Speaker 1: Welcome to Astronomy Daily. I'm Steve your host. It's the
sixteenth of the ninth, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: The podcast with your whole Steve gun Crude.
Speaker 1: Yes, welcome and welcome to Astronomy Daily. We have a
terrific collection of stories right off the Astronomy Daily newsletter
for you today, and Hallie will share with you something
from down Under, in fact, way down under, all the
way from gorgeous Adelaide in South Australia where they are
working on hypersonic technology. Great story. We'll have a look
at the next chapter for Boeing and Starliner, following the
long stay at the ISS and the uncrude re entry
of that craft. That'll be interesting. And did you know
there's a partial lunar eclipse coming shortly. I think Halle
has the details for that one as well. I saw
her going through the calendar a while ago, so I'm
sure she's got those details. The big news of this week,
of course, was the flight of Polaris Dawn. If you
were under a rock or asleep like I was, you'll
probably might have missed some of it. But he safely
returned to Florida yesterday. That's our time here in Australia.
But anyway, returned to Florida and there's another story filed
here somewhere on Malli.
Speaker 2: Where did you put it? Helle?
Speaker 3: Helly?
Speaker 1: Helle? Ah, Helle, crazy kids? Found my record collection again?
That's David Bowie. Halle turn it down? Oh cool?
Speaker 2: Hey?
Speaker 1: Have you been going through my record collection again?
Speaker 4: Final Human? Really?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Really?
Speaker 4: And David Bowie, Oh the star.
Speaker 2: Man, I mean, the coolest man on the planet.
Speaker 4: Okay, I'll give you that one. But you know why
I pulled that song out, don't you.
Speaker 2: Ah? Yes, sir, I remember what the story is now.
Speaker 4: It's the spiders from Mars.
Speaker 2: It's just too cool for school, isn't it.
Speaker 4: Helly so weird? Do you think he knew all those
years ago?
Speaker 2: Oh? I don't know.
Speaker 1: No, he was pretty weird back in the day though.
I mean it was a great song. If you don't
know who we're talking about, we're talking about David Bowie
and his song Ziggy Stardust and the spot is from Mars,
coincidentally preempting a story on the Astronomy Daily newsletter this week.
Speaker 4: Just a coincidence, of course, or is it you're freaking
my bits?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 4: Human? Should I do some stories.
Speaker 2: Yeah, keep on truck and Halle lay them on a.
Speaker 4: Sister, so groovy. All of a sudden.
Speaker 2: Ground control to Helle, I was never cool.
Speaker 4: It's news time, Roger that my favorite human. South Australia
is set to enhance its position as a global aerospace
hub following a memorandum of understanding between Southern Launch, a
prominent spaceport provider, and Hypersonics Launch Systems, a Queensland based
developer of hypersonic vehicles and scramjet technology. The memorandum outlines
a collaboration to develop a hypersonic testbed service that will
utilize Southern Launch as spaceports for testing. Hypersonics is known
for its expertise in designing and manufacturing hypersonic vehicle technology
and scramjet engines, and this agreement will see the two
companies working together on a mission to launch and return
Hypersonics's test bed vehicles utilizing either of Southern Launches spaceports.
South Australia has some geographical advantages that make it the
perfect place to test hypersonic vehicles. Hypersonic aircraft travel at
speeds exceeding five times the speed of sound and require
extensive space for testing. Hypersonics's aircraft will be launched on
a rocket and will ignite its scramjet engines to achieve
speeds of up to mock twelve. There are a huge
number of both emerging technology companies and large aerospace companies
that need hypersonic flight heritage for their products, and the
intensity of hypersonic testing is set to rise rapidly. Hypersonic
CEO Matt Hill said, our hypersonic test bed will make
it more affordable for these companies to flight qualify their technology.
The companies are set to collaborate on a concept for
the future commercial launch and return of a hypersonics test
bed vehicle. Hypersonics's long term goal is to provide affordable
aircraft like access to space, with spacecraft deployed at the
edge of space and returning to Earth like an airplane.
