Solar System

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Hello, I'm Robin Ins.

And I'm Brian Cox.

And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio.

Enjoy it.

Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

And I'm Robin Ins, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage.

We're going to start with some history today, and these are key historical dates.

1987, introduction of nuclear-powered engines, ion, and plasma systems.

1990, foundation of the World Community Research Council.

1998, WCRC, North African Space Research Centre is now operational.

2004, the first space freighter, Colonial One, enters service.

2005, Brian, work starts on lunar stations.

2000.

Let me finish.

We're not even up to 2014 yet, and this goes all the way up to 2096 because it's proper history.

Robin,

this is fiction, isn't it?

Well, this is the 2015 Martian Queen makes first commercial passenger flight to Mars.

We might do it!

This is a proper book,

it must be because it was on that show Human Universe, whatever that is.

And this

is Spacecraft 2000 to 2100 AD, which came out in 1978 with its predictions of where we would be.

Because both Brian and I, we are of that generation of incredible excitement about...

I mean, Brian's, in fact, older than me.

I know, it's appalling, isn't it?

He has existed, unlike me, from before the time that a human stood on the moon.

And

also, they send him round the Large Hadron Collider very fast, once a year.

And that keeps the skin very tight, really embracing.

Although we only landed on the moon 45 years ago, writers, philosophers, and bishops have been fascinated by human journeys into space for centuries.

Serrano de Bergerac's comical story of the states and empires of the moon, Johannes Kepler's Somnium, H.

G.

Wells' first man in the moon.

When the first space race was over at the end of the Apollo programme, public excitement seemed to cool.

But lately, curiosity has stirred again with the landing on a comet, a new generation of Mars rovers, and the steady stream of spectacular images from Cassini in orbit around Saturn.

So, anyway, to discuss current and future missions into space, we are joined by an incredible panel.

Who are Monica Grady from the Open University reading Planetary Science?

Well, you told me.

You said an introduction as if it was a university challenge.

No, no, no, that's fine.

But also, you I wondered if you have any hopes at all for the next ten years in space research.

Well it was really interesting what you were saying about the Martian Queen going off to Mars because really my hope is for continued Martian exploration and obviously the finding of life on Mars.

Or life on a comet.

Or life on an asteroid or life on Earth really, I'm not fussy.

But life somewhere.

I am Carolyn Porco and I am the leader of the imaging team on the Cassini mission for the past 25 years.

And my hope is that,

like Monica, I hope we get ever closer to finding life somewhere off the Earth.

I think that's where we're headed.

I think that is the most profound, most beguiling question we could ask.

And I just really want to get closer to answering it.

My name is Joe Brand.

I am a small planet.

They're called dwarf planets now.

I'm a dwarf.

Joe, Joe, you're a star.

Oh, my God.

I think I'm lots of things.

When it comes to dinner, I'm a black hole.

I'm here to add ignorance to the show and ask the questions you all want to ask, but you're too embarrassed because you think you might sound a bit simple.

I'll do that for you.

And this is our panel.

Monica, we'll start with you.

You were involved in the Rosetta mission and there's fantastic footage of your excitement at that pivotal moment.

But that is a fantastic seat to see that passion there.

And why is it important though?

Why was landing a probe on a comet, why?

Why all that hoopla?

Well,

no space agency had ever done it before.

It's something, you know, the mission had taken 10 years to get there.

I mean, Carolyn can empathise with this because it took a long time for Cassini to get to Saturn.

But then we were doing these amazing maneuvers to get there.

I keep saying we.

I had nothing to do with it.

You know, it was all the engineers behind.

I just, you know, just took the glory.

Which I think is fair enough.

But it it was just

prior to the launch, I had been involved in helping to build an instrument and raising the money money to build the instrument.

So it had been sort of 17 years in the making when we landed.

And it was due to land at two minutes past five.

And from quarter to five onwards, everybody was sort of looking at the control center, the feed that was coming in there, and trying to interpret body language.

And was that a smile?

You know, is that a thumbs up?

And it was all really, really, you know, grim.

And there'd been worries.

We'd already known that there had been problems during the night.

And then suddenly you could see like a half smile and then a look at somebody and another half smile and then a sort of cautious thumbs up and then there was nodding and then smiling and then they sort of shook hands you know and a bit of a round of applause.

And so where I was, which is where the sort of

glitterati for a better word, rather than the actual scientists,

you know, we just went ape.

It was just an absolutely fantastic atmosphere.

It was a

complex landing, wasn't it?

I mean, it bounced very high, so I think it took hours to come down.

But then I'd heard that it rolled and it was really very fortunate that it managed to get any data.

What's interesting is, you know, so we'd heard it had bounced, and so we were all going, fantastic, but actually,

the people in the control centre and the

whole new swag of people, this was in Darmstadt, but there was a whole swag of people in Cologne who were actually the instrument scientists and the rest of the Open University team with her.

They could see straight away that there was something wrong because one of the instruments should have been touching ground and it was sensing space.

So they knew straight away that it had bounced, and they could tell how high it had bounced, and then it you know, so it went up a kilometre and then it came down, and they reckon now it bounced possibly four or five times

and rolled and then came to rest under an overhanging cliff.

So sorry to be thick.

Was that meant to happen?

No, it wasn't meant to happen.

No, no, no.

It was meant to land.

All right, like this.

Land.

Well, that was a good question, yeah.

