>> Natalie Moore: This is Natalie Moore with Spark Science. Normally, I engineer the show, but this week, I went to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference to interview planetary scientists about habitability and the solar system. LPSC is hosted near Houston, Texas by the Johnson Space Center and the Lunar and Planetary Institute. Thanks for listening, and enjoy the show.

[♪ Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]

♪ Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
♪ Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
♪ As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
♪ Cyclotron and any and every mic
♪ You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
♪ Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow
♪ Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
♪ I’m every element around

>> Natalie Moore: I’m going to have you say your own name. So can you just say what your name is and what kind of science you do?

>> Chris Cline: Chris Cline, planetary geochemistry.

>> Natalie Moore: Nice. And how many years have you been at LPSC also?

>> Chris Cline: Oh, this is probably my 10th or 11th year.

>> Natalie Moore: Wow.

>> Chris Cline: It sounds a bit scary. I’m feeling old now, but that’s probably true.

>> Natalie Moore: So you —

>> Chris Cline: I don’t come every single year, but I — this is one of my regular conferences.

>> Natalie Moore: Yeah.

>> Chris Cline: So it’s really nice because it’s a smaller event. And so you get more personal interaction with people, which is nice. Another really big one is called AGU. There’s — I don’t know — 20,000 people there. This one probably has, I don’t know, 2,000. So it’s a lot different. And this is nice because it’s small and it’s very focused in on planetary science.

>> Natalie Moore: AGU is the –?

>> Chris Cline: It’s the American Geophysical Union. So it has biogeochemists, just normal biologists and ecologists, people who study the global climate, volcanologists. So it’s just — it’s quite a grab bag of people who are interested in things that relate to geoscience.

>> Natalie Moore: And can you just summarize kind of more basically than what you did in your session what your talk was about?

>> Chris Cline: Yeah. So my talk was a little bit off the beaten path and, in fact, it’s off the beaten path from what I normally do. But, essentially, what my talk was looking at was some of this interesting nitrogen isotope data in Titan’s atmosphere. So nitrogen has two major stable isotopes, nitrogen 14 and 15. And there’s a very peculiarly isotopic signature between N2, or molecular nitrogen we find in Titan’s atmosphere, and HCN, which is a chemical product of photochemistry in the atmosphere.

And this has all been really well known, but what I thought was kind of interesting was to apply this new information from Titan to thinking about the early Earth. So many people — and this started with Carl Sagan — thought that Titan could be a natural laboratory for prebiotic chemistry on an anoxic early Earth where you could have similar types of organic synthesis and this idea has gained a lot of ground over the past few decades. But people haven’t really been thinking about the isotope consequences of the atmospheric chemistry on Titan.

So I try to put those two things together, the Titan analog of the early Earth and then some of the new isotope chemistry ideas, to try to say, “Well, if we think Titan is a good analog of the early Earth, could we find some of this bizarre isotope chemistry in Titan’s atmosphere in the geologic record of early Earth?” And the real selling point to this is, maybe if we could find it, then we could discover some evidence for some of the earliest chemistry that might have happened on the early Earth. And this could be considered — it’s interesting because it could also be considered a somewhat crazy idea because the normal conventional view is that all traces of the earliest chemistry of the Earth have been obliterated.

So you have active geology, plate tectonics, you bury materials, you cook those, you cook stuff, and we might not expect to find some of the evidence of this fragile chemistry. But the isotopes — isotopes don’t get destroyed so there could be hope in finding some of this information.

>> Natalie Moore: Oh, so for people that don’t know, what are the oldest geologic units then — on the Earth then that you can find?

>> Chris Cline: The oldest rocks are about 3.8 billion years old. So these are found in Australia and in Greenland and then — so those are the oldest rocks. We think the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. And then some of the oldest minerals are called zircons and these are dated as old as about 4.4 billion years.

So there are some samples left from the earliest time on the Earth, but they’re incredibly rare.

>> Natalie Moore: Wow. And the isotopes that you’d be looking at like on Titan, they don’t get destroyed even though –?