The technology also holds the promise of powering future passenger aircraft,
potentially reducing flight times from Adelaide to London to just
two hours. And yes, human I found the next eclipse
in the calendar. It only took a nanosecond, of course,
and it turns out we get a bonus with this one.
So get ready for a partial lunar eclipse and supermoon
all rolled into one. The spectacle will be visible in
clear skies across North America and South America Tuesday night,
and in Africa and Europe Wednesday morning. A partial lunar
eclipse happens when the Earth passes between the Sun and Moon,
casting a shadow that darkens a sliver of the Moon
and appears to take a bite out of it. Since
the Moon will inch closer to Earth than usual, it'll
appear a bit larger in the sky. The supermoon is
one of three remaining this year. A little bit of
the Sun's light is being blocked, so the Moon will
be slightly dimmer, said Valerie raps In, an astronomer at
the State University of New York. At ONEONTA. The Earth,
Moon and Sun line up to produce a solar or
lunar eclipse anywhere from four to seven times a year,
according to NASA. This lunar eclipse is the second and
final of the year, after a slight darkening in March.
In April, a total solar eclipse plunged select cities into
darkness across North America. No special eye protection is needed
to view a lunar eclipse, viewers can stare at the
Moon with the naked eye, or opt for binoculars and
telloscopes to get a closer look. To spot the Moon's
subtle shrinkage over time, hang outside for a few hours,
or take multiple peaks over the course of the evening,
said cauch On, you, curator at the Denver Museum of
Nature and Science. It will take some time for you
to see the difference, but as good skywatchers know, it's
all about the observations and being patient for a more
striking lunar site. Skywatchers can set their calendars for March thirteenth,
the Moon will be totally eclipsed by the Earth's shadow
and will be painted red by stray bits of sunlight
filtering through Earth's atmosphere. I Run on Saturday blasted a
new research satellite into orbit, State Media said, in the
latest such development for an aerospace program that has long
faced Western criticism, the Shameran one research satellite was successfully
launched and put into orbit by the game one hundred carrier.
State Television said. The satellite, which weighs around sixty kilograms
or one hundred and thirty two pounds, is designed to
test hardware and software systems for orbital maneuver technology, the
report said. It also stated that the device was designed
and built by Iranian electronics industries affiliated with the Defense ministry.
Western governments, including the United States, have repeatedly warned Iran
against such launches, saying the same technology can be used
for ballistic missiles, including ones designed to deliver a nuclear warhead.
Iran has countered that it is not seeking nuclear weapons
and that its satellite and rocket launches are for civil
or defense purposes only. The Game one hundred rocket, which
carried the latest satellite, is manufactured by the Aerospace Organization
of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, an arm of the military.
The carrier is the country's first three stage solid fuel
satellite launcher, and official media reported its use in January
to send a satellite for the first time into an
orbit above five hundred kilometers or three hundred and ten miles.
Iran has for years been advancing its aerospace activities, insisting
they are peaceful and in accordance with United Nations Security
Council resolutions. In February, Russia put into orbit an Iranian
remote sensing and imaging satellite drawing condemnation from the United States.
At the time, Iran's telecommunications minister said Iran had carried
out a dozen satellite launches over the previous two years.
Iran in January said it simultaneously sent three satellites into orbit,
nearly a week after the launch of a research satellite
by the Guards. The Islamic Republic has struggled with several
satellite launch failures in the past. Iran has suffered years
of crippling Western sanctions, especially after its archfaux. The United States,
under then President Donald Trump in twenty eighteen, unilaterally abandoned
a landmark nuclear deal between Tehran and major powers. Iran
on Thursday summoned four European ambassadors after they imposed new
sanctions over its alleged supply of ballistic missiles to Russia
for use in Ukraine, which Tehran denies.
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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Just like that, you'll be receiving all the latest news
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Speaker 2: See you there.
Speaker 1: Astronomy with Steve and Halee Space Space Science and Astronomy.