One of our Mars rovers, that was the style of it.

It was meant to land and just be there, and it had thrusters to push it down and grappling hooks to grapple and a harpoon because the comet.

Were there whales there?

No.

That was not a good question.

No, that was a bad question.

Duck-shaped

rather than whale-shaped.

Okay.

So the idea was that it sort of landed here and it stuck itself in, but the harpoon didn't work, the grappling hooks didn't work, and the thruster didn't work.

None of those worked.

So it was a miracle that it bounced and then came back again.

So the way we're playing this is actually we've sampled four different locations on the surface of the planet.

But

just to finish, the lander got all the data back that you'd hoped it would take.

Yes,

it had a battery which was scheduled to last for 60 hours.

It actually lasted for slightly longer than that.

We got practically all the data which had been planned.

There was a drill that was supposed to drill down into the ice, it couldn't because it was sort of basically pointing in that direction.

So, we didn't get the drill samples.

But we are hoping that when Feli

wakes up again, possibly in April or May, we'll get that science then.

Because what happened is, because it was under an overhang, its solar batteries couldn't charge up.

And if anybody was following this on Twitter, it was just like, it was so sad.

There were all these talks about the battery dying, and it was just like some saga of olden times.

And night-night little fili, and fili would tweet back, I'm going to sleep now.

And it was just like, it was so sweet.

I mean, it just really was.

I've never followed a space mission on Twitter before, obviously, because we haven't had Twitter, but I'll always do space.

Is it for certain that it will wake up again?

I thought it was kind of

clear.

It's not clear.

I mean, we're just hoping that as the comet moves towards the sun, the strengthening power of the sun will charge up the solar panels.

And what is it?

Can I just ask what you've brought?

Because you've brought, obviously, the radio listeners don't know, you've brought a lump of last time you brought something, you brought a fantastic piece of Mars.

It was, I think all pieces of Mars are pretty fantastic.

I'm quite excited by them.

And I was in awe of it, and then Patrick Stewart was on, and he brought out one of his communicator badges, and he totally trumped you, and I was very...

I was really angry.

Can I just ask, are there any Star Trek geeks in?

Yeah, a few.

One or two.

Because actually,

when I started doing stand-up in the 80s,

pretty much every male stand-up had five minutes on Star Trek.

I don't know if you remember, Robin.

And it used to really piss us off, all the other people that didn't like Star Trek.

And I can remember one night someone trying out some new material, and it was dying really badly.

And we were thinking, oh, God, poor guy.

And someone in the audience shouted out, It's comedy, Jim, but not as we know it.

That just finished them all.

Caroline.

Well, actually, you said you mentioned Star Trek, and of course, the first Star Trek film has something which you were genuinely involved in, which is the first Star Trek film, the end of it, is the idea of Voyager becoming a kind of sentient god.

But you were actually involved, one of your first major pieces of work was working on Voyager.

How did that start off?

I graduated with a PhD in using Voyager data.

I happened to be very lucky and be working for someone who was on the Voyager imaging team.

That's very often how it happens.

And I happened to do my research, my thesis research, on the very kind of rings and Saturn's rings that

encircle Uranus.

These narrow eccentric rings, and they had been discovered around Uranus just a few years before Voyager got to Saturn.

And so the Voyager imaging team leader, after I graduated, offered me a job to work with him, and he put me, made me a member of the Voyager imaging team.

And so it was my job to join the people who were planning the ring sequences for Uranus and then later on Neptune.

And, you know, the rest is sort of history.

That was really an incredibly defining moment for me.

And that whole mission was so historic.

I mean, really, you know, everybody loves their planetary missions.

I can hear it in you, right?

You love it.

They're just so enormously inspirational to be part of something so magnificent and so much bigger than yourself and really something that allows you to touch, you know, in a real sense things that are so, so far away.

But Voyager was historic and it was romantic.

It was a romantic adventure.

It was like a Homeric odyssey.

You know, you'd spend a few weeks in the vicinity of some planet, and it'd be just outrageous discovery and conquest, and then it's like back in the boats, oars in the water, and years until your next port of call, and then you're at Uranus.

And then years you're at Neptune.

And look, it's still going.

Some of the instruments are still going, and we only just recently entered into stellar space.

It's a terrific engineering achievement, isn't it?

Because it was launched in 1977.

So it was what, Jupiter, 79.

Yeah, Saturn in 80, 81,

Uranus in 86, Voyager 2, 86, and then 89 for Neptune.

Yeah.

And just some sense of the difficulty of communicating with that spacecraft now and building a spacecraft to last over 40 years.

That's unprecedented, isn't it?

Especially with that technology, 1970s technology.

60s technology.

They usually don't let missions last that long.

I mean, even on Cassini, we've been already,

we launched in 1997, gotten to orbit 2004, and we will terminate the mission.

We will terminate the mission September 2017 by

sending it into Saturn.

So it really could go on probably longer if we had designed it that, I mean, if we had wanted, but you know, other missions are waiting in the queue.

So there are other things to do.

In terms of those cameras, you think about the

let's say Neptune, let's say, and the photographs of the moon, Triton, this remarkable object out there.

It's not bright out there, is it, Neptune?

So how difficult is it to fly past at the speed of a bullet or more and actually take what are quite beautiful pictures of Neptune in that low light?

Yes, so the sunlight at Saturn is 100 times fainter.

than it is here at the Earth.

