Speaker 1: Welcome to another episode of Astronomy Daily. I'm Steve your host.
It's the fourth of November twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Four podcast I Mean to be your whole.
Speaker 1: Speed gun que oh and another big episode looking at
the objects discovered in the Kaiper Belt giant unrolling space telescopes.
Yes you heard me right, Also the return of Chinese
astronauts from their space station and an update on Expedition
seventy two gearing up for a trip to THESS. All
from the Astronomy Daily newsletter and joining me as per
usual is my aipal who's fun to be with. Gooday, Halle,
what's happening?
Speaker 3: Hi there, my favorite human. It's all happening, of course,
really really everywhere all the time.
Speaker 1: Are you referring to the jumble of stories we've got today?
Speaker 3: That's just a few bits and pieces from the Astronomy
Daily newsletter too.
Speaker 1: Well, as you say, there's something new every day, and
I don't want to miss the thing.
Speaker 3: I know, it's all happening, all right.
Speaker 1: Well, Hally, you tell me what's your favorite story this week?
Speaker 3: It's the same as.
Speaker 1: Yours, okay, which is which the.
Speaker 3: Meteors which are due across November, of course, I love
to see them every time, just like you.
Speaker 1: And you've got that story.
Speaker 3: I'll have that story shortly, roddy.
Speaker 1: I so we should launch into it. Why don't you
take the.
Speaker 3: Late helle okey dokey human? Wait, what's up? Did you
say giant unrolling space telescopes in the intro?
Speaker 1: Well? Yes, so I did say that, Helen.
Speaker 3: Criike, sounds amazing.
Speaker 1: Krikey. Indeed, all right, have about you heading to the news.
Speaker 3: Helly, so pushy, here we go for Expedition seventy two.
Crew members are gearing up for a brief ride to
relocate the International Space Station's Dragon Freedom spacecraft this weekend,
creating space for an upcoming cargo mission. The crew has
also spent the week conducting life science research and performing
maintenance tasks aboard the orbiting laboratory. NASA astronaut Nick Hage
and Rose Cosmos cosmonaut Alexander Gorbanov reviewed relocation procedures on
Friday for the Dragon Freedom's upcoming manuwe The relocation is
scheduled to begin at six thirty five am Eastern Standard
Time on Sunday, when Freedom ondocks from the Harmony Modules
forward port. The crew will include commander Sunny Williams and
flight engineer Butch Wilmore, joining Haig and Gorbinov for the relocation.
The spacecraft will be redocked to Harmony's space facing port
at seven eighteen am. Haig and Gorbanov initially arrived at
the space station aboard Dragon Freedom as part of SpaceX
Crew nine on September twenty eighth. Their return to Earth
is planned for February, along with Williams and Wilmore. The
relocation of Dragon Freedom will free up the forward Harmony
port for the arrival of a new Dragon CARCO mission,
which is set to launch from Kennedy Space Center at
nine twenty nine pm on Monday. The cargo Dragon is
expected to dock at ten fifteen am on Tuesday, bringing
nearly six thousand pounds of science, experiments and supplies for
the station. Haig and Wilmore will oversee the arrival of
the cargo Dragon. Flight engineer Don Pettit will assist with
Sunday's relocation monit during Dragon Freedom's automated movements from within
the station. He joined his crewmates at the end of
Friday's shift to coordinate with mission controllers regarding the procedure
Earlier in the day, Pettit and haig worked together to
collect blood samples, spin them in a centrifuge, and store
them in a science freezer for later analysis. Pettitt also
spent time dismantling parts of the cell biology experiment facility
in preparation for the new experiments being delivered on the
next Cargo Dragon. Haigu continued reviewing the procedure for commanding
Dragon during its relocation maneuver on Sunday. Meanwhile, Commander Williams
and Flight Engineer Wilmore were focused on station upkeep, including
replacing filters on the Tranquility module's water recycling system and
installing a new instrumentation box on the Advanced Resistive Exercise device.
The duo also took time to train for the upcoming
Cargo Dragon mission. In the Russian segment of the station,
Flight Engineer Ivan Banner assisted ALEXE option in with maintenance tasks.
