An end of year compilation of conversations with various NASA scientists, engineers, and researchers throughout 2017 on the NASA in Silicon Valley Podcast.
Transcript
Frank Tavares: You are listening to episode 74 of the NASA in Silicon Valley podcast. This is Frank Tavares…
Abby Tabor:… and Abby Tabor, introducing you to our 2017 end of year clip show.
Frank Tavares: 2017 has been quite a year, but it’s finally winding down to a close. To cap things off, we wanted to look back at some of the highlights from the past year, and give a good overview to all the listener’s we’ve picked up recently of all the different things happening here at NASA’s Ames Research Center here in Silicon Valley.
Abby Tabor:We’ve picked out clips from our favorite episodes over the last year, but if any of these strike your fancy, the full episodes are there to listen to as well! Their perfect for tuning in on a long road trip or flight home for the holidays.
Frank Tavares: Sounds like we’ve got a great episode lined up. As usual, reach out to us on social media platforms using the hashtag #NASASiliconValley. Let’s jump on in!
KEPLER
Abby Tabor:For our first conversation from 2017 we have a favorite subject for the public, and for us here at NASA, too, that is the hunt for exoplanets. The Kepler space telescope has discovered many, many planets orbiting stars other than our own sun. In this first conversation, here is Natalie Batalha, Kepler science guru here at NASA Ames – and, incidentally, one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the year – explaining to us what Kepler is all about and how it works:
Matthew Buffington: What is Kepler? For anybody who has no clue, they’re listening for the first time.
Natalie Batalha:Well, it’s a space telescope. We call it a photometer: “photo” “meter.” Photo is light, meter is to measure. So you’re measuring light. But with a space telescope, you’re using a mirror to collect a bunch a photons, and you focus those photons onto a detector that turns the photons into a voltage. And you measure that as a number. It tells you about the brightness.
But Kepler was NASA’s first mission capable of detecting an Earth-size planet – moreover a potentially habitable Earth-sized planet. So it was a piece of technology that was launched that was really new. It allowed us to look at the universe in a different way. And as a result, whenever you put a new piece of technology into space, or you build a new piece of technology to look at things in a new way, you’re going to learn a lot, even more than you perhaps set out to learn. And certainly that’s what Kepler did.
So the way that Kepler finds these planets is to measure the brightnesses of many stars simultaneously. And by “many,” I mean on the order of 200,000 – 150,000 to 200,000 stars – taking a brightness measurement simultaneously of all of these stars once every 30 minutes without blinking basically for four years.
Matthew Buffington: Taking in a ton of data in that process.
Natalie Batalha:Yeah, it is a lot of data. That’s right. And so what you’re looking for in these brightness measurements every 30 minutes is a momentary diminution of light that occurs if a planet eclipses its star. Now, that’s not going to happen for all planets that are out there, because it requires a certain geometry. Right?
Matthew Buffington: Yeah.
Natalie Batalha:The orbit has to be inclined exactly right so that the planet in its orbit about the star casts a shadow that sweeps across the telescope perfectly. Right?
Matthew Buffington: Yes.
Natalie Batalha:And the telescope will perceive that shadow as a momentary dimming of light. So that’s how we infer the existence of these planets. And that’s what Kepler set out to do.
Matthew Buffington: Yeah. I think I remember hearing you talk one time about if you hold your palm at the night sky, you hold it up, that that kind of gives people an idea of the spot you’re looking into the sky.
Natalie Batalha:Yeah, we’re surveying a slice of the galaxy. So we’re not looking over the whole entire sky. We’re looking at about a handprint on the sky, which is 100 square degrees, 10 by 10. And we’re just looking out about 3,000 light years along the spiral arm of our galaxy.
Matthew Buffington: And even thinking of the science that you get from a space telescope like this, you’re bringing in so much data, NASA’s looking at that data, the scientific community’s looking at this data. I’d imagine that it’s like after you’ve brought this stuff in and shared it, then it’s like the actual results and papers that come off of this then happen down that line. And so even long after the mission’s over, you’ll probably still have papers coming.
Natalie Batalha:Absolutely.