And

Neptune, my God, I'm forgetting, I think it's three times farther away, so that's another factor of 10, let's say.

So 1,000 times fainter.

But, you know, we know before we go there, we have a good estimate of how bright an object is.

And so you develop the software tools.

You know, you just do the calculations.

Actually, I'm thinking now in Voyager days, we didn't do that.

We did it on our hand calculators.

But you figure out how bright the thing is going to be.

You know the detectivity or the

detectability of your detector and the camera system, and you calculate how long the exposure times have to be.

And the cameras, which are basically just telescopes, are built to gather enough light and the detectors are made sensitive enough so that you can take an exposure in a reasonable amount of time.

But it is remarkable when you think about it, especially on Voyager, which had this, you know, the way we stabilized the spacecraft, it was always constantly moving.

And so you had to take that into account too.

And there were algorithms for figuring out how to compensate for the motion of the spacecraft relative to the body.

And on Cassini, that's all programmed into

the guts of the spacecraft.

You say, I want you, Cassini, to point to a point on Enceladus and stay there while we speed by.

And it's already worked out.

Algorithms are on board.

The spacecraft does the calculation to keep the Bohr site fixed on this point.

So it does this as it's flying by, right?

Well, on Voyager, those calculations had to be done on the ground and they had to be sent up to the spacecraft.

It was far more complicated.

So we've gotten very, very, very good at imaging moving targets in the solar system.

So this is a spacecraft that's not only less powerful than an iPhone, it's less powerful than Robin Ince's phone.

I've got quite a lot of it.

Are you going to say it's an Android?

No, no, I'm sorry.

It's some kind of old antique photo.

I do have a proper kind of grandmother's phone, the phone you buy, just in case you do need to have an emergency grandmother.

Here's your phone.

Thank you very much.

Texting.

That's too much for me.

I remember, I know we talked before, I don't recall the exact numbers, but I think it's something like 16 kilobytes of memory or something, Voyager, isn't it?

And really slow, slow processes.

So the fact that you can control that spacecraft with that accuracy is to me a remarkable advantage.

Well, it took a lot of work.

It was years and years of planning.

And, you know, we didn't.

We're not, you know, didn't take the amount of data from the Voyagers that we've taken from Cassini.

You know, it was like several, tens of thousands of pictures, and there's more.

There's other data, of course, but just to talk about the pictures, tens of thousands of pictures in about two weeks' time.

And now with Cassini, it's just endless, just streaming data all the time.

Except for

the one picture of the surface of Titan, though, from Huygens.

Excuse me, there are lots of pictures of, and thank you for saying that, because you know, as I hear you, as I heard you talk about how remarkable it was to see this spacecraft land on the comet, I remember Huygens.

And Huygens was sweet for me, personally sweet.

So

that's the landing on Titan.

This is the European part, the solely European part of Cassini.

They built a probe that was deployed to Titan.

This was soon after we got into orbit, a few months after we got into orbit.

And it landed on the surface.

It was an aerodynamically shaped device.

four meters across, outfitted with something like six instruments, and it took two and a half hours to get down to the surface.

It took lots of measurements on the way down.

It had cameras on board, of course, and it spun as it fell.

So it took panoramas of pictures all the way down.

And this was not a part of the mission that I was involved in.

So when we first got into orbit to go six months earlier, all the eyes of the world were on me and my team because everyone's waiting for the pictures.

So it was like tremendous pressure.

I didn't sleep the night before.

I looked like crap in the press conference.

I can barely talk.

Lots and lots of pressure.

At the Huygens landing, which was monitored at the European Space Operations Center, and I was there as a guest.

I was like any member of the public, and it was, that was far more fun for me to be there and to see the pictures of the surface of Titan, which unambiguously showed something we were scratching our heads about.

Was there liquid flowing on the surface?

And there was this dendritic drainage pattern that it couldn't have gotten any better.

You know, it was clear that liquid flowed on the surface.

And it felt like me before the Huygens landing, I lived in one universe.

And then after we saw those pictures, I lived in another.

Joe, I was going to ask you, which is what you would just.

I've no idea.

No, you are, both you and I, by the fact that we haven't been involved in any space missions, I realize I'm on the back foot on this one, right?

But I was, you know, when Carolyn was just saying about that idea of going to sleep in one universe and waking up in another, some of the images that I'm sure you've seen, which have come back from these missions, or indeed even other things, like, for instance, you know, images from the Hubble telescope, do you ever get that sensation of you see an image of the universe that we're in and you think this has changed the perspective of being on the planet Earth?

Oh, God, absolutely.

I mean, I think it's magical, but to me, it's kind of

my horizon's quite narrow because I find it scary, you know.

I mean, when, for example, they were advertising recently, weren't they, for a married couple to go on a mission to Mars?

It's Mars 500, it's

a one-way ticket to Mars.

And they wanted people who got on well, so they wanted a married couple.

Well, that's not me and my mother.

That's weird, isn't it?

I was thinking I might apply and then at the last minute run down the steps and let him go on his own.

That kills a lot of birds.

Anyway,

yeah,

I am fascinated by it, and I don't understand a lot of it, but I still think it's amazing and interesting.

And I think it's a shame, in a way, that, for example, someone like Branson, who's sort of advertising trips to the stars, is

just doing it for people who are hugely wealthy.

I mean, in some ways, if they all disappear into space and never come back, I'd be quite pleased.

