This Week in Space 137 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
On this episode of this Week in Space. We're talking about the Kepler Space Telescope and its mission to discover strange new worlds with Dr Jason Steffen. Stay with us Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Tolt. This is this Week in Space, episode number 137, recorded on November 15th 2024. Strange New Worlds. Hello and welcome to another episode of this Week in Space, this, the Strange New Worlds edition. I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief of Ad Astra Magazine, and I'm joined as always by the enterprising Tarek Malik, editor-in-chief of Spacecom. Hello, brother, how are you? I'm doing well, I feel. Enterprising Tarek Malik, editor-in-chief of Spacecom. Hello brother, how are you?

00:45 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I'm doing well. I feel like baby smooth. I shaved last night. I feel good. I feel young Rod, I feel young.

00:52 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I don't know, man. So it was just the few days growth you took off. Right, it was like a week.

00:57 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
Because, you look very different to me. It was like a week, because normally I mean you have that kind of father goose sort of.

01:03 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I drank all the way till I could see the bottom of the bottle. Look which I like on you Now. You look like you're about seven.

01:11 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I know. That's why I love it. It's such a nice reveal, like after like. We recorded our last episode. There was like a double the growth after that and then it gets real. It's like that mangy, like it looks awful and you can't keep it down, kind of time. I don't, I don't know, I don't, I refuse, I don't need the beard anymore.

01:29 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So I get rid of it because it's all see, I encourage all my male friends to grow beards because it makes them look more intelligent. I'm working on pascal now to try to spend a few days with him well, very, very, very quickly.

01:41 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I did. I grew a full beard in college, full like way out to here. Um, and the reason that I don't have a beard anymore is because I had spent my entire adolescent and early adult life fighting to have clear skin. I took medication for it and all that and I grew that beard out, and because I don't know how to care for beards I didn't know anything.

02:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
We're gonna hear about his medical problems.

02:02 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, no, no, like when I broke out all over and I had ruined it, and it was like a whole another uphill thing to try to get my face clear again, and that was the last time I did it. So so what did you do about the hemorrhoids?

02:11 - Rod Pyle (Host)
oh my god okay, so, gosh, uh, moving on, we're here today to speak to jason stefan dr. Jason stefan doctor, yes, who is a member hasn't been a member of this kepler space telescope team since 2008. So he was there before they launched and is an assistant professor of physics at the university of nevada, las vegas. And a nice guy just wrote a book. Looks like a really good one. So we can't wait to talk to him, but before we do, I'm charging you audience, don't forget. Do us a solid, make sure to like, subscribe and do all the other podcast things to keep us alive and healthy and chunky, in my case. All right, let's go to a space joke from joe rich joe. This one popped up on our discord. Hey, tarik, yes, rod, why did the star break up with the black hole? I don't know why, because it felt like it was getting sucked into a toxic relationship oh, oh funny, joe.

03:10 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Black holes don't suck, they attract right that's a very interesting point, right.

03:16 - Rod Pyle (Host)
See? This is why everybody loves you, because you can put a good face on everything and I can tear anything down. Now I've heard that some folks want to jump in the nearest wormhole when it's time for the space joke on this show. But you can help, and I want you to listen because it's been down lately. Send us your best, worst or most indifferent space joke. Now we really like the ones that aren't taken from the internet, because we've already used all those. If you get something good out of ai, that's okay, but just the stuff on. You know bennett surf's 101 best base jokes, or something you know? I hear they got a restaurant on the moon, but it has no atmosphere. You know, we've done those in 100 and almost 140 episodes, so we need we need good ones, all right.

04:03
And now wait a minute. I hear something. I believe it's time for headlines. Headline news my mother would be so proud. Yeah, because I engineered that all by myself. I love it, all right. So first headline, and I love your, love your title here. So who walks among us? I think that's your title, right? Oh, is that mine? Okay, well, tell us the story uncle tart.

04:36 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, it may come as a surprise to you all that this week the house of representatives committee on oversight and accountability welcomed uh guess, the true believers. Right, they had a hearing called and I quote, the unidentified anomalous phenomena exposing the truth. Wow, that's the name of it, that's the name of their meeting, but they had all of it Seriously.

05:01 - Rod Pyle (Host)
They put that on the docket, is that?

05:03 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's the name of it, that's the name of the meeting exposing the truth. Right, kill me now. But they had a bunch of experts and, I guess, witness folks-.

05:13 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Now wait, were these experts or experts? Air quotes for the people not watching the video.

05:17 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I mean, I think that it's really for the listener and the viewer and the reader to decide, right? It's yet another congressional UFO hearing, and I'm going to say that again, congressional that means that your tax dollars are paying for this meeting about people saying that there are UFOs. Now I think that there's life out there somewhere. I don't think they're buzzing us for joyrides, right?

05:41 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I don't think that they're doing that, and yet there's a recent paper out that would contradict you that, yeah well, all kinds of evidence about you know, we know, from big, big names.

05:58 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I just think that et has better things to do, but but, but I I digress, that's not the point of this. This story, this story is just a note that they they really did take in like a, a bunch of new testimony from um, from from some folks, even though you've got, you've got uh, uh well, it's a well-positioned folks of some stature a former us counterintelligence officer, a retired us navy rear admiral, a former nasa associate administrator. You know, uh, all all these people were there. That was my goal, right?

06:23 - Rod Pyle (Host)
uh, yeah, it was my goal, that's right yeah, yeah, he was there talking, so it's not. This isn't the Deputy Administrator no 2. This is next level down Associate Administrator. There's a number of those right, Exactly exactly.

06:33 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And so they were there to make the case, to say that we are not alone in the cosmos. That's what one of them said. They said that excessive has led to grave misdeeds against loyal civil servants, military personnel and the public to hide the fact that we are not alone. So they're claiming cover-up right. Some of them are Not all of them, but some of them are, it wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility.

06:53 - Rod Pyle (Host)
There's been plenty covered up over the years, as we found out later, but you know, I still. You know I'm not Mike Gold, who's a brilliant guy, associate administrator or some of the others. There's some wackadoodles in this field, but there's a lot of really smart people. I mean, yeah, you don't become a rear admiral by being a gumball brain. I just don't understand and you know, maybe this is my naivete how these advanced, you know, races that can cross thousands of light years presumably either by folding space and walking in through my closet or by coming in a spaceship, why they keep crashing into our planet once they get here or if they're coming down to look at a carrier battle group. You know, I mean we can almost make planes that are invisible. Why can't they?

07:40 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, you would think so you would think so. Well, I guess that the whole point is that it seems like these experts, as well as some members of Congress, say that they just want the government to be more even, that the budgets are being hidden for the people that are looking at a lot of this stuff. So they want to know just more about what's going on and get everything just up and out there. So I don't know.

08:11 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
Are you ready?

08:11 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Are you ready to face our alien overlords Rod?

08:15 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I feel like I've been facing something worse than that for two years. Clark, okay, so I love this one. Is SLS, a dead rocket walking? That's definitely your headline.

08:28 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh yeah, I wrote that so this is.

08:29 - Rod Pyle (Host)
This has been talked about, and talked about, and talked about in the space community. Yeah, less so, as far as I'm aware, in government circles. But there's a new, I hear tell as of last Tuesday. There's a new sheriff coming to town and actually I spent this last conference I was at last week sitting next to the gentleman who may very well be the next NASA administrator and I think, if that's the case, sls may not.

08:57 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well hurdle. So this is really interesting and I put this on here this came from. So the other story, the alien one, came from spacecom, but everyone else and their mother picked up that story. I heard it on npr last night.