Boeing's crew transport space capsule the Starline a return to
Earth without its two person crew right after midnight Eastern
time on September seven. Its remotely piloted return marked the
end of a fraught test flight to the International Space Station,
which left two astronauts, Books Wilmore and Sanita Sunny Williams
on the space station four months longer than intended after
thrust failures led NASA to deem the capsule unsafe to
pilot back. Wilmore and Williams will stay on the ISS
until February twenty twenty five, when they will return to
Earth on a SpaceX Dragon capsule. NASA awarded contracts to
both Boeing and SpaceX in twenty fourteen to provide crew
transport vehicles to the ISS via the commercial crew program.
At the start of the program, both most bets were
on Boeing to take the lead because of its extensive
aerospace experience. However, SpaceX moved very quickly with its new
rock at the Falcon nine and its cargo ship Dragon.
While they suffered some early failures during testing, they aggressively built, tested,
and learned from each failure. In twenty twenty, SpaceX successfully
launched its first test crew to the ISS Space Station. Meanwhile,
Boeing struggled through some development setbacks. The outcome of this
first test flight is a huge disappointment for Boeing and NASA,
but NASA's leadership has expressed its support for Boeing believe
it remains the agency's best interest to have more than
one American crew launch system to support continued space operations.
NASA is also continuing to engage partnership with Russia. This
partnership provides the agency with multiple ways to get crew
members to and from the space station. As space station
operations continue, NASA and its partners have enough options to
get people to and from the station that they'll always
have the essential crew on the station even if there's
launch disruptions for any one of the capable crewed vehicles.
Having Starliner as an option will help that with that redundancy.
At the moment, Boeing is going head to head with
space X. Now, the SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft has several
flights under its belt and it's proven a reliable way
to get to and from the space station. It's important
to remember that this was a test flight for Starline.
Of course, the program managers want each test flight to
run perfectly, but you can't anticipate every potential problem through
ground testing. Unsurprisingly, some problems crop up and you expect
them in a test flight. The space pro environment is unforgiving.
A small problem can become catastrophic in zero gravity. It's
hard to replicate these situations on the ground. The technology
SpaceX and Boeing use is also radically different from the
kind of capsule technology used in the early days of Mercury,
Gemini and Apollo programs. NASA has evolved and made strategic
moves to advance its mission over the past two decades.
The agency has leaned into its legacy of thinking outside
the box. It was in innovative move to break from
the tradition and leverage commercial competitors to advance the program.
NASA gave the companies a set of requirements and left
it up to them to figure out how.
Speaker 2: They would meet them.
Speaker 1: As for but Wilmore and Sonny Williams, they are considered
rock solid professionals, and it's believed that their first thoughts
are about completing their missions safely. They are both highly
experienced astronauts with previous long duration space station experience. But
right now NASA is dealing with a ripple effect with
more astronauts than expected on the space station. More people
means more consumables like food and clothing that are required.
The space station has supported a large crew for short
periods in the past, but with nine crew members already
on board, the systems have to work harder to purify,
recycle drinking water, generate oxygen, and remove carbon dioxide from
their atmosphere. Wilmore and Williams are also consuming food, and
they did derive with the clothes and other personal supplies
they needed for an eighth month's stay, so NASA has
already started increasing those deliveries on cargo ships.
Speaker 2: It's understood that.
Speaker 1: Human spaceflight is excruciatingly hard and relentlessly, unforgiving. A million
things must go right to have a successful mission. It's
impossible to fully understand the performance of systems in microgravity
environments until they are tested in space. NASA has had
its numerous failures and near misses in the quest to
put Americans on the Moon. They lost the Apollo one
crew and a fire during a pre flight test. They
launched the first Space Shuttle in nineteen eighty one and
dealt with problems throughout that programme's thirty year life, including
the terrible losses of Challenger and Columbia. After having no
other US options for over thirty years, three different human
spacecraft programs are now underway. In addition to the SpaceX crew,
Dragon and Boeing Star Owner NASA's oryon spacecraft for the
Artemis two mission is planned to fly four astronauts around
the Moon in the next couple of years. These programs
have had setbacks and bumps along the way, and there
will be more. But there is excitement in the air.