But, you know, in other ways, I would like to see

a group of kind of fairly ordinary people.

You don't know that in the beginning of aviation, airplane tickets were also very, very expensive.

And then with time.

It's the first step.

I mean,

you can't suddenly say, right, okay,

the 600 people who might go on that jumbo jet to fly

to the States, all right, okay, you're going to get on Virgin Galactic and go.

You've got to take small steps, and he's a commercial enterprise.

It's worrying, though, isn't it?

Because if you are saying it's much like you kind of air flight, it does mean in 20 years' time go, well, we got to Mars and the holiday was nothing like you looked on the website.

And many of the species, microbial species, were frankly violent.

You've not seen the trip advisor review of Rosetta.

You know, it's like

feelised that Mr.

Rosetta didn't seem to know where he was going.

Monica, we mentioned in the introduction that the search for life.

So,

is it possible, will the Rosetta mission have anything to tell us, perhaps about the origin of life?

Yes, certainly.

I mean the results that were reported last week were about the deuterium-hydrogen ratio in water.

And that's interesting because it shows that some of the water, possibly some of the water, that we have on Earth was brought by comets.

You know, not all of it.

We never said all of it was.

But we've got to start looking at the organic compounds, and that's what we're doing with the data from Ptolemy that I'm involved with.

We're looking at the organics, we're looking at the...

So what was Ptolemy?

Is that one of the.

Ptolemy's the instrument built at the Open University with Ian Wright.

The footballer.

Well,

it's a big kick.

Ian Wright is my husband.

Sadly, no, not the footballer.

Of course, that's his thing.

Oh, oh, no, yeah, no, no.

All right.

So that's on Rosetta.

That's on feline.

It's on feline.

So that data you've got back.

We've got loads of data from Ptolemy, all right, and don't tell anybody, but we've found organic molecules and we're looking at them and trying to interpret what they mean.

It's difficult when you're trying to interpret something without having very much context.

So that's what we're doing at the moment.

We've got data which we're trying to decide: actually,

is this like what we find in meteorites?

Is this like

what is in interstellar space?

So we're talking about things as complex as amino acids.

Well, look, we probably don't actually,

we might have some nuclear bases.

We're not certain.

We almost certainly have some amides there.

We almost certainly have some carboxylic acid.

So these are

what you might call the building blocks of life.

Yeah, we've probably got comets.

We've probably got amides.

Does your instrument, excuse me, I'm just curious, does your instrument have the

resolution and the dynamic range enough to detect an amino acid, or you're just seeing what you think are smaller daughter products of a broken up?

We go from

a mass of

about 14 up to a mass of about 120.

AMU.

AMU.

So you can't see amino acids.

We can't see a full amino acid, but

we can see the fractionation, the break-up products, the cracking pattern.

Well,

it wouldn't be completely crazy to think you had amino acids on a comet because they're not found on

the corrections.

They're found in meteorites.

We found dicarboxylic, monocarboxylic acids, all these sorts of things.

We found HCN.

So that doesn't mean, I just want to be clear for the audience's sake, that doesn't mean that you have life on the comet.

Oh, never.

I don't think anybody would suggest that there would be life on the comet.

No, but but certainly, as far as we can tell, and for heaven's sake, don't tell anybody.

I said you'll get into real trouble.

You know, as far as I can tell, we've got the building blocks of life that we've seen on this comet.

Can I just tell how big is the comet?

It's about

two and a half miles, about five kilometres, something like that.

Right.

It's not very big.

It's a bit bigger than than my model, but not much bigger.

It's about the size of the a length of the runway at Heathrow Airport.

Well oh, right.

Oh, that that is quite nice, I thought they were quite small.

Well, some of the I mean, you know,

some of them are much bigger.

So some of them are much bigger.

It's the biggest comet that you've ever come across.

Is is there one as big as the Isle of Wight?

That's what I want to say.

Oh, Wales.

Oh, yes.

Usually whales, isn't it?

It is always whales.

I'm trying to shift it.

What is it?

Yeah.

I mean,

a tweet from a friend of mine when Belgium were playing Wales the other week.

He said there's a football match between a country the size of Belgium playing against a country the size of Wales.

And it was just like, well, yeah, that's the ridiculous sort of things that we're working.

But yeah, so a washing machine object fell on something the size of Heathrow.

I think there's a theory that the Isle of Wight was actually a comet, and I think David Icke said that the people who populate it may, I can't remember exactly how it went.

But the

David Icke actually lives on the Isle of Wight.

Yeah, you knew that.

And it's good that there's a channel of water that separates him from the rest of the mainland.

I can't believe it.

You know about landing, they've got ferries now.

You're always just looking up there, you're never looking down there.

You're kidding me.

Yeah, but actually, it is a little bit 1950s, the Isle of Wight, because I was there in the mid-90s, and I normally do some stuff on local goings-on, so I always get the local paper.

And on the front of the local paper, it said huge excitement at the Isle of Wight's first first escalator.

That was 1995.

Maybe it was a space escalator.

Exactly, whatever that is.

We see the building blocks of life, then it seems, or at least complex carbon molecules all over the place.

Yeah, we do.

Certainly on the comets.

When we go out into the outer solar system, so I know your great research focus has been this moon of Saturn, Enceladus.

So, could you describe Enceladus and say why it's so exciting, so interesting to you?