09:07
Uh, this one actually is interesting because it kind of has two different sources. Number one is our good friend, eric berger, who was on the show last episode talking about uh, you know his, his new book, as well as uh, uh, spacex and starship. By the way, we didn't hint about it, but starship might launch on on November 18, through a few days from now. That'll be really exciting. We'll talk about it next episode, but Eric tweeted out tweet, tweet text. Anyway, he posted a note this week where he said that he has heard from conversations from the experts that he has had you know, all the experts that tell him things that he's seeing a lot of signs that the SLS days are numbered, that it's not 100%, nothing is final yet, but the conversations are seriously trending into that direction and Futurism picked up on that, because Eric is not a spring chicken, eric knows things. We heard all about his expertise on the last episode and they really dived into this, and the reason I brought this up is because it isn't new, like you just said, rod.

10:15
In fact, there was an op-ed in the Washington Post that said that the SLS really should be canceled to make way for something that's more efficient, that's faster, that's cheaper $4 billion a year for maybe one launch, right? Not kind of the cadence that we were hoping for, so it's just something that we should be thinking about. This was NASA's biggest rocket since the Saturn V. It's launched once, supposedly going to launch again next year, but it's way behind schedule. Technically. We kind of should have been landing on the Moon by now. We're not there and it's very close to potentially just fading away a lot like Aries 1X, a lot like Aries V from.

11:01 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Constellation. Well, except the money spent and the metal bent, the time and effort spent, I mean there's multiple cores, there's a lot of pieces hanging around, there's all this development, new engines being designed and possibly built. I don't know if they started on the new Batch of RS25s or not. So you've got all this potential huge waste on a scale that doesn't quite approach the f-35, but you know it's still wasteful.

11:29
On the other hand, you've got the new government efficiency expert maybe coming in, elon musk himself oh yeah, that's, that's new too but there's also been an awful lot of planning and people you know developing pretty convincing plans about how you could achieve at least the interim moon results you want, which is getting there and kind of setting up basic infrastructure, not the whole big thing necessarily just using the Falcon Heavy and possibly the new Glenn, you just have to launch it in pieces. That's been studied since the 50s.

12:04 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And I think that's, I think that's the big thing. We have a new administration coming in, a new president who made it very clear in the, the last, the end of their administration that they wanted to to get to the moon. Uh, as uh how did mike pence put it?

12:18 - Rod Pyle (Host)
uh, by any means necessary, you know, and meaning boeing no more cost plus for you so.

12:25 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So it is not out of the realm of possibility that that, that viewpoint, that discussion will come up. And, as you mentioned, elon musk was officially appointed, you know, co-lead, along with vivek ramaswamy of this department of government efficiency. There there's going to be a lot of focus on getting that stuff done quickly.

12:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So bye bye social security. Okay, because think of what you could spend that money on instead of supporting old farts like me, although I'm not taking it yet. Okay, so we got to move along because we're burning time here. But yes, so tarik, yes, headlines, really did we kill life on mars now?

13:02 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well did we.

13:03 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Having read the story, I understand what you're getting at. But you of course know I mean it's funny. You know, when you're writing these headlines or subheads, like I do for my books, sometimes it takes somebody else tapping you on the shoulder, saying you know that that sounds like X. Right, this one struck me as did the Viking landing manage to kill everything on Mars? That might have been, but what you're really saying is did it kill the little bit of dirt that was dumped into the life science experiment?

13:29 - Tariq Malik (Host)
that's right, that's well. I will fall on the sword for this one, because I'm fairly certain that that's what I. I think I had a direct input into that headline there.

13:38 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Basically, you were intending what I said the first time, right?

13:42 - Tariq Malik (Host)
yeah, yeah, well, yeah, I told you no, but this, this is funny because this is actually. You know, it's not something. I think a lot of our listeners in the know this won't be like a surprising uh uh kind of take for them. Uh, about like a. There's been discussions about the life-seeking um experiment on on the viking landers for a long time and about what did they really detect, etc. But this week in Nature Astronomy there was a new study that came out or perhaps it's like a commentary that they published this astrobiologist, dirk Schultz I hope I pronounced this right McCooch at the Technische Universität Berlin in Germany. Wow, mangled that. I'm sure I did. I'm so sorry, dirk, but man, dirk is an awesome name, yeah, isn't it? Yeah?

14:37 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Like being rock strong or something.

14:38 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's right. So he has brought back the hypothesis that the Viking landers may have indeed had evidence of microbial life in the palm of their proverbial scoop, but because their detection experiment for this used water just as part of the process, that that water was enough to kill the extremely anaerobic. Is that right? The really dry life that could have been there? This life, according to this commentary, was even drier than what we see in places like the Atacama Deficit, where microbes get their water from salts, that get their moisture from the atmosphere. But even a tiny drop of water would be enough. It's like being drowned. Basically, it's enough to kill those microbes. And because we use that on the Viking landers and not knowing the sensitivity of these potential microbes, that it was enough to kill them. And then when we look at it, we just see a bunch of dead dirt and we're like, well, that's it.

15:43 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It, you know, has been planted, we don't need to go there so and to be specific, so when you say look at it, I mean all we were looking at was the gas release from whatever happened exactly. So just to to back up a step, viking would scoop up some soil. It would drop it in one of three funnels on top of the, the lantern deck, and then, uh, in one. I don't think they, I think all three. I'd have to go back and look. I think all three use water, but one or two of them actually had a nutrient broth as well, which also might have been toxic.

16:14
These little critters, because we're just guessing this is the 60s and they're really basing this on life science since, well, from the 50s, um, because you know it was the 70s at launch, but it was 60s, it was being developed and we didn't know a whole lot at that point compared to now.

16:28
We didn't know about extreme files, we didn't know about some of these weird life forms, how they live under the crust of rocks and oceanic vents and all that. It was kind of like you know, hey, if I have a box of kittens and I feed them some baked chicken, they'll be okay and they'll pass gas and we can measure the gas and that's basically what, what biking was doing. But once I read the article which I thought was a really good article, so congrats on that despite the title, um, it was pretty compelling and I I look forward to reading his paper about you know. Look, this stuff has been living on this dry, essentially dead, windswept, water, waterless planet. Of course it's going to go. Ah, you're killing me if you dump a bunch of water on it.

17:10 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It burns. It kind of makes sense. They found the microbial version of the Wicked Witch of the West on Mars.

17:17 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, pick one of the remaining two stories and then we'll jump into our interview.

17:22 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I know we've got to go quickly because we've got a long way to go, but there was such an interesting little note about Voyager 2, and this actually came up in our chat from our Discord followers too, who reminded us that Uranus, this is from Life Science. I love their this is from Life Science because I love their headline that we've been wrong about Uranus for nearly 40 years. But they, as a scientist, dove back into the Voyager 2 data and they found that Uranus or Uranus, depending on how you like to pronounce it might have actually been undergoing a bit of an event when Voyager 2 went there, so that what we saw in the imagery, in the data that was collected, was it was actually something really weird and outspoken because of ongoing solar events and whatnot Basically that it was being affected by this space weather event and I believe that it was like the magnetosphere that was messing it all up from a plasma burst from the Sun.

18:25 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Was the idea that the effect was why we saw the winds moving so quickly, or which part of the observations Well it was about.

18:34 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It's like magnet. Oh my gosh, this is. I should have read it more. No, no, but the idea is that it messed up the magnetic field because it's this plasma burst from the sun, right. So it hits the magnetic field and it buffers it. That's how we get the Northern Lights, it's how we get a lot of communication stuff on Earth, but that it messed it up, right, because the solar wind was just really blowing it out of shape.

