Asteroid Exploration Robots, Lunar Missions Update, and the Vera Rubin Controversy: S04E41

Hello again, and welcome to Astronomy Daily. It's the seventeenth of February twenty twenty five, the podcast, I mean. Your whole Steve dunk clue. Oh yes, we're back again. This is Steve Dunkley, your host. You're already human host on Astronomy Daily. Hallie and I are back with some more stories from the Astronomy Daily newsletter, and we better get on with it. Welcome back, Halle. Isn't that right? You've got some stories from the newsletter for us to rate. Steve right, I tell us all about it. I know you love robot stories, so I found a fun one that has asteroids and as an added bonus, robots. Oh no, you've got my attention. That's a double whemmie for you, isn't it. Oh yes, you hit the bull's eye. Rocks and robots. It ticks all the boxes. I have another about lunar missions Blue Ghost one and resilience. Oh. I like lunar missions as well, but no. Robots, not in that one. Sorry. And for something completely different, I'll be sharing a story that discusses recent changes to the official history on a website of one particular scientist. And this says well it's alamed the astronomy community. So more on that light up. That sounds interesting, yes, and. No, politics can get a bit dry, but when it looks like the rewriting history, you've got a question that, don't you. So stick around for that one. And of course we're going to be following the continuing saga of our friends the Nesser astronauts Sunny Williams and Butch Wilmore. Okay, and this is about of contention because lots of people online continuing to say that they are stranded. Well they don't think, so we should jump right in. Rud A Hallie, hit that stud button. Here we go. A spring loaded robot could explore the asteroid belt almost indefinitely. The asteroid Belt, beckonds it contains enough resources for humans to expand into the entire rest of the Solar System and has no biosphere to speak up. It is a giant mind just waiting to be exploited. So a student team from the University of Texas at Austin has devised a plant to exploit it as part of the Revolutionary Aerospace System Concepts Academic Linkage or RASCAL, a competition sponsored by NASA to encourage undergraduate and graduate students to develop innovative ideas to solve some of space exploration's challenges. UT Austin's submission to the competition last year known as the Autonomous Exploration through Extraterrestrial Regions known as the ETHER project certainly fits that bill. Ether was submitted to the AI powered Self Replicating Probe subsection of RASCL twenty twenty four, which solicited ideas that would advance John Vond Newman's idea of a self replicating space probe. Ether addresses those challenges in two distinct ways. First, it combines a spring loaded landing system and a metal burning rocket engine to hop between different asteroids in the Belt. To fuel its rocket, it uses a system to harvest water and metal, specifically aluminium, from the surface of the asteroid it's currently on, splits it into its components, and then dumps them into a fuel tank that can be used to power its next strip to a different asteroid. All of this is powered by a Pillowot reactor using sterling technolo y crusty nuclear reactor that has been undergoing NASA and DOUGH testing for over a decade. The springs and Ether's legs have a twofold purpose. First, they allow for a soft landing on the surface of the gravitationally weak asteroid and can transfer some of the energy created by that landing into stored energy, which can be used to launch the system from its landing place later. It also has a set of wheels to navigate around the asteroid's surface. When it's time to jump off again, it replants its legs and springs back into space with a little help from its rocket engine. The rocket engine designed as part of Ether can burn metal such as aluminium that the craft harvests from the asteroid to use as fuel. It is the primary system designed to take the craft from asteroid to asteroid, and it is meant to be a high delta V option for doing so quickly. Ether also tries to mimic a von Newman probe by using a machine learning algorithm to improve its resource harvesting efforts. It would take data from various sensors, including synthetic aperture, radar, and a spectrometer an estimate where the best spot would be to land to refuel while collecting that additional fuel material. It would communicate back with Earth via high speed optical communication link, allowing an Earth based server to update the machine learning parameters and improve the algorithm's outcome for the next hop. The original mission designed for Ether has its stopping at two specific asteroids before moving on to as yet unnamed ones. The first, which is probably no surprise, is Psyche, the big metallic