Gadgetory

I'm Eric Mac and I'm joined today by an astrophysicist and a planetary scientist who is at the forefront of the effort to answer one of the biggest mysteries of science is there life beyond our planet and beyond our solar system and now finally she has a new tool to help her and other scientists around the world in that quest it's called the transiting exoplanet survey satellite or Tess and it's set to launch aboard a SpaceX rocket this month professor Sara Seager of MIT is part of the science leadership team for Tess and she's here with us now via Skype thanks for taking the time to talk with me professor thanks for having me so tests must be an exciting upgrade for you a we've learned so much about exoplanets in recent years and it's been thanks in large part to the Kepler space telescope as well as Hubble and Spitzer and others but it's been it's been decades now since those telescopes were conceived and and now you finally get to work with a tool that has you know designed for this current era of exoplanets well there's always new technology so yes it's it's a big deal you know and the most powerful tools and telescopes we have today they weren't really made for studying exoplanets in the way that test was as I understand it that's right well I was just gonna say that only Kepler was actually specifically designed for exoplanets pretty much everything else you're right was just like a general-purpose observatory that we got lucky that could work for exoplanets well Tess is like the next step and surprisingly enough it's actually not really big it has four identical cameras and each camera the diameter of the aperture it's only 10 centimeters so they're like this and it's amazing to think that just even cameras they're very specialized though at that size can do the job but Tess is going to essentially provide the catalog like the phonebook if you will of all the best planets for following up for looking at their atmospheres and studying more about them Tess is going to be primarily focused on planets that are relatively nearby though right yeah planets around stars that are very nearby although NIR is also a relative term right so you know why is is that why was that decision made is a technical choice why focus I think it's within about three hundred light years right yeah within about three hundred light years that's right because those nearest stars are brighter and the photons I always say like photons are like our currency like if you wanted money more is always better and so in astronomy more photons more light it's always better and to do follow-up measurements of what we find is planets or planet candidates we want to measure the mass of the planet we want to look at the atmosphere of the planet and all of those things to require more photons so that's why the search is for nearby planets and I gather it's particularly you know exciting to people like me and of interest to you to be able to see more learn more about the atmosphere in particular right that's right that gives us a look at something called bio signatures yeah well eventually bio signatures but one thing to think about is Venus sometimes called our sister planet because Venus is about the same size and same mass as Earth is actually well I like to think about was like if there were intelligent aliens building the kind of telescopes we're hoping to build and they can look at our earth and Venus they would think it's like they wouldn't really know the difference actually unless they can look at the atmosphere because the Earth's atmosphere has water vapor and carbon dioxide and other gases whereas Venus its atmosphere is full of carbon dioxide and its surface is hot enough to melt lead so we really need the atmosphere to understand like the greenhouse gases and just everything more about the planet to know its temperature and other things and so tell me a little bit about the the timeline how long until you know you start to get some data and kind of make sense of what you're getting down from the telescope right well the launch is no it's actually an ASUS beak no earlier then that's our first launch window and once test launches it has what's called a 2 month of commissioning phase I always like in a spacecraft waking it up like waking up a person from a coma you know you don't wake them up and go hey go run this Boston Marathon you know first you'll wake them up and you wake your spacecraft up and say hi are you there yes I'm here put it back to sleep you know wake it up let it kind of move around a little so checking out the spacecraft and waking up if you will each subsystem that takes a while just to make sure it's all working properly and working together I want to say something like about 10 days after launch it might take its first images of the sky have the night sky and we'll get some real data that up from the cameras so that will be the first for me personally big milestone that actually will take test two months two months to finish this checkout phase and after two months the science mission of data taking will begin and you know can you tell me what the most exciting thing is for you about this this exploration you know that you've devoted yourself to and and how tests will empower it to go even further what what what is most exciting to you about this particular phase of your work I think the most exciting thing about tests is that it really is going to it really has a chance and I just want to save chance because we don't know how our luck will pan out but it really has a chance to find a rocky planet that's the right temperature the right distance from its star on the right temperature to have life on its surface and tests will find a pool of planets like that that we're going to use a more sophisticated telescope the James Webb Space Telescope to look at the atmosphere and look for signs of life on it so the meet s represents the very first opportunity to really truly make progress in this area of trying to find signs of life on other worlds test itself in all space missions they really have a focused goal and these so called earth sized planets that test is gonna find believe it or not they're not like our own earth actually because Tess is most sensitive to red stars red dwarf stars that are like half the size of our Sun or even down to 10 or 20% the size of our Sun and these planets orbiting these small stars we're not really sure what they're gonna be like if you want to know the honest truth because the