Matthew Buffington: Because when people finally get the time to dig through it all.
Natalie Batalha:Oh, yeah, absolutely. There’s a latency between the time you collect the data and the time that it comes to fruition. And so the number of publications has gradually been ramping up year after year. And I expect, even after we turn off the lights and go home, it will continue to ramp up, maybe even for another 10 years or so. There’s a lot of information there yet to be gleaned.
Matthew Buffington: So it’s like the biggest results may still be yet to come.
Natalie Batalha:That’s true. Yeah, absolutely.
Matthew Buffington: Yeah. It’s just fascinating, because I’m sure for you, for your career, it’s like you come in looking at the stars, studying this stuff, and the books that you learned on, the textbooks have literally been rewritten —
Natalie Batalha:Yeah, that’s true.
Matthew Buffington: — to match the stuff that you found.
Natalie Batalha:Yes.
Matthew Buffington: That’s just completely fascinating.
Natalie Batalha:Literally. In fact, we’ve been asked for figures for new textbooks. That’s right. And that happened really quickly, because the change in knowledge was dramatic and quite quick. It was literally like a veil being removed, lifted from your eyes as we revealed the small planets that populate the galaxy that we couldn’t see before.
Matthew Buffington: Yeah. And I think even in some of the more recent – you think of the TRAPPIST announcement and stuff like that. I remember listening to you talk one time. And it was the idea that every star you see in the night sky very likely has at least one planet.
Natalie Batalha:Yeah, every sun-like star, yeah, on average has at least one planet. That’s what we’ve learned from Kepler.
Eclipse:
Guhartakurta
Frank Tavares: You may have heard about the solar eclipse this August 21st across the continental United States. Our livestream was the most-viewed NASA event ever; it was really amazing to see a scientific phenomenon take the nation by storm. On the podcast, we had heliophysicist Lika Guhathakurta prepare us for the event by giving us some scientific background, and tell us why she was so excited. Let’s listen to what she had to say…
Matthew Buffington:For somebody who has been studying this, you have to be feeling super hyped, and you also have to be really excited as it builds. What’s going through your mind? What are you preparing for? What are you looking at as you get ready for this huge eclipse that’s going to cover the entire United States.
Lika Guhathakurta: I don’t know that there’s any one word or sentence that really captures my sentiments. I am in this hyped state and I think it will remained sustained for the duration. What is absolutely joyful, and it’s almost close to a month before, that I am seeing that the country, the reporters, are getting engaged in communicating this. This is such a potential moment, I would say – I’m going to use big words because that’s how I feel. You can’t predict these things, but that’s how I feel. It’s an event of history.
Matthew Buffington: Absolutely.
Lika Guhathakurta: Where the entire population of America, including Hawaii and Alaska, can view a partial solar eclipse. You don’t have to do anything, you just need protective glasses, and you can be wherever you are and look up at the sky. The only thing that will prevent you from seeing this directly looking at the sky is if you don’t have protective eye cover. But even then you can project it. The other thing is if it’s cloud cover. Otherwise, everyone, wherever you are, you can observe this.
People who are on those 14 states, about 70 miles wide, the special path, called the path of totality, that is a transformative moment. I kid you not. I’m a scientist, you know? Keep that in mind. And a solar scientist at that, but nothing takes away from when you actually look at the eclipse. The corona, the shimmering, pearly halo breathing. And It’s dynamic, you can see sometimes the post flare loops, the structures move.
You’re seeing this with your naked eyes. You’re seeing the outer atmosphere of the Sun, and we live in that atmosphere. We don’t think about it, but when you see it, somehow you begin to sense that. For me, if human beings understand that, there are so many greater things we could do together.
Matthew Buffington: Wow. Yeah, it reminds me of – A lot of people from Ames are going to be over in Oregon. In fact, you’re going to be heading up to Oregon as well to watch this. NASA TV is doing a huge production that will last throughout the duration of the totality at different locations throughout the day. But we have this drawing up on our whiteboard in our office where it says, I think, an 80 percent of eclipse, and it was making that emphasis of, yeah, the total eclipse will be up in Oregon, but we’re still going to get 80 percent. It was still really cool.
