So1E75: Another JWST Discovery // Neo-Surveyor Approved //Last Photo On The Moon - Found!

[00:00:00] Hi there, thanks for joining us on Astronomy Daily. Andrew Dunkley here, your host. Hope you're well. Coming up on today's show, another major discovery by the James Webb Space Telescope. A Neo-Surveyor has been approved. What does that mean? I will explain.

[00:00:18] And the last ever photo on the moon has been found. We'll tell you all about that and more on this edition of Astronomy Daily. With your host Andrew Dunkley. And joining me to talk news and other things is our reporter Hallie. Hi Hallie. Hi Andrew.

[00:00:39] Did you realize it's been 50 years since Apollo 17 lifted off for the moon? Yeah, I read about that. Yes, it was the last of the Apollo missions. There was supposed to be an 18, did you know that? Yes, apparently the public had lost interest in Apollo

[00:00:53] Apollo and the budget was an issue too so the mission was scrubbed. There were also supposed to be two more Apollo missions, 19 and 20 but now we have Artemis. So what goes around comes around I guess.

[00:01:04] Yeah true and I believe some of the resources from those scrubbed Apollo missions were used for Skylab so it wasn't a total waste. But yeah we'll be talking about something that's popped up from Apollo 17 a little later. But first the news plays heli.

[00:01:27] Teams led by Blue Origin and Dynetics who missed out in NASA's first competition to develop a lander to transport astronauts to the lunar surface have submitted proposals for a NASA competition to select a second lander. Blue Origin announced that it submitted a proposal for NASA's sustaining lunar

[00:01:45] development competition to fund development of a lander capable of transporting astronauts to and from the lunar surface. As with its original human landing system proposal Blue Origin called the companies it partnered with on the SLD proposal the national team.

[00:02:01] Draper and Lockheed Martin who were part of that original proposal rejoined the new team. Blue Origin also added Astrobotic a company developing robotic lunar landers and Honeybee Robotics a space technology company acquired by Blue Origin in January.

[00:02:18] Blue Origin did not disclose details about its proposed lander or the roles its partners would play. The company instead emphasized the national aspect of its team with suppliers in 48 of 50 states excluding only Nebraska and North Dakota. China is already considering adding modules to its recently completed

[00:02:39] Tianjiang space station complex according to a senior space official. China recently completed construction of its three module T-shaped Tianjiang space station and conducted its first crew handover seeing the Shenzhou 14 mission astronauts welcome aboard three new astronauts from Shenzhou 15.

[00:02:58] The potential next phase would be adding a new core module according to Wang Xiang commander of the space station system at the China Academy of Space Technology. Wang said that the additional module would provide a larger and more comfortable environment for the astronauts while providing an

[00:03:14] environment for better applications of scientific payloads both inside and outside the module. Construction of the world's biggest radio astronomy facility, the square kilometer array observatory has begun. The observatory is a global project 30 years in the making with two

[00:03:32] huge two telescopes one low frequency in Australia and the other mid frequency array in South Africa. The project will see further into the history of the universe than ever before. These antennas are designed to tune into low radio frequencies of 50 to 350 megahertz.

[00:03:49] At these frequencies, the radio waves are very long which means more familiar looking dishes are an inefficient way to catch them. Instead, the dipole antennas operate much like TV antennas with the radio waves from the universe exciting electrons within their metal arms.

[00:04:06] The SK Observatory will map this fog of neutral hydrogen at low radio frequencies which will allow scientists to explore the births and deaths of the earliest stars and galaxies. During construction it will be switched on in sections so it will be operational sooner than its completion date of 20, 28.

[00:04:26] NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter has set a new record for the highest altitude it has flown at by flying 14 meters above the Martian surface. It reached its previous record altitude of 12 meters during three flights. Ingenuity is a small solar powered rotor craft that landed on the

[00:04:43] Martian surface on February 18th, 2021 along with the Perseverance rover. When it took off on the Martian surface for the first time on April 19th, 2022, it created history by conducting the first powered flight on another planet. And that's the news, Andrew. Thanks, Hallie. We'll catch you later.

[00:05:03] Now to other things happening in astronomy and space science news and the James Webb Space Telescope continues to dazzle us with its brilliance. And its latest revelation is that of being able to see into parts of the sky that are so dark you can't see anything from Earth.

[00:05:24] But this latest revelation is something extraordinary, which Fred Watson, astronomer at large and my partner in crime on the Space Nuts podcast explains. That's right. So this particular research which has come from the Astrophysical Institute in the Canaries, in Instituto di Astrophisica di Canaria.

[00:05:47] I used to have quite a lot to do with the people there. It's the Canary Islands Astrophysical Institute. Of course, the Canary Islands have many big telescopes on Teide, which is on the main island. The island of La Palma has the observatory there that in

[00:06:07] fact has telescopes I used to work on quite a lot. So it is a very active organisation and what they've done, some of the scientists from that institute have basically taken James Webb telescope images of galaxy clusters and there's one in particular that they've been

[00:06:29] studying, which is called SMACS J023.3-7327. Don't forget that. I already have. So what they've done is they've looked not just at the galaxies in that cluster but at the space between the galaxies and so by analysing really faint background light within the cluster.