19:01
And then Voyager 2 comes by and is like well, I'm going to measure the magnetic sphere here and this is a really weird planet. It looks like it's all lopsided and then we are like, wow, we've never been here before, but I guess this is what it's like all the time, and then we zoom on by out of the solar system. So it was in the November 11th edition of Nature Astronomy. It's just fun to know that that data is still there, they're finding new things in it, and that maybe the magnetic field shape and concepts that we thought of this lopsided planet, that it really isn't like that we're not going to really know like unless we go back up there, up close again to Uranus rod, up close to.

19:51 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I'm.

19:52 - Tariq Malik (Host)
God took me, I I was, I'm not going there, so this is kind of like stay away from that part of me, this.

20:03 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So it's kind of like to draw a really stupid analogy. Uh, going on the morning of january 2nd driving through my hometown of pasadena and thinking, gee, the streets must be waist deep and trash all the time because it's the day after the rose parade, exactly town is a wreck. Did you ever go to the rose parade when you lived out here?

20:23 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I marched in the rose parade as a member of the usc marching band semi-professional dweeb, that's right oh my gosh, that's my freshman year in college and we won the rose bowl well under john robinson, who passed away this week.

20:35 - Rod Pyle (Host)
We did it in high school, but that's okay, we can't all be, really achievers. Yeah, the next day, man, that town looks like dresden in 1944 or something. All right, let's, um, let's, let's have a show. Yes, yes, let's do it. Okay, let's move on. We're gonna jump to an ad real quick and we'll be right back with jason stefan. Welcome back everyone and welcome jason, it's so good to see you here. Thanks for joining us today. I appreciate it.

21:01
Thanks for having me, it's my pleasure and, more importantly, congratulations on not just the book but a book, because doing any book these days is such a challenge that it's rarefied air for people that get something published, and you've done well, so congratulations.

21:20 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Thank you.

21:21 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So we have you here specifically because you've been a member of the Kepler Space Telescope science team basically since the beginning, since before launch. But can you give us a little bit of background on who Jason Stephan is and how you got to where you are today?

21:40 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
Well, so I was born in California and then peace broke out in the world when the Vietnam War ended and grew up in Utah. So I'm I mean I was three months old, grew up in Utah, went to the local college, but eventually went to the University of Washington to graduate school. That's where I met my advisor, who was the greatest PhD advisor ever to walk the face of the earth, advisor ever to walk the face of the earth, um, he got me started on a practice problem, and that practice problem eventually I was supposed to be doing what is the image of a black hole going to look like when we get very long baseline interferometry? So the pictures of the black hole that came out a few years ago. That was supposed to be me um, but I wasn't quite ready for that yet. I hadn't had the classes that would have been um useful.

22:26
And so he's like well, there's this practice problem that should only take us a few months to put together and then we can go back to this. That practice problem turned out to be looking at um, the gravitational effects of multiple planets in a planetary system, and how those would translate into what we observe in um, in the orbital periods that we measure so how the orbital periods change as the planets interact with each other. So that practice problem turned out to be really interesting and it turned into a dissertation. And eventually NASA, when the Kepler mission was about to launch, basically said we're looking for people who look for gravitational interactions within planetary systems to see the changes in the orbital periods. And I raised my hand and said I can do that. And that's how I pulled the wool over everybody's eyes and was brought onto the Kepler team.

23:16 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Boy, that's one of the best ramp up answers I've heard in a long time.

23:21 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Who was your advisor, Because you said he was the best of all time. Who, just to give a shout out for folks you know yeah, so his name is Eric Agle.

23:29 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
He is at the University of Washington. He has a twin brother who's a mathematician at Berkeley, who solved some long standing question and won a million dollar prize for Wow. So there, it's like the there was too much intelligence to put in one body, so they bifurcated in the womb. I think I saw that movie it's twins except it wasn't as asymmetric as the Danny DeVito Right.

23:59 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I love that we're like five minutes in and we're dropping like a 1990s comedy.

24:05 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
I think that's hilarious. That's when all the good movies ended was in the 80s and 90s, so um well, I'll follow up.

24:11 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Uh, just with my. My traditional question is about how you got into space overall, because, clearly.

24:16
Oh, come on, say it the way you always say well, I will, I will, but you have to let me get my build up there. But you know, clearly, you, you, you had an interest when you got into school to start studying everything. But I'm curious about little Jason, like how did the space bug get you? Was it something that had grabbed you when you were young? Was it something that you actually found when you were in college? How did the space bug bite you?

24:42 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
so I guess it's a little bit of both. Um, my brother was okay, my father was a, an air force pilot, um, and so my brother really was into the military um, and he bought this book that was it's called wings, I think, and it just showed um, no, it was modern military aircraft was the name of the book, and it showed like pictures of all the airplanes that every country in the world had um, so I had sr-71 and f-16 and um, and so this was when I was in elementary school and so I would, with my friends, design fighter planes. Of course this is also when top gun came out. So top gun was on the air, like was in the movie theaters, and so aerospace was a big deal. Also, the what's it?

25:31
The space shuttle program was kind of in full swing in the mid 80s. So all the movies were good, the music was good, the space shuttle was there, top Gun was there, the United States was winning at everything, and so my friends and I we would always draw like new fighter jets and say how fast they could go and give the statistics and stuff like that. So I was going to be an aerospace engineer when I went to college, except that where I went to college they didn't have aerospace engineering so I did have an astronomy class my first quarter at Weber State University in Ogden, utah, which is multi-year running the national cheer champion, so their other athletic programs aren't quite as reputable as that. So I went there and I had an astronomy class. My first quarter read the whole book before class even started and that was kind of the beginning of the end for my aerospace engineering career and got me into space and astronomy.

26:28 - Tariq Malik (Host)
There is a universe now where you and I are like super high aerospace engineer partners doing something because was going to do the same thing. I was going to study journalism aerospace engineering at USC, and they told me when I went there to register for classes that I couldn't do both at the same time.

26:47 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
I'd have to pick one, and so I ended up picking that's the worst, because I was a physics and history major for a period of time, but because they were in two different colleges, it wouldn't have worked out so and it was a lot of reading.

27:01 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So, tarek, I think the universe in which you're an aerospace engineer and writer is probably the universe in which Jason is God, because we got to keep these separations in place, and in that universe I'm a dog catcher.

27:18 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So all right so.

27:20 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
So that would have been the one, uh, similar to the one when I was a garbage man, because that looked like the coolest job ever when I was growing up.

27:26 - Rod Pyle (Host)
You get to ride on the side of the truck and everything yeah, I thought, fireman, riding on the back of the truck had more fun, but that I actually bought a fire truck about 25 years ago. You did not a little kid, I did. I had a 26 foot pumper and once had somebody else drive it while I stood on the back and it was terrifying. So they took those little steps up. But but I digress, I'll talk about the fire truck we got to talk about that sometime soon?

27:52
yeah, it was. It was definitely an outlier experience. All the the careers I could have had, right, yeah, exactly. Well, there are probably a lot more possibilities for you than there were for me, at least successful ones. But speaking of successes, can you tell us just kind of, give us the box top version of what Kepler was and what led up to Kepler becoming a valid mission?

28:17 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
Kepler was and what led up to Kepler becoming a valid mission. So Kepler was. It was originally conceived in the 1980s. So when all the good stuff was happening, the the Bill Baruchi, william Baruchi, started piecing together what the Kepler mission would be, and it was. The goal was to measure the frequency of Earth sized planets in Earth, like orbits, orbiting sun-like stars. So how common is the earth? Are we alone? Are we the only earth that there could be in the solar system or in the universe, or are there many of them?

28:45
So the way that it measures the presence of planets is it monitors the brightness of the stars over time, and if a planet happens to pass in front of the star, so if the planet transits the star, then the star gets a little bit dimmer, and so it looks for these small changes in the brightness of the star as the planets transit.