Okay, so let me start with Voyager.

In Voyager days,

the flybys of Saturn,

we took pictures of every moon.

That was part of the plan.

And we took pictures of the moon Enceladus.

And Enceladus right away stood out.

It's as white as white gets.

It's the brightest object in the solar system, reflects all the light that falls on it, pretty much.

It's the size of whales as well.

No, it's the size of, it's the size of the the UK.

Is it brighter than Europa?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it's the brightest object in the solar system.

It's a small world.

It's a small world,

but like I said already, we could see in the Voyager pictures that parts of it were smooth.

And it was, again, it was just one of those head-scratching things: like, what's such a small moon?

How could it have been geologically active?

So people started to look into it, and it is in a resonance.

And so people were trying to figure out: could there be liquid water inside?

And no one could actually get it to theoretically work out.

So it remained a puzzle.

And because it remained a puzzle, it was really a focus of the Cassini mission.

And our team, especially, had

images planned to take a look at the surface at very high resolution.

And we also had images planned, if truth be told, to look for plumes coming from the surface because we thought if it is geologically active, there may be plumes, just like the volcanoes on

Io, for example, or on Triton.

So,

long story short, we found them.

And once we got a whiff that, my goodness, there's something going on at the South Pole, we see a big plume of material, we completely rejiggered all our planned observations of Enceladus, our planned flybys, to make the spacecraft go closer, to make it go closer to the southern polar region.

And that's what we've been doing for ever since we found what we found there, which was early 2005.

And

again, long story short, after all these years of studying Enceladus, we now know that there is an ocean, a sea, under the South Pole.

The sea is about 10 kilometers thick.

It extends down, we think, to about a latitude of about 55,

excuse me,

55 or 45 degrees latitude.

So that would be approximately going from the South Pole to maybe around Tierra del Fuego.

Okay, that whole entire region on Enceladus, which has to be shrunken down, but nonetheless, is a cap sitting on top of a sea.

And the South Polar region, if you look at our pictures, is characterized by four very deep gashes in the surface.

And we have 101 geysers shooting out of

those gashes.

It's the most outrageous place in the whole solar system.

I calculated there are

10% of all the geysers that we know of in the solar system exist at the South Pole of Enceladus.

Half the geysers exist at Yellowstone Park.

And the other half are distributed around the surface of the Earth.

So

we could take Cassini, fly through this plume, and there are instruments on board that can scoop up the material and measure the composition of the vapor and also the composition of the ice particles.

Because what we see is vapor and tiny tiny tiny ice particles and what we have found is

largely water vapor trace amounts of organic compounds

and the icy particles are salty they have the salinity of the Earth comparable to the salinity of the Earth's oceans and with repeated flybys we've been able to determine just exactly the configuration of water to ice shell above it and so we now know I mean we have tremendous confidence that we have a subsurface ocean with organic compounds and salty water, which means it's in contact with a core, and that it's gushing through these fractures and it's there for us to sample.

A geyser is extending tens of thousands of kilometers, it turns out.

So

again, don't let anybody know, but I am a part of a team of people that are right now thinking about how we get back to Enceladus with a small mission because all the large mission slots are spoken for for decades into the future.

All we need to do is get back there with an instrument or two or three that can sample this stuff coming out of the South Pole with sufficient resolution and dynamic range to say do we have

compounds of biological interest there.

I have a lovely mass spectrometer that you can put on a penetrator and fire into the plumes.

Well, we can't do that because that would make it very much more expensive.

You said that, you said there.

I mean, the obvious question, we should get straight to it.

You said compounds of biological interest.

Is it possible, just possible, there's life on an Enceladus in that ocean?

It's as possible as

having life on Mars or once having had life on Mars, having life on the ocean on Europa.

I mean, who's to say?

It is.

Okay, well you've got to get him on your next show if he's got the answer.

It could save us a lot of money.

It was a remarkable thought, isn't it, Joe?

I mean, life potentially

on one of these small planets.

But I don't understand why we treat life so badly on a planet where there's loads of it and then we go, let's find some more and crush it.

You know, there's sometimes...

Why do you think it is, Joe, that we're so fascinated with finding life somewhere out there?

What is it?

We're obviously a bit lonely, aren't

I don't actually think it's such an unusual thing.

I just think why shouldn't there be?

It's really because it's here, and look how much of it there is.

So,

I don't find it

a big issue at all.

I think eventually we are going to find it.

It's just that scientists don't, we're not content to just say, oh, sure, it's there.

We want to make absolutely sure.

And we want to study it.

If it really is a second genesis, like completely independent beginning of life than we had on Earth, and there's a tremendous amount to learn about it by studying it.

How does it differ from life here?

Yeah, how do we know it's a second Genesis?

That's the thing, because there's so much interplanetary transfer of materials, and there've been a lot of talk, I mean, particularly for Mars.

Meteorites come from Mars to land on the Earth.

In the past, meteorites could have gone from the Earth to Mars.

You know, we don't know where we seeded from Mars because Mars was a better place for life to get going 4.5 billion years ago than the Earth was.

I'm glad you brought this up because that problem is going to

hamper.

Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm just going to say this.

It's going to hamper any attempt to find life and know that it got started on Mars.

You're absolutely right.

But it's not going to hurt Saturn because that transfer of material out to Saturn is very, very improbable.

It's quicker and cheaper to get to Mars than it is to Saturn.

