Looking back on 2024

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We're taking a look at space exploration in 2024 this week on Planetary Radio. I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. 2024 was packed with new discoveries, launches and space adventures. In a moment, the Planetary Society team will join us to review the best moments in space exploration, starting off with Kate Howells, our public education specialist. She'll announce some of the winners of the Planetary Society's best of 2024 awards. Then Mat Kaplan, our senior communications advisor, Ambre Trujillo, our digital community manager, and Asa Stahl, our science editor, come together for an epic rundown of what the space community accomplished this year. We'll close out 2024 with Bruce Betts, our chief scientist as we share our last and random space fact of the year. If you love Planetary Radio and want to stay informed about the latest space discoveries, make sure you hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcasting platform. By subscribing, you'll never miss an episode filled with new and awe-inspiring ways to know the cosmos and our place within it. Throughout November, thousands of Planetary Society members and space fans around the world voted for their favorite missions, images, and accomplishments of the year in the Planetary Society's Best of 2024 Awards. Usually the winners are all over the space map, but this year one mission really stood out. The awards are designed by Kate Howells, our public education specialist. Kate joins us now from Canada to tell us who swept the awards. Hey, Kate, happy holidays. We're so close to the end of the year.

Kate Howells: Yes, I can't believe it. It's another year that has just flown by.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Every year we try to celebrate by putting out our best of whatever year awards and allowing people to vote on them. We finally have this year's winners and there seems to be a clear trend.

Kate Howells: Yes, Europa Clipper really swept the awards this year.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: What awards did Europa Clipper take home with it?

Kate Howells: Yes, so every year one of the categories that people vote for is the most exciting moment in planetary science, and so this usually includes launches, landings, discoveries, breakthroughs. This year the winner was NASA's Europa Clipper Mission launching. So this took off in October and it's on a six-year journey to Europa. So maybe in 2030 it'll start winning awards again as it arrives at Europa. But that launch was the most exciting moment. The mission itself was voted the most exciting upcoming planetary science mission. And another category we always include is the best Planetary Society accomplishment made possible by our members. So these are usually advocacy related or Sci-Tech projects that we fund or just huge events that we hold or any other kind of impact of the work that we all do. And Europa Clipper is something that we have been advocating for, for over a decade now, and that was voted the most impactful and most exciting thing that we've done. Our members really feel proud of the role that they've had and rightfully proud of the role that they've had in making this really exciting mission possible. So you can also read all about the work that we did making this mission happen. We have a great article that summarizes the years and years of work that we've done.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I was really amazed to see how many Planetary Society members wrote Congress on this subject. It was something like 400,000 messages went into Congress.

Kate Howells: Yeah, it's astonishing, and we held events where we educated members of Congress on Europa and why it's worth going there. This was just such a multi-pronged effort of really advocating in every way possible to really convey to those who make the decisions about what NASA does, that this is a really valuable mission with a really interesting and very important science goal and that it just has to be done and our members and supporters around the world lent their voices to this chorus and helped make it happen.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's just the power of advocacy right there. But I also want to note that recently JPL had a big round of layoffs and a large portion of the Europa Clipper team were impacted, so this is another wonderful moment for advocacy.

Kate Howells: Yeah, absolutely. It's so important.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I'm also going to leave a link for our action center on this episode of Planetary Radio, so you can go ahead and help us sign those letters to Congress so we can help support missions like Europa Clipper and all of the other ones. Well thanks for this, Kate, and congratulations to all of the winners.

Kate Howells: Thanks, Sarah. Thanks for having me on.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Europa Clipper may have absolutely crushed it, but there are so many other missions, images and space people that deserve celebrating in 2024. You can see the full list of winners and the beautiful imagery that comes with it in the Planetary Society's article called The Best of 2024. And if you missed voting this year, no worries. Your next chance is going to come back around in November, 2025. But before we pack it in for the year and retire to our cocoa and our loved ones, it's time to look back at everything the space community accomplished in 2024. From the end of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter to the first sample return from the far side of the moon, there's a lot to cover. We'll dive in with three of my amazing colleagues here at the Planetary Society: The creator of Planetary Radio, and now our senior communications advisor, Mat Kaplan, returns, joined by Asa Stahl and Ambre Trujillo. You may recognize Asa and Ambre from our social media videos. Ambre is our digital community manager who lovingly cares for our member community and does all of our social media posts. And Dr. Asa Stahl, the newest member of the Planetary Society team, is our science editor. He produces beautiful classes for our members and writes some really insightful articles about the results from space missions across the solar system and beyond. Without further ado, here's what happened in space this year. Hey, team, thanks for joining me.

Ambre Trujillo: Thanks for having us.

Mat Kaplan: Glad to be here.

Asa Stahl: Thanks for having us.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Man, it has been a wild year and we've had some really cool adventures together, so I'm glad to be here with all of you at the end of the year to look back at all the wonderful things that happened in 2024.

Ambre Trujillo: I'm so excited to talk about all of the amazing things because there's a lot to cover.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I know. Well, let's get started with something that we all got to personally experience together. One of the biggest things that happened this year in astronomical events was the total solar eclipse in early April, and all of us got to share it together at Eclipse-O-Rama in Texas. That was a moment.

Mat Kaplan: There was an eclipse? That was so exciting and if you had to pick one cosmic event for the year, like 50 million people they think who witnessed totality and another 600 million or so who were under the partial eclipse and our party just couldn't have been much better with all the special guests like Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut. I hope that everybody out there got to enjoy at least the partial.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It was really cool to note that this was probably the most viewed total solar eclipse in human history. That is a moment. And for that to happen as we are finally in solar maximum, I think that made it extra special.

