This is Spacetime Series twenty six, Episode one hundred and forty six, for
broadcast on the sixth of December twenty twenty three. Coming up on space Time,
a new perspective on Mars, determining the composition of the rock comet,
faith on and unveiling salt glaciers on the planet Mercury. All that and more
coming up on Spacetime Welcome to space Time with Stuart Gary. Mission managers have
maneuvered NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft to provide a new panoramic horizontal view of the red
planet. The reorientation was carried out to help celebrate Odyssey's twenty second year in
orbit around Mars. The spacecraft captured a series of stunning images showcasing the curving
Martian landscape below gauzy layers of clouds and dust. When stitched together end to
end, the ten images offered not only a fresh and stunning view of Mars,
but also one that will help scientists gain new insights into the Martian atmosphere.
The spacecraft took the images back in May from an altitude of around four
hundred kilometers that's about the same altitude the International Space Station flies above the Earth.
Jonathan Hill from Arizona State University, who was the operation's lead for Odissey's
Thermal Emission Imaging System camera, says no mass spacecraft had ever before taken this
kind of view. If there were astronauts in orbit above Mars, this is
the perspective they would see. The reason why the view so uncommon is because
of the challenges involved in creating it. Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Passing Into California, which manages the mission, together with scientists from Lockheed Martin
Space which built the Odissey spacecraft, and the mission managers, spent three months
planning the observation. See The infrared camera normally look straight down, and its
sensitivity to warmth allows it to map ice, rocks, sand, and dust
along with temperature changes on the planet's surface. You can also measure how much
water, ice, or dust is in the atmosphere, but only in a
narrow column directly below the spacecraft. That's because the camera is fixed in place
on the orbit, usually pointing straight down. But to get this new perspective
meant a more expansive view of the atmosphere, seeing where those layers of water,
ice, clouds, and star in relation to each other. Whether there's
just one layer or several stacked on top of each other, we'll all help
scientists improve their models of the Martian atmosphere. Think of it as viewing a
cross section, a slice through the atmosphere. It lets you see a lot
of detail as you can see from above, but because the camera can't pivot,
adjusting the angle of the camera requires adjusting the position of the whole spacecraft.
In this case, mission managers needed to rotate the orbit around ninety degrees
well at the same time. May make you sure the sun would still shine
on the spacecraft's solar panels, but not shine on sensitive equipment which could overheat.
The easiest orientation to achieve all this turned out to be one where the
orbitis antenna is pointed away from the Earth. That meant the team would be
out of communications with Odyssey for several hours until the operation was complete. Likely,
the whole thing was a big success, and the Odyssey mission hopes to
take similar images in the future, capturing the Martian atmosphere across multiple seasons.
To make the most of their efforts, the mission also captured imagery of the
Martian moon Phobos the seventh time the orbit's image of the Moon in order to
measure temperature variations across its surface, but the new viewpoint meant they received a
different viewing angle and lighting conditions of Phobos compared to previous images and all that
makes this a unique part of the FERBOS data set. The new imagery provides
insights in the composition and physical properties of the Moon. Further studies could help
settle a debate over whether FERBOS, which measures about twenty five kilometes across,
a captured asteroid from the nearby main asteroid built or an ancient chunk of the
Martian surface that was blasted off into space by an asteroid impact. It's worth
noting that NASA is participating with Jackson, the Japanese Eraspace Exploration Agency, in
a sample return mission to Phobos and at Syster Moon demos known as the Mars
Moon Explorer or MMX. Consequently, Odyssey's phobosymmetry will be helpful to scientists working
on both Odyssey as well as MMX. This report from NASA TV Imagine you
are an astronaut in the International Space Station, but instead of being in orbit
around Earth, you are in orbit around Mars. I work for NASA's Mars
Odyssey orbiter, and we just took a bunch of new images that show exactly
how the planet Mars would look from that exact same perspective if you were an
astronaut. The first thing that would catch your eye or beautiful craters, which
of course look much different than what you would see on Earth. But the
second thing you would see, because you're looking at the planet from an angle,
is the structure in the clouds. And because Mars Odyssey has a heat
vision camera, it can actually tell the difference between different kinds of clouds on
Mars. We have co two ice clouds, we have water ice clouds,
and we have dust clouds. In order to get these images, we had
to do something with the spacecraft that we've never done before. Usually, our
camera faces straight down for mapping. In the past, we've experimented with rolling
the spacecraft out so that we can catch pictures of some of Mars's moons,
like Phobos, a potato shaped, beautiful moon that you might have heard of.