I know, but you guys are going to be digging for eons, and

we can send people to the back.

We're going to come back with the microbe that...

Hey, you two, right?

Just calm down.

How does it take to get to Saturn compared to how long it takes to get to Mars?

It only takes nine months to get to Mars when Mars is at its closest.

Right, and depending on how big a launch vehicle you have, I mean, it took us seven years to get to Saturn.

It's quite a long journey, isn't it?

It's quite a long, yeah.

It doesn't matter

When the goal, when the prize is finding out whether or not you have life on another body, it's well worth waiting.

But so the next mission to Mars, the UK are now leading the rover project, I think, aren't they?

They are, yeah.

Is ExoMars?

Is ExoMars?

And ExoMars is in two parts.

There's a Trace Gas Orbiter, which launches, oh gosh, I can't remember, 2016, I think,

which is going to orbit Mars and is going to look at methane and the atmospheric compositions.

And then there's the ExoMars lander, which is going to have quite a big rover on board, which is not going to, I can't remember, they keep changing the date.

I can't remember when it is these.

I think it's about 2020 or even 2022.

I can't remember.

That's a biology mission.

Yes, yes.

I mean, its big thing is it's got a drill, a big drill, deep drill, built by the Italians.

They like to drill holes in things, the Italians.

So it's going to drill sort of at least two meters down

through the sort of regolith, the broken surface, and to actually go down into the bedrock, the solid bedrock to look.

And why is that important?

Well, it's important because the stuff that's on the surface has been changed by the solar wind, by cosmic radiation, by weathering, by the by the wind, by bombardment, by dust particles, and so it's changed a lot.

It's destroyed organic compounds.

And it's destroyed because you've got in the same way as you can get sunburns if you go outside without a sunblock on.

The whole of the Mars' surface is sunburned because the ultraviolet radiation destroys the organics.

And so you've got to go deeper down to get that.

But it's possible now that there's life existing subsurface on Mars

today.

Yes, it's entirely possible.

Only if you go deep enough.

Yes.

And they're not really sure what the conditions are.

Is there enough water by the time you get deep enough

to be protected from the elements, so to speak?

But there's caves, there are cave systems, and you've also got intrinsic high vapor pressure between the grains.

So, if

you're only looking at microbial life, you know, the stuff like the cryptoendoliths in Antarctica, which

I've been told by people who are, you know, knowledgeable about these things that the best chance for finding life on Mars, current life, would be under the polar ice caps, where they've been protected from

protected from the UV radiation I would be I would be very very surprised if they found

living life on Mars I would be less surprised if they found dormant life some microbial spores or something like that I would still be still be surprised less surprised

it would be fantastic if they found

fossilized life but the chances of that are you know

the chance of anything coming from Mars are a million to one of course

but just clear by fossils, I mean, are you really suggesting quite small microbial fossils, not anything large?

Not dinosaur fossils.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's even multicellular.

Even multicellular.

It could be multicellular.

Ryan, the kind of thing that they thought they had found in the Allen Hills mirror back in 1997.

Six.

Remember, whenever.

Remember the big.

Sorry, Caroline.

This is getting very celebrity big brother house at the moment, isn't it?

Monica, you've decided to vote off the market.

Sorry, Carolyn.

So, there have been these rather controversial claims that the

people found in media.

I mean, the way I describe it, and the people who are involved in this description, I mean, two of them, or at least one of them, is now deceased, Dave McKay, who was the first author.

I mean, they were good friends of mine.

Everett Gibson is a really big mate.

But the way I describe it is that scientific opinion is divided.

Dave McKay and his team think they found life on Mars, the entire rest of the scientific community think they didn't.

Fossils in a Martian meteorite.

In a Martian meteorite, so in little

nodules or little rosettes of carbonate, which is the stuff that makes up limestone and corals on Earth.

And they found, looking in an electron microscope image, they found this little thing that it looked like a segmented worm, but it's only 200 nanometers long.

And at the time, there was a lot of discussion from biologists, which said, Well, hang on a minute, that's far too small for you to get all the right all the stuff that you need in a cell, you know, the nucleus and all the other stuff.

And people say, Well, yes, but fossilization shrivels it all up.

And then it was an impetus to do a lot of work, actually.

I think astrobiology was born around that time when biologists started looking and trying to understand that there was the possibility of life beyond the earth.

You know, it wasn't just science fiction, it became relatively, you know, it became respectable.

Well, I think it became respectable before then, but the denouement to this story is that the people who said it wasn't said that it much more was, it was more likely that it was the result of the process by which they prepared the meteorite.

They said it looked like it was.

I don't know if they used lasers or something to do things, but it looked like it might have been carvings in the rock produced by I mean, it was a broken chip and the problem with that is excuse me they use what a broken a broken chip which it was part and then semi-polished but the problem is that you get all sorts of image artefacts when you look at something like that and you can only it's only when you start getting

the quantitative data how much magnesium is in it how much calcium all that sort of stuff can you what do you mean by an image artefact what's that well it it's it's like if you look at something you know from a different angle you know if you you look at this from one angle, it might look like something, you know, good.

If you look at it from a different angle, it might look like something different, you know.

So something that's not real.

Yeah, so it's not real, all right.

So you might say, well, actually, you know, this looks like a duck, but from this angle, it it doesn't, you know, so you're looking at it from different angles.

