Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: So I want you to try and imagine something with
Speaker 2: me for a second. Imagine standing a full kilometer way from.
Speaker 3: An object, right, which is I mean that's a massive distance.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Just picture that immense distance. You're standing at
Speaker 2: one end of like at a long, perfectly straight highway, okay,
Speaker 2: and you're looking at something that is basically ten football
Speaker 2: fields away, So.
Speaker 3: A distance that would take you what a good ten
Speaker 3: or fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2: Just to walk exactly. It's a real trek. Now, from
Speaker 2: that incredible vantage point, I want you to imagine being
Speaker 2: able to perfectly see, and I mean visually, something that
Speaker 2: is exactly three point five millimeters wide.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, I mean three point five millimeter It's roughly
Speaker 3: the width of maybe two stacked pennies, or like a.
Speaker 2: Single grain of rice, rice grain of rice an entire
Speaker 2: kilometer away. That is just mind bending, right, But that
Speaker 2: is the exact level of visual sharpness, the sheer like
Speaker 2: optical perfection achieved by a newly developed Japanese X ray
Speaker 2: space telescope.
Speaker 3: Which is just an incredible engineering fee.
Speaker 2: It really is. But here's the thing. Getting that perfect
Speaker 2: image required scientists to completely abandon everything we thought we
Speaker 2: knew about how telescopes actually work.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, they had to throw out the entire playbook.
Speaker 2: You really did. I mean, they had to cross breathe
Speaker 2: their astronomical designs with the brutal physics of a particle accelerator.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They had to build a kilometer long vacuum tube deep
Speaker 2: underground just to fake a single star.
Speaker 3: Which is wild to even think about.
Speaker 2: And then after all that, they eventually strapped their creation
Speaker 2: to a rocket in the freezing wilderness of.
Speaker 3: Alaska just to see if it would survive.
Speaker 2: Right, And the reason they went to all of these extreme,
Speaker 2: almost absurd lengths to literally shrink the entire future of
Speaker 2: space observation down to the size of a shoebox.
Speaker 3: A shoe box, I mean, the journey to getting that
Speaker 3: technology into a shoebox is fundamentally a story about battling
Speaker 3: two of the most unforgiving hurdles in science.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what's unpack that? What are we dealing with here?
Speaker 3: Well, first, you are dealing with an incredibly hostile physical
Speaker 3: environment outer space, you know.
Speaker 2: Right, space is not exactly friendly, far from it.
Speaker 3: You have the violent shaking of suborbital rocket launches, the
Speaker 3: hard vacuum, the extreme temperature swings.
Speaker 2: It's basically a torture chamber for delicate equipment exactly.
Speaker 3: And second, you are hunting the most elusive, difficult to
Speaker 3: capture targets in the known universe. X rays, Yes, X rays,
Speaker 3: high energy X rays do not behave like the visible
Speaker 3: light we are accustomed to seeing every single day.
Speaker 2: They're a totally different beast, they really are.
Speaker 3: They actively resist being caught, they resist being focused.
Speaker 2: They just want to blast right through everything.
Speaker 3: Right, and they require a complete reimagining of optical physics
Speaker 3: to even look at.
Speaker 2: But the payoff for catching them is huge, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: it's the keys to the Kingdom.
Speaker 3: Oh, without a doubt.
Speaker 2: We desperately want to catch these high energy photons because
Speaker 2: they're the only way to really understand the universe's most violent,
Speaker 2: extreme temperature events.
Speaker 3: Because we aren't trying to look at you know, quiet
Speaker 3: peaceful dust clouds here.
Speaker 2: No, we are chasing monsters.
Speaker 3: That's a great way to put it. I mean, if
Speaker 3: you want to understand the calm, relatively cold universe, you
Speaker 3: look at visible light or infrared, right.
Speaker 2: The stuff Hubble or James Web does exactly right.
Speaker 3: But if you want to understand the true extremes of astrophysics,
Speaker 3: you absolutely must look at the X ray spectrum.
Speaker 2: So what exactly are we looking for? Like, what makes
Speaker 2: these X rays so special?
Speaker 3: Well, there is a distinction we should establish right away
Speaker 3: between soft X rays and hard X rays. Okay, because
Speaker 3: this new Japanese telescope it's specifically hunting the hard.
Speaker 2: Ones, got it? So what's the difference?
Speaker 3: Soft X rays have lower energy levels, and they are
Speaker 3: emitted by things like the million degree gas sitting in
Speaker 3: the corona of our sun.
Speaker 2: Which is still incredibly hot.
Speaker 3: Sure yeah, but hard X rays carry significantly more energy.
Speaker 3: They are the direct fingerprints of cataclysmic cosmic violence.
Speaker 2: Cosmic violence, I love that term. What does that actually
Speaker 2: look like?
Speaker 3: We are talking about enormous bursts of hard X rays
Speaker 3: being violently expelled when magnetic field lines snap and reconnect
Speaker 3: during massive solar flares, or we're talking about the detonation
Speaker 3: of dying stars, you know, the supernovae that completely outshine
Speaker 3: their entire host galaxies.
Speaker 2: Just unimaginably huge explosions, right.
Speaker 3: And perhaps most dramatically hard X rays are essentially the
Speaker 3: scream of superheated matter swirling violently around the event horizons
Speaker 3: of black holes.
Speaker 2: Oh man, the stuff falling in.
Speaker 3: Yes, it gets accelerated to millions of degrees by intense
Speaker 3: friction right before it crosses that threshold and just falls
Speaker 3: in forever.
Speaker 2: So basically the most dramatic spectacular events in the cosmos
Speaker 2: are happening constantly right over our heads.
Speaker 3: All the time twenty four to seven.
Speaker 2: But here is the massive physical barrier to actually seeing
Speaker 2: any of it. Earth is atmosphere completely utterly absorbs these
Speaker 2: X rays before they ever reach the ground, which I
Speaker 2: have to point out, from a biological standpoint, is the
Speaker 2: only reason we are even alive to discuss it today. Unquestionably, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean we'd be cooked otherwise exactly. I always think
Speaker 2: of our atmosphere as this incredibly dense wrap round pair
Speaker 2: of heavy duty lead lined sunglasses.
Speaker 3: That's a really good analogy.
Speaker 2: Because visible light trickles through just fine, right, which is
Speaker 2: why our human eyes evolve to see that specific narrow
Speaker 2: band of the electromagnetic.
Speaker 3: Spectrum, right, We adapted to the light that actually makes
Speaker 3: it down here exactly.
Speaker 2: But when it comes to ionizing radiation, the kind of
Speaker 2: high energy X rays that violently strip electrons away from
Speaker 2: atoms and you know, shattered DNA molecules, the atmosphere is
Speaker 2: an absolute vault.
Speaker 3: It's a total lockdown. The nitrogen and oxygen molecules high
Speaker 3: above us intercept those X ray photons through a process
Speaker 3: called photoelectric absorption, okay, and it is absolutely essential for
Speaker 3: keeping the fragile biology of Earth safe from being sterilized
Speaker 3: by cosmic radiation.
Speaker 2: So great for not getting vaporized, very great, But it
Speaker 2: is incredibly frustrating if you are an astrophysicist trying to
Speaker 2: look at the blinding flashes of a solar flare.
Speaker 3: Oh it's maddening. And the historical context of that frustration
Speaker 3: is actually super fascinating when you think about the timeline
Speaker 3: of astronomy. Oh so well, for thousands of years, human
Speaker 3: beings looked up at the night sky, you know, charted
Speaker 3: the stars tracked the planets.
Speaker 2: Like the ancient Greeks the Mayans.
Speaker 3: Right, and they genuinely believed they were seeing the whole
Speaker 3: picture of.
Speaker 2: The universe, because that's all they could see.
Speaker 3: Exactly, But they were completely blind to the high energy reality.