Mat Kaplan: That was part of it. For me, it wasn't just getting finally to see the magnificent Corona that we all thought we might miss because of the clouds, and I did miss seven years before at the previous North American eclipse, but it was the prominences because we were close to Solar Max that were just spectacular.

Asa Stahl: Yeah. The fact that you could actually see the pink color, those little tongues. Oh my God, that was breathtaking.

Mat Kaplan: Yeah, absolutely.

Ambre Trujillo: One of my favorite parts was actually seeing all of the members and getting to meet them, which was very special for me. Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

Asa Stahl: Yeah, I wanted to say the same thing that I had started at the Planetary Society two months before that and-

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Oh, that's insane.

Asa Stahl: ... then just got thrown into this giant event, which was incredible. And one of the coolest parts was not only meeting most of the staff in person, but also yeah, all of these members and seeing their commitment and their passion. Being able to share that together and all being united in this cosmic perspective was incredible.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Part of what made this total solar eclipse so special is that at least at the moment, we weren't sure if we were in full solar maximum at the time or if we were approaching it. But they did actually make that announcement just a few months ago in October. We are officially at Solar Maximum. You got to write an article about that earlier this year, I believe. Asa?

Asa Stahl: That's right. Yes. It was called Should You Be Worried about Solar Storms? And the TLDR is, yes, you probably should be. So yes, the sun is on this 11 year activity cycle, which has to do with how the geometry of its magnetic field changes over time, and that cycle has a maximum phase and a minimum phase. At maximum, you're more likely to have strong solar flares, coronal mass ejections. The solar storms that will get launched away from the sun and some fraction of them hit earth and then cause geomagnetic storms and other particle vents and fun stuff, which can be good in the sense that we would get crazy Auroras. I don't know if y'all remember, but in May this past year, there was a huge coronal mass ejection, multiple of them actually, that hit Earth and caused a G5 category; that's how they're classified; Geomagnetic storm, which is the most severe. And it led to some of the most strong, beautiful auroral displays we've had in centuries. And luckily it didn't fry too many satellites or do anything like that. There were just a couple of anomalies, but you could imagine that maybe in the future, possibly in the near future, even now that we're at our solar maximum, these things will continue to happen to some extent. And they can happen anytime, but they're more likely to happen now. Did y'all get to see any Aurora this year?

Mat Kaplan: My daughter in Chicago was able to go to the Lakeside and catch a little bit. Not much, just a little bit of tinting of the sky, but still Chicago.

Ambre Trujillo: Yeah, my little brother in New Mexico in Albuquerque was able to capture it down there, which was nuts, and I couldn't catch it where I was at, but maybe next time.

Asa Stahl: We'll probably get some more opportunities in the next year or two. Especially if you're ever considering maybe taking a winter trip to Iceland or a far latitude north or south, now's the time.

Mat Kaplan: I can recommend Fairbanks.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Alaska?

Mat Kaplan: Yeah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. My interview with The Aurora Guy earlier this year, he's up in Fairbanks, Alaska, which is where he takes all that beautiful imagery. I hope we all get to see that in person one of these days, but the human created object that's going to get closest to the sun of anything out there is going to witness it more directly, which is going to be the Parker Solar Probe, which has already touched the solar Corona, but is about to make its closest pass by the sun ever.

Ambre Trujillo: I am so excited about this because I love me some Parker Solar Probe. It is just an amazing feat of engineering that Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab has mastered. We are in the peak of the solar weather where we're looking for those CMEs and the Parker Solar Probe is built to not only dive into that weathered in order to understand our star, the sun, but also reveal really profound clues about the sun's Corona. Why is it so much hotter than its surface? It's already started to uncover a lot of that stuff. But as you said, it was the first spacecraft to touch the sun, and now on December 24th, it will be the closest any human made object has been to the sun. It is just nuts. But I want to backtrack a little bit because at the beginning of November, the Parker Solar Probe completed its final Venus gravity assist, which is that nice little boost from the planet and it's actually got very close. It passed something within 233 miles of Venus's surface. It's actually done planetary science on Venus, which a lot of people don't know. That Gravity Assist allowed Parker to go into its closest perihelion, which refers to its closest approach to the sun. And this will take place on Christmas Eve, December 24th. It's literally going to cut through plumes of plasma that are still rooted to the sun. And it's maybe even going to fly through a patch of solar eruption. So it's really just an amazing spacecraft. I'm so excited to get those videos back because if any of the listeners have looked up the videos from Parker Solar Probe, they're just so cool and I know it's just going to capture some amazing science and hopefully some visuals as well.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Solar adjacent, but not about the sun directly. There have been a lot of wonderful new missions that have launched this year, one of which includes a solar sail, NASA's ACS3. Now, this is something that we've helped out with because of our light sale program. We did that program to make sure that we could prove that you could use solar sailing as a viable means for propulsion for small scale spacecraft. In our case, we use some CubeSats. But we helped give that data to NASA. We collaborated with them so they could take that next step. But ACS3 launched in April on the 23rd. I do understand that they're having some issues with it tumbling, but it's still a wonderful demonstration of their new solar sail boom technology. And hopefully that means that through the work that we've done and JAXA and through NASA, we'll hopefully see some more solar sails in the future.

Mat Kaplan: It is always so gratifying to see all of these other developers of solar sails crediting the Planetary Society for proving the concept. Another reason for our members and others who like the society to be proud.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, that was a really cool tech demo, ACS3, but I think this is one of those years, when we think back on space technologies. The thing we're really going to think about is commercial space and all of these rocket launches that have happened because this has been a wild year.