>> Chris Cline: They don’t get destroyed, but there would be challenges because the amount of material available is so limited that it’s going to require the most sophisticated analytical techniques. And, in fact, it may require developments and new technology before we can try to actually look for this stuff that I’m proposing.

>> Natalie Moore: Cool. So you kept talking about HCN.

>> Chris Cline: Right.

>> Natalie Moore: In your talk.

>> Chris Cline: I’m obsessed with that HCN [laughing].

>> Natalie Moore: Yeah. And I don’t — like I said, I’m not a chemistry major. I’m a physics major. So I don’t know much about HCN or why it’s an important component for life. So can you kind of describe a little bit about that?

>> Chris Cline: Sure. Yeah. You know, it’s a bit bizarre to say that HCN might be important for life because, as all of us know, if we breathe HCN, we die. But, for some of the earliest chemistry that leads to the building blocks of life, there’s this very interesting finding that HCN seems to pop up in all these reactions that can form these building blocks.

So, in my talk, I discuss how this building block called adenine, which is one of the key players in forming RNA or DNA, these genetic molecules, the syntheses that form adenine start from HCN.

>> Natalie Moore: Oh.

>> Chris Cline: And so you might think that HCN’s important and it’s kind of interesting also that HCN has these key elements. So it has the hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen that you would need in these biomolecules.

>> Natalie Moore: So you want to look for this on the Earth to see if, like, yes, it’s here on Earth and we exist also.

>> Chris Cline: Right.

>> Natalie Moore: So there’s the tie between like this isotope abundance or just finding that in the early materials and life?

>> Chris Cline: Yes. It might tell us something — we might have a new window into the chemistry that led to the origin of life. The normal way people study the chemistry leading to the origin of life is they try to form these experiments in the laboratory. And they say, “Well, I tried to construct some simulation in a flask or a beaker for the early Earth. And here’s what I get when I mix these different chemicals together.”

What’s nice about this approach is that we could potentially send geologists out into the world and we might be able to find observational evidence of prebiotic chemistry. And I think this is not something that we previously thought would be possible.

>> Natalie Moore: Wow. So where on — we already know that this exists on Titan because of Cassini. And we were like flying by Titan, you know, over 150 times or whatever. Where would you like guess to look next then? Like what other systems would you guess to look for this isotope? And how would we look for that if we don’t have a spacecraft already there?

>> Chris Cline: Right. I’ve got to be careful here because I’m not an astronomer.

>> Natalie Moore: Oh, yeah.

>> Chris Cline: So I don’t want to misspeak here. What I would like to see is we could look for some of this — these are — this is a warning, some of these ideas are speculative. It’s possible we could look for some of this evidence on the moon because some people have talked about some of the earliest crust on the Earth being blasted off the surface of the Earth and landing on the moon and being preserved.

So, if there was an era of prebiotic chemistry, it may not have been preserved on the Earth, but maybe some of these rocks made it onto the moon and are still lying on the moon preserving some of this evidence. So that’s one possibility.

Another is Mars. So people think that Mars might have had a more active geology and atmospheric chemistry in its past leading to some of this photochemistry and production of organic molecules. So it’s possible that, in some of the oldest rocks on Mars, some of this chemistry might be revealed.

And then the third possibility, besides those two and Titan, is we might be able to look at exoplanets. I’m not really quite sure what the state of capability with the current and upcoming telescopes is, but, if those telescopes can detect the heavy nitrogen isotope in HCN on exoplanets, that could tell us about this process and whether or not it is a universal feature of having atmospheric prebiotic chemistry on planets in general.

>> Natalie Moore: But, of course, we would need to — there would need to be like a large area where this isotope occurs on those exoplanets, right, for us to –?

>> Chris Cline: It would have to be a global phenomenon.

>> Natalie Moore: Yeah.

>> Chris Cline: And you’d also have to have great observational capabilities because it’s already very difficult to see a trace molecule like HCN. And then now we’re telling people, “Oh, not only do you have to see HCN, but you have to see its minor isotope, which is over 100 times less abundant.” But I learned from the literature and speaking with astronomers that these people who make observations are pretty clever people. So I don’t want to underestimate their capabilities.

