Celebrating Astronomy Day with the Giant Magellan Telescope

Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science

The Planetary Society

Technology, Science

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2018

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Happy Astronomy Day, October 13, 2018! We salute humankind’s long history of stargazing by checking in on what will be our planet’s largest telescope. Patrick McCarthy is an astronomer and a leader of the Giant Magellan Telescope project. He returns with a report on the instrument’s status, followed by a fascinating tour of the GMT facility. The MASCOT spacecraft has successfully completed its brief mission at asteroid Ryugu. Emily Lakdawalla provides an overview. And the space trivia contest has returned to What’s Up. See pics of our GMT visit and learn much more at: http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2018/1010-2018-patrick-mccarthy-gmt.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Going big for Astronomy Day this week on planetary radio.
0:05.0	Welcome, I'm At Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our
0:14.8	solar system and beyond. Happy Astronomy Day everyone. We'll celebrate
0:19.9	humankind's 10,000 years of watching the skies with an update on what will be the biggest
0:26.4	telescope ever built by far.
0:29.6	Join me for a conversation with Patrick McCarthy of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization
0:35.2	and a tour of its headquarters. We'll also check in with Bruce Betts. The chief scientist
0:40.4	is in Washington, D.C. this week for a conference about the stuff that solar
0:44.8	sales are made of. Emily Loch Duvala is the Planetary Society's Senior Editor and
0:50.2	Planetary Evangelist. Emily, welcome back from New Zealand.
0:54.4	I hope you are dealing well with the remnants of that massive dose of jet lag.
1:00.4	Tell us about this latest touchdown on the asteroid called Ryugu.
1:05.0	Yes, we had the success of the German-built mascot lander last week.
1:11.0	It was really cool. It's such a tiny little robot. It's 30
1:14.7	centimeters square by 10 centimeters tall. They call these hoppers or
1:19.6	even rovers sometimes, but they're really just bricks that have little flywheels inside that allow it to
1:24.8	reorient itself on the surface. The lander took 30 minutes to descend, it landed on the surface.
1:31.1	They had a little bit of trouble initially getting its instruments in the right
1:35.0	orientation because the asteroid is so dark that mascot sensors are having trouble figuring out
1:41.8	the difference between the asteroid surface in space and
1:44.8	figure out which direction was up.
1:47.1	But with a little help from Earth, they finally got that figured out and they managed three hops
	...

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