyone who’s watching this right now, actually, yeah.
Abby Tabor:We could just go bring it up and look at it [on a phone]?
Greg Schmidt: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah.
Abby Tabor:Awesome.
Jim Green:Well, we did see that [Flash Stop] was a fabulous cratered system in the southern hemisphere, and you can tell by . . . Now this is a different view.
Male Voice: [Where do you want it]?
Jim Green: Oh. Oh, oh. Let’s go to . . . We can go to Schrödinger, or you can go to —
Greg Schmidt: Yeah. Schrödinger, or Tycho maybe.
Jim Green: Well, Tycho is not quite in the polar region.
Greg Schmidt:No, no. Uh-uh.
Abby Tabor: No, of course not. Of course not.
Host: Who wants to go to Tycho?
Greg Schmidt: Oh. Well, Tycho, yeah. [Crosstalk] the central peak.
Jim Green: This is Tycho Brahe. So this is a shout-out to what he has done for us, as we talked a little bit about.
Host: Brian will give us a shout-out when he’s ready to go.
Abby Tabor: Yeah.
Jim Green: But those regions are just really exciting. But they’re challenging. Not only [are they] on the moon, but it’s dark there. And so if we’ve got a spacecraft that moves in there that wants to make measurements, we’re going to have to either bring our own light or it’s going to have to feel its way along.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah, yeah. That’s right, that’s right. And having mechanical components work in the cold like that is not so easy, too, because we’re talking really, really cold here.
Jim Green: Right. As I said, that becomes a cold trap. The temperature is very low because it doesn’t get heated because of the sun angle and such. And so consequently, we expect accumulation of ices. Now, if it’s cometary material, it’s more than just water. It’s ammonia and other kinds of ices and methane and things that were probably in the original collapsing cloud that formed the comets. And so if we want to look at pristine material that’s 4.5 billion years, this actually might be the place to go.
Host: So while Brian is pulling that up, on the chat we have No Way Get Real, who asks . . . I’ve got to love the Twitch handles. It’s pretty awesome. “Are there different types of weather on the moon?” I’m thinking the answer is just straight up “No,” but I think there’s probably something more interesting than that.
Jim Green: Yes, there is.
Host: All right.
Jim Green:All right.
Host: Let’s do it.
Jim Green: So it’s not like the weather you’re used to. But because it doesn’t have the atmosphere we know and love, it actually is exposed to the solar wind two-thirds of the time. And the other third of the time, it’s exposed to interactions between the earth and its magnetosphere and the solar wind. In other words, the moon crosses the earth’s magnetotail. Now, when that happens, it is indeed a different environment. But when it’s outside the earth’s magnetotail and in the solar wind, then it gets hammered with the normal things that come from the sun. The sun constantly outgases. It’s just like it exhales everywhere, and we call that the solar wind. And it loses matter when it does that, and that material moves out. So there’s a constant stream of that.
And then sometimes things happen with the sun’s magnetic field that envelopes a whole section of it, energizes it, and throws it out. And we call that a coronal mass ejection. And that can hammer the moon just as well as it hammers the earth. And when it hammers the earth and interacts with our own magnetic field, it produces aurora. When it hammers the moon, that solar wind gets embedded right into the soils and changes its composition, changes its mineralogy and makes it a different set of material. And on the swirls, these areas that have the remnant magnetic field actually probably protect[s] the surface of the sun from that. And that’s another reason why we want to go there: We want to see what the pristine early solar regolith, the soils on the moon look like by going in those areas.
Abby Tabor:There’s so much going on on the moon.
Jim Green: There’s a lot going on. It’s a cool —
Clive: [Crosstalk] Schrödinger.
Jim Green: Schrödinger has arrived.
Host: All right. Well, there it is on our screen.
Abby Tabor:Yep.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah.
Host: All right. Yeah, here we go.
Abby Tabor: Amazing.
Jim Green: Okay. All right.
Host:Go on.
Abby Tabor: Tell us.
Host: Pray, tell.
Jim Green: Yeah, so this is just an absolutely spectacular crater. You actually can see several features about it that you have to think about. You see, normal smaller craters where there’s an impact but no central peak, those typically are maybe 5, 10 kilometers in size. And then if you look real hard, you might see a crater that’s bigger, that actually has a central peak. And then the new idea here is this crater is so enormous that it actually has two rims. And so this is a tremendous impact. Clive, correct me if I’m not right: This actually is one of the younger impacts at this size.
Clive: It’s actually one of the older ones. [Crosstalk] older ones.