Speaker 3: They were only seeing that tiny slid of the electromagnetic
Speaker 3: spectrum that makes it through the atmospheric sunglasses.
Speaker 2: So the entire X ray universe, the violent, churning, high
Speaker 2: energy cosmos, was entirely invisible.
Speaker 3: To us, completely invisible. It wasn't until the mid twentieth century,
Speaker 3: specifically around the late nineteen forties and early nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2: Wait that recently, Yeah.
Speaker 3: That was when scientists first put rudimentary Geiger counters onto
Speaker 3: captured V two rockets and sent them above the atmosphere.
Speaker 2: Wow. So they literally had to shoot a rocket up
Speaker 2: there just to realize what was happening.
Speaker 3: Right, And that was the exact moment we realized the
Speaker 3: sky wasn't just twinkling peacefully, it was glowing and pulsing
Speaker 3: with intense X ray radiation.
Speaker 2: That must have been a mind blowing discovery.
Speaker 3: It changed everything because to understand the fundamental laws of physics,
Speaker 3: gravity and magnetism, you really have to study these high
Speaker 3: temperature processes.
Speaker 2: So imagine knowing that the most spectacular fireworks show imaginable
Speaker 2: is happening right above your head twenty four hours a day,
Speaker 2: but you are permanently trapped inside a house with no windows,
Speaker 2: sitting behind this impenetrable curtain of air.
Speaker 3: That is exactly the dilemma. Ground based X ray astronomy
Speaker 3: is not just difficult, it is a physical impossibility.
Speaker 2: Because the atmosphere acts like a solid brow wall for
Speaker 2: those high energy photons.
Speaker 3: A total brick wall.
Speaker 2: So because observation from the surface is a complete non starter,
Speaker 2: you are forced to bypass the atmosphere entirely.
Speaker 3: You have to go to space.
Speaker 2: You have to, and historically scientists started with high altitude
Speaker 2: weather balloons trying to get just above the thickest part
Speaker 2: of the air.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was step one.
Speaker 2: When they moved to suborbital sounding rockets and eventually the
Speaker 2: massive permanent satellites we have up there today.
Speaker 3: But here's the catch. Just getting your instrument above the
Speaker 3: atmosphere is only solving half the problem.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: The real nightmare, the true engineering paradox that basically melted
Speaker 3: my brain when I first understood it, is trying to
Speaker 3: actually catch and focus a hard X ray once you're
Speaker 3: up there in the vacuum of space.
Speaker 2: Because the moment you try to build a telescope for
Speaker 2: X rays, you have to completely discard the everyday intuitive
Speaker 2: understanding of how mirrors work. You really do, because think
Speaker 2: about it. When you picture a telescope, you picture a
Speaker 2: large curved piece of glass coated in a highly reflective metal.
Speaker 3: Right, like a big satellite dish for light.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like a massive, precisely engineered version of the mirror
Speaker 2: in your bathroom. Exactly, light hits the curve surface, bounces off,
Speaker 2: and focuses perfectly onto a single point where an eyepiece
Speaker 2: or a digital sensor sits.
Speaker 3: That's standard optics.
Speaker 2: You point a regular curve mirror at a distant star
Speaker 2: and boom, you have an image.
Speaker 3: But you absolutely cannot do that with X rays, And
Speaker 3: the underlying physics of why you can't is crucial to
Speaker 3: understanding this Japanese team's breakthrough.
Speaker 2: So break that down for us. Why doesn't a normal
Speaker 2: mirror work for an X ray?
Speaker 3: Well, normal mirrors rely on visible light photons, which have
Speaker 3: relatively long wavelengths and low energy. When visible light hits
Speaker 3: the atomic sit structure of silver or aluminum coating. It
Speaker 3: interacts with the electron clouds of those atoms and just
Speaker 3: bounces right back.
Speaker 2: It reflects right.
Speaker 3: But X rays, especially hard X rays, carry an immense
Speaker 3: amount of energy. Their wavelengths are incredibly.
Speaker 2: Short, so they don't bounce.
Speaker 3: No, if you point a normal dish shaped mirror directly
Speaker 3: at a black hole emitting hard X rays, the photon
Speaker 3: doesn't bounce, It punches straight through the mirror.
Speaker 2: It just glasts right through the glass, straight.
Speaker 3: Through, or it gets completely absorbed by the atomic structure
Speaker 3: of the mirror itself. Wow, it's the fundamental defining property
Speaker 3: of high energy photons. They penetrate matter.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's exactly why we use them for medical imaging,
Speaker 2: right to look at broken bones inside the human body.
Speaker 3: Exactly. They pass right through the soft tissue because the
Speaker 3: carbon and water molecules in our flesh don't have the
Speaker 3: density to stop them.
Speaker 2: The bones are dense enough to cast a shadow, but
Speaker 2: the flesh isn't right.
Speaker 3: So, in an astronomical context, if you build hi traditional
Speaker 3: dish shaped parabolic mirror and flight above the atmosphere, the
Speaker 3: high energy X rays from a solar flare will just
Speaker 3: blast straight into the dish and vanish into the metal.
Speaker 2: You get nothing.
Speaker 3: You get zero reflection, zero focus, and therefore absolutely no data.
Speaker 2: So how do you fix it? How do you make
Speaker 2: something that just wants to punch through a wall actually
Speaker 2: bounce off it.
Speaker 3: It's a geometry problem.
Speaker 2: And the analogy that really clarifies this geometry for me
Speaker 2: is the skipping stone.
Speaker 3: Oh that's a perfect analogy, right.
Speaker 2: Think about standing at the edge of a completely still
Speaker 2: pond with a rock in your hand. If you stand
Speaker 2: right over the water and throw the rock straight down,
Speaker 2: which is the equivalent of an X ray hitting a
Speaker 2: normal mirror face on, what happens.
Speaker 3: The rock just breaks the surface tension instantly and sinks
Speaker 3: right to the bottom exactly.
Speaker 2: It sinks. But if you want that rock to bounce,
Speaker 2: if you want to skip the stone across the surface
Speaker 2: of the pond, you have to change your geometry.
Speaker 3: You have to get down low.
Speaker 2: You have to get down low to the water and
Speaker 2: throw the rock at an incredibly shape, almost perfectly horizontal angle.
Speaker 3: You have to make it graze the surface, yes, graze it.
Speaker 3: And the physics concept governing this in optics is literally
Speaker 3: called grazing incidents.
Speaker 2: Grazing incidents. Okay, so how does that work with X rays?
Speaker 3: Well, the refractive index of all materials for X rays
Speaker 3: is actually slightly.
Speaker 2: Less than one, which means what exactly?
Speaker 3: It means that, unlike visible light, which bends when it
Speaker 3: enters glass, X rays exhibit a phenomenon called total external reflection.
Speaker 3: But only, and this is a huge only under extremely
Speaker 3: specific conditions.
Speaker 2: Let me guess the skipping stone conditions exactly.
Speaker 3: The only physical way to make a hard X ray
Speaker 3: reflect off a surface without being absorbed is if it
Speaker 3: strikes that surface at a microscopic grazing angle.
Speaker 2: How microscopic are we talking?
Speaker 3: We are talking about an angle of incidents that is
Speaker 3: often less than a single.
Speaker 2: Degree, less than one degree.
Speaker 3: Yes, it has to skim the metallic surface, exactly like
Speaker 3: your skipping stone skimming the water.
Speaker 2: Wait, okay, hold on. If the the X rays are
Speaker 2: only skipping off the very edges of this surface at
Speaker 2: a one degree angle, doesn't that mean the actual like
Speaker 2: catching area of the telescope is almost non existent?
Speaker 3: Yes, you hit the nail on the head.