>> Natalie Moore: Yeah.

>> Chris Cline: So I just like to poke them and say, “Well, maybe you should consider this,” and I’ll let them get to work.

>> Natalie Moore: Mm-hmm. Well, that’s really cool. I think that would be — if people — I hope people go out and look for that stuff and that would be a huge — at least that would give us another line of evidence to follow for looking.

>> Chris Cline: Yeah. I’m hopeful. There’s been a lot of phenomenal work in the laboratory studying prebiotic chemistry, but I think we’re going to need more information if we’re going to really make great progress and understand the origin of life. And I think that information needs to come from observations.

So that can be geologists looking in the deep, dark record of the history of the Earth, or it could be astronomers looking at Earth-like planets elsewhere in the universe.

>> Natalie Moore: Mm-hmm. So we don’t actually need to go to the planets and have like a rover there or a spacecraft there. We can hopefully — I mean, you’re not an astronomer, but hopefully we can come up with another way to be able to look at other planets and not actually go there and find this isotope.

>> Chris Cline: It’s going to depend on how much detail you want and what stage of the process we’re interested in. So, if you want to look at some of the earliest stages, then maybe these telescopes will be phenomenal tools. But, if you want to look for some of these things like the direct building blocks of life or the first evidence of life, then we’re going to need real samples. So we’re going to need to analyze rocks off the surface of Mars. We’re going to need to dig through the dunes of Titan or its lake sediments. We’re going to need to probe the geological record of the early Earth.

So, in the ideal case, I would say let’s do all of that.

>> Natalie Moore: Yeah. So I’ve been asking people — because I was kind of confused when I came to this conference about what a biosignature would be — would even look like, or what people — what scientists consider a biosignature. And I keep seeing that in all these talks. And people have — they can’t really give me an answer because we don’t really know yet. But, if we found this isotope on Earth in the oldest materials, would you then say that it could be considered a biosignature?

>> Chris Cline: No. What’s actually kind of cool about this idea is you could maybe consider it a prebiotic or a signature at the boundary or transition between chemistry and life because it relies on some of these processes where you have just simple chemical reactions happening in the environment and then leading to the building blocks of life. So it’s something that’s complementary to thinking about finding evidence for old life.

>> Natalie Moore: Oh. OK. That makes sense. So I just have a couple more questions. So what are you most excited for in the future of your field?

>> Chris Cline: I’m most excited for testing a lot of these possibilities. So testing if different environments in the solar system and outside of the solar system are habitable and, in the solar system itself, trying to find evidence of life. I don’t know if we will be successful, but I think it’s really inspiring to think that we now have a lot of the tools that we need to start testing these ideas. And so what I’m hoping for in the next few decades is, no matter what the answer is, we can all be very proud that we gave our best answers — we gave our best efforts in trying to answer these fundamental questions.

>> Natalie Moore: Cool. And is there anything else that you want to say that I didn’t ask you about?

>> Chris Cline: I think that’s about it. I’d just like to say, if this is your first LPSC, I hope you have a great rest of the trip and rest of the week here.

>> Natalie Moore: Thank you. I’m already having a great time. What has been your favorite part about this year’s LPSC?

>> Chris Cline: Oh, geez. That’s a tough one. I really liked the session I was just in on Ceres actually. I wasn’t aware that there was all this great new data from the Dawn mission telling us all about the composition and some of the processes that have happened on Ceres. So that’s really interesting.

>> Natalie Moore: Later, I will be talking with Tom Prettyman who was talking about the differentiation of Ceres and I was really confused because I was like, “This is an asteroid.” I didn’t realize that it would have this like internal differentiation.

>> Chris Cline: Yeah, you know, it’s — I think a theme that you might be noticing is we find lots of different objects and processes in the solar system and it seems like, for these different bodies that we’re observing, they’re sort of like people where they have different personalities and they behave differently. So I think it’s really fascinating when we try to figure out their life stories. And I think Ceres is just one of the latest examples.