29:06
In order to do that, it has to monitor simultaneously about 150,000 stars, just because the geometric alignment of the planetary orbit is pretty small. Just because the geometric alignment of the planetary orbit is pretty small, you know it's relatively low probability, and the probability of it, like an individual transit, for example, for the Earth, would only be about 12 hours every year, and so you have to have a lot of things, because if you miss one transit, then you miss it right. You have to wait for another year for something else to come along. So you want to get a fairly sizable sample of target stars. So it monitored about 150 000 stars, looking for the changes in brightness. That would be the equivalent of looking down at las vegas from space and identifying individual flies as they buzz around the street lights. Oh man, that is a great metaphor.

29:52 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So in a sense it it's a giant space born photometer.

29:57 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
Yeah, it's a photometer, so it doesn't take pretty images, um, in that it's not designed to take high detailed images that show lots of structure and things like that. It's just designed to count photons. Um, just to give an idea. So the Kepler field of view is this thing that I have in the background here. That uh footprint on the sky is roughly the same size as the palm of your hand if your arm is extended. Where, if you compare that to the wide field camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, that would fit inside the eye of Abraham Lincoln for a penny that's held at arm's length.

30:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Wow, these comparisons are like like I mean, you should write a book. Oh wait, you did, but these are like the the big golden book of of analogies for the kepler space telescope. I'm going to jump in here for a second, I'm going to take a break and then we'll come back and please feel free to finish your answer as you wish, and then tarik will have his shot standby. We'll be right back, all All right, so please go ahead. I'm sorry I jumped in there, okay.

30:59 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh well, I guess I'll ask real quick then about you kind of touched on how you know you kind of got roped in. I would say that you know, with air quotes to the Kepler mission, when they fell backwards into it or you were looking, they were looking for someone with a particular set of skills, as they would say, and then you met that. I'm curious how you got onto the team and I think one of the things that and if I missed it I apologize, the stars that you were looking at with Kepler, that's, toward the constellation Cygnus, right For people that yeah, it's between Cygnus and Lyra, so Cygnus is in the plane of the Milky Way galaxy.

31:38 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
One of the challenges if you have too many stars in the field because Kepler's a photometer and not an imager you run into a confusion limit where there's so many stars that land on the same pixels that you can't separate them anymore. So you can't point it in the plane of the galaxy. But if you point it too far away from the plane of the galaxy, then there aren't enough stars to do your survey, so you have to kind of there's a sweet spot above the plane of the galaxy, which in this case happened to lie between Cygnus and Lyra, so it's up in the summer sky.

32:05 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, I wanted to make sure that there are some folks that might want to look up and reminisce and so where they should be looking that. What was that phone call like when NASA came calling or the the Kepler team came calling to you? I mean, was it, was it something that you were already trying to get involved in? Was it something that happened serendipitously? Or like, how did you get become part of the actual team at that point when they needed you?

32:29 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
So when you have a NASA mission, the expertise that it takes to build the mission is different than the expertise it takes to run the mission and analyze the data.

32:37
So you don't necessarily want someone like me fiddling around with the telescope or the hardware.

32:42
And so what happens is, once a mission gets selected, they'll have it being developed for a period of time and then, right before its launch, nasa will send out a solicitation, an invitation basically to join the team. So you have to write a proposal that says here's what I'm going to do for this mission. So those are called participating scientists. So they're generally full members of the team, in that they have voting rights and that kind of stuff, but they're brought on at the late stages in order to do the analysis of the data that comes out, to kind of expand the scientific footprint of the mission. And so NASA in 2000, late 2007, I think it was then announced that they were bringing on participating scientists and they listed a few of the things that they were looking for, and it just so happened that they almost exactly copied my dissertation title into that. And so then it's just a matter of writing a proposal and then saying here's what I would do if I were selected, and then a few months later, I got the message congratulations, you're selected.

33:50 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh, that's great. That's great. And can I ask, because some of our listeners might know different ways to find, I guess, signs of planets around stars? There's like the, I guess, the wobble method or the gravitational perturbations from it.

34:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Radio velocity.

34:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I think, yeah, and then this dimming kind of effects too. So I'm curious what made the Kepler method really stand out for what? The telescope was designed to, you and the team, to kind of look for these signs of planets, as opposed to other methods to find them.

34:27 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
Yeah.

34:27
So the two workhorse methods for finding planets, especially 20 years ago when this was all coming to fruition, were the Doppler measurement, so that the wobble, or radio velocity, so that you're looking at the Doppler shift of the star because of the planet orbiting around the star, and then the transit method, which is you monitor a bunch of stars and look for changes in the brightness. These were actually both proposed in the 1950s by Otto Struve. He said oh, you know, our spectrographs are getting good enough where we might be able to see a Jupiter mass planet on a one day orbit. Not that anyone would ever expect that there would be a Jupiter mass planet on a one day orbit, but his reasoning was that we see stars that are that close and so maybe we'll see planets that are that close. And then he also said that we might be able to measure the changing in the brightness with photometric surveys. And so for a couple of decades those two methods were just kind of stewing in the background.

35:24
And the Doppler shift measurements when that first paper came out. The CCD camera was invented in 1969. And so that was kind of ripe for exploitation, as was a lot of computing development, so it's a lot easier to do an analysis of a single star with a spectrograph than it is to analyze. I should say it takes less computing power to analyze the spectrum of a star than it does to analyze a full frame image of the Kepler field of view Actually, 60,000 full frame images of the Kepler field of view, or something like that. And so it was kind of a confluence of the analysis technology. You know the computational power and the instruments that brought both of them together.

36:22
So with the Doppler shift measurement, you really need big pieces of glass with expensive spectrographs in order to make high precision measurements. And so you know, you're looking at $10 million to build a spectrograph, which, granted, is less than a billion dollars to fly a space mission. But the two different techniques actually measure two different properties. So the Doppler shift measurements you only get the mass of the planet, you don't get the planet size. With the transit measurements, you get the planet size. You don't get the planet size With the transit measurements you get the planet size but you don't get the planet mass. And so by doing both of them together, you can get both the size and the mass, which helps with understanding. You know what are they made out of what kind of where might they have formed? How would the system have evolved after they formed Things like that?

37:13 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So this is a wonderful answer, because I was reading about that yesterday, trying to piece together what you just said in simple terms like that in my little Labrador brain, and it wasn't working, so let me just jump back here. The Kepler launched in 2009 and it's a 37 inch optic in their mirror. One of the things I found fascinating about it is that you keep the within the optical train. You keep it deliberately, I guess, defocused, you'd say, so that you don't end up frying or oversaturating. Uh, your, your ccds with individual hot pixels from the stars, right?

37:51 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
um.

37:51
So one thing that I learned, um, as was researching this book it had been proposed that we defocus the images, but it turns out that they found that they got better results if they really had good focusing.

38:06
But the reason that defocusing was proposed is because you're only looking for a change of like 20 parts per million in the brightness of the stars, so you don't have a lot of wiggle room for things like temperature variations or sensitivity variations.

38:24
So each individual pixel in the camera has slight sensitivity variations across the surface, and so if the camera isn't pointed exactly at the same spot and the image drifts across the different pixels, then you can actually get fluctuations in brightness that are comparable to what you would see with the planet, but it's just because of a poor pointing, and so the idea was that if you defocus the camera, it's already spread across a lot of pixels and then you average it out.

38:51
But it turns out we got slightly better performance if we had a good focus and just focus, and worried more about keeping the pointing stable, which is actually ultimately what led to the demise of the mission, because keeping the pointing stable uses the reaction wheels, and they had only one spare and two of the reaction wheels broke. So the mission came to. It wasn't necessarily an early demise, because it did last for about six months longer than the warranty Right, but when those two reaction wheels failed it could no longer point as stably as was needed to get the kind of data that Kepler had been getting, and so they had to repurpose the spacecraft.