Speaker 2: Because if you point a flat cylinder at the sky,
Speaker 2: the frontal area intercepting the light is just the razor
Speaker 2: thin rim of the cylinder, right, aren't you basically throwing
Speaker 2: away ninety nine percent of the photons you just flew
Speaker 2: all the way to space to catch.
Speaker 3: You absolutely are, and you are hitting on the exact
Speaker 3: critical flaw of grazing incidence optics.
Speaker 2: It seems so inefficient it is.
Speaker 3: The effective collecting area is abysmally small compared to a
Speaker 3: standard telescope because you can only catch the photons that
Speaker 3: hit the extreme inner edge of the mirror at that
Speaker 3: sub one degree angle. The vast majority of the X
Speaker 3: rays just passed straight down the empty middle of the
Speaker 3: tube without touching anything.
Speaker 2: So they just fly straight through the hole, yeah, or.
Speaker 3: They hit the outside of the tube and are totally lost.
Speaker 3: This is exactly why doctor Ikuyuki Mitsuishi, the project leader
Speaker 3: from the Graduate School of Science at Nagoya University, described
Speaker 3: their mirror specifically as a very precise.
Speaker 2: Funnel, A funnel that makes so much sense, not a dish,
Speaker 2: not a bowl, A hollow cylinder that narrows exactly. The
Speaker 2: X rays enter the open top of the barrel, skip
Speaker 2: off these smoothly sloped inside walls at that tiny grazing
Speaker 2: angle and get funneled down into a concentrated point where
Speaker 2: a digital detector sits at the bottom.
Speaker 3: But and this is a massive butt. The requirement of
Speaker 3: that incredibly shallow angle creates an engineering and manufacturing nightmare
Speaker 3: that basically borders on the impossible.
Speaker 2: Because the tolerances have to be so tight, beyond tight.
Speaker 3: Because the reflection angle is so shallow, the margin for
Speaker 3: physical error on the surface of that funnel is effectively.
Speaker 2: Zero, zero margin for error.
Speaker 3: We are not talking about millimeter precision here. We are
Speaker 3: not even talking about micrometer precision.
Speaker 2: And what are we talking about.
Speaker 3: We are operating in the realm of nanometer level precision.
Speaker 2: Nanometer.
Speaker 3: Yes, Doctor Mitsuishi emphasized that if any part of the
Speaker 3: interior of this funnel is even slightly misaligned, or if
Speaker 3: the surface texture is slightly rough at a microscopic level,
Speaker 3: the X ray photons will not bounce toward the focal point.
Speaker 2: They'll just scatter everywhere.
Speaker 3: They will scatter wildly, They will miss the tiny digital
Speaker 3: detector completely, and the million dollar image you just went
Speaker 3: to space to capture becomes nothing more than a useless
Speaker 3: blurry smudge of static.
Speaker 2: Just to establish what nanimeter precision actually looks, like, for
Speaker 2: you guys listening, a nanometer is one billionth of a meter, right.
Speaker 3: It's almost unimaginably small.
Speaker 2: A standard human hair is roughly eighty thousand to one
Speaker 2: hundred thousand nanimeters thick.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So we are talking about shaping and polishing the
Speaker 2: interior wall of a metallic barrel to a degree of
Speaker 2: absolute smoothness that is tens of thousands of times smaller
Speaker 2: than the width of a single hair.
Speaker 3: And achieving that kind of surface smoothness and a sterile, pristine,
Speaker 3: temperature controlled vibration isolated optical laboratory on Earth is a
Speaker 3: monumental undertaking on its own, right.
Speaker 2: Just doing it on a desk is hard enough.
Speaker 3: But this is where the aerospace variable completely ruins your day.
Speaker 3: Oh no, because this is not a lab experiment meant
Speaker 3: to sit nicely on a heavy granite table. This is
Speaker 3: a space telescope.
Speaker 2: Right. So you spend months, maybe years, building this flawless
Speaker 2: nanometer precise optical masterpiece, and then what is the very
Speaker 2: next step.
Speaker 3: You put it on a rocket.
Speaker 2: You strap it to the top of a giant metal
Speaker 2: tube filled with highly explosive rocket fuel, and you basically
Speaker 2: detonate it exactly.
Speaker 3: The agonizing reality of aerospace engineering is that you must
Speaker 3: subject incredibly delicate instruments to pure, unadulterated physical.
Speaker 2: Brutality, so counterintuitive.
Speaker 3: During a rocket launch, the payload inside the faring experiences
Speaker 3: a gauntlet of destructive forces.
Speaker 2: Like what is the telescope actually going through?
Speaker 3: First, there are the immense g forces of acceleration physically
Speaker 3: crushing down on the structure as it blasts.
Speaker 2: Off the path right just the raw speed.
Speaker 3: Then you have massive thermal expansion contraction as the rocket
Speaker 3: moves from the ambient temperature of launchpad, pushing through the
Speaker 3: friction of the atmosphere and into the freezing vacuum of space.
Speaker 2: So the metal is heating up and shrinking down rapidly.
Speaker 3: Yes, but the most destructive force for optics, believe it
Speaker 3: or not, is acoustic sound.
Speaker 2: Sound destroys telescopes, oh absolutely.
Speaker 3: The acoustic shockwaves generated by the rocket engines are so
Speaker 3: phenomenally loud, often exceeding one hundred forty to one hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty decibels.
Speaker 2: That's like standing inside a jet engine.
Speaker 3: It is. The sound waves alone can literally shatter rigid materials.
Speaker 3: The physical vibrations are just bone rattling.
Speaker 2: It's the aerospace equivalent of taking a finely tuned, meticulously
Speaker 2: balanced Swiss watch, throwing it into an industrial pain shaker,
Speaker 2: turning it on high for ten minutes, and expecting it
Speaker 2: to keep perfect time when you take it out.
Speaker 3: That is exactly what it is. And after all of
Speaker 3: that chaotic violence, when the firing finally opens in the
Speaker 3: dead silence of space, that nanometer precision has to be
Speaker 3: completely utterly inact.
Speaker 2: If a single piece of the internal mirror assembly is
Speaker 2: shifted by what the width of a bacteria.
Speaker 3: The optics are ruined.
Speaker 2: The optics are ruined, and the mission just fails.
Speaker 3: Complete failure, which brings the engineers to a very harsh realization,
Speaker 3: which was the astronomers at Nogoya University understood that traditional
Speaker 3: telescope manufacturing techniques were simply not going to survive this environment, right.
Speaker 2: Because how do you traditionally make these things.
Speaker 3: Historically, if you wanted to build a grazing incidence X
Speaker 3: ray telescope, you would grind curved pieces of glass or metal,
Speaker 3: and then you would physically bolt those different curve segments
Speaker 3: together to form the funnel.
Speaker 2: Oh, I see, you build it in pieces.
Speaker 3: Right, But a multipart mirror inherently has joints. It has seams.
Speaker 3: It relies on brackets, epoxy and microscopic screws.
Speaker 2: And under the extreme acoustic stress and vibration of a
Speaker 2: rocket ascent, seams are fatal fatal.
Speaker 3: Where there is a joint, there is the potential for movement.
Speaker 2: A seam is basically a structural vulnerability waiting to.
Speaker 3: Happen exactly moving parts shift during launch, if your mirror shifts,
Speaker 3: your focal point shifts, and.
Speaker 2: Even beyond the structural weakness, seams are the moral enemy
Speaker 2: of grazing incidents optics from a pure physics standpoint.
Speaker 3: Aren't they oh entirely. If you construct a cylindrical funnel
Speaker 3: out of say four separate curved pieces of metal, there
Speaker 3: will always inevitably be a microscopic gap or a raised
Speaker 3: ridge where those pieces.
Speaker 2: Meet, because nothing is truly perfect when bolted together. Right.