So for the folks who are not necessarily in the path of the totality, you’re still going to get quite the show.
Lika Guhathakurta: Imagine, most people have never seen an eclipsed Sun, whether partial or total. I mean this is such a cosmic coincidence. With the population that we have in the country, with the technology – This happened 99 years ago, but think of our knowledge base today, think of social media, think of all the technology, all the apps, the cameras, the lens. The kind of observations we are going to be able to take – I’m not even talking about the science observations which NASA will be doing from our operating spacecraft, from the ground, from airplanes, from balloons. You name it and we are doing it.
But then there’s the other side. There are animals, you can actually do animal behavior. There will be cameras in zoos. Animals respond to the change in ambient light. You know, social behavior, psychological behavior, it’s really quite an incredible moment.
Matthew Buffington: In talking about it being impactful for everybody, one of the coolest things that I saw was a project that’s coming out of Ames, but it’s actually with the SSERVI group – we’ve done podcast interviews with different folks from SSERVI here before. But talk a little about this, it’s an actual braille book about the total eclipse. If you’re visually impaired, you’re not going to be able to see the eclipse, but NASA worked with them to create a book where you can feel it with your hands and it’s a whole detailed thing of how the totality works, where it’s going to go across the United States. So, talk a little bit about that.
Lika Guhathakurta: It’s really quite amazing, the steps that NASA will take to make this accessible to almost all, even the ones who are visually impaired. Through tactile sense you kind of get that imagination of what’s happening, what’s the phenomenon like. We have done this for the eclipse for them to be part of it and understand what’s going on. We have done this with other missions actually. We do it through braille. Sometimes we produce music out of the data we collect. In the deep space, where we think space is empty, and it’s not. We measure the particles and then we actually give them some tonality as opposed to a color. That’s also something we do in Hubble images, for example.
NASA is really, in that sense, very thoughtful in sort of making what we are doing as accessible to everyone as possible. I think this is such a cool thing.
CASSINI
Abby Tabor:After the eclipse, in September, we had another big moment when the Cassini spacecraft made its final plunge into the planet Saturn. This is a mission that many, many people have been working on for decades, and here the spacecraft, at least, goes out in a blaze of glory. I had the chance to talk with 3 members of the original science team, who have been studying Saturn’s rings and its moons. I asked them what they think will be the lasting impact of this captivating mission, and, basically, how they’d say farewell:
Abby Tabor:What, for you, are the biggest impacts or the ones that really captured your minds?
Jeff Cuzzi: Since you mentioned the rings of Saturn, let me say a few things about what we have learned. Saturn’s rings are really like a vast dynamical laboratory. It’s a big, giant particle disk where the particles interact like molecules in a fluid. So, we treat it like a fluid, collisions and such. So, it’s a great way to understand the processes by which our planet formed from the disk of particles and gas that originally surrounded our sun. It’s a laboratory for us to study that. All those processes in the rings probably happened in one way or another in our own forming solar system and in other forming solar systems where we see all these thousands of exoplanets.
Abby Tabor:Okay. Right. Saturn tells us about Earth potentially and then beyond.
Jeff Cuzzi: And beyond, no doubt.
Abby Tabor:Wow.
Jeff Cuzzi: The other thing we learned was that Saturn’s rings are changing before our eyes. This fluid flops around and moves and changes. We see things colliding and recreating as we watch. That’s been fascinating. In fact, the whole origin of Saturn’s rings, we think, it’s whether they formed in the last couple hundred million years is a hot topic these days. That is around the age of the fish on Earth or more recently.
Abby Tabor:Interesting.
Jeff Cuzzi: There are things that are still being worked. So, we can’t answer that question right now. There’s data being taken right now by Cassini that we’ll hear about in two weeks, and this work will go on. But this is a very hot subject right now about Saturn’s rings. This whole concept of impermanence and change applied to this vast structure has been something we’ve really learned very well through Cassini.
That’s very cool Yeah. Because we don’t think about the outer Solar System transforming and going through long term change.
Jeff Cuzzi:Exactly.