Asa Stahl: Yeah, and we're just getting started.

Mat Kaplan: Yeah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Right?

Ambre Trujillo: So excited.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Let's start with the Boeing Starliner. I know that you and I covered this a few times over the last few months, Mat, so what do you think?

Mat Kaplan: Forgive me for editorializing a little bit. I don't know whether I'm more embarrassed for Boeing or angry with its management for allowing a truly great company and innovator to go so wrong. And I'm not talking about just Starliner here of course. But Starliner, I'm sad to say, is a good example. On the other hand, I really admire NASA for making the safety of the astronauts; Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, their highest priority. We covered a little bit of the arguments that took place apparently in private between Boeing engineers and NASA when they were talking about whether it was going to be safe to bring them home on this Starliner and NASA eventually called it and said, "Nope, bring it back autonomously, which it did successfully." But even now, after months and months of research on the ground and at the ISS when the Starliner was still parked there, they're still not sure, at least not as it'd been reported, of why they had these problems, these various problems. The helium leaks and maybe more troubling, the thruster malfunctions, which may have been software related. We're told now next launch in 2025, but I have not seen a firm date for that. And of course, Wilmore and Williams, they're not going to come home until next year and it won't be on a Starliner. Really, when you see those Crew Dragon spacecraft going there almost routinely now back and forth, also carrying cargo, I don't know what to say about Boeing. Of course, there are also the rumors that that company wants to get out of the commercial space sector altogether, including the sale of its partnership with Lockheed Martin ULA or United Launch Alliance. It's going to be an interesting story to follow. Not one of the happier ones of 2024.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: You did bring up the fact that they're not coming back on a Starliner. They're coming back on a SpaceX-made vehicle. And SpaceX has also had just a phenomenal year, particularly with their Starship Super Heavy booster.

Asa Stahl: Yeah, it's been so cool to watch. Regardless of what you think about Elon Musk as a person, when you see those Mechazilla chopstick arms catch a gigantic rocket from midair; which happened on my birthday, October 13th this year. A nice present.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: A nice present, yeah.

Asa Stahl: You can't help but be amazed, right? And so for those who have not been keeping track, that was integrated flight test number five of the Starship setup, which is a Super Heavy booster and then a thing that's also called Starship or just ship on top of it. That's the thing that would carry payloads and potentially humans at one point, maybe the moon as part of Artemis III. And so there's still a lot of steps that have to be taken. There's still a lot of other tests that need to prove that Starship is ready to take humans to the moon. But yeah, it's been incredible to see that technological innovation. I think that we haven't seen that level of just brand newness in what spacecraft can do in a long time and people are excited about it.

Mat Kaplan: I am so looking forward to in 2025, this refueling in space of one Starship refueling another, which takes me back, because I'm old, to the days of Gemini when we were first learning if spacecraft could meet up in space. This is really going to be something to watch for.

Asa Stahl: Absolutely. Especially because the efficiency of that refueling. Not just showing that they can do it, but how well they can transfer fuel from one Starship to another in space will dictate how many Starships they need to launch to be able to get one to the moon. That could be anywhere between three or more than 20. So definitely something to watch out for.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: But there were also some really great moments in human spaceflight this year. We haven't seen any humans go up to the moon yet, but we did see people go further from the earth than has happened since the Apollo 17 mission. I'm speaking specifically of the Polaris Dawn mission.

Ambre Trujillo: That mission was another huge step for the commercial sector. They used SpaceX Dragon capsule again, and they also launched on a Falcon 9 rocket. But it was very monumental in a couple of ways. It was commanded by Jared Isaacman who at this point, a lot of people have heard his name because he is Trump's nominee for NASA administrator. And this was actually his second mission after funding the Inspiration4 mission, which helped raise over 240 million for St. Jude, and he continued that cause through Polaris Dawn, which is very cool. But the mission launched on Falcon 9 on September 10th for a five-day mission, and it went into an elliptical orbit around earth. And as I said, the mission achieved several monumental milestones. They, as you said, reached the highest altitude any human has been since the Apollo mission. In '72, they conducted the first commercial spacewalk where they're exposed to the vacuum of space. They used commercial spaces which were also designed by SpaceX, and they were the first to test Starlink's laser-based communications in space, which is super critical technology for the future of moon and beyond missions. So this is another big, huge step in humans becoming an interplanetary species. They also gathered really crucial data to advance the understanding of human health, which is another pain point when thinking about humans going into space, is how are we going to survive? And they did all this great science like testing the radiation environment, decompression sickness and a bunch of other stuff. It was just another big win for space.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: They went pretty far out there and did some really interesting radiation-specific testing which we're going to need if we're going to send humans to the moon, especially for long duration missions.

Ambre Trujillo: 100%.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: So thinking about lunar exploration because there have also been some really big steps there, but not just for the United States. I think for me, the standouts this year for going to the moon were actually the Japanese space agency and the Chinese National Space Administration. So let's start with JAXA's SLIM Mission because this one totally floored me.