Jim Green: All right, older ones. Thank you. Yeah, it’s one of the older ones. And so we want to get in it and we want to bring back material and age-date it and really understand how old these structures are. We also want to go to some of the newer craters and younger craters and examine those. You can also see on the surface these features where there are gullies or look like gullies. This crater is actually filled in with basaltic material. That means that once you hit it, the molten rock underneath inside the moon bubbled up and then started to fill in the crater.
Abby Tabor: Like lava?
Greg Schmidt: That’s right, like lava.
Jim Green: And that’s different than the . . . Yeah, like lava. And this is a different feature if it was hit on the far side of the moon. We don’t see a lot of these huge regions that are old lava fields. And that’s because, we believe, the tidally locking part of the moon where we only have one face actually pulls gravitationally the moon to the point where magma is much more likely to flow on the near side than it is the far side. And so a lot of the craters on the far side don’t have floors of magma that have come up.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah.
Host: So here’s a question that came real quick from A Strawberry 2: “Is there any potential for life to exist anywhere on the moon? I know it couldn’t live on the surface, but is it possible that it could be buried underground or in polar ice?”
Jim Green:Or in the caves. There’s life in caves all over the place.
Host: In caves. You have all kinds of extreme environments.
Jim Green: Now, I’m not starting speculation in that area.
Greg Schmidt:Yeah, yeah. So probably not.
Jim Green: Probably not. Probably not.
Greg Schmidt:Yeah, yeah.
Host: Sorry, guys.
Greg Schmidt: The problem is: How would it have evolved? On Earth a long time ago, there were some very favorable conditions for that. We had an atmosphere. We had liquid water. We had all of the organic ingredients. We had this kind of pea soup that could result in life. Now, are there places that could result in life that are completely different? Some have speculated that maybe life could exist in the lakes of Titan, for instance. I’m not one of those believers myself, necessarily, but I suppose it’s possible.
Jim Green: Now, there’s better places in the Solar System.
Greg Schmidt: There are.
Host: There’s more interesting places.
Jim Green: But when the moon formed early, it also had a lot of organic material — it had to — on its surface. And that organic material was also brought to it by other impacts. The detractor for the moon is that it’s small in comparison to the earth; therefore, its gravity isn’t very big; and therefore, it didn’t hang onto that. And then the sun just ate that away, with the energy of the sun breaking up the organic material and the solar wind then stripping that away. So that really makes it tough.
Clive: That’s why the polar regions with the polar ices, they may contain the building blocks for life.
Host: And I’m going to say: Eric, can you hear Clive on there, or do we need him to move closer to the mic?
Eric: I can hear him, actually.
Host: Oh, awesome. Good. I didn’t want our poor audio listeners to be like: “I can’t hear Clive.” You’re good, man. Go for it.
Clive: Those ices may contain the materials that came to Earth, but they’ve not evolved because it’s too cold. And that material may be what led to what you see on the screen right now, which is scary.
[General laughter, crosstalk]
Clive: But that’s why we want to go there in terms of science: to see, okay, are there the pre-biology molecules there?
Jim Green: What did we start out with?
Clive: What did we start as? What were the [unintelligible] the moon important? But then those same molecules can be used to support life up there now. You can get water. You can crack the water into hydrogen and oxygen. You can breathe the oxygen. You can put the hydrogen back into the process, get more water. You can drink it. You can crack it again, use hydrogen and oxygen as rocket fuel. So there’s a way that the moon becomes very important as a refueling depot for exploration but very important for understanding why we’re here and how things started.
Greg Schmidt: Well, a lot of people are interested in these questions. We have laboratories here at NASA Ames where we are using very, very cold temperatures with some very raw pre-organic material, exposing it to ultraviolet light just like it would be exposed to in deep space, and seeing what happens. And there have been people here, such as Lou Allamandola and others, that have been doing this for years. And they’ve found that some pretty complicated things called PAHs and other compounds form in a deep-space environment. And so the question of how life originates and exactly where it originates is by no means settled. It’s still an active debate topic.
Abby Tabor:Those are the building blocks of life, right?
Greg Schmidt: The building blocks, right.
Abby Tabor:Whenever we talk about organics, I’m afraid people might understand live organic material. But you’re talking about molecules that can come together and . . . ?
Greg Schmidt: That’s right. Yeah, organics in a scientist’s point of view are molecules that are made from carbon, basically, carbon and other atoms. But yeah, that’s right.
Abby Tabor: Right.
Greg Schmidt: Huh? Yeah.
Abby Tabor: Okay, cool.