[♪ Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ♪]

♪ Early late at night ♪
♪ I wander off into a land ♪
♪ You can go, but you mustn’t tell a soul ♪
♪ There’s a world inside ♪
♪ Where dreamers meet each other ♪

>> Tom Prettyman: So I’m Thomas Humphrey Prettyman and I do planetary science, but I do it from the perspective of nuclear physics. So I look at the radiation that comes off of planetary bodies either through the decay of radioactive materials or bombardment by galactic cosmic rays. And I use that information to sort out what elements are in the surface of the planets. And then that information is used to understand how they form in a ball.

>> Natalie Moore: Wow. And how many years have you been at LPSC?

>> Tom Prettyman: I think my first LPSC was, you know, one of those last years of the ’90s.

>> Natalie Moore: I know your talk was a while ago, but could you summarize what your session was about?

>> Tom Prettyman: No. It’s too long ago for me to remember any of that [kidding]. So what I talked about today was I try to do an integrative analysis of the data that we have from Dawn and also telescopes to try and figure out how much carbon there might be on the surface of Ceres and what form it might be in. And it’s interesting that we have an optical spectrometer. We have a framing camera. We have a nuclear spectrometer. And each of them has strengths and there are things that they can see. They probe different depths. They look at different spatial scales. And, when taken separately, they can do quite a lot. But, when you put them together, they can do even more.

So I’m trying to exploit the synergy of the different instruments on Dawn to work out the total carbon budget of Ceres’ surface. And once we determine that, that can provide some clues about Ceres’ internal evaluation.

>> Natalie Moore: So, for our listeners who don’t know about the Dawn spacecraft, could you just kind of describe like when it went there, how long it’s been there, and, I guess, what instrument you are most invested in?

>> Tom Prettyman: Well, I am the lead for Dawn’s gamma ray and neutron detector. So that’s my favorite instrument. Although, I really love the others ones too.

So the Dawn spacecraft has redundant framing cameras. It has — visible to infrared mapping spectrometer, VIR. And it also does gravity science. So it uses radio science to sort out information about gravity, which is used to determine internal structure. And the spacecraft launched back in 2007. So we’ve been in space for over 10 years.

>> Natalie Moore: Wow.

>> Tom Prettyman: And we’ve been to Vesta and now Ceres for almost — I believe it’s 3 years now, but I can’t remember the exact number of days [laughing]. But we did a — at Ceres – the way in which we have investigated Vesta and Ceres is to approach characterizing environment around the target and then go to different altitudes. And, at each altitude, you get different information. And, eventually, you get to the low altitude mapping orbit where the Dawn’s gamma ray and neutron detector makes its measurements.

And so, at Ceres, we descended to within a body radius of Ceres’ altitude. And we stayed there for a while and gathered data needed to sort out the elemental composition of the surface. And then we spiraled back out. And we’ve been at a very distant orbit for quite some time now. And that’s helped us in terms of the kind of information I work with. It helps us get background data that we need to refine our elemental analyses.

However, we had a choice, two different possibilities for Dawn’s extended mission. One was to descend to low altitudes to measure composition of Ceres up close, much closer than we’ve gotten before. And the other was to go to another target which would be Adeona.

And NASA selected staying in Ceres. So we’re now going to do something really exciting for my investigation and that is we’re going to get in close, within 35 kilometers of the surface of Ceres in elliptical orbits.

>> Natalie Moore: So does Dawn have any ability to land on Ceres, or is it purely orbital?

>> Tom Prettyman: It’s purely orbital. And so we’re not planning to land on Ceres. In fact, the orbit has to be designed in such a way that we are sure that, if things fail, we won’t collide with Ceres for a long period of time. And that’s for planetary protection reasons.

>> Natalie Moore: And just as super basic information, how big is Ceres compared to Earth and why do we care about it?

>> Tom Prettyman: OK. Those are two good questions. The first one’s the easiest to answer because it’s just a fact [laughing].

>> Natalie Moore: Yes.