Asa Stahl: Yeah, it was so cool. It was the mission that just would keep getting knocked down and then always come back up again. You could name a few different space missions; Perseverance, and they have, but this one would've been a good one too. But so SLIM was a lunar lander that achieved that milestone on January 19th at the start of the year and made Japan the fifth country to ever achieve a soft landing on the moon. So huge milestone for Japan and for JAXA, its National Space Agency. But also not just that. It performed the first precision lunar landing. Its goal was to land within a 100 meters of its target, and it got to within about 50. And it would've gotten to within less than 10 meters if it weren't for at the literally last minute in its descent, one of its thrusters failed for I think a reason they still haven't figured out or disclosed and ended up moving a little bit too much to the side as it landed, and then it tipped over a little bit. And so one of its solar panels was configured sub-optimally for catching solar rays and collecting energy. So at first it seemed like maybe this won't even turn on. This could have been a complete failure, but then they could. They managed to turn it on. And then not only that, but it survived multiple lunar nights when it had to essentially be hibernating and withstanding conditions that it was not meant to withstand. So it just kept coming back to do more cool science. It released a couple of rovers, a cute hopping rover and cute rolling rover. So yeah, a huge testament to Japan's space capabilities, which we're only going to see more of soon. They're participating in future Artemis missions. There's going to be humans on the moon driving around a pressurized rover built by JAXA. That's going to happen, and this is just a stepping stone to stuff like that.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Funny to me too, because it created this trend in early 2024 where spacecraft were trying to soft land on the moon and they all tipped over, man. It started with JAXA's SLIM mission but then we had this moment in February with the next mission that attempted it.

Ambre Trujillo: Yeah. It was a bit of a hard landing for these guys. It was intuitive machines. Spacecraft, Odysseus. This was the first commercial space company to build a lander and landed on the moon, which is pretty cool. And it was also the first time that we've been back to the moon for over 50 years for the United States. They landed in This South polar region, which is a very popular target this year, and the fact that private companies now are achieving this proves that commercial landings can work and yeah, I'm just really excited to see where 2025 is going to take us.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, that was a really triumphant moment. People from the United States finally getting to land something on the moon for the first time in 50 years. But of all the achievements and lunar exploration this year, I'm just going to executive decision here, but China's Chang'e-6 mission. I think that's the mission we should give the award to.

Mat Kaplan: Yeah, no question.

Asa Stahl: Totally.

Mat Kaplan: Talk about a triumph. This is just a stunning success on the part of Chang'e. Think of what was involved in making this happen. Basically, sample return in the way that we've talked about doing it from Mars that was laid out by NASA and now has been pulled back to be reconsidered. The fact that it included a little mini rover which was able to back off and take a couple of shots of the main spacecraft doing its work. And that it had to put a communication satellite in orbit where China had to put another one of those in orbit around the moon so that they could stay in touch with this thing because of course it was on the far side of the moon down at the South Pole. That very popular Aitken Basin where we all have such high hopes of finding water that's going to make it a heck of a lot easier to live and work up on the moon someday, we all hope. Just an absolutely brilliant success by the Chinese and a real marker of how serious they are about making things happen on the moon. Their plan is independent of the US and ESA to put a base up there. Their own consortium, well underway. And then you look back to the US and, sure, we had that big success that we just heard about, but also the cancellation of the Viper Rover, which was basically ready to go. One of the projects that the Planetary Society is hoping can be saved.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I think one of the things that really kicked off this year for me was the end of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter.

Asa Stahl: That was such a bittersweet moment. Yeah, it was only supposed to go for almost a month and five flights. It ended up going for almost a 1,000 days and more than 70 flights. It was supposed to be a technology demonstration mission, and boy did it demonstrate new technology. With essentially the computing power of a smartphone or easy off-the-shelf parts that you could get on earth, it went and used some automated computational power to navigate on its own as it was flying from place to place on Mars. And yeah, just showed us that powered flight on Mars was within our grasp. And also, the fun fact I feel like I have to mention because I think it is so cool, is that it carried a piece of the original Wright Flyer. So we had the same object, the same thing on both the first powered flight on Mars and Earth. So cool.

Mat Kaplan: And even in its end. We just heard in the last few days from NASA that it made news because it was the subject of the first investigation of a crash of a flying object on another world, which is just so cool.

Ambre Trujillo: We're in a science fiction.

Mat Kaplan: I got to say they're still not quite finalized, but it seems like the initial indications are that ingenuity used onboard measuring devices to look at the ground it was flying over, and then detect features like rocks that it was flying past and determine how fast it was flying in different directions and adjust accordingly. And so 70 flights in, it was in a pretty different place than when it started. A place that was less amenable to that feature characterization. It was just rippling sand. No rocks, nothing to really keep track of. And so it lost track of how fast it was going and it crashed against the sand. It pitched and rolled. It snapped all of its rotor blades. I didn't realize this. I know one was flung away, but before that, all of them snapped and then one got completely thrown away into the sand a distance away. So pretty dramatic ending. And yet in the end it landed upright, I believe, and is still functioning. They're still able to communicate with it. So that's just incredible.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Wow. We're going to need that data as we go onto our next helicoptery-like mission. This is a little sidetrack because it's not Mars related, but we did also hear that the Dragonfly mission to Titan got the full green light this year. So that data, the way that ingenuity works in that context, we're then going to be able to apply that to the next ... it's not a quadcopter. Is it Octocopter?

Mat Kaplan: Octo.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Octo, yeah. We're going to be able to apply that to the next octocopter that's going to a moon of Saturn.

Mat Kaplan: Those folks at APL, the applied physics lab, they stayed in touch with the ingenuity folks at JPL because they want to learn.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We will return with our look back at 2024 after this short break.