Speaker 3: So when a high energy X ray photon skips along
Speaker 3: the surface and encounters that seam, it doesn't just gracefully
Speaker 3: hop over it. It trips, It hits the ridge and
Speaker 3: deflects randomly. It scatters A seamed mirror, bleeds light, and
Speaker 3: just completely destroys your image resolution.
Speaker 2: So the Nagoya team needed a mirror with no moving parts,
Speaker 2: no brackets, no bolts, and absolutely no seams none. They
Speaker 2: needed a single, continuous, perfectly smooth, monolithic shell.
Speaker 3: A single piece of metal.
Speaker 2: But they also quickly realized they couldn't just call up
Speaker 2: a traditional commercial telescope manufacturer to build it right, No.
Speaker 3: Because traditional lens grinders don't make seamless metal funnels. It's
Speaker 3: not in their wheelhouse.
Speaker 2: So to solve an optical problem this complex, they had
Speaker 2: to step entirely outside of their own field of astronomy.
Speaker 3: They did they needed the hyper specialized precision of particle physicists,
Speaker 3: which is wild it is. They basically had to ask themselves,
Speaker 3: who on Earth is already spending billions of dollars to
Speaker 3: build incredibly precise, indestructible, perfectly smooth funnels for high energy
Speaker 3: X rays.
Speaker 2: And the answer was not an observatory.
Speaker 3: No, the answer was spring eight.
Speaker 2: Wait, okay, you're telling me telescope engineers couldn't figure out
Speaker 2: how to build a space telescope. So they went to
Speaker 2: the people who smashed subatomic particles together.
Speaker 3: I know it sounds like science fiction, but yes, that's
Speaker 3: exactly what happened? Spring eight is a massive world renowned
Speaker 3: research facility located in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, Okay. It is
Speaker 3: not an astronomical observatory. It is a synchrotron radiation facility.
Speaker 2: A synchotron. Yeah.
Speaker 3: It is one of the most powerful and advanced X
Speaker 3: ray research installations on the entire planet, characterized by this
Speaker 3: massive circular ring measuring nearly one point five kilometers in circumfort.
Speaker 2: What exactly happens inside a one point five kilometer ring, Like,
Speaker 2: what are they doing in there?
Speaker 3: Particle physicists take electrons, inject them into a massive circular
Speaker 3: vacuum tube, and use incredibly powerful electromagnets to accelerate those
Speaker 3: electrons until they are moving at very nearly the speed
Speaker 3: of light, which is fast, unbelievably fast. Now, according to
Speaker 3: the laws of electro dynamics, when you take a charged
Speaker 3: particle moving at relativistic speeds and you force it to
Speaker 3: bend its path to travel around a curve rather than
Speaker 3: in a straight line, it sheds energy.
Speaker 2: It bleeds it off, right.
Speaker 3: It bleeds off that energy in the form of incredibly intense,
Speaker 3: bright and highly focused beams of X rays oh ICEE
Speaker 3: and that brilliant light is called synchrotron radiation.
Speaker 2: And researchers from all over the world travel to Spring
Speaker 2: eight to tap into those intense X ray beams, right
Speaker 2: they do. They use them to map the atomic structure
Speaker 2: of new pharmaceutical drugs, to analyze the molecular weaknesses of
Speaker 2: advanced aerospace alloys, to peer inside the chemical reactions of
Speaker 2: next generation batteries. But here is the massive catch. To
Speaker 2: actually utilize those blindingly powerful X ray beams in their laboratories,
Speaker 2: the Spring eight physicists had to figure out how to
Speaker 2: physically corral and focus them.
Speaker 3: Because you can't just let that kind of beam fly
Speaker 3: around the room exactly.
Speaker 2: They had to invent their own ultra precise mirror technologies
Speaker 2: just to safely balance the X rays generated by their
Speaker 2: own particle accelerator into their experimental stations without melting their
Speaker 2: equipment or losing the beam.
Speaker 3: And this is where the cross disciplinary brilliance of the
Speaker 3: project truly shines.
Speaker 2: It's such a cool collaboration, it really is.
Speaker 3: You have the astronomy team from Negro University who deeply
Speaker 3: understood the complex optical mathematics required to image the Sun.
Speaker 2: And who knew exactly what kind of brutal payload stresses
Speaker 2: a rocket launch wood inflick.
Speaker 3: Right, And they teamed up with the synchrotron radiation community
Speaker 3: at Spring eight, who possessed the bleeding edge proprietary manufacturing
Speaker 3: technology required to physically craft these exotic seamless mirrors.
Speaker 2: It is basically a flawless marriage of space astronomy and
Speaker 2: high energy particle physics.
Speaker 3: It is so they join forces and they aren't grinding
Speaker 3: massive blocks of glass. They use a proprietary manufacturing technique
Speaker 3: perfected at Spring eight called precision electroforming.
Speaker 2: Precision electroforming. Yes, Now, electroforming is a word that gets
Speaker 2: thrown around, but how do you actually grow a seamless
Speaker 2: metal mirror from scratch? What does that mean?
Speaker 3: It is essentially three D printing at an atomic.
Speaker 2: Scale, domic scale three D printing.
Speaker 3: Okay, The electroforming process completely inverses the concept of carving
Speaker 3: a mirror. You don't start with a block of metal
Speaker 3: and hollow it out. Instead, you start with a master mold,
Speaker 3: which is called a mandrel.
Speaker 2: A mandrel.
Speaker 3: Yeah, This mandrel is a solid cylinder of metal, usually
Speaker 3: aluminium or a specialized alloy that has been machined and
Speaker 3: polished to absolute subnanometer.
Speaker 2: Perfections, so it's perfectly smooth.
Speaker 3: Completely and the outside of the mantrel is shaped exactly
Speaker 3: like the negative space of the empty funnel they want
Speaker 3: to create.
Speaker 2: Ah, I get it. So you spend all your time
Speaker 2: polishing the solid block, not the hollow tube.
Speaker 3: Precisely, it is much easier to polish the outside of
Speaker 3: a solid object than the inside of a narrow tube.
Speaker 2: Well, that makes total sense.
Speaker 3: So once the mandrel's exterior is flawlessly smooth, they submerge
Speaker 3: it into an electrochemical bath rich in dissolved nickel ions.
Speaker 2: Okay, so it's taking a bath in nickel right.
Speaker 3: By running a highly controlled electrical current through the bath,
Speaker 3: the positively charged nickel ions are drawn to the surface
Speaker 3: of the mandrel likegamagnet exactly like that, they deposit themselves
Speaker 3: onto the mold, atom by microscopic atom, layer by incredibly
Speaker 3: thin layer. Wow, the nickel slowly builds up, creating a
Speaker 3: metallic shell that conforms perfectly down to the atomic level
Speaker 3: to the nanometer smooth surface of the mandril.
Speaker 2: And because the nickel atoms are bonding to each other
Speaker 2: molecularly as they deposit. There are no seams, none, There
Speaker 2: are no joints. It is a single, continuous crystalline structure
Speaker 2: of pure metal.
Speaker 3: Yes, And once the nickel shell has grown thick enough
Speaker 3: to be structurally sound, they cool the entire assembly down.
Speaker 2: Okay, what do they cool it?
Speaker 3: Because the aluminum mandrel and the nickel shell have different
Speaker 3: coefficients of thermal expansion OI. See, the mandrel shrinks slightly
Speaker 3: more than the nickel when cooled, allowing them to carefully
Speaker 3: slide the hollow nickel shell right off the mold.
Speaker 2: That is so clever. And what you are left with
Speaker 2: is the ultimate X ray.
Speaker 3: Funnel, the ultimate funnel.
Speaker 2: The specific mirror shell they manufactured for this mission is
Speaker 2: roughly sixty millimeters across and two hundred millimeters tall.
Speaker 3: So it's pretty small.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's lightweight, it is incredibly rigid, and because it
Speaker 2: is seamless, it has absolute optical purity.