>> Tom Prettyman: We know how big Ceres is. We’ve known for a long time. We know better now that Dawn’s visited Ceres. So Ceres is about 1,000 kilometers in diameter. And, if you took Ceres and placed it onto a map of the United States, it would be sort of scale size — the circle would be kind of scale size of Texas or New Mexico. Vesta is about half that diameter. And I think it fits rather nicely on my home state, which is New Mexico. So, you know, the driving distance across is about how far you would have to drive if you could go through a tunnel through the center. So that’s how big.

Now, why is it important? Well, you can get lots and lots of different answers from people. I think it’s — just from today’s talk, one aspect is Ceres is water rich and it’s in the main belt. It has a story to tell us about the beginning of the solar system, how water rich bodies formed, how they got implanted into the main belt. And so Ceres has a lot in common with the carbonaceous chondrites. These are meteorites that have been altered by water.

And Ceres has had the same thing happen to it except on a huge scale. So you look at Ceres and you think about all the different missions that NASA might plan to do in the future. Some of them involve trying to go to icy worlds to understand whether or not liquid water might still be present within some of them, how water shaped these worlds. Well, there’s Ceres sitting right there in the main belt, very accessible.

And, if we’re right, it’s got a lot of carbon. And carbon in a water rich environment is very interesting for studies of prebiotic chemistry. So that’s one reason why it might be really exciting. You could ask other people and they’ll tell you other things. It’s just a really fascinating place.

>> Natalie Moore: But Ceres doesn’t have an atmosphere so it could not actually have any lifeforms on it. Right?

>> Tom Prettyman: Well, I don’t think there’s any life on Ceres. Your assumption that it doesn’t have an atmosphere is correct. It does not have an atmosphere. It periodically appears to have an exosphere. And so water vapor is liberated by various processes and measurements by the instrument that I’m in charge of show that Ceres forms a bow shock on occasion, which means that it’s the collision of the solar winds with a transient atmosphere called an exosphere because it’s probably collision. So you form a bow shock and my instrument detected energetic electrons probably produced by a bow shock on Ceres.

So Ceres is an interesting place not just for the surface chemistry, but also for some of the space physics type issues.

>> Natalie Moore: And that’s actually a good segue to what I thought was interesting about your talk is that I didn’t realize that Ceres could have these kind of geological processes. And I was wondering what kinds of active processes do we observe on Ceres.

>> Tom Prettyman: Right. And throughout the session there are some examples. Margaret Landes talked a little bit about the probability that you could expose subsurface ice by impacts during the duration of the Dawn mission. And it was very low. And whatever you expose probably would be fairly small. On the other hand, there was a talk by [inaudible] and that talk discussed the exposure and varying size of water ice on a cliff edge in a crater called Juling, which is a mid-latitude crater. And so we’ve been watching this crater with Dawn for a while and it looks like the ice content on a cliff wall in that crater is actually increasing.

And so you have processes where we know that there is subsurface ice on Ceres. And you have processes where you could have a landslide and expose some of the ice, the water vapor that comes into the landslide could now be exposed to sunlight. And, when it’s exposed to sunlight, it will sublime and produce water vapor. And so Juling Crater is one of the places you can look and see evidence for very recent, you know, immediate geologic activity.

However, in the longer timeframe, 20 million years let’s say, there’s Occator Crater and that’s how old the crater’s thought to be. It’s thought to have formed about 20 million years ago. And it contains the famous bright spots.

>> Natalie Moore: So we don’t know what those are made of yet?

>> Tom Prettyman: We know what they’re made of, we just don’t know exactly how they formed. We know that they’re made of sodium carbonates, possibly ammonium carbonates, salts, you know, kind of a salty mixture that somehow, you know, extruded onto the surface. And so it could be crater volcanism. So you might have warmed the material underneath and proliferated it that way. There could have been preexisting brine that was liberated. There are all kinds of possibilities. We’re still trying to figure it out.