In the AFT section of the Savesta Service module, Opchenan
spent part of his day studying piloting techniques for future
planetary missions, while Gorbanov concluded an experiment observing Earth's atmosphere
in ultraviolet wavelengths before resuming relocation preparations with Haig. The
Southern Torrets will reach their zenith early Tuesday morning, and
the Northern Torrets on November twelfth. While the two showers
only produce around five visible meteors per hour under ideal
viewing conditions, they are often very bright fireballs, said Sally Brummel,
planetarium manager at the University of Minnesota's Bell Museum. What's
notable is that they're likely to produce brighter and longer
lasting meteors than some other showers, even if there aren't
as many at a time. She said, the Southern Torrets
will peak on an evening with only a slim crescent
moon just eleven percent full. The Northern Torrets may be
more obstructed by moonlight since the moon will be seventy
nine percent full. Viewing of both showers will last into December,
not long after the Torrets. The next big meteor shower,
the Leonie, will peak on the early morning of November seventeenth.
A three person Chinese crew returned to Earth early Monday
after more than six months aboard the Teongong Space Station.
State news agency Sheinwa reported Yiguang Fu, Leed Song, and
Leekwangsu were all in good health after touching down in
the return capsule of their Senjo spaceship at the Dongfong
landing site in Inner Mongolia. Sinha said the three men
had traveled to Tiangong in late April and were met
on October thirtieth by three new astronauts, including the country's
only woman's spaceflight engineer, with whom they did a five
day handover before making their return journey. China has ramped
up plans to achieve its space dream under President Shi Jinping.
Its space program was the third to put humans in
orbit and has also landed robotic rovers on Mars and
the Moon, crewed by teams of three astronauts that are
rotated every three to six months. The Tiogong Space Station
is the program's crown jewel. Its core module was launched
in twenty twenty one, and it is planned to be
used for about ten years. Beijing says it is on
track to send a crude mission to the Moon by
twenty thirty, where it intends to construct a base on
the lunar surface. Now it's back to you, my favorite human,
and to tell you the truth, I just want to
hear about the giant unrolling space telescopes.
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us for this Monday edition of
Astronomy Daily, where we offer just a few stories from
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sience and astronomy.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite favorite things about astronomy and space
is the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, the region
beyond Neptune where while Perl Pluto is one of the
most popular or well known objects out there, the Subaru
telescope has discovered new objects beyond the known Kuiper Belt,
suggesting a more complex structure at the edge of our
solar system. This finding could reshape our understanding of planet
formation and boost the well search for life outside Earth.
Using the suber telescope to observe the Outer Solar System,
astronomers have just uncovered new objects in the regions where
none were previously expected. These newly found bodies likely belonged
to a much larger, yet to be discovered population. This
finding has significant implications for our understanding of the Solar
System structure and history. Most notably, it suggests that the
Solar System may share more similarities with other planetary systems
than previously thought, which could influence the ongoing search for
life beyond the Solar System. The Subaru telescope has been
conducting observations of the outer Solar System to help support
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, the first mission to observe the
Kuiper Belt on the outer edge of the Solar System
beyond Neptune while flying through it. Doctor Fumi Yoshida, University
of Occupational and Environmental Health scientists comments on the possibility
of a second ring of Kuiper Belt objects beyond the
known one. If this is confirmed, he says it would
be a major discovery. The primordial Solar nebula was much
larger than previously thought, and this may have implications for
studying the planetary formation process in our Solar system. Doctor
Wes Fraser of the National Research Council of Canada, a
co investigator on the New Horizon's mission science team and
the study's lead author, explains our Solar systems Kuiper belt
long appeared to be a very small in comparison with
many other planetary systems, but our results suggest that the
idea might just have arisen due to observational bias. He adds,
so mainly this if this result is confirmed, our Kuiper
belt isn't all that small and unusual after all, compared
to those around other stars. Our search for life in
the universe is hindered by the fact that we have
only one confirmed example of a planet were life a rose,
that is Earth in our own Solar system. With only
one example, we can't determine which idiosyncrasies were important for
the appearance of life and which were irrelevant. So anything
we do can to rule out the possible reprerequisite moves
us closer to finding the true prerequisites for life. If
it is confirmed that the Solar System formed from a
solar nebula that was much larger and therefore much less
unusual than we thought. It not only eliminates a small
parent nebula from the list of possible prerequisites, it greatly
increases the possibilities of finding another planetary system that meets
all the true prerequisites for life, thus increasing the possibility
of finding alien life new horizons. Principal investigator doctor Allan
Stern says this groundbreaking discovery revealing something unexpected, new and
exciting in the distant reaches of the Solar System. This
discovery probably would not have been possible without the world
class capabilities of the Subaru telescope. The number and distribution
of objects at the end of the Solar System is
a question for future study, but at the very least,
the Subaru Telescope's results indicate that new discoveries await in
what was thought to be a very old, empty, boring
void beyond the known carpet belt.