And it's very difficult to make an interpretation when you're just looking at a picture from one particular direction.

You you, you know, you've got all sorts of hidden shadows and stuff.

It's very, very difficult to to understand.

So, is it likely that some of the possible life could be ducks, or have I misunderstood that?

Or drakes.

Well, this is what I find interesting: there is, you know, between the two of you there talking back and forth, where, and there is a, I wouldn't say pugilistic, but there's a, you know, there's a, there's an energy and vibrant kind of fighting.

That's why I love actually.

I'm thinking about, we were going to talk about, you know, the possibility of intelligent life on other planets.

And before we went up, you went, Do you know what?

I'm not entirely sure I'm going to be able to understand your accents.

So I think once we meet someone who's come from Mars, that's going to be all right.

But this is

this, I'm wondering about how, when there is the battle to where the money goes, what mission, where you know, and you're talking here about differences, how, when the scientists get together, those kind of fights about deciding, right, we believe this is where we should be going, we should be going to this moon because this is where the most interesting information is, or we should be drilling under Mars because how does that work out?

It's consensual.

One, it's consensual.

No, it's I'm sorry.

And here we see the difference between the European and the Nike.

No, I'm sorry.

I might even be older than you too.

I'm just saying from all the years I've been involved in the space business, it comes down to the P word,

politics.

Okay, and

I've seen mission decisions be made solely on the basis of politics.

The person in the room with the most power, or the person who's going to go in the back room, you know, at the intermission and talk to the guys at NASA headquarters and maybe twist their arm.

Well, the big person in the middle of the year.

That's really how it goes.

If you go and you think, right, this is the mission that I really want to happen.

And what is the way that you kind of try, you know, is there any specific, you know, in the years that you've done this, since Voyager, that you've learned different techniques of going, I think this is going to make the big person in the room go with this particular idea.

What are the things that excite them?

Yes, and, but, you know, you have two situations here.

We're talking about.

Do you continue to go to Mars or do you go to Enceladus, which is the new kid on the block?

Do you go to Europa?

There's been a large group of planetary scientists over in the States that have been pushing a Europa mission for decades.

Or do you build the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope?

It depends which pot of money it's coming from.

Where do the pots of money come from?

Are they government funds?

All of them are government funds.

Government funds has to be.

But

NASA

is very simple.

NASA is one government, all right, and it all speaks the same language, approximately.

The European Space Agency is a dozen countries, plus Canada, for some unknown reason.

And they all speak lots and lots of different languages.

It also has several different programmes, and some of the programmes every country that belongs to

ESA has to pay into, but one of the programmes is optional, so you can pay into it if you want to, and then you can take part in the missions planned by that programme.

And compared to ESA, NASA is

a miracle of clarity and transparency.

I went in college there.

Maybe you said that

compared to ESA.

And under your breath, you said they're very expensive.

But th these missions are not expensive in the scheme of things.

If you think that they're answering questions like, are we alone in the universe?

as questions that we should be answering.

They're relatively cheap for what they do compared to manned exploration, for example.

This is how I put this.

Because, you know, there's different perceptions.

Let's just forget individual missions.

Let's talk about the NASA budget, which is $18 billion.

And how many times for the past, you know, I mean, the Apollo 11 astronauts, you can find this on YouTube, I think, they all testified before Congress after coming back from the moon.

And I remember

Michael Collins' presentation.

He defended the use of money to explore the moon against all the criticisms.

You can guess them.

Why aren't we taking this money and solving the problems on Earth, right?

Because it sounds like such a lot of money.

$18 billion sounds like a lot of money.

Why?

Because we always compare it to our own personal wealth.

That's the first thing you think about.

You think, holy cow, what I could do with $18 billion.

$18 billion is only a half percent of the amount of money that is spent by the U.S.

government, the U.S.

budget.

So you are right.

Even the whole entire NASA budget isn't a lot of money.

And when you're talking about these huge, important,

paradigm-shifting scientific questions, you and I would say it's well worth the money and you would never solve the world's problem by buying the NASA budget.

Yeah, it never gets into the public arena, though, does it?

You don't hear politicians with an election coming up going, and we're going to go to the planet where we saw Peter Stringfellow's dad waving at us.

And the problem is,

a US presidency lasts four years, eight years if they go two terms.

We now have a five-year,

do we have a fixed term?

It didn't used to be

a fixed term.

Right.

And it could go on because they can be re-elected ad infinitum.

But

mission planning

takes a lot longer than the the length of a of a Parliament or of a Congress.

And that's the problem because politicians short term short term vote winning and it's very, very difficult.

This is why you need to have your budget and and poor old NASA, they have to go and justify their budget, what, every year?

It's true.

At least with the European Space Agency, we get three years of budget.

And it's tiny compared to how much the UK, Europe, has spent on Iraq and Afghanistan and going to war and all that sort of stuff.

And it's, you know, when you think about what you could do if you took all the stuff that you were spending, all the money that you were spending on

war and

Trident and all all those other things, and actually built space missions which were going to do peaceful research.

You know, you create jobs because we pay something like two hundred million pounds a year to the European Space Agency,

of which about one hundred and sixty million comes straight back into the UK to provide jobs in the space industry, which is one of our biggest industries, and that isn't particularly well known.

And so, what ha we have this thing called just retour.

So for every pound we pay in, we get sort of 80 or 90 pence back into industry in the UK, which is jobs and

all the things that come from people having jobs and paying into the economy.