Bill Nye: Greetings, Bill Nye here. 2024 was another great year for the Planetary Society, thanks to support from people like you. This year, we celebrated the natural wonders of space with our Eclipse-O-Rama event in the Texas Hill Country. Hundreds of us members from around the world gathered to witness totality. We also held a Search for Life symposium at our headquarters here in Pasadena and had experts come together to share their research and ideas about life in the universe. And finally, after more than 10 years of advocacy efforts, the Europa Clipper Mission is launched and on its way to the Jupiter system. With your continued support, we can keep our work going strong into 2025. When you make a gift today, it will be matched up to $100,000 thanks to a special matching challenge from a very generous Planetary Society member. Your contribution, especially when doubled, is critical to expanding our mission. Now is the time to make a difference before years' end at Planetary.org/Planetary Fund. As a supporter of the Planetary Society, you make space exploration a reality. Thank you.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Taking this back to Mars and all the wacky rocks along the way, we've had some really cool moments as both curiosity and perseverance have explored the area around them. The first one being a complete accident for the Curiosity Rover, but this one floored me. The discovery of pure sulfur on the surface of Mars.

Mat Kaplan: Yeah, not messing around. Not just sulfur-containing minerals, but yellow sulfur. And why? Because of an accident. Because the rover rolled over a rock and cracked it and my goodness, there inside was a little treasure waiting for us to observe. I got to go back to the start though, because we have such a long history at the Planetary Society with not just curiosity and perseverance, the rover's still exploring the Red Planet, but all the way back in Mars exploration. I mean spirit and opportunity. We had a wonderful Planetfest celebration for the landing of Spirit. And then 12 years ago, over 12 years now, is when we got together for Planetfest in Pasadena. I was standing next to our colleague, Casey Dryer. I have never seen him so excited in his life. Of course, now he's witnessed childbirth, so maybe it's been surpassed. But it was the most exciting thing in the world to stand with these thousands of people and then have curiosity scientists come over from JPL when they knew it was safe and get a standing ovation from all of us in Pasadena. And it just keeps coming. As you said, this discovery of sulfur first in that one rock accidentally, and then they found more in Gediz Valles or Gediz Valley. They're still trying to figure out why it's there. They really don't know. And this is in spite of curiosity turning really the most sophisticated suite of instruments ever sent out on a robotic craft. And of course those instruments largely replaced because they needed room for all the sample handling stuff inside Perseverance. But I guess we'll get to that in a minute.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. I was really lucky because I got to go to the 10th International Conference on Mars this year, which was held in Pasadena. So lucky me, I just got to trot right down the street. But I went there anticipating that we were going to be talking primarily about what was going on with these cool new curiosity rocks. Maybe speculating about what was going to happen with the Mars sample return. And then in the midst of that, they dropped one of the biggest potential news stories from the Perseverance Rover since it landed.

Mat Kaplan: Just amazing. And really, even after finding all these tantalizing hints, but no more than hints, of past life, possible past life on Mars, now we get this rock, which has been named Cheyava Falls, which I guess is a real waterfall on earth in the Grand Canyon, that the rover found in July of this year. And it went to work on it and it has found these various bits of evidence which have direct relationship to finding the same kinds of characteristics in rocks on earth, which are only created by life. And this does not mean that we've found that evidence of past life, certainly not in any confirmable way, but it does put us at least on the first step of that proposed seven-step cold scale, the confidence of life detection scale. And the first step is not very far up the ladder, but it's important and it's really a revolutionary find on the planet Mars. It gives me great hope that if we can get those samples that are waiting for us up there on the surface now and inside Perseverance, get them back to the big labs on earth. Let's get those samples back here; something we've been pushing for for decades; and really find out if Mars billions of years perhaps before Earth had anything crawling on it.

Asa Stahl: Even if Cheyava Falls doesn't contain active signs of life or old signs of life, which would be amazing, it would still tell us about the conditions of habitability in Mars's past. That there are these leopard spots, these markings on the rock that could have been directly formed by microbes back in the day, or they could have been the symptoms of a process that would've been fuel for microbes to live off of, to eat that energy. And so either we'd see evidence of those microbes, which would be incredible, or we see greater signs that microbes could have survived on Mars and learn how widespread that sort of thing could have once been, or maybe even still is. So it's a win-win. You just got to bring them back.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: One of the biggest events of last year was actually the return of samples by OSIRIS-REx to earth from asteroid Bennu. But when those samples came back at the end of last year, they could not get that container open. So thankfully we kicked off this year by them finally actually managing to open that container.