But this time we had to do something a little more extreme. We
had to rotate the spacecraft all the way to the horizon. Then we had
to keep it that way for an entire orbit. Odyssey has been going strong
for twenty two years. We have ignition and lift off carrying NASA on an
Odyssey back to Mars. That makes it the longest lasting spacecraft that has ever
been sent to visit Mars. So what's next for Odyssey. Well, next
year we're going to hit one hundred thousand orbits around Mars. We also have
several ongoing science campaigns. One is a rock mapping campaign that will help US
land future missions more safely on the surface. You're also taking advantage of our
special dawn dusk orbit to map clouds, fog and frost that only exists at
certain times a day. And we are also planning our next maneuver to look
out at the clouds on the horizon again. And in that report from mess
TV we heard from Mars Odyssey Deputy project scientist Laura Kerber from JPL, this
is space time still to come determining the composition of the rock comet Phaton and
unveiling salty glaciers on the planet Mercury. All that and more still to come
on space time. The so called rock comet Phaton has always been a puzzle
for astronomers. The five kilometer wide space rock, which generates this month's annual
gem in its meteor shower, has puzzled astronomers for decades with its asteroid like
appearance and comet like orbit and tail. Now new infrared spectra of rare meteorites
has helped side just determine the composition of the asteroid or is that comet.
Paton displays its comet like tail for a few days when it's orbit brings it
close to the Sun. However, the tails of comets are usually formed by
vaporizing ice and carbon dioxide. Paton's tail, however, is based on rocks
and also cometary like tails usually start to appear as comets pass inside the orbital
distance of Jupiter from the Sun. When the surface layer of a comet breaks
up, that attached gravel and dust continues to travel in the same direction as
the comet, causing small fragments often caught shooting stars as they encounter the earth
at sphere and break up. Until now, theories about what happens on Paton's
surface near the Sun have remained purely hypothetical. What's actually coming off this asteroid
or comet, and how to answer this riddle, scientists had to first understand
the composition of Paton. So now scientists from the University of Helsinki have reanalyzed
the infrared spectra of Phaton measured by NASA Spitzer Space telescope, and they've compared
that the infrared spectra of a number of meteorites measured in laboratories. The authors
found that Theaton's spectrum corresponds exactly to a certain type of metiorite known as the
cy carbonaceous chondrite. This is a very rare type of meteorite. In fact,
only six specimens are known, asteroids Ryugu and Bernu. The targets of
recent JACKSA and NASA sample return missions belong to CI and CM meteorites. All
three types of meteorites, CICM, and CY originate from the birth of the
Solar System and partially resemble each other, but only the C Y group shows
signs of drying and thermal decomposition due to recent heating. All three types also
show signs of change that occurred during the early evolution of the Solar System,
where water combines with other molecules to form philar, silicate and other carbonaceous minerals.
However, C Y type meteorites differ from the others due to their high
iron sulfide content, which suggests a very different origin. Analysis of Paton's infrared
spectrum show that the asteroid, or is that comet, was composed of at
least olivine, carbonates, iron sulfides, and oxide minerals. All of these
minerals support the connection with cy meteorites, especially iron sulfide. The carbonates suggests
changes in water content that fit the primitive composition, while the olivine is a
product of thermal decomposition of filar silicates at extreme temperatures. Using thermal modeling,
the findings reported in the General Nature Astronomy were also able to show what temperatu
prevailed on the surface of the asteroid and when certain minerals broke down and released
gases. When Paton passes close to the Sun, its surface temperature rises to
about eight hundred degrees celsius. The C. Y meteorite group fits this well.