Speaker 3: Crucially a vastly superior chance of surviving the acoustic paint
Speaker 3: shaker of a rocket ascent.
Speaker 2: Right. But the shape of this funnel is not just
Speaker 2: a simple straight walled cone, is it.
Speaker 3: No, not at all.
Speaker 2: The geometry of the interior wall is mathematically complex. The
Speaker 2: entire mirror assembly, which stands about two hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: millimeters tall when fully mounted in his housing, actually utilizes
Speaker 2: two distinct, highly specific geometric curves to focus.
Speaker 3: The light right, and this is known in physics as
Speaker 3: Wolter optics ulter optics. Okay, yes, specifically Vulter type I optics,
Speaker 3: named after the German physicist Hans Walter, who first proposed
Speaker 3: the design way back in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 2: So it's an old theory finally perfectly realized exactly.
Speaker 3: The electroformed nickelshell is divided into two sections. The upper
Speaker 3: section of the mirror features a parableloidal curve, while the
Speaker 3: lower section features a hyperboloidal curve.
Speaker 2: Wait, if the goal is just to skip the X
Speaker 2: ray down to the bottom of the funnel, why on
Speaker 2: earth do you need two completely different mathematical.
Speaker 3: Shapes tams overly complicated?
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, why wouldn't a single smooth curve work.
Speaker 3: It all comes down to correcting optical aberrations. If you
Speaker 3: build a funnel using only a single parabolic curve, you
Speaker 3: run into a massive problem called coma aberration.
Speaker 2: Coma aberration, yes.
Speaker 3: Which violates what physicists call the abissine condition.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's ground that. What does a coma aberration actually
Speaker 2: do to the image of a star?
Speaker 3: What would I see if an X ray enters a
Speaker 3: single curve funnel slightly off axis, meaning it doesn't come
Speaker 3: straight down the absolute dead center of the barrel, which.
Speaker 2: It almost never will.
Speaker 3: Right exactly, the single bounce will cause the focal point
Speaker 3: to smear. Instead of seeing a sharp, tiny dot representing
Speaker 3: the star, you will see a blurred shape that looks
Speaker 3: like a comet with a trailing tail.
Speaker 2: Oh, I've seen pictures like that. Right.
Speaker 3: That tail is the coma aberration. It destroys the high
Speaker 3: resolution data you are trying to collect. Hans Walter realized
Speaker 3: that to properly focus grazing incidents ex to a flawlessly
Speaker 3: sharp point across a wider field of view without massive distortion.
Speaker 3: Skipping the photon just once isn't enough.
Speaker 2: You have to bounce it twice.
Speaker 3: Exactly, You bounce it twice to correct the optical path link.
Speaker 2: So walk me through the path of a photon here.
Speaker 3: Okay, the high energy X ray enters the top of
Speaker 3: the telescope, skips off the upper parabloidal section, travels a
Speaker 3: few centimeters, then hits the lower hyperbloidal section, skips off again,
Speaker 3: and finally angles perfectly down into the focal point where
Speaker 3: the detector sits.
Speaker 2: It's like a perfectly banked double shot and pool.
Speaker 3: It really is. The two highly specific curves work in
Speaker 3: tandem to cancel out the optical distortion.
Speaker 2: And the sheer brilliance of the Spring eight electroforming process
Speaker 2: is that it allows them to grow this incredibly complex
Speaker 2: two stage geometric curve perfectly seamlessly inside a single solid
Speaker 2: piece of nickel.
Speaker 3: It is an absolute masterpiece of engineering.
Speaker 2: It really is. So the Nagoya and Spring eight teams
Speaker 2: have successfully built this in this instructible, seamlessly grown dual
Speaker 2: bounce Wolter funnel.
Speaker 3: The hardware is ready.
Speaker 2: The hardware is ready. But here arises the next massive
Speaker 2: logistical nightmare.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, because you can't just trust it without checking it.
Speaker 2: Right Before you can strap this multimillion dollar piece of
Speaker 2: custom hardware to a rocket and hurl it into the
Speaker 2: upper atmosphere, you have to verify that it actually works.
Speaker 3: You have to test it on the ground.
Speaker 2: And testing a high resolution space telescope on Earth requires
Speaker 2: you to simulate the exact conditions of outer space. Right,
Speaker 2: you have to fake a.
Speaker 3: Star, which sounds conceptually straightforward until you look at the
Speaker 3: geometry of starlight.
Speaker 2: Exactly, when we look up at a star of the
Speaker 2: night sky, we are looking at an object that is
Speaker 2: trillions of miles away.
Speaker 3: It's incomprehensibly distant.
Speaker 2: Right, because the light source is located at a distance
Speaker 2: approaching infinity from our perspective. By the time those specific
Speaker 2: light rays travel across the vacuum of space and reach Earth,
Speaker 2: they are no longer spreading out in all directions.
Speaker 3: The geometric spread is so minimal that the rays are
Speaker 3: essentially perfectly completely parallel to one another.
Speaker 2: Right, scarlight arrives at our atmosphere is parallel rays, and
Speaker 2: the complicated parabloid hyperboloid geometry of the Wolter mirror we
Speaker 2: just discussed is specifically mathematically designed to take parallel rays
Speaker 2: of light and fold them down into a single microscopic point.
Speaker 2: But if you try to test this mirror in a normal,
Speaker 2: standard sized laboratory room, say by taking an X ray
Speaker 2: emitter and placing it ten or twenty feet away from.
Speaker 3: The funnel, the geometry completely fails because it's too close,
Speaker 3: way too close. The X rays coming out of a
Speaker 3: machine from ten feet away are still spreading out violently.
Speaker 3: They're diverging rays.
Speaker 2: So if you point the telescope at a lab source
Speaker 2: ten feet away, the diverging X rays hit the interior
Speaker 2: walls of the funnel at the wrong angles, completely the
Speaker 2: wrong angle, The dual bounce mechanism won't function correctly, and
Speaker 2: the resulting image on the detector will be a blurry mess.
Speaker 3: Right, And the worst part is the engineers wouldn't know
Speaker 3: if the image was blurry because the electroform mirror was
Speaker 3: physically flawed, or simply because the test environment was geometrically inc.
Speaker 2: So you can't trust the test.
Speaker 3: You can't to truly recreate the parallel rays of deep
Speaker 3: space starlight on the ground, you need immense, almost absurd
Speaker 3: distance between the light source and the mirror, which.
Speaker 2: Is exactly why the team engineered a testing system at
Speaker 2: the Spring eight facility that is staggering in its scale.
Speaker 2: It's massive To force those diverging X rays to mimic
Speaker 2: the parallel nature of starlight, they had to place their
Speaker 2: artificial star a microscopic X ray point source a full
Speaker 2: nine hundred meters away from the telescope mirror.
Speaker 3: Nine hundred meters, almost a full kilometer.
Speaker 2: This brings us right back to the visual We started
Speaker 2: with a highway. Yes, imagine a corridor nearly a kilometer long.
Speaker 2: At one far end of this massive hallway you mount
Speaker 2: the sixty millimeters wide telescope mirror. At the absolute other
Speaker 2: end you place the X ray source.
Speaker 3: And we must emphasize the scale of that source.
Speaker 2: Too, right, it's not a floodlight.
Speaker 3: No. To test the extreme resolution limits of the mirror,
Speaker 3: you cannot use a massive, blinding source. The X ray
Speaker 3: points source they used at Spring eight was a mere
Speaker 3: ten micrometers across.
Speaker 2: The human hair is roughly eighty to one hundred micrometers thick. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this artificial star they built is a fraction of the
Speaker 2: width of a single human hair.
Speaker 3: It's basically a spec.
Speaker 2: The alignment challenge alone is mind boggling. They had to
Speaker 2: take a microscopic, invisible beam of high energy radiation and
Speaker 2: aim it perfectly down a nine hundred meter corridor to
Speaker 2: strike a target the size of a coffee mug.