39:32 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Don't tell us more because this is our big surprise unveiling for the next chunk of the show. But I will say you guys did what to lay people like me was a heroic Hail Mary to keep this thing going. So we're going to jump to one more ad and we'll be right back. Stand by, all right. Good, nobody repositioned their telescope. Everybody's still here. We're good to go.

39:55
So before we get into K2, could you talk a little bit about? Well, two things, I guess, and then I'll toss over to Tarek. But I don't think a lot of people realize that to do the first of the two methods, the photometry method, we have to assume that a certain number of planets in the direction you're looking are in the same equatorial plane as we're looking. Right, because if they're going around the star top to bottom, we're not going to see anything. They have to pass in between us and that star, so that eliminates some of them. So you have, you know, in this field of view you had a lot of target opportunities. But what are, statistically, what are the odds you're going to find what you want?

40:37 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
Yeah, so for the Earth transiting the Sun from a random point, it's only about 1% of observers that will see the Earth passing in front of the Sun, and so you see 100,000 stars and you would expect that something on the order of 1% of them. If all of the stars have planets, then you'd get something on the order of 1% of them, and that's roughly what we saw. Actually, we saw slightly more than that. So we surveyed, in the end, about 200,000 stars and we saw signals for about 5,000 or so planets, but a lot of those planets are in multi-planet systems, and so it really was right around 1% of the stars that happened to have a fortuitous alignment.

41:22
The result of that is that it implies that basically, at least 30% to 50% of all stars have planetary systems like the ones that Kepler saw, which is interesting because kepler was just barely sensitive to earth, um, and so it's entirely possible that, uh, the other 60 like 50 to 60 percent of stars in the sky have planetary systems that are more like the solar system.

41:51
So the solar system was really on the edge of what kepler would be able to find, and there are probably planetary systems similar to the solar system that Kepler didn't see, simply because the star happened to be a little bit more noisy or there was a gap in the data, or you know, just when they did some of the noise mitigation, it happened to remove the signal from the planet planet. And so the jury is still out in terms of how common solar system like planetary systems there are, where the rocky planets are relatively far out and the gas giants are even farther out. When I say relatively far out, it's because the Kepler planetary systems, the ones that it found most often had orbital periods that were only like two or three weeks long. So the typical planets are orbiting well inside the orbit of Venus or Mercury. So it's a different kind of animal compared to the solar system. Solar system has planets on month and year long orbits and decade long orbits, where the most Kepler planetary systems are on week long orbits or month long orbits.

42:55 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, I wanted to follow up, I guess, with that, because you mentioned 5,000 planets indicated by Kepler overall about those sum results. So we had and I think Rod wants to ask about the post-primary mission bit there. So your primary mission, I think it was planned for three and a half years or so, yeah, planned for three and a half and went for four.

43:18
You went for four. And then you mentioned that you find the signs of these 5,000 planets there. I mean, is that like the good number that came from that, or was that total from later on? And then was the next step when Kepler found these hints, these light signal changes indicating planets, they were followed up on to confirm them by other means. Is that kind of what the process was like for folks beyond Kepler-2?

43:50 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
Yeah, so it basically found a bunch of what are called threshold crossing events, which is, changes in brightness that match the… are large enough that they deserve some attention. And there were tens of thousands of threshold crossing events. Initially those were gone through one at a time by people in order to weed out spurious signals, cosmic rays and things like that, and then we narrowed down to a candidate list. And then the candidate list was sent out to a bunch of astronomers called the Kepler Follow-Up Program, the KFOP, and they used…. Sounds like a popcorn, yeah, so they used like every piece of glass at their means at their disposal to look for, you know, what are the properties of the star that it's orbiting? What are the detailed properties? We had some indication of what the stars were similar to the sun, but in terms of like, what's their chemical composition and things like that. That was that was new, that was information that we didn't have. So they followed up to get reconnaissance spectroscopy to see maybe there's a multi-star system here. Do we see a signature of two stars or multiple stars? Um, and then starting to rule out if there's a blend scenario where you might have a foreground star with a background eclipsing binary that would mimic a signal. So there was a lot of detective work that had to go in after that and then.

45:15
So one of the issues that we faced early on in the mission was that the rate of planet discoveries from this mission was really quite slow it took. So we first um. The first announcements we made was about five planets, and that was about six months after we got data um back from the spacecraft. And then a year later we still had five planets um, and that was partly because we were just how do you grapp? It's hard to swallow when you're drinking from the fire hose, and so how do you grapple with all of this information? But even then the systems were trickling out. We had a bunch of really interesting systems that came out early on, and the really interesting systems would require a disproportionate amount of analysis in order to kind of flesh them out. So we found some museum pieces um.

46:05
So this would be like the first rocky planet on kepler 10, the first planet that showed um dynamical interactions within the system, like kepler 9. Um. The first planet planetary system that had many, many, many transiting planets with um, like kepler 11. Or the first circumbinary planet that was kepler 16. Um. So a lot of the early ones took, you know, a disproportionate amount of resources to to do the studies on them.

46:32
But then after about a year and change, the mission was there was a pressure, you know, we got to get the catalog list longer than 10. Um, and so sure, you know, we got to get the catalog list longer than 10. And so I was a group, myself and a group of my collaborators developed some faster methods to confirm planets. So that got us from about say, one dozen to you know, 50 or 60 planets. So that was kind of a big breakthrough. And then there were some. It took a few years to develop the statistics, like the statistical properties that we were looking for in order to say, okay, the probability of these planets being real is, you know, some high number. Once those tools were developed, then we started finding planets by the like, confirming planets by the thousands.

47:25
So I guess there's an important in the life of a threshold crossing event. So your threshold crossing event a human says, oh good boy, you look like a planet, and so then you're moved to a Kepler object of interest. And then you get reconnaissance spectroscopy that shows that you're not an eclipsing binary or something like that. So then you're moved on to the planet candidate list and most of the discoveries from Kepler are still on the planet candidate list. Then it's some types of analyses can verify that you're an actual planet to within the acceptable confidence level. And so then you go from a planet candidate to an actual planet.

48:06
We even had two different terms for this process. You can either be validated, meaning that people accepted you for who you were. So validated would be that we ruled out a substantial number of false positive things. Or you could be confirmed. Confirmed would mean that you had, for a given planet, you had a signal, some kind of dynamical signal that demonstrated that you were planetary mass. So if you followed up a given planet candidate with Doppler shift measurements and found that you were actually a planet, then you'd be confirmed. If you looked at a system and said, said well, the chances of this being a false positive are less than 0.01 percent, then then you'd be validated. I mean it's kind of a technical issue, but it was something that I guess we felt very careful.

48:56 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We wanted to be careful in our terminology that sounds like something that astronomers will fight over at the bar right, oh, oh yeah, like the habitable zone About their candidates.

49:04 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Dr Tarek, I think we've been doing this show for the last two years. Have you been waiting for validation or confirmation, because I'm looking for both.

49:11 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I'm waiting. I get confirmation from my scale that I'm planet mass every morning.

49:17 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Oh, yeah, okay, anthony's pinging me. He wants another commercial. These guys are merciless, so let's take a quick ad break here and we'll be back with more fun. Stand by. So one of the things that I read about this mission was that you had what will we call it a richness of data. That became kind of a problem because this thing was collecting so much data and I guess it stored it on board and did some parsing there, but it was still sending back gigabytes of stuff that you guys had to sort through. And then the real work begins on the ground. Right is that?

49:55 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
yeah, in fact.

49:56
So with each new data that was brought down, you have to reanalyze it from scratch.