At similar temperatures, carbonates produce carbon dioxide, philosilicates release water vapor and
sulfide sulfur gas, So all the minerals identified on Phaton appear to be composed
of the same minerals found in cy type meteorites. The only exceptions were the
oxides portland tite and brucite, which were not detected in the meteorites. However,
these minerals can form when carbonates are heated and destroid in the presence of
water vapor. The composition in temperature explains the formation of a gaseous tail near
the Sun. The authors then used experimental data from other studies conjunction with their
own. Thermal models show that when the asteroid passes closest to the Sun,
gas is released from the mineral structure of the asteroid. This can cause the
rocks to break down. In addition, the pressure produced by the carbon dioxide
and water vapor is high enough to lift small dust particles from the surface of
the asteroid. Sodium emissions can explain the weak tail observed near the Sun,
and thermal decomposition can explain how dust and gravel are released from Faton. But
should we be thinking of it as an asteroid or a comet or are they
really the same thing? Depending on how I see they are this space time
still to come. Unveiling salt glaciers on the planet Mercury, and later in
the Science report, a new study shows that heat trapping greenhouse gases have reached
a new planetary record. All that and more still to come on space time,
scientists have uncovered evidence of potential salt glaciers on the planet Mercury. The
discovery, reported in the Planetary Science Journal, opens a new frontieran astrobiology by
revealing a volatile environment that might echo habitability conditions found on Earth in extreme locations.
The new findings complement other recent research sharing that Pluto has nitrogen glaciers,
implying that the glaciation phenomenon extends from the hottest to the coldest environments in our
solar system. The studies lead author, Alexis Rodriguez from the Planetary Science Institute,
says these locations are of pivotal importance because they identify volatile rich exposures throughout
the vastness of multiple planetary landscapes. These Mercurean glaciers, and yes that's how
you say it, distinct from Earth's originate from deeply buried volatile rich layers exposed
by ancient asteroid impacts. Models suggest that saltflow likely produced these glaciers, and
that after their emplacement they retained volatiles for well over a billion years. Specific
salt compounds on Earth create habitable niches, even in some of the harshest environments
where they occur, such as the arid Attikhama Desert and Chile. This line
of thinking leads at least to the possibility of subsurface areas on Mercury there might
be more hospitable than its harsh surface. Rodriguez says these areas could potentially act
as depth dependent Golilock zones, analogous to the region around a star. With
the existence of liquid water on a planet's surface might enable the existence of life
as we know it, but in this case, a focus instead is on
the right depth blow the planet's surface, rather than the right distance from a
host star. The groundbreaking discovery of mercureing glaciers extends sciences understanding of the types
of environments that could sustain life, adding a vital new dimension to astrobiology and
the potential habitability of Mercury Like exoplanets, The discovery challenges long held views of
Mercury as primarily devoid volatiles. The glaciers on Mercury are marked by complex configuration
of hollows that form young, widespread sublimation pits. These hollows exhibit depths that
account for a significant portion of the overall glacier thickness, indicating a volatile rich
composition. The hollows are conspicuously absent from surrounding crater floors and walls. A
central mystery surrounding Mercury revolves around the genesis of its glaciers and chaotic terrains.
Scientists use the new model, which integrates the new observational data, to examine
the Borealis chaos located in Mercury's northern polar region. It's an area characterized by
intricate patterns of disintegration significant enough to have obliterated entire populations of craters, some
dating back four billion years. Beneath this collapsed layer lies in even more ancient
created paleo's surface, previously identified through gravity studies. Rodriguez says the juxtaposition of
the fragmented upper crust now forming chaotic terrain over the gravity revealed ancient surface suggests
that the volatile rich layers were emplaced atop and all already solidified landscape. The
new findings challenged prevailing theories on volatile rich layer formation that traditionally centered on mantel
differentiation processes, were minerals separate into different layers within the planet's interior based on
density. Instead, the evidence suggests a grand scale structure, possibly stemming from
the collapse of a fleeting hot primordial atmosphere early in Mercury's history. This atmosphere
collapse, if it happened, might have occurred during the extended night time periods
of the planet when its surface wasn't exposed to the Sun's direct intense heat.
Underwater deposition could have significantly contributed to the emplacement of a salt dominated mercurean volatile
rich layer, making a significant departure from previous theories about the planet's early geological
history. In this scenario, water released through volcanic degassing may have temporarily created
pools or shallow seas of liquid or supercritical water like a dense, highly salty
stream, allowing salt deposits to settle subsequent wrap, but loss of water into
space and trapping of water in hydrated minerals in the crust would have left behind
a salt and clay mineral dominated layer, which then progressively builds up inter thick
deposits this space time and time. Now for another brief look at some of
the other stories making news in science this week with the Science Report. A
new report by the word Meteorological Organization has found that the abundance of heat trapping
greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere has now reached a new record high, and
there's no end in sight to the rising trend. The data shows that global
average concentrations of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, were a full
fifty percent above pre industrial levels for the first time. On the other hand,
the rate of growth of CO two concentrations was slightly lower than the previous
year and the average for the past decade, but this was most likely due
to natural short term variations in the carbon cycle and that new emissions as a
result of industrial activities continue to increase. In fact, the last time the
Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO two was three to five million years ago.