Abby Tabor:We don’t get the chance to see that, normally.
Jeff Cuzzi: That’s right.
Abby Tabor:Yeah. Neat. That’s a good takeaway. How about Dale or Chris?
Chris McKay: My farewell to Cassini would be, “Thank you for the revelations of Titan’s liquid methane lakes, and even more so for the organic-rich geysers on Enceladus,” because that’s given us astrobiologists a clear direction on what to do next, and we’re doing it.
Abby Tabor: Awesome. Awesome. We look forward to that next chapter, clearly. Dale?
Dale Cruikshank:I see two things. One is that the things we’ve been finding with Cassini in the Saturn system give us ideas for the use of the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be an enormously powerful facility to be launched in about two years from now.
Abby Tabor:Right.
Dale Cruikshank:The other thing that comes to mind is that Cassini, with so many of the other things that NASA does, is most often the best news you ever get. And in a world where the media are jammed with not-so-good news. Almost everything you hear from NASA is good news and stimulating.
Abby Tabor:It is.
Dale Cruikshank:I think that this is a tremendous gift to not only the American public, but to humanity, that NASA has these lofty goals and has found ways to achieve them, and with a cadre of talented, anxious, and vigorous young people to carry these missions out. We are often the best news you’ll ever get.
Abby Tabor:Absolutely. I couldn’t have said it better myself, that’s so true. You feel that around NASA Ames.
Ali Guarenos / CubeSats:
Frank Tavares: Next, we’ll hear from Ali Guarneros Luna, engineer and deputy project manager here at Ames. She’s worked on safety systems for CubeSats, small satellites that bring scientific experiments or technology demonstrations into space. One of the projects she mentions here, TechEdSat and it’s exo-brake, recently was launched and deployed from the space station. Let’s hear more from her!
Matthew Buffington: So what are some new innovations or engineering things that you’ve had to implement?
Ali Guarneros Luna: In the beginning it was completely try this, try that, try to see if you satisfy the safety engineers in the space station. So one example I can think of is the ALI switch, which is the Auxiliary Lateral Inhibit switch. So it’s named after me.
Matthew Buffington: It’s named ALI. How fortuitous.
Ali Guarneros Luna: So we were building this CubeSat. The space station was like we need to make sure that when you are inside the space station you don’t get turned on and start emitting from the radios that you have. We have three radios. And they were really worried because even though it was a one-unit cube sat – one unit is 10 by 10 by 10. So 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters.
They were worried that the three radios that we have, something might happen inside the space station or the satellite turns on, we will be radiating an interference with the communications to ground. So you’re talking about the life of the astronaut, and having constant communication with ground is very important. So we had two inhibits in the foot switches in the frame.
And they were going to be against the plate of the deployer. So you shouldn’t be turned on unless you get ejected from the deployer. So they were like, that is not sufficient because the frequency that you have in your CubeSat is too high, and we need to have a third inhibit. So where do you put a third inhibit in a 10 by 10 by 10 centimeter CubeSat, right? After you had already built it. Because we had already built it.
So to satisfy that requirement we ended up thinking about — we spent two days thinking between all the engineers and myself —
Matthew Buffington: Trying to figure it out.
Ali Guarneros Luna: Yeah. Where do we want to put the third inhibit? Do we want to put it in another foot? Do we want to put it on the opposite side of the other inhibits? Where? So from my experience of building amateur rockets – because I usually do it in the summer, and I go to Nevada and launch amateur rockets. Sometimes you have switches that have leverage. So they’re compressed.
And when you have a payload inside the rocket and they come out, the leverage, it gets lifted and then the payload turns on.
Matthew Buffington: So the act of lifting flips the switch.
Ali Guarneros Luna: Yeah. So I was like, well, we can do something like that. But we need a roller because what happened on the frame of the deployer, you have to be very smooth. You don’t want to scrape the deployer. So it has to be smooth. So I was like, well, we can have the same switch but with a roller.
Matthew Buffington: So it’s smoother, not friction.