Host: So I’m going to try to get to some more questions. This is from a while back. [Isutinos 749]: “What are the plans for this year’s missions?”
Jim Green: Okay, so —
Host: How about the guy who holds all the money? Go for it.
Jim Green: No, no. That would be the worst thing to do.
Greg Schmidt: He gives it away.
Jim Green: I get it out.
Clive: This is being recorded, right?
Jim Green:I know. I get it out, I get it out.
Host: Go ahead.
Jim Green: Yeah, so we have just an absolutely spectacular planetary program. It’s unbelievable the kind of things that we’re doing. Right now we’ve got LRO, as I mentioned, orbiting the moon, making spectacular observations. We move a little further out into the Solar System, you go to places like Mars, we have a set of spacecraft that are orbiting Mars right now. One, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, also could see a table about this size if it sat on the surface of Mars. So we have some similar things going at the moon as we do Mars.
And then, of course, on Mars we have two active rovers. One is called Opportunity, and the other is called Curiosity. Curiosity is making its way up Mount Sharp, and right now it’s at a layer where there were clays. Now, clays were formed in water. So now we know that whole area was just filled with water for a fair length of time. And clays might be the perfect place for organic molecules to connect and start building structures that could be of importance to life. So that’s an important set of observations. We’re going to be starting to make those.
As we move further out, into the asteroid belt, we have a spectacular mission. It’s called Dawn. And Dawn is now orbiting Ceres. This year we’re going to change its orbit. It’s going to be a highly elliptical orbit. It’s going to get really close to the surface and make high-resolution imaging of certain regions so that we get a better idea as to what Ceres is like, particularly in the future if we want to be able to land and study that. Also an asteroid mission called OSIRIS-REx.
Host: Nice.
Jim Green: This time we are getting very close to an asteroid called Bennu, and Bennu is a carbonaceous chondrite. It’s kind of ball-shaped. It has a fat little belly or equatorial band associated with it.
Host: Carbonaceous chondrite.
Jim Green: Yes.
Abby Tabor: I was waiting for that.
Jim Green: “What does that mean? Yeah, okay.”
Host: Let’s go for that.
Jim Green: So it’s full of carbon —
Host:Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.
Jim Green: — and is just a nation to its own. So it’s carbonaceous. And what that’s all about is, because it’s so rich in carbon, we think it has amino acids. We believe it has a fair amount of water. It had the early, early collapsing cloud material that things like it bombarded the earth and brought those things to our planet that we believe potentially started and helped start life on it. And by going to Bennu, this primitive asteroid, we’re going back in time and we’re going to really examine it in a way that we’ve never done before. That’s going to get to Bennu starting in August. So in the next several months, Bennu is going to get closer and closer in view to us as OSIRIS-REx comes up to it, and it’s just going to be a spectacular set of observations. We’re just really waiting for that.
So then, as we go further out in the Solar System, we ran out of [Huygens]-Cassini. It was down to the final few breaths, and we did ditch it into Saturn this last year in a spectacular event. We didn’t want it flying into any of the really fabulous bodies like Titan we talked a little bit about, or Enceladus. And so we have nothing at Saturn at the moment.
But then, as we move much further out, we have a spacecraft racing its way out of the Solar System called New Horizons. It did a fabulous fly-by of Pluto a couple years ago. And on January 1st of next year, 2019, it’s going to fly by a smaller object beyond Pluto. It’s called a Kuiper Belt object. This is also debris left over from the collapsing cloud that we’ve just now discovered. So in our lifetime, we actually found these pieces out there. There’s probably tens of thousands of them out there. These are building blocks of objects that become Pluto-like objects, and there’s quite a few of those bigger objects like that out there. And so we’re really excited about that flying by. In fact, we now know that it may not be just one object. It might be as many as three.
Voices All: Oh, wow. Yeah.
Jim Green: And so it’s going to be really exciting as we fly by it. So we have quite a few things going on this year. And then in May, in particular, the start of a new mission. I talked about those missions that are active right now. Our next start of a mission is on May 5th with the launch of Insight, and Insight is going to Mars. It’s a unique platform that allows us to put down on the surface several important types of measurements, one of which is a seismic system that will then really give us knowledge about how Mars quakes. And we know it quakes. We see avalanches from space from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Abby Tabor: Really?
Jim Green: Yeah, we caught them in progress — you know, sides of the mountain coming down. Wow. Something is happening. Something is shaking there. And Mars gets hit, too, gets hit by asteroids. That causes quakes, too. So the seismic measurements will tell us about the structure of Mars. And we want to do that at the moon.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah.