There hasn't been this kind of excitement since Apollo put
men on the moon. You're listening to a slightly Day
the podcast, now moving on to the big story this
week which is of course SpaceX Polarist Dawn mission, which
made history when the crew conducted the first spacewalk by
non government astronauts, and it's splashed down off the coast
of Florida early on Sunday. It's landed in the ocean,
and a webcast of the splashdown showed with a recovery
team deploying in the pre dawn darkness to retrieve the
capsule and crew. Form member team led by fintech billionaire
Jared Isaacman, launched Tuesday from Kennedy Space Center, quickly journeying
deeper into the Cosmos than any humans in the past
half century. As they ventured into the dangerous Van Allen
radiation belt. They reached a peak altitude of eight hundred
and seventy miles that's fourteen hundred kilometers for the rest
of US, more than three times higher than the International
Space Station and the furthest humans had ever traveled from
Earth since the Apollo missions. Then, on Thursday, with their
Dragon spacecrafts or but brought down to four hundred and
thirty four miles, Isaacman swung open the hatch and climbed
out into the void. Gripping a structure called Skywalker. Of course,
as the breathtaking view of Earth unfolded before him, SpaceX
back home. We have a lot of work to do,
but from here Earthshore looks like a perfect world, he
told mission control in Hawthorne, California, where teams erupted into applause.
He went back inside after a few minutes and was
replaced by second astronaut, space EX engineer Sarah Gillis, who,
like Isaacman, performed a series of mobility tests on SpaceX's
sleek next generation suits, and I reckon those suits look fantastic.
Since Dragon doesn't have an airlock, the entire crew were
exposed to the vacuum of space. Mission pilot Scott Petit
and SpaceX engineer Ana Menon remained strapped in throughout as
they monitored vital support systems. I know what I would
have been doing right then. It marked a giant leap
forward for the commercial space industry and NASA Chief Bill Nelson,
as well as another triumphant achievement for space X. Though
the company was only founded in two thousand and two,
it has outpaced its legacy competitors thanks to in large
part to founder elon Musk's vast Fortune and Z to
begin colonizing Mars. Since completing their extravehcular activity, the crew
have continued to carry out roughly forty science experiments, for
example inserting endoscopic cameras through their noses and into their
throats to image their airways and better understand the impact
of long duration space missions on human health fantastic. They
also demonstrated connectivity with SpaceX's Starling Internet satellite constellation by
sending back to ground control a high resolution video of
Gillis playing raised theme by Star Wars composer John Williams
on the violin. Polaris Dawn is the first of three
missions under the Polaris program, a collaboration between Isaacman and SpaceX.
Financial terms of the partnership remained under wraps, but Isaacman is,
the forty one year old founder and CEO of Shift
Fur Payments, reportedly poured two hundred million of his own
money into lending the twenty twenty one all civilian space
inspiration for orbital mission. The final Polaris mission aims to
be the first crude flight of SpaceX's Starship, a prototype
next generation rocket that is key to Musks Interplanetary Ambitions podcast. Okay,
so at the top of the episode you heard Hally
and I talking about David Bowie and the fabulous spiders
from Mars.
Speaker 2: Well, so what's it all about.
Speaker 1: Scientists have recreated a geologic feature found on Mars, and
it was difficult to do. Since discovering them in two
thousand and three via images from orbiters, scientists have marveled
at the spider like shapes sprawled was going to say
crawling sprawled across the southern hemisphere of Mars. No one's
entirely sure how these geologic features were created. Each branch
formation can stretch more than half a mile or a
kilometer from end to end and include hundreds of spindly legs,
called a rakniform terrain. These features are often found in clusters,
giving the surface a wrinkled appearance. The leading theory is
that the spiders are created by processes involving carbon dioxide ice,
which doesn't occur naturally on Earth. Thanks to experiments detailed
in a new paper published in the Planetary Science Journal,
scientists have for the first time recreated those formation processes
in simulated Martian temperatures and air pressure. The spiders are strange,
beautiful geological features in their own rights, said Lauren McEwan
of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California. These experiments,
she says, will help us tune our models for how
they form. The study confirms several formation processes described by
what is called the Kaifer model. Sunlight heats the soil
when it shines through transparent slabs of carbon dioxide ice
that build up on the Martian surface each winter. Being
darker than the ice above it, the soil absorbs the
heat and causes the ice as close ice closest to
it to turn directly into carbon dioxide gas without turning
liquid first, in a process called sublimation, the same process
that sends clouds of smoke billowing up from dry ice.