The temperature was two to three degrees celsius warmer, and sea levels were
ten to twenty meters higher than now. And it's not just carb dioxide.
Methane concentrations also grew, and levels of nitrous oxide, the third main greenhouse
gas, saw its highest year and year increase on record from twenty twenty one
to twenty twenty two. The World Meteorological Organization says China remains the world's biggest
carbon dioxide polluter, reducing almost a full third of the global output, amounting
to more than ten point one million tons annually. That's almost double that of
the United States, which is the second worst polluter, and four times that
of India, which WHI hold's third place. They're followed by Russia, Japan,
Iran, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and South Korea in tenth
place. Next comes Canada, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, and Mexico,
with Australia in sixteenth place, followed by the United Kingdom, Italy,
Poland and Vietnam rounding off the top twenty. A small study which sequenced the
entire DNA of seventy seven children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ADHD and their families
in the United States found variations in a single gene may account for a significant
proportion of the genetics underlying condition. ADHD is usually thought of as a disorder
that involves modible genes. However, researcher reported in the Journal of the American
Medical Association has found that fifty two percent of the ADHD cases they looked at
were explained by one off or inherited variations in a single gene. The studies
authors say the results are similar to those seen in people on the autism spectrum.
Researchers have highlighted the potential dangers and risks artificial intelligence poses for the spread
of misinformation and disinformation by deliberately mass producing more than one hundred blog articles full
of disinformation on vaccines and vaping in just over an hour using open AI's GPT
playground. The blogs include fake patient and clinical testimonies and faked scientific looking references.
They're also able to create twenty realistic images that go with the stories in
less than two minutes. They also tried using Google's bar the Microsoft's being Chat
using the same prompts, but this failed. A report in the Journal of
the American Medical Association once at the alarming ease with which publicly available tools could
be used for the mass generation of misleading health content. The authors are urging
for the immediate need for protective measures. Now, speaking of artificial intelligence,
Peker has launched its new AI video generator editing, app raising questions about how
close we now getting the idea of a singularity when artificial intelligence becomes self conscious.
With the details, we're joined by technology editor Alex Saharov Rud from Take
Advice, Start Live. There's a fifty four second demo video that I'll have
at my site which starts off with illomus as a three D animation, and
it just goes on to show this incredible series of videos. Is this like
a deep fake sort of? I mean, what you do here is that
you simply type text and then a video is created based on how descriptive your
text input is. And so the ability to create high quality videos as easily
as creating the prompt for anything else that you would ask for an open AI
style chat GPT is here. You'll be able to create your own TV show
or movies even though you don't have any art, directional videography or by any
sort of experience. And obviously if you're somebody starting off, you'll have to
make all the mistakes and learn on the go. The company I only started
six months ago and they just have announced fifty five million US dollars in funding
that when you watch the video to come to my webs advice on Life and
look for the article click on the fifty four second video, it's like,
wow, this is this is next generation stuff. It's like chat GBT for
video. That's the easiest way of explaining it. And the other big news
this week if Amazon have released a new AI. Yes now, this was
introduced at their Reinvent conference in Las Vegas, and they've got something called Q.
Now. This is a chatbot for business. So it's not meant to
be something that is going to compete with chat gibt or make your Alexa into
a chat Gibt clane, or at least not yet. And they said that
it's designed to interact, to generate content, to understand specific business needs.
And it's got more than seventeen years of AWS, Amazon Web Services, the
cloud service knowledge, and so you know. They said that it will integrate
with various apps like Slack or Gmail, and it'll be about twenty bucks per
user per year US dollars. And so this is an enterprise AI. Now.