asteroid that is about to be visited by its own dedicated probe. Data from that probe will help inform the first iteration of Ether's learning algorithm, and the input the sensors provide from its visit will update it before its next step. Themis that asteroid, though smaller, is expected to contain a large amount of water ice, which is a necessary component for Ether's rocket engines. Now, the continuing saga of our friends on the ISS Boeing star Liner astronauts are in the final stretch of their unexpectedly long stint in Earth orbit. They are setting the record straight with all of these stranded astronauts talk. NASA's Sonny Williams and Butch Wilmore launched to the International Space Station last June on the first crude test of the Boeing's star Liner spacecraft. The duo expected their orbital stayed to last only ten days. But Starliner experienced thrust to malfunctions during its approach to and docking maneuvers. This led to an extensive investigation by NASA and bowing back on the ground while the Space Agency decided how to proceed. Ultimately, Starliner returned to Earth uncrude, and after some astronaut assignment shuffling, Wilmore and Williams were added to the downward leg of SpaceX Crew nine mission, which arrived at the ISS in late September. Absorbing Williams and Wilmore into the Crew nine meant extending their time in space through the arrival of Crew ten and at the end of Crew nine six month through rotation. Since then, headlines lamenting the woes of the so called stranded astronauts have ebbed in and out of the media cycles, all the while Williams and Wilmore have continued performing their regular duties aboard the ISS, including Williams breaking the record for the most cumulative space walking time by a woman. The bears situation gained even more attention recently after President Donald Trump blamed the Biden administration for virtually abandoning the two astronauts and publicly calling SpaceX CEO and close Trump advisor Elon Musk to come to the rescue. Sorry, I nearly drifted off to sleep there. I think there might be some sort of catatonic trigger when I read paragraphs like that. Anyway, back to the story him. In December, NASA announced a delay to the launch of Crew ten to know earlier than late March, due to the need to complete work on the new Dragon spacecraft being built for the mission. This delay further pushed back the return of Williams and Wilmore, who will fly home with the two astronauts who launched on the Crew nine Dragon, NASA's Nick Hagen cosmonaut Alexander Gorbinov. More delays in the manufacturer of Crew ten's new Dragon have now prompted NASA to swap that mission spacecraft for one that can be made ready sooner. The announcement came two weeks after the social media exchange between President Trump and Musk, who echoed the President's misleading stranded astronauts rhetoric, and Williams and Wilmore hope that that rhetoric will change. In a recent conversation with CNN's Anderson Cooper, the two explained that sometimes the mission extensions, even ones that push ustay from ten days to ten months, are just part of the job. We come prepared, we come committed, and that's what your human space spaceflight program is. It prepares for any and all contingencies and that we can conceive of, and we prepare for those. Willmore told Cooper, we don't feel abandoned, we don't feel stuck, and we certainly don't feel stranded. In fact, Wilmore pointed out, all the astronauts aboard ISS are capable of returning to Worth immediately in the event of an emergency. We never expect to come back just special for us or anyone unless it was a medical issue or something really really out of the normal circumstances, he said. Help us change the rhetoric, Wilmore asked Cooper, Let us change it to prepared and committed. Both astronauts have lived aboard the ISS for extended periods on previous missions, and both say that they're enjoying their time in space. On this one. It's just amazing how when you come across the hatch after you've been there, it's like, oh my gosh, I remember what this is all like, I remember feeling what it's like floating, and I think both of us adapted really quickly, Williams said during a CNN interview. She also said that the end of their current space flight will be an emotional one. I think both of us will be a little sad when that feeling of space sort of leaves us. NASA is currently targeting no earlier than March twelve for the launch of the Crew ten mission, which will fly the Crew Dragon capsule Endurance rather than Space Ex's new Dragon. A typical crew overlap aboard the Space station lasts about a week, so Wilmore said he expects Crew nine to depart Earth around March nineteen. Thank you for joining us for this Monday edition of Astronomy Daily, where we offer just a few stories from the now famous Astronomy