Jim Green: We want to be able to think about how we can land things on the moon to make those kind of measurements, and then that helps us understand the structure of these terrestrial bodies. We know the structure of Earth well because we have seismic measurements here now and have for decades. We’re starting it on Mars, and we want to start that on the moon, too. So Insight, Cinco de Mayo.
Host: Nice.
Jim Green: May the 5th it’s going up. And it lands on Mars also this year, in November.
Greg Schmidt: Well, and then we’ve been to places like Mercury, a little bit longer ago Venus.
Jim Green: Yeah.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah, so . . .
Jim Green: Well, the United States has been first to every one of the planets, even Pluto.
Host: U.S.A.
[General laughter]
Host: Well, I’m looking at the chat. I have so many questions, there’s no way we’re going to get to it. We’re going to wrap up in a couple of minutes. I was going to try to do it at 3:00, but do you want to do a rapid fire on a couple of these?
Greg Schmidt: Sure.
Host: Short, pithy things? Try to get as many people involved as possible?
Jim Green: Sure.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah, absolutely.
Host:All right, so let’s go with [Navi XP]: “How long until we can put humans on Mars? What are some of the hurdles to building a colony there?”
Jim Green: So short and pithy. So in my opinion, it’s going to happen. There’s some technology things we’re working on. We know what we have to do and how we have to do it. And so I don’t think there’s any show stoppers. It’s really all about will. It’s really all about the American people deciding that we want to move in this direction. We’re working hard with our international partners. We know it’s going to be of international activity. And as we do that, I think that will hasten the opportunity. I would like to see that happen, having humans on Mars, in my lifetime. It’s certainly viable.
Host: Let’s go to [Dazzle Adorn]: “Astronauts returning from the moon to Earth went through decontamination to make sure they didn’t bring back organisms. Did they do the same procedures before going to the moon to avoid contaminating it?”
Abby Tabor: Hmm. Good question.
Greg Schmidt: No. No, not that I’m aware of.
Jim Green: They took every organism they could get.
Greg Schmidt: That’s right, that’s right. It’s pretty much impossible to do that.
Host: Wow.
Greg Schmidt: The thing is we are ecosystems.
Host: Microbiome.
Greg Schmidt: We have more mass of other stuff with us than we do human mass, and we have a tremendous variety of organisms on us. We’re actually really just learning about things like the gut biome and how much it —
Jim Green: We need that.
Greg Schmidt: We do. We do.
Jim Green: Yeah, got to have it.
Greg Schmidt: It’s incredibly important. And so no, we will never be able to sterilize ourselves.
Clive: The later Apollo missions, the astronauts didn’t go through that contamination because they knew they weren’t bringing anything back.
Greg Schmidt:That’s right, yeah.
Jim Green: Right, right.
Host:So [Soreth Avera]: “Would water from Moon be drinkable?”
Jim Green: Yeah, H20 is H2O now.
Host: Nice.
Jim Green: But I would say this: We would anticipate that what we would get when we go to a permanently shadowed region and grab that material is a variety of things, a mixture of things. It wouldn’t necessarily just only be H2O.
Greg Schmidt: Right.
Jim Green: There would be other volatiles in it. As we mentioned, it could be a methane. There could even be, perhaps, some ammonia in it. Those are the kind of things that we see in comets, too.
Host: So all right, we’ll grab one more before we wrap it up. This is [Preto_Naquo]. I’m totally butchering this. “Can we eventually . . . ” And they put it in all caps because they really mean it. “Can we eventually terraform the moon?”
Greg Schmidt: The moon. Wow. Wow. I know people have looked. People have looked at terraforming Mars for a long time. Chris McKay, one of the experts on that, is right here at NASA Ames. The moon, I’m not sure if the gravitational field is strong enough, quite honestly. What you need to do to be able to terraform an object is have a planet or a moon with enough gravity to hold in atmosphere and then be able to eventually have liquid water exist. And below a certain pressure, that’s not going to happen. And so could you do it by impacting enough comets? I don’t know. Someone has probably done the calculations. I don’t know what they are.
Host: Cool. Well, so as we get ready to wrap up, a couple of plugs. We have Gravity Assist. I’ll have to give the shout. It was Sarah Noble who you had on the moon episode, which is already up online.
Jim Green: Yes. Yes.
Host: People can go ahead and listen to that. Which one do you have coming up?
Jim Green: Now, every Wednesday we put out one. I think this week we did Linda Spilker on Saturn. So that’s been posted. We’ve got a couple more to go in this season. After that I’m going to talk to Amy Simon, who’s . . .