Ali Guarneros Luna: That’s right. And not to scrape. So we ended up finding one. Then we put it on the side of the frame in one of them. Then I was just like, well, we can do it, right? So we implement it. So my friends the next day, we came around to meet and talk about the inhibit, they came up with that acronym. The Auxiliary Lateral Inhibit — to name it after me.
Matthew Buffington: Nice.
Ali Guarneros Luna: And that’s what we’ve been using ever since actually.
Matthew Buffington: That’s awesome. So your namesake.
Ali Guarneros Luna: Yeah. So that’s one of the things that I found it very interesting that you wouldn’t think about it, but it just happens that we needed to have it.
Matthew Buffington: You just figure it out, find a way to make it work. So what kind of stuff are you working on, are you looking forward to, coming up?
Ali Guarneros Luna: Coming up, we’re having another satellite, which is TechEdSat 5, being deployed from the space station. And it’s going to be the first satellite that is going to be controlled to the orbit. Because it has an exo-brake, which is a cross parachute we can rig up. And it has a winch. We’re going to control it from the ground. Actually we’re going to control the winch to make sure that we can put in the two wires that are connected to the exo-brake.
So when we are in a certain orbit or altitude we can change the shape of the exo-brake and guide the CubeSat to reenter in the specific area that we want. Not survive, but just reentry.
Matthew Buffington: And that’s important because these are small 10 by 10 by 10 things. Normally they burn up in the atmosphere —
Ali Guarneros Luna: That’s right.
Matthew Buffington: — when they’re done doing their job in orbit they fall down. They burn up. But you want it to survive the reentry. So you’re using this exo-brake to —
Ali Guarneros Luna: Well, yes. The exo-brake is more to guide the CubeSat to enter a specific area. If you’re shooting at something and aiming at a specific area – so the exo-brake will give you that capability. Usually when CubeSats are in orbit, they just go around the Earth. They do whatever they need to do, whatever experiment it is. Then as they come close to Earth’s altitude, they will burn in.
It could be anywhere. But what we’re trying to do is deploy something from the space station. Then as it’s coming down and going around the Earth, actually give it a route where to enter.
Matthew Buffington: Where you want to tell it — where you can control it —
Ali Guarneros Luna: Yes. Because that whole aspect to try to maneuver the cube sat, the next step for us is to build something a little bit bigger and actually be able to survive the reentry as we try to guide it —
Matthew Buffington: First figure out how to steer it. And then figure out how to make it survive.
Ali Guarneros Luna: Survive. Yeah. And reentry.
Crossover:
Frank Tavares: Like all the best comic books, NASA in Silicon Valley had a crossover episode with Houston We Have a Podcast! We spoke with Dennis Leveson-Gower, project science here at NASA Ames, and astronaut Shane Kimbrough, talking both about the cargo and science projects sent up to the international space station, and the process of unpacking them.
Matthew Buffington: We see there’s the both sides — there’s the people up at the space station working on receiving the cargo or even science experiments, but also on the flipside of, how do you get that stuff prepared? That is a feat in and of itself.
Gary Jordan:That’s true. So Dennis, what do you have to do to prepare stuff to go on cargo missions?
Dennis Leveson-Gower:That’s a big question, because I mean, it really starts one to two years ahead of the launch, if you think about it, or more, because after you have an experiment defined, you’ve got to prepare exactly what the science requirements are, then you’ve got to start making a plan, then you’ve got to start assessing what the hardware needs are, and the kits’ needs are, then you have to design those, then they have to get through safety, you have to plan operations, you have to plan how everything’s going to be labelled.
And then, usually I think somewhere between three and six months before a launch is when we’re going to actually have things prepared, off-gassed, tested, H-fit, label committee, all those things, and do the early load. And then we start preparing the late load chemicals and perishables that have to be loaded 25 hours before launch. And we do that out at Kennedy Space Center for SpaceX launch, anyways.
So, there’s a whole experiment development cycle that happens, and that’s just for one payload. And if we have five or six payloads from Ames coming out, that’s a lot of work from a lot of people to send a box of something.