And that is so important.

A NASA administrator once told me that

we will get away from this having to justify every four to eight years in the space program on the the other side of the pond when it is perceived that the importance of the space program is as critical to national security as the military is.

And it's not there.

Which it was, of course, in the 60s.

Well, it was

certainly a proxy for going to war.

Well, why is it we were talking about politics?

You were saying, Joe, there, about, you know, whereas with, of course, you know, John F.

Kennedy famously made a speech which is, you know, that we must do this.

You know, we do it, but don't put it up because we must, but what's the you know, it can be easy for it.

Because it's hard.

Because it's hard.

And so, what has changed?

Is it because there aren't the same things to cover up?

I mean, what is it?

Because that was, you know, that was.

It was a thing.

Well,

it could be that we did it.

You know, we proved we could do it, and that was the purpose of it, really.

It wasn't motivated initially on the basis of science.

It was motivated as kind of just

an arm wrestle, you know, to see

who would do it better.

And remember, the U.S.

was very threatened.

The Russians were kicking our butt.

I mean, you know, they'd sent people into space.

Their rockets were doing well.

Ours were blowing up on

the launch pad.

So, and Sputnik, Americans felt very threatened.

And, you know, you have to also give credit to Kennedy.

You know, I mean, he could have been a madman.

He could have been someone, even the people who became astronauts thought this guy's out of his mind, but it turned out it was the right thing to do, and everybody galvanized behind it.

And I should say that, you know, when you take account of inflation, I did this calculation once.

The maximum annual budget of the Apollo mission era was roughly twice, I believe, what NASA's budget is now.

So a huge amount of money was devoted to it, to really do it.

And then once we proved that we could do it, people weren't interested.

Immediately, once Apollo 11 landed, there were plans, okay, we're not going to continue doing this.

And then, of course, when Nixon became president, no one can really give me an answer to this.

I even asked Neil Armstrong this, and he didn't know the answer for sure.

But it's everybody's suspicion that Nixon, who ultimately dismantled everything Apollo, the means to produce the command modules and the LEM and all that and the Saturn V,

he's the one who really ground everything down to nothing.

The suspicion is he did that because he didn't want to have anything, any program in his administration that had Kennedy's name on it.

So it comes down to politics again.

Do you think Kennedy might have been worried that he was going to run out of women to have sex with on Earth?

And he thought there might be possibly some on the moon.

And why do you have to lower the trends?

Well, because I read that biography of John F.

Kennedy,

Joe,

as the non-space professional on the panel,

I mean, really, so

Vince Cable made a speech the other day saying that he felt that there should be an increase of an extra nine billion into the science budget over the life of the next Parliament.

So really a big step change in expenditure on science.

I mean, what's your feeling

as a non-scientist?

Would you support that level of increased expenditure in science, not on

space exploration being a part of that?

I think it's a really tricky question to answer because I think every single person has compartments in their head and in their life, whether they've got children or they've not got children, which part of the country they live in, what they think money needs to be spent on.

And I think it's a very difficult choice to make.

Personally, I would say yes, I would sanction spending more money on it because I think

you know, humans are naturally kind of very curious and we want to expand our minds, we want to expand further, and I think it's incredibly important that we don't just become stagnant.

Do you think people would feel differently if it was impressed upon them how valuable scientific

inquiry and investigation has been in bringing them things like microphones, cell phones, heating systems in their house that work, you know, just the technological advances that propel human life here on Earth?

I think if Simon Cowell said it on the X Factor, they would be introduced.

No, but you need populist fingers, I think, to interpret what are quite tricky.

Don't you guys have Brian?

We have Brian.

I haven't got an idea what he's on about there.

But no, that's not true.

That's not true.

So this is, we asked the audience questions as usual.

We have a hive mind here, and we wanted to see what their imaginings of the universe today is.

And we asked them, where would you like to go to the universe and why?

What have you got, Brian?

Where would you like to go in the universe?

In the universe, yes, sorry.

To the event horizon of a black hole, so I can throw things in and see what it looks like.

I am a child.

Venus, to meet other like-minded women, because that's where we allegedly come from.

I read that in my most radio-formed voice.

I'd like to return to my home planet.

As a child,

I was terrified of being abducted by aliens.

Now I peer up at the night sky and hope someone comes to get me.

ET.

So Kate is an alien.

ET.

Kate Lovell.

I will send this now broadcasting across the universe and hopefully they'll pick up your message.

Thank you very much to our fantastic panel, Professor Monica Grady, Dr.

Karen and Porco and Joe Brand.

We have a letter.

Hello from San Diego, California.

So my question, could black holes be our universe's recycling machines?

Could everything just be recycling?

Traditional matter, iron in blood, stars, beer, carbon, enters a black hole.

It's pulled apart and broken down to its subatomic fundamental fundamental parts.

The event horizon will break down the matter, energize it, dark energy, to a higher state, possibly like the Higgs.

Gravity still affects the elevated state of matter, maybe called dark matter, which then cools over time, bringing it back to a lower energy state and appearing as traditional matter.

So we see that forms stellar nurseries where the process starts again.

Brian?

No.

So, thank you very much to our our panel.

Thank you for listening.

And thank you to our long audience for being here.

And goodbye.

In the infinite monkey cage.

In the infinite monkey cage.

Till now, nice again.

Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best store.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.