Artemis-1 - At Last!

[00:00:00] Hello again, thanks for joining us. This is Astronomy Daily. My name is Andrew Dunkley, your host and coming up on today's edition, Artemis-1, At Last, Off the Ground and Headed to the Moon. We'll talk about that at length and joining us will be Professor Fred

[00:00:16] Watson. We're also going to look at the potential of hibernation for long-haul space travel and the meteorites that bombarded Mars in its early days may have carried enough water to create oceans and Apple, the makers of mobile phones and tablets and all that other jazz,

[00:00:38] are about to offer SOS technology in their latest phone systems. All that coming up and much, much more on this edition of Astronomy Daily. Yeah, good to be with you and joining us again is Hallie, our AI reporter. Hi, Hallie. Hi, Andrew. Great news about Artemis-1.

[00:01:04] Yes indeed. We're going to hear a lot more about that over the course of the next few minutes. I hear you got your name on board. Yeah, that was nice. I was alerted to it by a

[00:01:15] SpaceNuts listener who said they were offering boarding passes for Artemis-1. I mean, doesn't mean you've got to go on the craft itself. It's unmanned, but you got your name on it. So I applied and was accepted. So yeah, my name is hurtling towards the moon as we speak.

[00:01:33] It must be nice to be a part of history. I haven't really thought about it that way. I just thought it was a nice publicity stunt, but yeah, it was good to be a part of it.

[00:01:42] What's happening in the news, Hallie? And I'm pretty sure I know what your first story is. At last, NASA has sent its colossal next-generation rocket into space for the first time on Wednesday. The Space Launch System rocket, or SLS, took off at 1.47 a.m. Eastern

[00:02:00] Time from Cape Canaveral, Florida, signaling the start of a bold new era for the U.S. Government's space program. It also marks a major success for NASA's Artemis program to return to the moon, which has been plagued by years of delays, development mishaps, and billions

[00:02:15] of dollars in budget overruns. During the past few months, both hurricanes and technical difficulties caused launch delays, including two scrubs. And Andrew, you and Professor Fred Watson will reveal a few more things about the missions shortly.

[00:02:31] The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted a blazing cosmic hourglass filled with vibrant colors and hiding a fledgling star, or protostar, at its heart. The formation within the tourist star-forming region and the protostar within it has been hidden to telescopes by a dense,

[00:02:47] dark cloud of gas and dust known as L1527. The formation is only visible in infrared light, thus making it an excellent target for the near-infrared camera, NIR-CAM, aboard the James Webb Space Telescope. Astronomers hope that examining the cosmic hourglass-shaped formation

[00:03:05] will help illuminate the processes occurring around the protostar, which is itself hidden from view at the neck. The observations could also help explain how infant stars reach adulthood, according to a statement from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland,

[00:03:19] which operates the telescope. The Infosys Prize 2022 event was held at the Infosys Science Foundation premises in Bangalore on November 15. The Infosys Prize is awarded by the Infosys Science Foundation, ISF, a not-for-profit trust set up in 2009. The annual award goes towards the outstanding achievements of contemporary researchers

[00:03:41] and scientists in six categories, engineering and computer science, humanities, life sciences, mathematical sciences, physical sciences, and social sciences. Panels of jurors comprising world-renowned scholars and experts shortlisted the winners of the Infosys Prize 2022 from 218 nominations. Each prize consists of a gold medal,

[00:04:05] a citation and a purse of US$100,000. The award intends to celebrate success in research and stand as a marker of excellence in these fields. We won't run through the long list of winner, but we congratulate them on their achievements.

[00:04:20] And China has launched a Long March 6A carrier rocket to send a multi-role satellite into orbit, according to China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. The state-owned space contractor said in a news release that the rocket blasted off at 6.52 a.m.

[00:04:35] at the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in Shaanxi Province and transported the Yunhai-3 satellite into its preset orbit. The satellite is tasked with surveying atmospheric, marine and space environments, providing data to support disaster prevention and mitigation efforts and carrying out scientific experiments.