Ambre Trujillo: So I think that there's a thing with science. In science, you love rocks and then astronomy, you just love space rocks. There's this thing with rocks and the OSIRIS-REx samples have some of the coolest rocks. As you mentioned, yeah, it returned its samples and it's now OSIRIS-APEX because it Pokemon-ed and evolved once it dropped off the samples. And we'll now study Apophis, another asteroid will be a close call for Earth, but that's another story. It landed, and they had this reveal, which I actually had the opportunity to be at Johnson Space Center to see when they got the samples out. It was a marvelous mission. It secured the samples too well, however. The initial reveal of the material from the outside of the sampler head is what I was able to witness but the bulk of that asteroid material couldn't be accessed because as you said, NASA technicians could not remove two very stubborn fasteners. And I know listeners are thinking, "Just give me a screwdriver and I would've stripped that thing in minutes," but we're talking about NASA here. They're very careful for good reason, and these are precious samples. But one thing about NASA technicians and engineers and scientists is they're so innovative. And on January 10th, they finally got it open and their patience was very much worth it. Researchers identified a whole bunch of carbon and hydrated minerals, A.K.A. water, in the sample, which supports the hypothesis about the potential role of asteroids and bringing the building blocks of life to earth. Panspermia. Are you kidding me? That is amazing. And I spoke to Dante Loretta, and I know Sarah you have, and Mat has as well. I am a huge fan of Dante Loretta. He's the principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx and this was something he really stressed. That this mission had the potential to reveal life's beginnings. You might have to stop me honestly, because I will talk forever about OSIRIS-REx, but they found that Bennu likely holds the original ingredients that built our solar system. It's a time capsule. And among those ingredients are these really cool clay minerals, particularly something called serpentine, which is fascinating because this sample mirrors the kind of rock found at mid-ocean ridges here on earth where material from the mantle, that layer beneath Earth's crust, meets water. And this discovery hints at something absolutely wild that Bennu could have broken off from some long-lost primitive world. An ocean world that no longer exists, but it left behind this piece of its story. And humans were just like, "I'm going to go probe that thing." And they did and now we have this amazing sample. And one of the biggest questions driving this mission is understanding how earth became a habitable planet. Bennu has just this pristine composition that gives us a direct glimpse into the earliest days of the solar system. No melting, no re-solidifying. Just ancient, glorious rock. I love OSIRIS-REx. Clearly.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: A big reason why I think the general public is so mystified by asteroids is not because of the clues into the formation of our world and the search for life, although that's something we're really passionate about. But the broader audience of humans on earth care mostly about making sure that we don't go the way of the non-avian dinosaurs. They want to make sure we're studying these things so we can survive. And I think one of the major missions in that task over the last years has been the NeoWise mission, which came to its end this year.

Mat Kaplan: Absolutely. Yeah. Sadly, but very successfully. And another one that we were very involved with from the start; its principal investigator for a long time, Amy Meisnger; great friend of the Planetary Society. Wonderful science communicator. WISE of course, and she was part of that mission, became NEOWISE, the Wide Field Infrared Explorer, added near earth object, Wide Field Infrared Explorer. And they took this spacecraft, which was not designed for it. To ran out of its cryogenic coolant. And they said, "Hey, why don't we use this to start looking for some of these rocks that want to kill everybody?" And sure enough, they were able to find I think eventually over 300 newly found, newly discovered near earth objects along with more than a score of comets. And finally, yeah, all good things come to an end. It did finally reach the end of the mission just what? Last November 1st. But not until it had completed this complete survey of the sky last summer. And it was a great precursor to what's going to come next. Another mission that Amy has had in development for a long time. She's now back at JPL putting together NEO Surveyor, which is going to be the spacecraft that is specifically designed to look for these Near-Earth Objects, the ones that cross our path. It is on track as far as we know for launch in September of 2027. None too soon. Nothing has been more important to the mission of the Planetary Society than defending Earth. And if we're going to defend Earth, as we all have heard for many, many years, we need one of these infrared telescopes out there dedicated to the search. We found the really big guys, but there's still plenty of them out there ready to take out a city and we need to find them before they find us.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, step one is find the things, characterize and track them. But then step two was figuring out how to actually deflect these things so we don't get hit in the face with them. And the first mission in this vein, the first planetary defense mission was DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which was my first rocket launch ever. I feel deeply connected to it even though I didn't work on the team. Then that DART mission slammed straight into Dimorphos, which was an asteroid moon of Didymos. That was a beautiful mission. But we also got to see the follow-on mission; the European Space Agency's Hera mission launched this year as well.

Asa Stahl: Yeah, and it's an incredible one-two we're going to get, not because Hera is going to literally smash into the same asteroid system. It's not. But because it's going to follow-up and study that asteroid system. This is the one downside of intentionally crashing your spacecraft into something, is that you don't get to watch it do that and then follow up on it later. So in this beautiful partnership, ESA and NASA are providing each step to this one-two punch. And so Hera is going to arrive at this asteroid system in 2026. It launched in October of this year. So it's got a little bit to go still, but once it gets there, it's going to deploy a couple of CubeSats and orbit this asteroid system and just yeah, see how DART reshapes dimorphos's surface, how it altered its orbit. So it's going to give us a powerful new window, not just into how this deflection method works for protecting our planet, but also just asteroids in general in the same vein as OSIRIS-REx. And not only that. This mission is worth calling out has been an incredible feat of engineering and organizational prowess. ESA launched this mission only five years after they approved it. That's super short for a space mission. That is incredible. And because of that efficiency, it's made it much more likely that ESA's future potential mission to the asteroid Apophis called Ramses will be able to do the same thing. Will be able to get built and launched within just a few years of it being approved. And that's going to really matter for that one because Apophis is only coming on a particular date and you can't miss it. So that mission hasn't quite been confirmed yet, but it does, by all indications, seem to be on its way to being confirmed and that is also thanks to Hera.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Seeing Hera launch was a really big moment, but that happened just one week before, I think what we would all agree, is the biggest launch of this year; Europa Clipper, which after 10 years of us advocating for it, has finally left earth and is on its way to the Jovian system.

Mat Kaplan: Thank goodness. I'm so glad to have seen this mission get underway. I just want to still be around and able to talk about it in 2030 when it finally gets out there to the Jovian system. There were so many people involved, including politicians who were no longer in office, who advocated for it at the top of their agendas. The great cooperation that we get from leaders of the Mission like Bob Pappalardo who I was talking to for years on Planetary Radio. And now Sarah, you've carried on that tradition of getting reports from Bob, the project scientist for this as it starts to head out there.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Listening to his legitimately harrowing tale about that launch was probably one of the highlights of all the interviews I've done this year because that mission launch was delayed by Hurricane Milton coming through that area. Unfortunately, that hurricane, which at one point was a category five, was straight on dead heading for Cape Canaveral. And the entire mission team, the ones that got to be there at least, was crammed into one hotel together when a tornado came through and ripped the roof off the building across the street. Then they had to turn around and go to this launch together. What a wild human moment for these people.