planets that orbit the small stars they're very close to the star for the planets that are the right temperature for life because these small stars have a very low energy output and what's so interesting is when the planet is that close tides from the planet from the star have affected the planet some orbit in its rotation rate and the the planet actually orbits one time for every time it orbits what this means for the planet itself is that one side is permanently bathed in daylight one side is permanently night and the other thing about these small stars is they tend to be very active like they have flares like giant flares that will create Northern Lights and send all kinds of unfortunately dangerous particles towards these planets so one of the more exciting things about tests is being able to explore like armchair Explorer with telescopes these kind of planets that would be so different from our earth even if they're about the same size and made of the same material yeah and you know we're really heading into a new era of astronomy it seems where we're gonna be able to think about those things a lot more deeply and with data more than we've ever had before and test seems to kind of be kicking that off and then you have the James Webb Space Telescope the European Space Agency is also going to be launching some planet-hunting satellites soon I mean care to speculate about what or when we might find it next I mean what can say that two things one is that we'll have the capability to find signs of life by gases in the atmosphere that don't belong that might be attributed to life so we'll have the capability to do it but like nature has to cooperate right I mean there have to be lots of planets that are the right temperature that have the right ingredients and life has to not only be there but generate gases and so if Nature cooperates we have a great shot at it that's one thing the second thing is as you just said not just tests but these European missions like the number of people going into the field and the kind of number of small but growing amount of resources funneling here we'll definitely be trying hard so there will be it won't so people try and having the capability it's just a matter of nature cooperating I've read that you've made it somewhat of a mission of yours to help to find another earth which is kind of what you're describing and within your lifetime what is it about that goal that appeals to you and drives you well I just always think that there you know everyone has their own sort of desire for more like on earth we go to our job we do our daily thing and oftentimes I just find a lot of people you know even children will sometimes say like is that it uh-huh and so for me the earth kind of represents wanting to know more like how did we form how did we come to be how did our earth form and evolve why are we here is there anything out there and for me just the thought of finding another earth or Earth's will help put all that into context I don't have a great answer behind Hawaii I mean I wish I had like a we have to do this we're gonna move there next year we're gonna do something but it's not it's just I can't even explain why I'm just so compelled to do it but part of it is just that hope that there's something bigger out there than we are is there anything we're leaving out anything you want to add about the test mission or anything else that you're working on yeah I do I guess they will add something so one thing that sometimes is really interesting to think about is just how our whole world is going towards big data I mean sometimes it's bad big data analytics where people are stealing your data to make you know find patterns sometimes it's good big data like for health or other things and so tests actually and Kepler and Kepler and tests it's actually just a new version of that so we actually borrow from and build upon what the rest of the world is doing and artificial intelligence and things like that so you do think about tests of finding planets a step towards finding life but what I just wanted to share is that underlying all that is just the same big data that a lot of other fields are doing in computer science and related right it's not just about staying up all night looking through a lens right hasn't been about that for a while it's more like setting your computer on a task and then checking the next day to see what it found right real real quick any updates on some of the other projects I know you've been working on like starshade yeah okay I do have something to say well even though test is so exciting and it's launching like imminently it's just the first part in a much longer journey because tests will really nail the problem for these red m-dwarf stars but ultimately we really need to search sun-like stars true Sun twin it's a much harder problem actually find an earth-sized planet in front of that twin so I do want to show this to you I actually can't see myself that you Malaysia you see this dark shade what I'm showing you is a star shade it's actually 1% scale so the actual star shadows design would be a hundred times bigger than mess and these petals here they're very sharp and they come to these sharp tips the star shape would be attached shoots on the spacecraft and that spacecraft would be formation flying with the telescope so the star shape would block out the Starlight so the telescope can see the planet directly and star shade is emission under development you heard like some of these missions like Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope and Kepler they can be 30 years from concept to launch sure the source shade actually you know it was first thought of actually in the 1960s and it's been revisited every decade because it's nearly impossible to build that recently huge amounts of progress are being made so it's in good shape but it still needs more money glad to hear well I look forward to the launch we're gonna be watching the launch from well I'm going out to Cape Canaveral and I'm gonna be with probably a couple thousand people who got invited to the launch I'll be with some of the other test team members I'm bringing my husband and two kids and it turned out to be April school break here so one of them is actually on break the other one we're pulling out of school we've invited a bunch of friends and hopefully it'll be a breathtaking experience perfect well travel safe and keep up the work and we will definitely be watching thanks a lot Eric