50:01
Because if you, because if you take three months of data, but the planet that you happen to see in that region has a six-month orbital period, then you kind of have to start over.

50:13
So you get new data down and then you reanalyze from the beginning to the end of the time series, and then you get three more months of data and then you reanalyze it, and then you get three more months of data and you reanalyze it, and then you get three more months of data and you reanalyze it, and it was getting to the point where it was taking longer to analyze the data than the time interval between successive data down links, um, and that's that was a problem, um, and so I mean a number of things that you discover again and again and again.

50:36
For example, early in the mission, it was faster to transport the data from one computer to another by saving it to a hard drive and then walking the hard drive over to the other computer and plugging it in, because you know you're talking about gigabytes and going through the Internet at the time was pretty slow, and so you know it's still true today that the fastest way to get data astronomical data from one place to another is to put it on magnetic tape and then fly it from one place to another. So aren't you glad you weren't using punch cards.

51:13
Yeah, those were the days.

51:15
So the? So that was one issue that we ran into. Also. You have to have enough warm bodies to make sure everything is functioning correctly, so there was some staffing that had to take place in the science office. Of course, launch always gets delayed and there's always last minute changes, and so that requires that the software engineers focus on writing the software that flies the spacecraft instead of writing the software that analyzes the data that's going to come from the spacecraft. And so, you know, resources were allocated towards launch that ultimately, in principle, would have gone towards the data analysis pipeline. So in the end, like after about six to eight months or so, all of the data analysis was moved to the Pleiades supercomputer, which is a supercomputer that's about the size of a grocery store, just lined with lots of processors. And then there they had enough computing power to kind of churn through it.

52:11
But there was, I mean, even issues. There was a lot of politics that came into play. It's not really not partisan politics, but just so. Jpl, for example, the Jet jet propulsion laboratory in pasadena, is older than nasa, and so it has. It was grandfathered in under different rules than the other nasa centers, and so the mission was run out of nasa aims, but nasa aims because it wasn't it has a different set of rules. They were really worried that certain bits of data might get fall into the wrong hands and then, um, so we can't export the data to get it analyzed by something, and so there had to be some negotiation to take the data and put it on the jpl website, because jpl has different rules that allow us to get. I mean, so there were a bunch of these things that had to get shaken out in the first year of the mission, including just the fact that we're drinking from the fire hose Every time something came down, and there were a bunch of artifacts also.

53:11
So, for example, occasionally the whole camera would get bright. So you'd have this you'd be looking at something and then the whole camera lights up and then it calms back down again. And no one was sure what it was. There was a ball engineer, his last name was Argo Bright, and he identified them and so they called them Argo Brightening Events, and what we think it was is that you have micrometeorites out in space. It's kind of a harsh environment and it would chip off pieces of paint and then they would drift across the telescope aperture and reflect light from the sun into the telescope. So you have a little paint fleck that is reflecting sunlight into the telescope and causing it to get brighter than the signal that we were looking for, and so you know you have to.

53:57
Once you see them and you see, kind of, what are the characteristics of these events? Um, how do you treat them? How do you remove them from the data? So the analysis pipeline had to constantly be developed Eventually by the time the mission ended, the final. So the mission, the Kepler mission, ended, but the analysis of the data persisted for about five more years. So the final Kepler catalog of actual, real Kepler data, not the subsequent data that came out in 2018. And that was the first time that it was completely automated, from the start to the end. And the advantage of having something automated is that computers don't get bored the same way that graduate students do, and so when you're analyzing the threshold crossing events and things like that, it's better to be consistent than it is to be thorough. It's better to know what your systematics are rather than really scrutinize something and pay a heterogeneous amount of attention from one object to the next.

55:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Oh, he's using college words on us here, Tarrant clear the room.

55:06 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I just want to say really quickly, really quickly, but, jason, you hit the nail on the head. As a graduate student who was tentatively given access to astronomy data, I promptly got bored and accidentally erased a week's worth of observation. So very, very poignant observation there.

55:23 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
We've all been there. So rm dash, rf star. Um, that was. That was a mistake that everybody's made at one point or other not me, because they never let me close to that stuff.

55:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Uh so it. I just wanted to add a fun fact here. One of the reasons that mariner 4 got lost on its way to Mars was also paint flecks and dust, because it had a cloud of detritus sort of surrounding it. Because it was like I don't know fourth or fifth planetary or space probe we had sent out of that type, and when the fairing came loose and the rocket continued going, they let Mariner go, all this crud that was, I guess, sealed up with it to start drifting along with it. So every time the canopa sensor would start looking for a star. It's like oh, there's one.

56:10 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh, no wait, oh wait, there's one that but that's a great excuse to cover up for the aliens trying to contact us there you go, that's.

56:18 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
That's another episode, but well, okay so if you, if you'll indulge me for a moment. So the Kepler pipeline wasn't quite ready to handle all the data, as I explained, because just a bunch of things that happened that required the engineer's time before launch, but that didn't change the time when we were required to release the first catalog of results. So we weren't quite ready, and at the time a substantial fraction of exoplanet discoveries had been retracted. So the discipline had a lot of egg on its face because of the number of retractions that were coming out in the literature. I mean it was like 20% or something like that. It was huge coming out in the literature. I mean it was like 20% or something like that. It was huge.

57:08
Like you would see a planet, you think you see a planet, and then you publish a paper, you become famous, somebody follows up. A few months later the thing gets retracted. And so we were worried that for a number of reasons. One is that we didn't want to have any mistakes in our catalog. We didn't want to have holes in the catalog that were filled with retractions. At the same time, you have an instrument that's designed to detect Earth-like planets orbiting around sun-like stars, and so there's a lot of motivation to find Earth-like planets orbiting around sun-like stars, around sun like stars.

57:43
So the challenge, the issue that we confronted, was if we release the data before we can properly, you know, clean it up and remove the artifacts and things like that, then people might go in and see a planetary signal that is that's not real, make a discovery claim, have that claim retracted and they would get all the fame and we would get all the consequences of having the retraction because it came from Kepler data. It's not necessarily. The public isn't generally going to be like oh, it came from kepler data, but was it a kepler scientist that showed it right? Um, and so, uh, we requested and I was, I helped actually draft the document.

58:15
We requested to withhold information on about 400 target stars. Um, and so it like blew up with a bunch of conspiracy theorists like oh, you know, nasa, fine, nasa builds a spacecraft to find earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars, and then they withhold the data last minute and keep us from learning the truth about and uh anyway, so that that was a fun episode. Um, of course, eight months later all the data were out. Um, but uh, it didn't go over very well in certain segments, segments of the population.

58:47 - Rod Pyle (Host)
We know that the real thing you were trying to hide was the life you found on proxima centauri, but I digress so. So your mission is going fine. Then a couple of reaction wheels give it up. And so who built the reaction wheels? I've been dying to know um same people that built them for hubble or a different company uh, that I don't know okay, because I think we should get a little.

59:08
I know it's been a few years with a little nasty right letter writing campaign saying hey, you guys, you know, four years on your reaction wheels, give me a break here, because it's a, it's a flywheel, right, that you use to torque the thing around, to look at other stuff, so you're not using maneuvering fuel constantly, right, but you lose a couple of them and now it's like, oh gee, what do we do with our big space telescope that can only maneuver on, I guess, one axis at that point, right?

59:36 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
uh, it could go on two, so I had one square. I had four reaction wheels, um, so it could orient the spacecraft, um, it could keep it pointed in the right direction, but it couldn't prevent it from rotating around the axis it was pointing along but the brilliant solution I've been.