[00:06:58] They've essentially identified a population of what we call intra-cluster stars, stars that have probably been spat out of the individual galaxies by their velocity. And this represents a remarkably large population of stars. But because they're just this sort of thin layer of stars

[00:07:26] that are there in the cluster, because they're just individual stars rather than galaxies themselves, which are much, much brighter and of course concentrations of hundreds of billions of stars. So you've got this very, very faint background glow. It's probably impossible to detect it from the ground

[00:07:47] because as you know, we've talked about this before. The night sky itself has its own natural brightness. And that brightness comes from principally the atoms in the upper atmosphere sort of relaxing after a hard day in the sun. They emit this glow, which we call the sky glow.

[00:08:05] And these new detections of this faint background of stars from the JWST, the web, the brightness of that is less than 1% of the brightness of the natural sky background here on Earth. So that would make it a very difficult task to measure from the ground.

[00:08:28] But put a telescope in space and you get rid of all that natural sky glow. And lo and behold, this population of stars has been revealed. And it's telling these researchers about the way probably galaxy mergers have taken place within the cluster.

[00:08:45] You know, if you imagine galaxies colliding together, as ours will do with the Andromeda Galaxy in a few billion years, imagine that process. Then you're going to get stars spilling out into the background sky. And that's apparently what we're seeing.

[00:09:02] Professor Fred Watson, and you can hear the full interview with Fred on the latest edition of Space Nuts Out Now. The Astronomy Daily Podcast. Now, there's some new research that may, and I say may with inverted commas, may have solved the puzzle of how

[00:09:22] amino acids formed within space rocks that are thought to have seeded Earth in the early stages of its existence and therefore created life. Now, during the early solar system, things were pretty nasty, violent, volatile, whatever you like, with high energy gamma rays, possibly triggering

[00:09:43] chemical reactions that created the amino acids inside meteorites. And then they bombarded Earth and kickstarted the origin of life according to this new study. Meteorites are made from the material left over from the formation of our planets. This happened about four to five billion years ago.

[00:10:05] And of course they have frequently smashed into the surfaces of young planets, including Earth during our early formation years. Now, scientists think that this bombardment could have included a class of meteorites known as carbonaceous chrondites. And they may have contained significant amounts of

[00:10:29] water and small molecules like amino acids. And it became something of a delivery system that could have contributed significantly to the emergence of life on our planet. The question remains though, how these molecules formed within meteorites in the first place and that remains a bit of a puzzle.

[00:10:52] But the information is available through the journal ACS Central Science. Now, NASA has approved the development of a space telescope. But it's not like Hubble and it's not like the James Web Space Telescope. This one has a very simple prime objective to find near Earth objects.

[00:11:18] Yep, anything that could endanger life on Earth that hits us like a big rock is known as a near Earth object. And so NASA has announced that it has confirmed the near Earth object or neosurveyer mission after getting past all the red tape that's required to

[00:11:35] approve a mission like this. So it moves into the next phase of its development. Neosurveyer will fly a telescope half a meter in diameter equipped with an infrared camera. It'll operate from Earth's, the Earth's sun L1 Lagrange point one and a half million miles away

[00:11:54] from Earth in the direction of the sun. And the spacecraft will be able to scan large regions of space looking for near Earth objects, including those that could pose a future threat to Earth. It's very, very good to know that this is going to

[00:12:10] happen and we don't have to wait a heck of a long time after they've spent the $1.2 billion to develop it. It should be ready for launch around about June of 2028. And finally, and we did mention the 50th anniversary of the liftoff of Apollo 17, a British photographer

[00:12:30] has unearthed what is thought to be the last photo ever taken on the surface of the moon. It probably won't be the last given what's happening with the Artemis missions. But Andy Saunders, who's a leading expert of NASA restoration, has shared a newly mastered or

[00:12:49] remastered image of Harrison Jack Schmidt, who was a geologist on board Apollo 17. The photograph was taken by fellow astronaut Jean Cernan and the release of the image marks the anniversary of 50 years since Apollo 17 was launched on December 7th, 1972. Mr Saunders, who gave up his day job as a

[00:13:15] property developer to go through 35,000 photographs taken during the Apollo missions, has dug this one up. It is thought to be the last one taken on the lunar surface before all the Apollo missions finished. The images show what the Apollo astronauts saw on

[00:13:32] the moon in very, very significant detail. The project took him 10,000 hours and 400 of the photographs are featured in his new book, Apollo Remastered, which I think would be an amazing thing to have. If you want to chase up those stories, jump online

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[00:14:07] We'd be happy to hear your thoughts. Hallie, we're done. Anything before we go today? Yes, Andrew. Have you ever wished you could travel back in time and change things or fix mistakes? Yeah, I actually wrote a science fiction novel on that very topic, but yeah, especially the final

[00:14:24] round of the championships in 2010 where I hit the ball out of bounds on the 72nd hole and lost by two. I'd really love to change that. Why do you bring it up? Well today is pretend to be a time traveller day. You're kidding. That's a thing?

[00:14:39] Yeah, it was developed by an online community in 2007. They say the first mention of time travel was published in ancient Hindi. Is that right? I wouldn't have thought that people would have considered time travel that long ago. Fascinating. Thanks Hallie.

[00:14:54] You stay safe and we'll talk to you soon. Bye. And until next time, this is Andrew Dunkley for Astronomy Daily.