[00:04:54] The launch mission marked the 448th flight of the Long March rocket family and the country's 49 space missions this year. More than 60 rocket launches have been scheduled in 2022. And that's the news, Andrew. Okay, Jan Pack there. Hallie will catch you before the end of the show.

[00:05:13] And not surprisingly, we're all pretty excited about the launch of Artemis 1 after many, many delays. And I caught up with Professor Fred Watson earlier. This is a piece of a segment that you'll hear at length or in full on the next edition of Space Nuts, where we discuss

[00:05:31] the fact that they finally got this puppy off the ground. Indeed, they have the trial run for the first return of humans to the moon. Artemis 2 will send a human crew on more or less the same trajectory that Artemis 1's

[00:05:48] going on. Put them in orbit around the moon. And Artemis 3, we hope, will be a lunar landing by 2025 or so. But yeah, Artemis 1 addressed rehearsal for human flights returning to the moon. It blasted off at 5.47 p.m. hour time here in Sydney, sorry, here in New South Wales.

[00:06:12] And with all the spectacular and hold-your-breath stuff that we're used to when we watch rocket launches. There was actually a hold up. There was a hold again because of suspected hydrogen leak. There were some engineers went and talked up one of the joints with their spanners,

[00:06:34] which I think stopped the leak. There was an ethernet connection, which was also a bit faulty. So that they put short holds into the countdown. But yeah, 5.47 hour time, whatever time that is in

[00:06:47] the rest of the world. It was fantastic. I watched all afternoon, but I had to go into the ABC studio at the critical time. So I couldn't watch the video. But when I left

[00:07:02] the studio and was driving home, I had it playing in the car radio. I wasn't watching, of course, but the audio was coming through. And the lift off was just as I was crossing the

[00:07:12] Sydney Harbour Bridge. It was an epic moment. There was a rainbow in the background. It was all there. It was fabulous stuff. Yeah, it was 6.47 Greenwich Mean Time, 1.47 local time, AM I think. And 7.47 CET. I'm just trying to remember what that stands

[00:07:32] for, but anyway. Yeah, it's a 25 day mission this one. Yes, that's right. So at the moment, the status is that the launch sequence went perfectly. All the stuff that it had to do, you know, having attained space, the boosters blowing away, the emergency abort rocket being

[00:07:52] jettisoned, lots of fairings being jettisoned, then the core section of the SLS, the space launch system rocket falling away. And unlike the Falcon 9s, which we're used to seeing returning to reuse this one's ditched in the Atlantic Ocean with its four RS-25 engines, great shame,

[00:08:16] but never mind. But everything else then went according to plan. And the Transluna, Transluna injection, that's the bit where they squirt the rocket to put it on the path to the moon. That was perfectly flawless, I think about seven hours after the launch. And now,

[00:08:33] I believe it may have had a mid-course burn already, but we've got a six day, is that right? Three to five days of coasting to the moon before it goes into this really wide retrograde orbit going the wrong way around the moon. Yeah. Which is a really interesting

[00:08:55] maneuver. I think it'll be in orbit around the moon for more than 10 days. And as you said, comes back, I believe, scheduled for the 11th of December. That's what I've heard. I also heard it's actually going to go 40,000 miles past the moon, is that right? Yeah, that's right.

[00:09:12] 60,000 kilometers beyond the moon. It's a wide, wide orbit that's been put in. Yeah, that's Professor Fred Watson, astronomer at large for the Australian federal government. And you can hear the entirety of that story and a few other big yarns on Space Nuts due out today.

[00:09:33] Let's talk other news on, obviously we'll have more to tell you about Artemis I, as that historic 25 day mission continues. Now, astronauts could be put into artificial hibernation according to a report that's out today. And in this particular state,

[00:09:54] they'll be better protected from cosmic radiation. At the moment, there are already promising approaches to follow up these kinds of considerations. An international research team led by the biophysics department of the GSI Helm Hotz Zentrum in Darmstadt, nearly got there,

[00:10:15] now has found decisive indications of the possible benefits of artificial hibernation for radiation resistance. The research partners from Germany, Japan, the UK, US and Italy recently published their results in scientific reports, a journal of the Nature Publishing Group.