Speaker 3: But the geometry works.
Speaker 2: It does. Yes.
Speaker 3: By traveling that extreme nine hundred meter distance, the widely
Speaker 3: diverging rays spread out so massively that the tiny specific
Speaker 3: fraction of photons that actually managed to enter the sixty
Speaker 3: millimeter opening of the mirror are for all practical mathematical
Speaker 3: purposes perfectly parallel. Wow, it flawlessly mimics the physics of
Speaker 3: incoming starlight.
Speaker 2: Wait, the atmosphere ruins everything again, doesn't it.
Speaker 3: Oh, of course it does.
Speaker 2: You can't just fire hard X rays down a regular
Speaker 2: hallway for a kilometer. The air in the room will
Speaker 2: absorb and scatter the beam.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you attempted to fire a hard X ray
Speaker 3: beam through nine hundred meters of standard atmospheric air, the
Speaker 3: photoelectric absorption and compton scattering caused by the nitrogen and
Speaker 3: oxygen molecules would completely degrade the beam.
Speaker 2: It would just get eaten up by the.
Speaker 3: Air exactly by the time it reached the mirror, there
Speaker 3: would be practically no photons left to reflect.
Speaker 2: So to solve the air problem, they enclosed the entire
Speaker 2: nine hundred meters beam path inside specialized vacuum tubes.
Speaker 3: That is just wild to think about.
Speaker 2: They constructed a kilometer long vacuum chamber underground at the
Speaker 2: Spring eight facility, pumping out all the atmosphere strictly to
Speaker 2: test a piece of metal the size of a mug.
Speaker 3: It highlights the extreme lengths required to push the boundaries
Speaker 3: of modern astrophysics. You have to move mountains just to
Speaker 3: test your gear.
Speaker 2: And the results they gathered from the subterranean vacuum tests
Speaker 2: were spectacular.
Speaker 3: Oh a total success.
Speaker 2: The digital detectors captured color coded X ray images, proving
Speaker 2: that the Walter optics were successfully bouncing the high energy
Speaker 2: photons exactly as simulated.
Speaker 3: Focusing them down into a spectacularly sharp central point.
Speaker 2: They achieved that mind bending resolution we talked about at
Speaker 2: the beginning, the ability to visually resolve an object three
Speaker 2: point five millimeters wide from a full kilometer away.
Speaker 3: Which is just incredible. But the scale of this test
Speaker 3: facility brings up an incredibly important point regarding the broader
Speaker 3: impact of this research.
Speaker 2: Right because this massive nine hundred meters vacuum tube wasn't
Speaker 2: just a temporary stunt hastily assembled for this one specific
Speaker 2: telescope shell, was it not at all?
Speaker 3: Rito Fuji, the first author of the research study and
Speaker 3: a former master student deeply involved in the project, articulated
Speaker 3: the true lasting value of what they constructed.
Speaker 2: At Spring eight and what is that lasting value.
Speaker 3: This isn't just a win for Nagoya University. This specific
Speaker 3: bean line setup is the very first ground based system
Speaker 3: anywhere in the world capable of accurately evaluating the performance
Speaker 3: of high resolution X ray based telescopes, specifically operating at
Speaker 3: hard X ray and energy levels.
Speaker 2: And the most vital part of that achievement is that
Speaker 2: the facility is now available to the global scientific community.
Speaker 3: Exactly, it's a resource. Now.
Speaker 2: Any university or space agency developing similar high energy grazing
Speaker 2: incidence technology can now bring their mirrors to Hiogo, put
Speaker 2: them in the nine hundred meters vacuum tube, and definitively
Speaker 2: prove their hardware functions before spending hundreds of millions of
Speaker 2: dollars securing a rocket launch.
Speaker 3: It is a massive infrastructural contribution to global astronomy.
Speaker 2: So, with the nine hundred meter ground test a resounding
Speaker 2: quantified success, the Electrofolm mirror was declared flight ready, it
Speaker 2: was time to go. The geometry held, the resolution was verified.
Speaker 2: Now it was finally time to leave the pristine, temperature
Speaker 2: controlled safety of the Springing laboratory and head to the
Speaker 2: launch pad.
Speaker 3: It was time for the fa excise for mission In.
Speaker 2: April of twenty twenty four, the team packed up their
Speaker 2: seamless electroform Marble, crossed the Pacific and transported it to
Speaker 2: the freezing, desolate launch pads of the Poke Flat Research
Speaker 2: Range in Alaska. Right now, when most people think of
Speaker 2: a space launch, they picture Cape.
Speaker 3: Canaverl, Florida, sun palm trees.
Speaker 2: Right. They picture a massive SpaceX Falcon nine or an
Speaker 2: Atlas V rocketing a school bus size satellite into permanent
Speaker 2: orbit around the Earth, where we'll operate for twenty years.
Speaker 3: But FOXSI four was a sounding rocket mission.
Speaker 2: Right. What fundamentally separates a sounding rocket from the orbital
Speaker 2: launches we usually see on the news It.
Speaker 3: Is a completely different operational paradigm. An orbital launch vehicle
Speaker 3: uses hundreds of tons of liquid fuel to push a
Speaker 3: payload up above the atmosphere. Ok, and then critically, it
Speaker 3: must accelerate that payload horizontally at thousands of miles.
Speaker 2: Per hour, right, because you have to stay up there.
Speaker 3: Orbit is essentially moving sideways so incredibly fast that as
Speaker 3: gravity pulls you down, the curvature of the Earth falls
Speaker 3: away beneath you at the exact same rate.
Speaker 2: You're constantly falling and constantly missing the ground.
Speaker 3: But a sounding rocket doesn't do that.
Speaker 2: What does it do?
Speaker 3: A sounding rocket doesn't have the immense fuel capacity required
Speaker 3: to achieve horizontal orbital velocity. A sounding rocket is essentially
Speaker 3: a suborbital parabolic shot, like an arc right. It fires
Speaker 3: straight up into the sky, reaches the atmosphere, reaches the
Speaker 3: vacuum of space, and then almost immediately falls straight back
Speaker 3: down to Earth.
Speaker 2: It is the aerospace equivalent of throwing a baseball straight
Speaker 2: up into.
Speaker 3: The air exactly. It carries the scientific instruments briefly into space,
Speaker 3: giving them a few minutes of weightlessness and a perfectly clear,
Speaker 3: unobstructed view of the cosmos above the atmospheric shielding okay,
Speaker 3: and then the entire payload descends on a parachute to
Speaker 3: be recovered in the Alaskan wilderness.
Speaker 2: So it is an unbelievably harsh, incredibly fast paced environment,
Speaker 2: highly stressful because when you launch a satellite like the
Speaker 2: James Web space telescope, engineers spend months carefully unfolding mirrors,
Speaker 2: calibrating sensors, and running diagnostics before taking a single picture.
Speaker 3: They take their time.
Speaker 2: On a sounding rocket. You don't have months. You have minutes.
Speaker 3: On a typical sounding rocket flight profile, the instruments might
Speaker 3: only be above the atmosphere and capable of observation for
Speaker 3: about five to ten minutes before gravity pulls them back
Speaker 3: down into the air.
Speaker 2: Five to ten minutes. That is a tight window.
Speaker 3: It's incredibly tight. And the FOCXSI program, which stands for
Speaker 3: Focusing Optics X Ray Solar Imager, is a collaborative international
Speaker 3: experiment specifically engineered for this rapid fire, high stakes observation window.
Speaker 2: So what are they trying to look at so quickly?
Speaker 3: Its primary scientific objective is to capture high resolution hard
Speaker 3: X ray images of the Sun's corona, to study the
Speaker 3: mechanics of solar flares, and to understand how magnetic energy
Speaker 3: is violently converted into thermal energy.