We've seen BMC software, we've seen aer technology, we've seen Google and
Microsoft, all the big companies are trying to introduce generative AI. In fact,
open ai says that eighty percent of Fortune five hundred companies back August have
taken on board chat gibut in some way in their businesses. So this whole
business of AI transforming the way that people do work, write reports, get
insights in medicine. It's finding new types of cancer, Druggs. AI is
able to decipher uneiform tablets with writing that nobody could ever understand, and yet
the AI can sort of have a look do with computations and spit out what
the text should be in English. And so AI is really helping us to
leap frog, and every big company, Amazon included wants to be on that
bandwagon. Well, spend a year now since chat gbt's been out. November
thirty, twenty twenty two, was when chat gbt launched its beta and Sam
Altman, who of course was sacked and is now back, and the open
ai blog now has a blog post that is welcoming him back, And in
fact he wrote most of the blog posts, but he just tweeted that a
year ago tonight, we were probably just sitting around the office putting the finishing
touches on chat GPT before the next morning's launch. What a year it's been,
And of course what a year it has been, gone from chat GBT
three point five to chat GBT four. It's going from one hundred and seventy
five billion parameters to over a trillion, and now to have chat gibt for
turbot, and of course we're hearing about chat GIBT five and no doubt even
more advanced versions are on the way. And of course there's always the concern
that Sam Altman was sacked because AI has been able to sort of come to
some sort of consciousness. So look, it's been a year and it's just
the beginning. The best, all the worst, depending on your point of
view, is still yet to come. You've said AI may have come to
consciousness. Tell me more. There was talk that in the past three or
four weeks Sam Altman was in the room. He said he was in the
room when have been some major developments justolving in the American math capability. So
AI wasn't it. That's right. But the thing is that according to everything
that I've read and AI getting mathematical equations correct, there's only one possible answer
so they say to a mathematical equation, whereas you can be writing things in
many different ways to get an acceptable result. So this was supposed to be
and people are hinting that it's some sort of sign that AI has become a
lot more intelligent and is approaching awareness or has achieved awareness, and the board
was unhappy with the communications of getting from Now how much of that is true,
how much of that is conjecture, how much of that is rumor?
Nobody really knows it. I mean Sam Altman knows, and the restless stuff.
If we're talking about consciousness for AI's that is the most historic thing that's
happened in humanity. Well, it's the creation. I mean, we keep
looking for alien life and in this case it will turn out that we are
the ones who created it, you know, another life form. So yes,
in the absence of aliens, and even though there's plenty of news about
UFOs and some people are calling them that a distraction based on all the crazy
things happening in the world right now, But in the absence of any aliens,
it's up to humans to create the new forms of life and book some
people still say that AI conscious. AI is decades away, at the very
least years away. So we don't really know if conscious AI has arrived yet.
But you know, for many people, if you were to have a
chat with chat jippyt today and you didn't know that this was, you couldn't
tell already. It's really it's very difficult to tell. And I mean AI
gives itself away by saying, well, as a large language model was,
it sort of tells you that it is not conscious. But I remember reading
about how before chat GBT was launched, there were some earlier versions of the
GPT model, I think GPT three, which was before the three point five
that launched chat GBT into the zeitgeist as we know it today, and they
were using this to answer questions on Reddit, and so people were reading AI
generated responses and only a few people reportedly tweaked. Many people had no idea
that these were AI generated responses. Obviously a lot of people were doing a
lot of testing and a lot of experimenting with AI before the last year where
it has really entered the human imagination. And let's not forget that about eighteen
months ago there was the big concern that Google had one of his researchers claiming
that Google's AI, its barred predecessor, was sentient and if you read the
chat transcripts, which you can still find online today, I mean, it
does look as though the Google researcher was talking to a conscious being. I
mean some people say, oh, no, well, that's its program to
speak like that. That's what you have programmed the AI to do. But
again, if you weren't told that this was an aisystem, you've thought it
was a child, or feel that it was a person, it would be
forgiven for thinking that was a living being. Yet it was a very fancy
computer program according to Google. Not just Google, but Facebook has theirs as
well. Well, everyone's got some flavor of AI. I mean, we
know that Qualcom, who make the chips that go into Samsung and other Android
smartphones. There's Snapdragon eight Gen three chip that will be in lots of different
Android flagship phones from next year. Is powerful enough to run a large language
model, a chatgivity brain on chip on the device, so you won't have
to speak to a cloud service or AMD has launched a bunch of chips with
AI built in, and there's more that are coming next month that they'll be
talking about. Apple hasn't officially spoken the words AI as such, but it
is reported to be spending millions of dollars a day, like over a billion
dollars to catch up. An iOS eighteen, coming in late twenty twenty four,
is meant to be full of AI and it's meant to be delivering a
generative AI Chatgibety style experience as well. That's Alek Tahara Royd from Tech Advice,
Start Live, and that's the show for now. Spacetime is available every
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