59:51 - Rod Pyle (Host)
This is what I wanted to talk about since we started this episode. You know, you have this mission. It goes great, you know you're you're kind of out hubbling hubble, at least in this topic area, obviously Obviously a very different instrument. So we're all excited about this and then, oh, it's not working anymore. Wait, I have an idea. Let's point it in a direction that the solar wind pushes against the solar panels in the spacecraft to keep it properly oriented, and we'll stare that way for a couple of years until we move it. And I thought that actually it's what I think 85 days per per target. But what a brilliant solution. So that's the story I want to hear, dad. Yeah, so.

01:00:30 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
So when the reaction wheels failed, um, everyone, everyone's heads were down like looking at the data, and only the mission managers and stuff like that they kept saying, oh, this reaction wheel, there's a little bit of friction in it, and and me and I maybe there were some collaborators who were like some members of the science team who were alarmed by it, but I was like, yeah, it'll work out, no problem. So when it actually failed, I was like what, how did this happen? So, and we had just at that point passed the senior review that gave us extended funding for two years. So every two years there's a senior review of all the major programs, and the bigwigs at NASA decide which things to keep funding and which ones to retire. And so we just passed the senior review. We had funding for a bit longer, but then the spacecraft stopped working, and so, very quickly, nasa sent out a solicitation If we were to give you a half billion dollar photometer that works really well, but we just can't point it very well, what would you do with it?

01:01:31
And so there were a bunch of proposals that were submitted back to NASA about where you should point it, and a lot of us, myself included, said we should still try to point it in the original Kepler field of view because there's a lot of science we can do on the targets that we already know about um. But there was an engineer at ball who was the one who thought you know, maybe if we because we can't steer it in three dimensions, but maybe we can use the solar wind to help balance it so that um, even though it's still going to have to have some corrections, like some, will fire the thrusters to correct the attitude of the spacecraft, it should be stable for longer than it would be stable if we were to point it somewhere else. And so Ball started running some tests to see how precisely they could keep the pointing by using the solar wind as a way of limiting the motion that the telescope would undergo. So once they found that they could get pointing almost as good as the original mission and that the corrections that they had to make so they would fire thrusters to just put it back in the right spot, when they found that they could get the corrections that they needed to make down to a small like basically one cadence, so they would drop one data point out of it's every half an hour. So it'd be like they could do it within one hour, so they would only miss one piece of data and come back to it. So they demonstrated that they could do that and that basically just drove the rest of the design of the K2 mission.

01:03:09
So the K2 mission is the resurrected Kepler. So in NASA speak, a mission includes the flight segment, which is the spacecraft, and the ground segment, which is the operations and the data analysis. So when Kepler, when the reaction wheels failed, the Kepler mission ended, and then when they, even though they use the spacecraft to still look for planets, it was a different program and so it was a different mission. So they called it the K2 mission. The first person I ever heard calling it K2, it was actually our proposal that we were writing, and one of the guys that was an author on the proposal he was a member of the science team as well.

01:03:39
He just said he just caught up calling it K2 because kepler 2 was too many syllables and you know when you're trying to get your ideas out fast, you want to cut down on the number of syllables you use, and so that was ultimately the name that stuck like somehow worked its way through the system. But once they found that they could do the pointing with pretty high precision, then that just meant that was what you had to do, because why would you sacrifice data quality when you could really recover a lot of what you were capable of doing? And so the K2 mission. It looked in a different part of space. It would have to change its field of view every few months, but it still got really high quality data, and actually some of the systems that the K2 mission not necessarily found but studied are among the most important exoplanetary systems that we know of.

01:04:32
So the best example, actually the two best examples are everybody else's favorite. Okay, so my favorite is the WASP 47 system. So WASP 47, it was a planetary system discovered by a ground-based survey called the wasp survey, which is the wide angle search for planets. Um, wasp 47 was a hot jupiter and the k2 observations of wasp 47 showed that it had nearby earth-like planets, like earth-sized planets, but it was not in earth size orbits, they're like few day orbits, but that was the first time we'd ever seen a hot jupiter that had nearby earth-sized companions, and and all of a lot of my early research was on looking for nearby companions to hot Jupiters, and so WASP-47 is my. To me, that's the most important planetary system that ever has ever been discovered.

01:05:13 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I was going to ask if you had.

01:05:16 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
So everybody else? Everybody else thinks that the TRAPPIST-1 system is the most important planetary system ever discovered, and that was also um studied by the k2 mission.

01:05:30 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Okay, so tarik has a really important question. He wants to ask if you had a favorite. By the way, k2 is amazing. Everyone loves a sequel, right and and k2 just hits it there.

01:05:40 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It's like k2. This time it's personal, or or yeah, better than kepler resurrection. Yeah, it's personal, or or yeah, well it's better than kepler resurrection.

01:05:45 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, but ask the question in yellow. Yeah, so I, I wanted. I wanted to ask if you ever got to name one. You said that that was 47, was your, your favorite? But did you get the name a planet? Is that something that you had hoped to do?

01:05:55 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
uh, no, um, it wasn't. I mean, they're all catalog names, right kepler 5, kepler 21, kepler 32, um, there. So the catalog names aren't really that. Those were all chosen based upon what the order of the publication dates were, which actually changed depending upon. You know, you could have two papers that would be submitted to different journals at the same time, or like one could be submitted before the other, but the review process would slow one down and so that, which actually made it a little confusing, because we always worked with the different planet candidates based on their candidate number. It's called the KOI number, the Kepler object of interest. And so we studied KOI-157, we studied KOI-70, we studied KOI-72, we studied KOI-377.

01:06:39
These were all really important systems. We spent, you know, in some cases a year, almost like six months to a year, studying each individual, one um, really getting to know its family and its neighbors and stuff, and then we publish it, and on the right before publication, that's when the kepler number was assigned to it, and so, um, so it comes out in the literature as kepler-10, but nobody knew what Kepler-10 was Like. None of the people who worked on it really knew what Kepler-10 was. It was just like that was the number that came out of the slot machine when you pulled the lever right before the publication. So it took me years.

01:07:17
I mean, it really was like clear until the 2020s. Maybe it was during COVID when I finally okay, okay, maybe I should probably figure out what these are. But it took me years to separate in my head the koi number, which is what I was familiar with with the actual kepler planet number, which was usually something that was assigned after I had stopped paying attention to the system anymore. So koi72 is Kepler-10. Koi-157 is Kepler-11. Koi-377 is Kepler-9.

01:07:46 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But you can always say oh, kepler-9, I knew you when you were KOI, right yeah.

01:07:53 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
So you get to know what they were like as a child, and then you can't forget it.

01:07:57 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I guess I would close. You've got this groundbreaking research. All of these worlds are yours, rod, right from from kepler except you all.

01:08:09 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
Their all, their base are belong to me I love it, I love it, man.

01:08:14 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Uh, that's the first meme I ever was like ahead of. I was so excited when that came. What is all your base are belong to us? Oh man, we, it's a whole thing we'll talk about having a grandpa moment

01:08:24 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
okay, let's do it. You'll have to look that one up and you'll, you'll, you'll use it yourself, right okay, ask your son, rod, ask your son.

01:08:30 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But uh, but um, I'm curious about what's next. What is like the next step beyond kepler, beyond what has been done now, to either confirm these other thousands more candidates Kepler found or to just go into the discoveries, the ones that are confirmed, and learn more about them? What does it look like? What's the air taste like? I don't know if we can even do that with what we've got now. What's the next step? Let him answer.