[♪ Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ♪]

♪ Dance in the trees ♪
♪ Paint mysteries ♪
♪ The magnificent droid plays there ♪
♪ Your magic mind ♪
♪ Makes love to mine ♪
♪ I think I’m in love, angel ♪
♪ Take me back to Wondaland ♪
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland ♪
♪ Take me back to Wondaland ♪
♪ I think me left me underpants ♪
♪ Take me back to Wondaland ♪
♪ I gotta get back to Wondaland ♪

>> Natalie Moore: So your talk on the carbon content of Ceres.

>> Tom Prettyman: Right.

>> Natalie Moore: And that was super interesting to me. And I was really surprised to learn that there were these like complex molecules on an asteroid. I mean, it’s the largest asteroid in our solar system, but still, it has carbon and you’re talking about water ice.

>> Tom Prettyman: And organics.

>> Natalie Moore: And organics.

>> Tom Prettyman: Right. So the carbon on Ceres we know is in the form of carbonates in one location around the crater Urnutet. The VIR spectrometer has detected evidence for organic matter. And so my question in looking at the total carbon budget is, “Can you explain it with just the carbonates, or do you maybe have organic molecules in the regolith everywhere?”

So, with the meteorites, most of the carbon is actually in the form of organic matter. Very little of it is in the form of carbonates. And it’s hard to imagine how you could convert carbon and carbonates — or carbon and the organics into carbonates and just have a surface covered in carbonates given the low temperature processing that must have gone on in Ceres.

So it’s puzzling that you don’t see organics. You know, one of the things that might be interesting to do is to have another mission that goes back and maybe lands on the surface and scoops up some material and does some analysis. Because carbon — carbonates and also organics — organics, once they get to the surface, that top surface layer, they’re fairly fragile and, when exposed to UV and ionizing particles, they can degrade. And they, you know, basically get graphitized. And there’s evidence that there is graphite on the surface of Ceres.

>> Natalie Moore: So how did Ceres get carbon off it?

>> Tom Prettyman: So Ceres is interesting because, again, it’s a lot like the carbonaceous chondrites in terms of it’s mineralogy. It would have formed outside the orbit of Jupiter and then would have later been implanted into the main belt some how. So it formed in the outer solar system. And, yeah, you’re outside of, you know, the dew line in the solar system. So you’re condensing a mixture of volatiles and silicates to make the body that you’re going to form, in this case Ceres.

And, you know, this — what happens is that, if the interior of the object is warm enough, you melt the ice that’s created and liquid water starts to interact with the silicates, particularly olivine, and you form serpentine. Well, that’s in oxygenic process, you release heat. You release this heat and you get more melting and you get more heat and more melting and more heat. And so you get a wave of this serpentine forming throughout the body. That doesn’t get too terribly hot, maybe 400 C or so. And you’re not going to wipe out the organics and it’s not clear, you know, what is exactly going to happen.

But the solar system has organics in the nebula that accreted along with the water and you should preserve there. And they’re light so, if you differentiated the body — and by differentiated, I mean a low temperature aqueous differentiation, not an igneous differentiation — then you might have had the lighter organics, the lighter materials moved to the surface. So that’s one of the things that we’re trying to figure out.

>> Natalie Moore: Oh, OK. And when is the Dawn mission expected to end?

>> Tom Prettyman: It is probably going to end — well, it’s going to end in the autumn some time. That’s when we’re basically going to run out of hydrazine. So we’re just not going to be able to go any further and —

>> Natalie Moore: Is that the fuel?

>> Tom Prettyman: Yeah. Well, kind of. Dawn is really an ion propulsion based system and so it’s got a big tank of xenon and we use the xenon to thrust. But we’re using hydrazine for attitude control. So to ornate the spacecraft. And we have a limited hydrazine budget. We’re doing our best to conserve it. That’s one of the things operationally we really want to do in doesn’t our mission.

But when we go to the low altitude, we’re going to start using a lot of hydrazine. And it’s going to be used up fairly quickly. That’ll be it for the mission, you know, as far as operations are concerned. But then, of course, we have data archiving, publishing the fascinating results that we find when we go to low altitude. So.