Speaker 2: Okay wow.
Speaker 3: The program has been running since twenty twelve, incrementally flying
Speaker 3: better and better instruments with each iteration, and.
Speaker 2: On April seventeenth, twenty twenty four, FOXSI four successfully blasted
Speaker 2: off from the Poker Flat Range in Alaska, carrying a
Speaker 2: payload of seven different X ray telescope modules YEP. One
Speaker 2: of those seven was the seamless electroform nickel funnel developed
Speaker 2: by the cross disciplinary team from Nagoya University and Spring eight.
Speaker 3: And you know, the historical and emotional weight of that
Speaker 3: specific launch really cannot be overstated.
Speaker 2: I hain't of imagine.
Speaker 3: Doctor Mitswishi and his dedicated team of graduate students were
Speaker 3: physically present at the Alaskan Range to watch.
Speaker 2: The countdown, standing out there in the freezing cold.
Speaker 3: Standing in the cold, feeling the deafening, bone rattling roar
Speaker 3: of the solid rocket motors, vibrating in their chests.
Speaker 2: Just hoping their mirror holes together.
Speaker 3: Right, they were watching the absolute culmination of years of
Speaker 3: theoretical optical physics, particle accelerator engineering, and relentless ground testing
Speaker 3: blast off into the sky.
Speaker 2: It was a huge milestone moment. It was the very
Speaker 2: first time a domestically developed Japanese high resolution X ray
Speaker 2: telescope had ever flown on an international sounding rocket.
Speaker 3: Mission, and the technology delivered exactly as promised. It survived,
Speaker 3: It survived the acoustic shockwaves and the extreme g forces
Speaker 3: of the launch ascent did not destroy the optics.
Speaker 2: The lack of seam saved it absolutely.
Speaker 3: The seamless nickelshell grown atom by atom and an electrochemical
Speaker 3: bath held it shape perfectly.
Speaker 2: So what did they see While the payload.
Speaker 3: Was coasting above the atmosphere in its brief window of microgravity,
Speaker 3: The telescope pointed at the Sun and successfully observed a
Speaker 3: solar flare.
Speaker 2: In progress, a live solar flare.
Speaker 3: Yes, the dual bounce Walter geometry functioned flawlessly in a vacuum,
Speaker 3: focusing the high energy hard X ray photons emitted by
Speaker 3: the snapping magnetic field lines exactly as the nine hundred
Speaker 3: meter ground test predicted it would.
Speaker 2: That is just such a massive triumph. It is but
Speaker 2: the defining characteristic of a truly great scientific team, so
Speaker 2: that they never just popped the champagne, declared total victory
Speaker 2: and move on.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, they immediately start looking for what went.
Speaker 2: Wrong exactly despite this massive historic success. The moment they
Speaker 2: recovered the payload and downloaded the telemetry, they immediately began
Speaker 2: tearing apart the data to find the flaws.
Speaker 3: They wanted to know why the image resolution wasn't even
Speaker 3: more perfect.
Speaker 2: That relentless, critical pursuit of incremental improvement is the fundamental
Speaker 2: engine of the scientific method.
Speaker 3: It really is. So.
Speaker 2: By heavily scrutinizing the performance data and an image resolution
Speaker 2: captured during the FISI four flight. The Nagoya team actually
Speaker 2: identified the primary limiting factor that prevented the mirror from
Speaker 2: achieving even sharper theoretical perfection.
Speaker 3: They found the weak link and what was the culprit?
Speaker 2: Did the structural housing bend under the G forces? Did
Speaker 2: the digital detector fail?
Speaker 3: No, the overall structure remained entirely sound. The limitation came
Speaker 3: down to the absolute microscopic boundaries of the electroforming manufacturing
Speaker 3: process itself.
Speaker 2: Really, the atom by adom printing wasn't good enough.
Speaker 3: They discovered that there were still infinitesimally tiny imperfections along
Speaker 3: the internal length of the nickel mirror surface.
Speaker 2: How tiny are we talking.
Speaker 3: We are not talking about major structural warping or visible seams.
Speaker 3: We are talking about microscopic textual variations at the atomic
Speaker 3: lattice level wow Angstrom level roughness in the crystalline structure
Speaker 3: of the nickel that caused a small fraction of the
Speaker 3: hard X rays to scatter slightly more than the theoretical
Speaker 3: physics models predicted.
Speaker 2: So, even after utilizing bleeding edge particle accelerator technology to
Speaker 2: grow a mirror atom by atom, the universe still demands
Speaker 2: an even smoother surface to properly reflect its highest energy light.
Speaker 3: But identifying the exact nature of the problem is the
Speaker 3: most important.
Speaker 2: Step in science, right because now you can fix it.
Speaker 3: Because they isolated the scattering effect to atomic level surface roughness,
Speaker 3: they now possess a perfectly clear, actionable target for improvement.
Speaker 2: They know what to tweak.
Speaker 3: They know exactly what parameters of the electrochemical bath, perhaps
Speaker 3: the deposition rate, the temperature, or the ion concentration they
Speaker 3: need to refine in the electroforming process to make the
Speaker 3: next iteration of the mandrel and the shell even smoother.
Speaker 2: And they are already back in the laboratory working on it.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, they didn't waste any time because.
Speaker 2: A newly refined, improved version of this seamless telescope is
Speaker 2: already manifested and scheduled to fly on the upcoming foc
Speaker 2: SSI five mission slated for twenty twenty six.
Speaker 3: Which is coming up fast.
Speaker 2: So we have a fully validated manufacturing process, a successful
Speaker 2: suborbital launch, a working high resolution telescope, and a concrete
Speaker 2: roadmap to make the next one even sharper.
Speaker 3: It's an incredible timeline.
Speaker 2: But refining the surface texture to get a flightly clearer
Speaker 2: picture of a solar flare. Isn't the ultimate endgame of
Speaker 2: this project now, not at all. The true ambition of
Speaker 2: the Nagoya team is vastly more expansive. The real goal
Speaker 2: is to take this validated, highly efficient seamless mirror technology
Speaker 2: and use it to forcefully shrink the entire paradigm of
Speaker 2: space exploration.
Speaker 3: We are talking about facilitating a massive paradigm shift in
Speaker 3: astrophysics SOSO, the transition from relying exclusively on colossal, multi
Speaker 3: billion dollar government observatories to deploying agile, highly accessible, inexpensive
Speaker 3: fleets of tiny satellites.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about that future, the shoebox future of astronomy.
Speaker 2: I love that phrase. When the average person thinks of
Speaker 2: space telescopes, they picture the Hubble Space telescope or the
Speaker 2: James Webb Space Telescope.
Speaker 3: Right, the big ones.
Speaker 2: These machines are massive school bus size behemoths. They weigh
Speaker 2: several tons, They are huge, They require decades of international
Speaker 2: political maneuvering to fund billions of dollars to design, and
Speaker 2: the largest most expensive orbit rockets on the planet just
Speaker 2: to launch them.
Speaker 3: And because these monolithic observatories are so astronomically expensive and
Speaker 3: exceedingly ware, the observing time on them is one of
Speaker 3: the most fiercely competitive resources in the scientific world.
Speaker 2: I can imagine everyone wants a turn.
Speaker 3: An Astrophysicists will literally wait years, sometimes staking their entire
Speaker 3: academic career, just to secure a few precious hours of
Speaker 3: time to point one of these giant telescopes at a
Speaker 3: specific galaxy or black hole of interest.
Speaker 2: But the Nagoya University team wants to completely upend that
Speaker 2: monopolized model.
Speaker 3: They want to blow it wide open.