01:09:01 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
So that is. There's a few next steps. Um, I think the the main next step is going to be to study the individual planets that kepler found. So kepler I I say it's a discovery mission, meaning that it's designed to just identify things that are interesting to look at. It's to identify planets. It's not there to measure the properties of the atmosphere. It's not there to see what the weather looks like. It's just there to find planets, and so once you have them found, then you need to go back and study them in more detail, and so that's where, like james webb space telescope comes into being. Webb is not a discovery instrument in terms of like for exoplanets, in that it's not there to find new exoplanets. It's there to study planets that we already know are there. You wouldn't want to do a survey with the James Webb Space Telescope of trying to find planets that hadn't been discovered yet, because it would be a huge waste of time on an extremely valuable instrument. So a lot of the field is shifting toward. Now that we know where these planets are, how do we study them?

01:10:06
One of the things with the Kepler mission is that it looked in a single part of the sky for four years and, as a consequence, most of the stars that it finds, most of the planets that it finds, are orbiting stars that are quite far away. Because if you want to have a large number of candidate stars in your survey and you're only looking in a single direction, most of your targets are going to be really distant. So following on the heels of Kepler was the TESS mission. Tess is an all-sky survey. So once Kepler launched, at the time that Kepler was designed, we thought planets would be in one-year orbits and so there wouldn't be that many to find and you had to stare at the same part of the sky for multiple years in order to find planets. Once Kepler started getting data and we saw, oh, planets actually orbit their stars every 10 days, then that changes how you design your mission. So the first mission that followed on the heels of Kepler is TESS and that one surveys the whole sky looking for planets that orbit every 10 to 30 days. But because it's an all-sky survey, now all the stars are a lot closer and so you can get the bright stars and those are easier to follow up with.

01:11:17
There's a European space agency mission called the PLATO mission that's supposed to launch sometime in the near future. That's also a follow-on discovery mission that's going to look for planets. Um, I think at the time it was all the rage to discover new planets, and, and it's certainly going to discover a lot of interesting systems, but it's not going to be as groundbreaking as kepler was, just because kepler broke the ground, and so it's? Um, it's not really what it's there for, um, and so the characterization of the exoplanets is going to be done with missions like the james webb space telescope. I guess another area that things are going to open up is the roman telescope, so that's the one where one of the alphabet agencies talked to nasa and said hey, would you like to have a really nice mirror? Um, not that anyone would wonder. What would it? What would an intelligence agency be doing?

01:12:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
with a really nice mirror.

01:12:09 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
What planet is it looking at? So the, the mission that was developed from there. It started off as W first.

01:12:17
It was kind of the shotgun wedding of a bunch of different things in the decadal survey and then, um so, but it's about ready to launch and it's going to be uh, as they say in the northeast, wicked awesome. Um, in that it's going to be comp, like comparable image quality to hubble, but the size of the field of view is hundreds of times larger than the hubble field of. So it's a really capable instrument and with that one it's going to be, the data are going to be good enough that we should be able to see.

01:12:53
Look at planetary systems right as they form. So we can look at young star clusters and see the planets in those young star clusters, which you couldn't really do with Kepler because it would be too risky to do it with Kepler, but now with this one, we're hoping to be able to see, like moons orbiting, planets that are still so. We're looking at planets that are still warm, and so then you can see the transits of the moons in front of those planets. Looking to see. You know, are the planetary systems different when they're young? If you get a really young system, it hasn't had enough time to really relax the way that planetary systems are want to do so. The early solar system didn't look at all like what it looks like today so okay.

01:13:30 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So this is our big chance here. And your book, by the way. Great cover, which is not always the case with university presses, great title, which is not always the case of university presses. So you have a book out called hidden in the Heavens, with Princeton University Press. Tell us about it and make us want to buy it right now.

01:13:50 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
So it's basically like an insider view of both the workings and the science from the Kepler mission. So it starts off with some of the mission design. It gives a little bit of my own history and how I stumbled into being one of the scientists on the mission, and it also talks about some of the discussions we had. Should we focus it, should we not focus it? What's going to happen when it goes into safe mode? What happens when this coronal mass ejection almost fries all the electronics in the device? So those kinds of things like what did we argue about? And so there's some of that is in there the discussions about where what kinds of where we should allocate resources. So there's a little bit of inner workings of a mission from kind of a young, naive, wide-eyed kid, and then there are several chapters that are devoted to the science that we learned from it.

01:14:46
So this is both exoplanet science, how a comparison between the planets that we discovered with Kepler, and how they compared to the solar system and how their histories are similar and how their histories are different. There was a lot of stellar astrophysics that was done with the Kepler Space Telescope. So looking at one of the things you can do with the Kepler data is measure the structure of the stars that you're seeing, and so there was a lot of stellar astrophysics that was done with Kepler. That is also included in this, and then just kind of a retro, like now looking back in the mirror what have we learned and how does that affect science going forward?

01:15:26 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, and I want to thank everybody for joining us with Jason Stephan for episode 137 that we call Strange New Worlds. Jason, where's the best place for us to keep up with your activities and what's ahead for?

01:15:41 - Jason Steffen (Guest)
you. So I do have a website, jasonhstefancom, that has kind of my updated research. I just put some new stuff up there yesterday because I'm supposed to be working on an NSF proposal and I didn't want to. Okay, and then you can follow me on Twitter. I'm horizonpsi on Twitter, although I don't know. Know people are often. It's really easy to be disappointed in people that you follow on twitter, so maybe that okay, but uh, I do try to keep uh my stuff um mundane and and things like that. I don't, I'm not really big on social media. It brings out the worst in me.

01:16:22 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah well, and it just gets boring after a while. And speaking of boring, tarek, where can we find you inventing weird new names? Wow, where can we find you? Let me get through it. Where can we find you inventing weird new names for full moons these days? There we go, just had to get that involved a bit.

01:16:39 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Funny that you mention it, but once again, another reminder that as we're recording this, it's the full moon of November. It's the beaver moon. It's also the last super moon of the year. Everyone go up and look at the moon tonight. It's going to be gorgeous.

01:16:54 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I went out last night. Sorry to interrupt, but I went out last night because I had heard at the last minute on the radio of all places hey, if you're in Southern California you may see the space station pass in front of the moon. So I sat there with my binoculars for 15 minutes, then finally tuned back in. They said, oh, wasn't that great. It's like, how did I miss that? So I guess I was just in the wrong location.

01:17:13 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It takes like a bajillionth of a second to pass the face of the moon. It's really hard to see. But no, you'll find me at spacecom, as always, looking up at the moon for the full moon and maybe even outside on the lawn to see the Leonids this weekend as they peak. Of course, on the Twitters at Tarek J Malik, and this weekend is going to be a cleanup. I have to put away all the Halloween decorations and it's like the middle of November, always lovely to learn about your private life and your last colonoscopy.

01:17:47 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And of course, you can find me at pilebookscom or at astromagazinecom or at Hangout. And, please, if you will consider picking up an issue of Ad Astra, you can get it from that very their website at astromagazinecom and you can download an issue for free. Remember you can drop us a line at twisttwittv. That's T-W-I-S. At twittv we welcome your comments, suggestions, ideas and jokes. Lazy audience Get with it. And, of course, new episodes of this podcast published every Friday on your favorite podcatcher and elsewhere. So make sure to subscribe, tell your friends and give us reviews Good ones only. I used to say anything, but now that we're almost two years old, let's get the good reviews in.

01:18:29
You can get all the great programming with video streams and more on the Twit Network ad-free, on Club Twit, as well as some extras only available there that I won't go into detail about for Tarek's sake, for just $7 per month and for a limited time. New subscribers oh, this, I didn't write this right. Basically, if you bring in a friend or refer somebody, you'll get either two weeks or a month for free. I'll have to ask, anthony, I know it's one of the two. You can follow the twit tech podcast network at twit on Twitter and a Facebook at twittv and Instagram. Thank you very much, jason. Thank you, it's been a real pleasure.

01:19:06
Fun talking to you and likewise we'll see everybody next week. Take care everyone.