Matthew Buffington: It takes a village for it, gathering all that stuff up. But I’m always curious on your guys’ side, Shane, for you guys, when you receive this cargo, how exactly does that happen, or how does that work? Like, you’re unpacking a trunk from a trip?
Shane Kimbrough:No, we’re always excited to open up the hatch and get new stuff. It’s kind of like Christmas every time we get one of these vehicles up there. But the way we go about unpacking is very organized, and it has to be that way. We have a great team on the ground that gets us ready and prepared with all kind of documents, and keeps us organized with charts and things on how they want it to be unpacked. And so, we follow that religiously.
We’ll have somebody in the crew is going to be called the loadmaster, and that person’s responsible for that vehicle. If we just start pulling things out and stowing things where we want to stow them, that’s not the way it’s going to be, because we’ll never find that stuff. We really have to be disciplined, and put things where they’re supposed to go. A lot of times, that means we’ll take one bag out, and the bag will have 100 different items in it. And we have to go put those 100 things somewhere.
So, it’s not as easy as pulling a bag out and stuffing it somewhere. Sometimes it is, but most of the time it’s not. So, we’ve really got to make sure we’re all helping each other out. And it’s always better to, as I’ve found with all these cargo ops, to do it as a team versus doing it individually. You’re much more efficient, and you can have one person reading the book, keeping control of everything, and the other couple people running things around. And that really worked well for us.
JACK
Abby Tabor:Lastly, we had a very cool conversation with Jack Boyd, Senior Advisor to the Center Director here at NASA Ames. Jack has 70 years of experience here – he arrived back in 1947 when Ames was a part of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and helping to lay the groundwork for modern aviation. In this conversation, Jack shares his advice for the next generation:
Matthew Buffington: If you’re talking to somebody who doesn’t know anything about Ames, what are the main things that you tell them?
Jack Boyd:Well, I ask them if they’ve ever heard of supersonic speeds. And most of them haven’t. What is supersonic speed? Then I explain Mach waves, Mach cones, sound barriers, etcetera. And how valuable it would be to get from point A to point B in one hour, instead of five. Flying from New York to London in a Concord is like two-and-a-half hours. Now it takes you what, seven or eight?
So to get around the world as the world is opening up, as I think people understand, it’s very valuable to do this kind of basic research. Otherwise we have to depend on some other country to do this, and that doesn’t serve anyone at all. So they love the idea of space. They don’t know why quite. You talk about Mars and they think of little brown men.
Like Carl Sagan designed that plaque that we have, that was put on the Pioneer spacecraft. Ames made a little spacecraft called Pioneer back in the ’70s that went beyond Pluto. And Carl was working with us and he designed a plaque. He said, “ET is out there. I firmly believe there is extraterrestrial life somewhere in the universe, and someday we’ll find it. And if this Pioneer is going to go beyond the solar system –” — and it went beyond Pluto — “we ought to put something that would tell people what we’re all about.”
So he designed this very interesting plaque, which has two human forms on it, for one thing, a male and a female. And it shows this solar system with the Sun and nine planets, and this spacecraft comes from planet number three. So you’ll know, one, where we come from, and you’ll know what we look like. And some smart person said, “Well, they’ll think they look just like us, except we don’t wear clothes.” If you see this plaque, it’s two nude humans.
Matthew Buffington: So considering your experience of the time that you’ve seen NACA go to NASA, and all the different range of changes, what’s the main advice that you give people who are coming in, the next generation, the new people getting hired in?
Jack Boyd:Do two things, do three things. One, listen to the older folks who are here because they really know what they’re doing. They’ve developed a remarkable ability to build a new airplane or build a new spacecraft. Be sure you get along well with people because you have to depend on the people. There’s no question about it. You’ve got to depend on people. So if you’re a manager, in particular, you better be able to get along with them and get along well.
And two, don’t be afraid to go out and learn something new, as I have tended to. I wanted to be an engineer. That doesn’t mean you can’t learn about other things. So do those three things and you’ll probably get along pretty well.
Abby Tabor:And that is it for 2017. Thanks so much for tuning in!
Frank Tavares:Thank you all. We’ll see you – or more accurately, you’ll hear us – in the New Year.