>> Natalie Moore: And you say you don’t want any kind of contamination on Ceres so it’s not like Dawn is going to crash into Ceres?

>> Tom Prettyman: Right. The orbits are designed so that the orbit will be stable for many years. The number 50 years rings a bell, but I’m not an expert on planetary protection so, yeah.

>> Natalie Moore: Cool.

>> Tom Prettyman: They’re going to be very careful to avoid striking Ceres with a spacecraft.

>> Natalie Moore: Mm-hmm. Cool. What are you most excited about for the future?

>> Tom Prettyman: Well, I’m excited about getting this data. This will be the very first time we’ve been able to get Dawn element data on the spatial scale of geologic units on the surface, the very first time. And so we’re going to be able to look and see, I hope, what’s inside Occator crater.

And, for example, you’ve got — you know, if you look at the geologic maps, you’ll see the interior has these lobate deposits. They might contain water that was mobilized following the impact and that ice might still be there. And, if it is, and it’s at the right depth, we’ll probably see it with GRaND. I like living in the moment and this is a really fascinating time for us. And I’m really excited for what we have the potential to do with Dawn.

>> Natalie Moore: When do you think that data will come in?

>> Tom Prettyman: It’ll start coming in in June.

>> Natalie Moore: So maybe by next year [laughing] — next year’s LPSC, there might be some talks on it?

>> Tom Prettyman: I think there’ll be — yeah, information at LPSC and AGU.

>> Natalie Moore: Awesome.

>> Tom Prettyman: Yeah.

>> Natalie Moore: Sweet. Also, what has been your favorite part of LPSC this year?

>> Tom Prettyman: I really loved both Cassini general talks that I saw. It was just so beautiful to see the results from Cassini and it’s — with Dawn coming to an end and Cassini having ended, it’s sad, but it’s also great to see, you know, how much these missions have accomplished.

>> Natalie Moore: Yeah. I saw some sniffles at the end of that thing for sure.

>> Tom Prettyman: Yeah. Exactly.

>> Natalie Moore: You can’t help with that epic music, though.

>> Tom Prettyman: Right. Right. Right.

>> Natalie Moore: Well, is there anything else that you’d like to say that I didn’t get a chance to ask you about?

>> Tom Prettyman: People always ask me that and I can’t think of anything. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.

>> Natalie Moore: Great.

>> Tom Prettyman: And if you need any more information or clarification from me, just send me an e-mail and I’ll do my best to respond.

>> Natalie Moore: Great.

[♪ Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ♪]

♪ Take me back to Wondaland ♪
♪ I think me left me underpants ♪
♪ The grass grows inside ♪
♪ The music floats you gently on your toes ♪
♪ Touch the nose, he’ll change your clothes to tuxedos ♪
♪ Don’t freak and hide ♪
♪ I’ll be your secret santa, do you mind? ♪
♪ Don’t resist ♪
♪ The fairygods will have a fit ♪
♪ We should dance ♪
♪ Dance in the trees ♪
♪ Paint mysteries ♪
♪ The magnificent droid plays there ♪

>> Natalie Moore: Thanks for listening to Spark Science. If you missed any of our show, go to our website, sparksciencenow.com. If there’s a science idea you’re curious about, send us a message on Twitter or Facebook at Spark Science Now. Spark Science is produced in collaboration with KMRE, Spark Radio, and Western Washington University.
Today’s episode was recorded on location at the Woodlands Convention Center in the Woodlands, Texas. Our producer is Regina Barber DeGraaff. Our audio engineers are Natalie Moore, Andra Nordin, and Tori Highley. Our theme music is “Chemical Calisthenics” by Blackalicious and “Wondaland” by Janelle Monae.

[♪Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ♪]

♪ Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc ♪
♪ When I rap you think ♪
♪ Iodine nitrate activate ♪
♪ Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound ♪
♪ Balance was unbalanced then you add a little talent in ♪
♪ Careful, careful with those ingredients ♪
♪ They could explode and blow up if you drop them ♪
♪ And they hit the ground ♪

[End of podcast.]