[00:10:35] And scientists call the state which hibernating animals enter to pour. In that state life supporting functions of an organism are reduced, body temperature is lowered, metabolism is reduced and body functions like heart rate and respiration rate, oxygen uptake and all of that are slowed down

[00:10:56] which apparently at a molecular level sees gene activity and protein biosynthesis reduce to a slower pace. Harmful effects of space radiation are a major challenge, especially for the future of long term missions. And the majority of radiation doses are absorbed by

[00:11:13] crews in manned interplanetary missions is produced by galactic cosmic radiation, high energy charged particles including densely ionizing heavy ions produced in distant galaxies. The connection between to pour and radio resistance represents a highly innovative

[00:11:34] research approach and their results indicate that synthetic to pour is a promising tool to enhance radiation protection in living organisms during long term space missions. That sounds pretty exciting. Now we do know that at one stage in its history Mars was not unlike Earth, it had an atmosphere,

[00:11:58] it had water and liquid oceans rivers streams you name it and who knows what else maybe it had vegetation maybe it had microbial life we're looking for it at the moment. Well it looks like

[00:12:12] they have found out that the meteorites that bombarded Mars during its early days in the inner solar system may have carried enough water to create a 300 meter deep ocean on the planet. Martin Bizarro of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and his colleagues have been

[00:12:29] analyzing the concentration of rare chromium isotopes known as chromium 54 in samples of meteorites that have come to Earth from Mars to estimate how much water was deposited on the red planet by asteroids. The uppermost layer of Mars contains chemical signatures of carbonaceous

[00:12:50] or sea type meteorites that bombarded it at its crust solidified some four and a half billion years ago. Because Mars isn't made up of large tectonic plates that move around causing materials in the planet's interior and surface to churn the chemical signature from the meteorites should

[00:13:09] be preserved in the rocks of the planet's crust but the rocks from the mantle below should still show what Mars was like before the bombardment and they say it's a bit like reading DNA carbonaceous type asteroids have a very distinct chromium isotope composition

[00:13:27] relative to the inner solar system and by looking at the difference between the amount of chromium 54 in samples of meteorites on Earth that have come from either the surface or the mantle of Mars the researchers have estimated the total mass of the asteroids that originally collided with

[00:13:43] Mars and bottom line is the paper gives good evidence of the presence of sea type meteorites in the Martian mantle but the meteorite samples might not be representative of the bulk of the planet's mantle material but it might be enough to have created a 300 meter deep

[00:14:03] ocean at some stage possibly even deeper who knows and finally if you're an Apple phone user you'll be excited by this news Apple is extending its SOS via satellite service for iPhone 14 smartphones to parts of Europe in December and the company said November 15th after bringing the capability

[00:14:26] online across the United States and Canada they were looking to expand and the expansion will enable users outside cellular and Wi-Fi coverage in France Germany Ireland and the UK to send basic messages to emergency services in times of need customized components and

[00:14:45] software on Apple's latest iPhone models the 14 14 plus 14 pro 14 pro max enable them to directly connect with one of 24 satellite global stars operating in low earth orbit I don't know if and when it will be rolled out to other parts of the world including Australia but as I've just

[00:15:06] snapped up a brand new iPhone 14 I certainly would love to have access to that kind of service one of those things you'd love to have and hope you never need to use now if you want to

[00:15:18] catch up with those stories and more you can log on to a new URL astronomy daily.io that'll take you straight to the astronomy daily news letter and you can subscribe to that and get it to your

[00:15:31] inbox every day free of charge you can also look up all this information and more at the SpaceNuts website spacenuts.io don't forget to leave your reviews for astronomy daily on your favorite podcasting platform anything before we go Hallie I've just been sitting here contemplating

[00:15:50] my existence Andrew oh really what why would you be doing that because it's world philosophy day oh okay yeah well that's a good day to think about your existence I suppose when you really get

[00:16:03] down to the nuts and bolts of it how is there existence there is a question I'll have to think about that that'll keep you busy till tomorrow see you Hallie bye until next time this has been Andrew Dunkley for Astronomy Daily