Host: Nice.
[General crosstalk]
Host: I have a cheat sheet over here, and he’s like: “I’ve got it.”
Jim Green: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And she’s going to talk about Uranus and Neptune. Those are really huge planets. We think of them as gas planets, gas giants, but they’re very different than Saturn and Jupiter. So that’s been really intriguing, and she’s been studying those her whole scientific career. And then we’ll end this season with Alan Stern. We’re going to talk about Pluto, which is probably one of the most exciting places in the Solar System. I think when we flew by it, I just was absolutely shocked.
Greg Schmidt: What a surprise for everyone.
Jim Green: Oh, yeah. Oh, man. That body is much smaller than the moon but has an atmosphere. Now, we just got done talking about no atmosphere on the moon, nor will it ever have it, and Pluto has got it.
Greg Schmidt: Yeah. And it’s geologically active, too.
Jim Green: And it’s geologically active.
Greg Schmidt: No one expected that.
Jim Green: It’s got these nitrogen glaciers that move like toothpaste scouring the surface and creating this beautiful heart-looking region. And it just blew my mind.
Host: Excellent. So as I was saying — well, I always talk about, when talking about Gravity Assist, this is the NASA in Silicon Valley Podcast. Well, technically this is NASA in Silicon Valley Live. But we’re a podcast. We’re not the only NASA podcast. Gravity Assist. Houston We Have a Podcast is one that’s out of Johnson Space Center. We work a lot with them. There’s a YouTube and audio version of This Week at NASA. They’re still going. It’s shorter, four- or five-minute little segments. So a lot of content out there for people to grab. This has been the NASA in Silicon Valley podcast. Huge thanks to Jim Green and to Greg Schmidt for joining us.
Jim Green: My pleasure.
Greg Schmidt: And my pleasure.
Abby Tabor: Thanks, guys.
Greg Schmidt: Thank you, yeah.
Host: And I would be remiss to . . . We have Eric, who’s in our audio studio. We have him on the Voice Of God over there. And if we go to the cloud cam, over on the far left we have Jesse and Dave. And you can’t see Dominic who’s sitting over there, Clive and Brian sitting there. So huge thanks, guys. This has been way fun.
For folks who are listening or watching on demand, or if you’re listening to this on your audio, too bad you can’t see everybody wave. But trust us that they are. If you’re watching on demand, we’re on all the major social-media platforms under NASA Ames. We are using the hashtag #NASAInSiliconValley. And we’ve gone analog, so we have a phone number. If you have any comments, questions, you can also call 650-604-1400. Call. We’re not going to answer the phone, but leave a comment or a question and then we’ll try to figure out how we can wrap that into an episode.
Huge thanks to everybody who participated live and participated in the chat. We’re going to keep doing this, not next Friday but the Friday after that. We’re working on a fun show where we’re talking the early days of VR development. Also autonomous-vehicle systems, stuff like that. We’re trying to solidify that up. So not next Friday but the Friday after that. If you haven’t already, go ahead click “like,” “share,” “subscribe,” every button on the screen or podcast app that you can think of. That’s how you can find us. And that is all of my plugs that I’m doing, but I also do need to give a shout-out to the @NASAMoon. There’s a lot of moon activity happening at NASA. We had the supermoon. There was the blood moon, the eclipse earlier.
Greg Schmidt: Oh. Yeah, yeah.
Jim Green: Well, we also, in October — I think it’s October 20th — really promote the international Observe The Moon Night —
Host: Nice.
Jim Green: — where we get a lot of people out and we have opportunities to talk about the moon as we see it from Earth but interact with a lot of subject-matter experts and a lot of scientists that go to various places where many people are congregating to look at the moon and really give you some great details about what’s going on.
Greg Schmidt: I think the bottom line is this is your space agency.
Host: Exactly.
Greg Schmidt: So get involved.
Host: Absolutely.
Greg Schmidt:We want you.
Jim Green: And the moon we have is not any old moon. It’s our moon.
Greg Schmidt: It’s our moon.
Host:And this is all . . . We’re doing this on Twitch. We’re doing this as a podcast. Notice there are no ads. Don’t give us any tips. Pay your taxes — this is how we survive. So fortunately, we don’t have to throw in ads or baked-in anything. But thank you so much, everybody. Thank you for making this possible.
Jim Green: Thank you.
Greg Schmidt: Thank you.
Host: Thank you, guys, for watching. And we will see you in a couple weeks.
Jim Green:Sounds great.
[END]