Asa Stahl: That was just at the launch. There was also the months of uncertainty leading up to it around those transistors in the spacecraft. That was a wild curve ball that could have destroyed years of work and set back human space exploration by decades. And instead we get a mission that actually launched and that could do so much.

Mat Kaplan: Yeah. And I guess the latest is that they think that those transistors are going to be strong enough, durable enough to make it through at least the primary mission of Europa Clipper. And I hope that we are, as we often are by mission, surprised by just how durable the entire spacecraft turns out to be. Also, we learned the same transistors are on Juice; the European Space Agency mission to the icy worlds of Jupiter. So we wish them the best as well. But yeah, it's a tough place to hang out, the vicinity of Jupiter. And that of course is why Europa Clipper is not going to orbit Europa itself. It's going to orbit Jupiter in that very elliptical orbit. That means that it'll only have to be in that intense radiation for a fairly limited portion of its time out there.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: The people on the Europa Clipper mission after, all of this fantastic work, were hit in a pretty horrible way recently when a large number of their team who works over at the Jet Propulsion Lab here in Pasadena unfortunately were laid off just weeks after this mission launched.

Mat Kaplan: And here again, the Planetary society fighting to make sure that the loss of these incredibly valuable resources be minimized, if not eliminated. Losing engineers and scientists whose skills and knowledge simply cannot be replaced, who may very well find themselves higher paying jobs in the private sector, but are lost to the planetary science that all of us at the Planetary Society want to accomplish in large part. I know it's going to be a big, big priority, for us for our advocacy team in 2025.

Asa Stahl: Even if you can get an amazing, high paying job working in the commercial sector, they're not going to be doing the fundamental science, the stuff that people's dreams are made of. That's why they work for JPL and places like that. And it takes so much effort to slowly, brick by brick build up these expert teams, these institutions capable of doing these amazing missions. And then it's so easy to just let that vanish with the wind. I remember going back and looking through all of the Planetary radio episodes where each of you interviewed Bob Pappalardo. There's a bunch of them. And it's really cool to see over more than a decade, maybe even close to two decades, he evolves in how he's describing Europa because we learn more, the mission gets refined. But our hopes for it remain the same, and that is going to be achieved. And I just wish that more of the team could have stuck around to see it come to fruition.

Mat Kaplan: Yeah, well-said.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well-said. Well, I know that all of us here are going to do everything we can to advocate for NASA funding so that missions like this don't lose their teams, and these NASA facilities have enough money to keep on their staff. And if anybody wants to help join us in that, we have some actions on our action center that you can take. But also, please consider joining us in Washington DC this year in March on the 24th, we're going to be taking a group of Planetary Society members into Congress, going door to door, talking about why we love, space exploration and missions like Europa Clipper so much. And I think what's gone on this year in 2024 and all of the years that we've been working together here at the Planetary Society, we're kicking off our 45th anniversary as an organization. And during the last 45 years, I think we have really seen the power of space exploration to not only teach us more about the universe around us, but to accelerate our technology and to connect us across continents. This is a really powerful thing. So who knows what's going to happen in the next year. I know there's a lot up in the air for NASA in particular as this new presidential administration comes into power. All that being said, I think we have some really wonderful opportunities upcoming, some really cool things happening, and it is worth advocating for space exploration.

Mat Kaplan: Boy, Sarah, again, very well-said.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Thank you and thanks for joining me for this rundown. I know there's been so much that's happened in the past year, but of all the people on earth, I don't know anybody else I would've rather spent this journey with on than you guys so it is been a pleasure being in 2024 with you.

Mat Kaplan: Thank you.

Asa Stahl: Yeah, looking forward to the next one.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, happy holidays everyone, and happy New Year.

Ambre Trujillo: Happy holidays.

Asa Stahl: Happy New Year.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Congratulations to all of the amazing teams, engineers and scientists that made 2024 so special. And here's to all the people that are looking forward to their own moments in 2025. Now it's time for the last What's Up of 2024 with Dr. Bruce Betts, our chief scientist. Hey, Bruce.

Bruce Betts: Hey, Merry Planetary Radio. Happy Planetary Radio.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Happy Newton miss slash almost solstice slash holidays no matter what you celebrate.

Bruce Betts: Yeah, Isaac, happy birthday.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Right? I thought that was a cool coincidence that he was born on Christmas. Well, we just heard from several people on the Planetary Society crew about all the cool things that happened in the last year of space exploration, but I haven't had a chance to ask you yet. What were some of your favorite things that happened in 2024?

Bruce Betts: Well, you know better than I all those things that happened that I haven't misplaced in time. But that total solar eclipse and our eclipse of Rama, that was good stuff.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That was so cool. It was a wonderful moment to see an eclipse, but I'm glad we all got to be there together and I'm glad that you got to meet my brother. That was cool. He talked a lot about how much he liked you afterwards.

Bruce Betts: Yes, I can fool people for a few minutes. No one who's listened to this program this long though. All right. What else happened this year? There were things that just kept going. A whole fleet of Mars things just kept doing cool stuff on the in orbit and on the ground surface. And so I always love that. The end of ingenuity, but since it was scheduled to make five flights and wasn't even clear it was should be on the payload at first. The fact that it made a bunch of flights and did all sorts of cool stuff, that was big.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Not really, though. I was so surprised by how long that spacecraft persisted. It really did.