Speaker 2: Their long term objective is aggressive miniaturization. They want to
Speaker 2: take this lightweight, highly efficient, seamlessly electroformed X ray funnel
Speaker 2: and scale it down to the point where the entire
Speaker 2: telescope assembly, the mirror of the housing, the digital detector
Speaker 2: of the power source, and the telemetry transmitter fits entirely
Speaker 2: inside something called a cub sat.
Speaker 3: If you break down the dimensions of a cubeset, the
Speaker 3: contrast against something like Hubble becomes absolutely staggering.
Speaker 2: What are the dimensions?
Speaker 3: A CubeSat is a highly standardized class of nanosatellites. The
Speaker 3: base structural unit, known as a one U is a
Speaker 3: cube measuring exactly ten by ten by ten centimeters ten centimeters.
Speaker 2: That's tiny.
Speaker 3: You can stack a few of these standardized units together
Speaker 3: to create a three U or a six U satellite,
Speaker 3: But fundamentally we are talking about launching a fully functional
Speaker 3: deep space observatory that is roughly the physical size of
Speaker 3: a shoe box.
Speaker 2: Shoe box, compare that to a machine the size of
Speaker 2: a yellow school bus.
Speaker 3: The difference is night and day.
Speaker 2: The economic applications are massive because in aerospace engineering, mass
Speaker 2: is money.
Speaker 3: Mass is absolutely money.
Speaker 2: Every kilogram you try to lift out Earth's gravity well
Speaker 2: cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Speaker 3: The beauty of the CubeSat standardization is that they are
Speaker 3: phenomenally cheap to construct, often utilizing off the shelf commercial
Speaker 3: electronics for their bus systems, and they are incredibly cheap
Speaker 3: to launch because they just hit your ride exactly. Because
Speaker 3: they are so small and lightweight, they don't need a
Speaker 3: dedicated rocket. They can simply hitch a ride as secondary
Speaker 3: payload ride shares on rockets that are already going to
Speaker 3: orbit to deploy larger commercial communications satellites.
Speaker 2: But up until this specific breakthrough in Japan, the idea
Speaker 2: of putting high resolution hard X ray optics onto a
Speaker 2: cube sat was basically considered science fiction.
Speaker 3: Oh totally. People thought it was impossible.
Speaker 2: Because the traditional bolted together glass mirrors were too heavy,
Speaker 2: the optics were too physically complex, and the required focal
Speaker 2: links were too large to fit into that tiny ten
Speaker 2: centimeter form factor and survive the launch environment exactly.
Speaker 3: High resolution X ray optics have never successfully flown on
Speaker 3: cube SATs. It was physically prohibitive.
Speaker 2: But this spring eight electro formed nickel funnel fundamentally alters
Speaker 2: the equation.
Speaker 3: It changes everything.
Speaker 2: The nickel shell is incredibly lightweight because it is a
Speaker 2: single seamless structure, it is physically robust enough to survive
Speaker 2: launch without massive heavy structural support brackets, and most importantly,
Speaker 2: its optical efficiency and ability to correct COMA aberrations are
Speaker 2: so high that even a vastly scaled down version of
Speaker 2: the Wolter funnel can catch enough photons to generate highly meaningful,
Speaker 2: publishable scientific data.
Speaker 3: So if they successfully integrate these funnels into a ten
Speaker 3: centimeter box, what does this actually mean for the future
Speaker 3: of science? Why does the shoe box future of X
Speaker 3: ray astronomy matter so much?
Speaker 2: Is it completely democratizes access to the extreme universe.
Speaker 3: Democratize the space. I like that it.
Speaker 2: Takes the ability to observe the most violent, fundamental high
Speaker 2: energy processes in the cosmos out of the exclusive, monopolized
Speaker 2: hands of massively funded, multi decade government agency projects, and
Speaker 2: it puts that capability directly into the hands of a
Speaker 2: much broader, more diverse scientific community.
Speaker 3: Imagine a standard university physics department or even a well
Speaker 3: funded graduate program being able to design, physically, build, and
Speaker 3: launch their own dedicated high resolution X ray space telescope
Speaker 3: in the span of three or four.
Speaker 2: Years, or a tiny fraction of the cost of a
Speaker 2: traditional satellite.
Speaker 3: Right. The scientific yield changes dramatically when you shift from
Speaker 3: a monolithic model to a swarm model.
Speaker 2: A swarm model that sounds so cool.
Speaker 3: Instead of relying on one giant telescope attempting to look
Speaker 3: everywhere at once and missing things because its schedule is
Speaker 3: book years in advance, universities could launch a swarm of
Speaker 3: dozens of specialized shoebox sized X ray CubeSats, just.
Speaker 2: A constellation of them looking everywhere.
Speaker 3: They could monitor the entire sky continuously in real time,
Speaker 3: waiting to catch unpredictable transient events like a tidal disruption
Speaker 3: event where a black hole unexpectedly tears a wandering star
Speaker 3: part wow, or the sudden violent detonation of a supernova.
Speaker 3: A swarm of CubeSats can pivot and observe those transient
Speaker 3: phenomena immediately, whereas the big telescopes would miss them entirely
Speaker 3: because they were locked into observing a different quadrant of
Speaker 3: the sky.
Speaker 2: It opens an entirely new, highly agile, fast moving chapter
Speaker 2: and compact astrophysics.
Speaker 3: It is a truly staggering technological evolution.
Speaker 2: We have gone on an incredible journey to understand this.
Speaker 2: Today we really have. We started with the frustrating impenetrable
Speaker 2: shield of Earth's atmosphere and the fundamental, almost paradoxical physics
Speaker 2: of skipping high energy X rays like flat stones across
Speaker 2: a pond. Right. We watched astronomical engineers cross completely different
Speaker 2: scientific disciplines teaming up with particles accelerator physicists at Spring
Speaker 2: eight to literally grow seamless, mathematically perfect metal funnels layer
Speaker 2: by atomic layer.
Speaker 3: Which is still just amazing to me.
Speaker 2: We explored the sheer logistical absurdity of building a kilometer
Speaker 2: long vacuum tube deep underground just to physically verify the
Speaker 2: parallel geometry of.
Speaker 3: A fake star, that nine hundred meter test.
Speaker 2: And then we travel to the freezing wilderness of the
Speaker 2: Alaskan Poker Flat Range to strap that nanometer precise mirror
Speaker 2: to a suborbital sounding rocket surviving the violent one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty decibel acoustic ascent to catch the invisible, high
Speaker 2: energy scream of a solar flare.
Speaker 3: It's an incredible story.
Speaker 2: And now we're looking ahead to a horizon where highly
Speaker 2: affordable fleets of shoebox sized explorers democratize our access to
Speaker 2: the extremes of the universe.
Speaker 3: It stands as a brilliant testament to human ingenuity and
Speaker 3: our refusal to accept physical limits.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 3: But you know, as we reflect on the specific leap
Speaker 3: forward in X ray optics, it raises a profound question
Speaker 3: that extends far beyond just astronomy.
Speaker 2: Well, what's up if.
Speaker 3: Scientists can take the massive, highly specialized, impossibly delicate equipment
Speaker 3: required to observe the universe's most violent, high energy phenomena and,
Speaker 3: through sheer cross disciplinary brilliance, miniaturize it to the point
Speaker 3: where it fits neatly inside a shoebox.
Speaker 2: Okay, I see where you're going with this.
Speaker 3: What other monumental, seemingly untouchable fields of science are about
Speaker 3: to experience the exact same revolution. That is a fascinating thought, right,
Speaker 3: What other massive laboratories, multi billion dollar particle colliders, or
Speaker 3: colossal medical instruments are about to be radically miniaturized, democratized
Speaker 3: and placed directly into the hands of everyday researchers, completely
Speaker 3: changing the pace of global scientific discovery forever.
Speaker 2: It really makes you wonder what else we might soon
Speaker 2: be able to resolve perfectly from a kilometer away down
Speaker 2: to a single grain of rice.