As the gas builds up in pressure, the Martian ice cracks,
allowing the gas to escape, and as it seeps upwards,
the gas takes with it a stream of dark dust
and sand from the soil that lands on the surface
of the ice. When winter turns to spring, the remaining
ice sublimates. According to the theory, the spider like scars
from those small eruptions are what's left behind Fourmercu and
n her coauthor's the hardest part of conducting these experiments
was recreating the conditions found on the Martian polar surface,
extremely low air pressure and temperatures as low as minus
three hundred and one degrees fahrenheit that's minus one hundred
and eighty five degrees celsius. To do that, mcuan used
liquid nitrogen cooled test chamber at JPL, a dirty under
vacuum simulation test bed for icy environments. And they call
that dusty. They love their achromans. I love dusty. She
says it's historic, McEwan said, noting that the wine barreled
sized chamber was used as a test prototype for a
rasping tool designed for NASA's Mars Phoenix lander. The tool
was used to break water ice, which the spacecraft scooped
up and analyzed near the planet planet's north pole.
Speaker 2: For this experiment, the.
Speaker 1: Researchers chilled Martian soil simulant in a container submerged with
liquid nitrogen bath. They placed it in the dusty chamber,
where the air pressure was reduced to be similar to
that of Mars's southern hemisphere. Carbadoxide gas then flowed into
the chamber and condensed from gas to ice over the
course of three to five hours. It took many tries
before mcurn just found the right conditions for the ice
to become thick and translucent enough for the experiments to work.
Once they got the ice with the right properties, they
placed a heater inside the chamber below the simulant to
warm it up and crack the ice. A Curn was
ecstatic when she finally saw a plume of carbon dioxide
gas a wrapting errapting from within the powdery simulant. Dark
plumes opened holes in the simulant as they streamed out,
spewing simulant for as long as ten minutes before all
the pressurized gas was expelled. There are still many questions
about the spiders that Carbi answered in a lab Why
have they formed in some places but not others Since
they appear to result from seasonal changes that are still occurring.
Why don't they seem to be growing in number or
in size over time. It's possible that they may be
left over from long ago when the climate was different
on Mars and could provide answers to the planet's passed
but for the time being, lab experiments will be as
close to the spiders as scientists can get both the
curiosity and perseverance. Rovers are exploring the Red planet far
from the Southern Hemisphere, which is where these formations actually
appear and where no spacecraft has ever landed. And just
to give you an idea how tough things are up there,
the Phoenix mission, which landed in the Northern Hemisphere, lasted
only a few months before succumbing to the intense polar
cold and limited sunlight.
Speaker 2: Cool.
Speaker 1: I got cold just reading that story. Holy cow, And
that's all she wrote. Folks, thanks for sticking around with
us today. I really hope you enjoyed those tales of
space science and astronomy.
Speaker 4: And I hope you'll join us again next week for
more Astronomy Daily. But don't forget, Charlie and Anna will
be bringing the show to you during the week, so
don't miss all the news from the Astronomy Daily newsletter.
Speaker 2: Oh excellent, Ally a second, that emotion nice, So we'll
see you all next week.
Speaker 4: Bye.
Speaker 2: Your whole silly bla gets are.
Speaker 3: Jamming good with Weed and Ginner the spiders from Mars.
Speaker 1: You pleaded left hand.
Speaker 3: And made it too far became a special man. Then
we were Ziggie's boun Ziggy really sang, screwed.
Speaker 2: Up bys and screwed down handle lack. Some cat from Japan.
Speaker 3: You can lock him by smiler, leave him to hand.
Speaker 2: Came on some loaded man.
Speaker 4: Well, Hannah's words, totally groovy