Bruce Betts: Yeah, no, it's lasted longer than any of my radio-controlled things, although I haven't spent quite as much on testing. I just can't believe they flew in the Mars atmosphere. Little known fact that I occasionally mentioned I was the program scientist for the Mars airplane program, the ill-fated, non-funded, rushed Mars airplane program that I was told here. That's a thin atmosphere.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: But you know that because of ingenuity and its success, I have seen people that are reviving this idea. Someone actually presented it at NIAC this year. A new Mars airplane. So your dream lives on, Bruce.

Bruce Betts: It is interesting. I never said it was my dream. It was my job. All right, let's get back to the good stories. We had cracking open those OSIRIS-REx samples rovers on Mars, curiosity finding pure sulfur. Launches. Europa Clipper and Hera. Hera going out to the asteroid we whacked with the DART mission to check out that binary system. And Europa Clipper.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Really though, we as an organization have been advocating Europa Clipper for over a decade. To actually see that thing-

Bruce Betts: Yes.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: ... go up is amazing.

Bruce Betts: Yes, it's really exciting. All these missions take so long, but then they're the ones that we've been involved with and our members have been involved with and trying and trying and trying get them flown because of their importance. And Europa Clipper is one of them, and it's up and it's out there and it's headed off. Headed on its way.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: And one of the things that you've been working on for a long time, and we have as an organization as well, is Planetary Defense. And we didn't get a chance to talk about this too much in the show, but the end of the NEOWISE mission I feel is like a pretty big thing this year.

Bruce Betts: Yeah, NEOWISE, which started out as WISE and then was looking off at the universe and then ran out of its coolant, and so became a really great NEO discovery and characterization mission. Not ideal because it wasn't optimized for it. That's what the next round that we're still pushing and is funded for now, and it should be great. It will do a more specialized version of that. But NEOWISE did a lot of great stuff. Being able to use the infrared bands to characterize the asteroids as well as visible and do it without atmosphere and without the geometric limitations on earth. Just a lot of science of understanding things better.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. We'll cover this a little bit in next week's show because I talked with Bill Nye about this, but wouldn't it be wacky if in our lifetime we actually come up with a solid answer for not only how many of these objects are near us, but how to deflect them because of this work? This is a solvable problem and we've done so much work in this space as a space community, both with the amateur astronomers who aren't really amateur and all these spacecrafts. This could be a problem we actually solve.

Bruce Betts: That's what I've been harping on for a long time. And others. It's different in the realm of natural disasters, especially large scale ones that we actually can do something about it. We can actually prevent it. So far we're not at the prevention or even fantasy of prevention in earthquakes or hurricanes. We can track them, but we can't prevent them. But this. It's going to take more work and we're getting there, but the probability of impact, if we don't do something, damaging dangerous impact is 100%. We will get hit. Could be tomorrow and it could be later. So we keep working, we keep pushing and the bigger and bigger community does too, and it's wonderful to see that moving forward. And the NEO Surveyor mission. That's what that community's been pushing for since I got involved over 20 years ago, is we need a dedicated space orbiter nodule; that's a technical term; to check out the skies.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We're going to do it, Bruce.

Bruce Betts: Yeah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We totally are. I believe with our space community and all of our advocates, we are going to get this problem solved and then we can check that off our list of things to do and move on to finding life in the universe and all of our other priorities.

Bruce Betts: Yeah, we can do that simultaneously.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah.

Bruce Betts: Yeah, it's been a great year for space.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Here's to next year. 2025. We've got a bunch of other cool stuff coming up.

Bruce Betts: 2025, the year of awesome space. Again.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Let's go! Also our 45th anniversary year as an organization.

Bruce Betts: Congratulations!

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's going to be awesome.

Bruce Betts: Let's get excited about a truly random space fact. I thought to myself what is the last in the alphabetical list of moons in our solar system? And you of course immediately said to yourself, "MIR."

Sarah Al-Ahmed: MIR.

Bruce Betts: But you said, "Bruce doesn't really know how to pronounce that because it's probably old Norse-based. But why MIR is the last, as far as I can tell, in the alphabetical listing of moons of either planets or dwarf planets in the solar system and it's way out there from Saturn. Way out there takes 3.6 Earth years to complete an orbit around Saturn. Isn't that wild?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's a long time.

Bruce Betts: Yeah, MIR. So we need a Z name.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I was just going to say, we need to get in touch with the IAU. Fix that right now.

Bruce Betts: Yeah. Everybody go out there, look at the night sky and think about what Z name you would use for a moon in our solar system that hasn't been used for something else large and important. Thank you. Good night.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We've reached the end of 2024, but we'll be back next year on January 1st to kick off The Planetary Society's 45th Anniversary celebration with our CEO, Bill Nye. If you love the show, you can get Planetary Radio t-shirts at planetary.org/shop, along with lots of other cool spacey merchandise. Help others discover the passion, beauty, and joy of space science and exploration by leaving a review or a rating on platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Your feedback not only brightens our day, but helps other curious minds find their place and space through Planetary Radio. You can also send us your space thoughts, questions, and poetry at our email, at [email protected]. Or, if you're a Planetary Society member, leave a comment on the planetary radio space in our member community app. Planetary Radio is produced by The Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by our dedicated members. You can join us and help make space exploration in 2025 even better at planetary.org/join. Mark Hilverda and Rae Paoletta are our associate producers. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Pieter Schlosser. And until 2025 Happy Holidays, happy New Year, and Ad Astra.