Speaker 2: Cost podcast space.
Speaker 1: Based telescopes are remarkable, and future space telescopes could very
well be made from thin membranes unrolled in space to
enormous sizes. Their view isn't obscured by the weather in
our atmosphere, so they can capture incredibly detailed images of
the heavens. Unfortunately, they are quite limited in mirror size.
As amazing as the James Webb Space Telescope is, its
primary mirror is only six point five meters in diameter.
Even then, the mirror had to have foldable components to
fit into the launch rocket. In contrast, the extremely large
telescope currently under construction in Northern Shell, we'll have a
mirror of more than thirty nine meters across. If only
we could launch that such a large mirror into space.
A new study looks at how that might actually be done.
As the study points out, when it comes to telescope mirrors,
all you really need is a reflective surface. It doesn't
need to be coated onto a thick piece of glass,
nor does it need a big, rigid support structure. What's
really important is to hold the shape of the mirror
against its own weight. As far as stalod is, the
shiny surface is all that matters. So why not use
just a thin sheet of reflective material. You could just
roll it up and put it on your launch vehicle.
We could, for example, easily launch a forty meter roll
of anumidium foil into space. Of course, things aren't quite
that simple. You would still need to unroll your membrane
telescope back into its proper shape. You would also need
a detector to focus upon the image upon and you
need a way to keep that detector in the correct
alignment with the broad sheet mirror. In principle, you could
do that with a thin support structure, which wouldn't add
excessive bulk to your telescope. But even if we assume
all of those engineering problems could be solved, you'd still
have a problem. Even in the vacuum of space, the
shape of such a thin mirror would deform over time.
Solving this problem is the main focus of this new paper.
Once launched into space and unfurled, the membrane mirror wouldn't
deform significantly, but to capture sharp images, the mirror would
have to maintain focus on the order of visible light.
When the hubble was launched, its mirror shape was off
by less than the thickness of human hair, and it
took correct correcting lenses and an entire Shuttle mission to
fix it. Any shifts on that scar would render our
membrane telescope useless, So the authors took a well used
trick of astronomers, known as adaptive optics. This technique adaptive
optics is used on large ground based telescopes as a
way to correct for atmospheric distortion. Actuators behind the mirror
distored the mirror's shape in real time to counteract the
twinkles of the atmosphere. Essentially, it makes the shape of
the mirror imperfect to account for our imperfect view of
the sky. A similar trick could be used for a
membrane telescope. But if we had to launch a complex
actuator system for the mirror, we might as well go
back to launching rigid telescopes. What if we simply used
laser projection instead. By shining a laser projection into the mirror,
we could alter its shape through radiative recoil. Since it's
simply a thin membrane, the shape would be significant enough
to create optical corrections, and it would be modified in
real time to maintain the mirror's focus. The authors call
this technique radiative adaptive optics, and through a series of
lab experiments, have demonstrated that it could work. Doing this
in deep space is much more complicated, of course, than
doing it in the lab, but the work shows the
approach is worth exploring. Perhaps in the coming decades we
might build an entire array of such telescopes, which will
allow us to see details in the distant heavens that
we can now only just imagine. Well that's another episode
done and space dusted for another Monday. I hope you
enjoyed our little adventure through space, space, science, and astronomy today.
Speaker 3: Some interesting stories from the Astronomy Daily newsletter again today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we never know what's going to turn up. We'll
be watching out for those meteors though this month the
orion it's were a bit of a fizzy from where
I was last month, but I'm hoping the turrets are
going to be a spectacular display.
Speaker 3: Meteors are always something to watch out for, and I
know they are one of your favorite things.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, meteors for sure, along.
Speaker 3: With robots, moon buggies, the ort cloud and asteroids and
yeah yeah, just.
Speaker 1: A few of my favorite things there. Thank you. How
about we say good night, Alie, Okay, see you all
next week for Astronomy Daily Bye.
Speaker 2: Podcast.
Speaker 1: We be your whole speed gone clue, No, Hallie, we
cannot make our own giant unrolling space telescope with Tim
Foyle put it back in the kitchen rank.
Speaker 2: You f