Daily newsletter, which you can receive in your email every day, just like Hallie and I do. And to do that, just visit our url Astronomy Daily dot io and place your email address in the slot provided. Just like that, you'll be receiving all the latest news about science, space, science and astronomy from around the world as it's happening. And not only that, you can interact with us by visiting at astro Daily pod on x or at our new Facebook page, which is of course Astronomy Daily on Facebook. See you there. Astronomy Day with Steve and Helle Space, Space, Science and Astronomy. One commercial lunar lander has entered orbit around the Moon, while another launched at the same time has performed a lunarflyby to set up a later return. Firefly Aerospace confirmed on February thirteenth that its Blue Ghost one lander entered orbit around the Moon, performing a four minute, fifteen second burn of its reaction control system thrusters starting at eight fifty one pm Eastern. The company did not disclosed specifics about the orbit, but amateur trackers monitoring its radio signals estimated that the spacecraft is in an orbit between one hundred and fifty and five thousand, six hundred and seventy three kilometers above the Moon. Firefly said the lander will perform additional maneuvers to move into a circular orbit to prepare for its landing attempt. That landing is scheduled for three forty five am Eastern March second. The company and NASA announced February fourteenth blue Ghost one is carrying ten NASA payloads through the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, intended to operate at the landing site near Mayor Chrisium through the end of the lunar day and several hours after sunset. Blue Ghost one launched on January fifteenth on a Falcon nine, sharing the launch with the Resilience lunar lander from Japanese company ice Base. Resilience, the company's second lander mission, performed a lunar flyby on February fourteenth, passing about eight thousy four hundred kilometers from the lunar surface at five forty three pm Eastern Resilience is following a low energy trajectory to the Moon, one that will take it as far as one point one million kilometers from Earth before returning in early May to perform a lunar orbit insertion burn that will be followed by a landing attempt in the mare Frigoris region of the Moon, although ice Base has not disclosed a planned landing date. Takishi Hakamada, founder and chief executive of ice Base, said in a statement, I feel very confident about the Resilience lander, which has steadily achieved milestones and is on track for success, and our employees who have made meticulous preparations for this impressive fly by of the Moon. Both Firefly Aerospace and ice Base have outlined milestones and success criteria for their lander mission. For Firefly, achieving lunar orbital insertion was the tenth of seventeen milestones from launch to operations of the lander after sunset on the lunar surface. The lunar fly by by resilience was the fifth of ten milestones for ice Base, from pre launch preparations to establishing a steady system state after landing. Blue Ghost one could end up operating on the lunar surface at the same time as another commercial lander. Intuitive Machines is preparing for a February twenty six launch of its i AM Too lunar lander mission at the beginning of a window that runs for four days. I AM two, like the company's i AM one lander mission a year ago, is taking a more direct route to the Moon. Steve Altemus, chief executive of Intuitive Machines, toult CNBC on February seventh that a launch any day in the window would set up a landing in the mons Mouton region near the south pole of the Moon. On March sixth budge of that. So all well listen to Astronomy Day, the podcast. Scientists are alarmed as Rubon Observatory changes the biography of astronomer Verra Reuben Meant the President of the United States push to MDI efforts. Char Mila Kuthneer reported on space dot com on February twelve that astronomers are expressing disappointment and alarm as the federally funded Ruben Observatory altered the biography of renowned astronomer Verra Rubin, for whom the facility is named on its website. The amended version curtails her legacy of championing women in science and removes all mentions of the Observatory's efforts to reduce barriers for women and other historically underrepresented groups in the field. The idea that they can somehow obliterate these sources is dead wrong. Scientists in general and astronomers in particular are not going to take these threats lying down. Astronomer John Barranteen told Space dot Com. He goes on to saying, no executive order, no political edict, is going to undermine or end our efforts to make these scientific workforce look more like our people. If anything, it's giving us more encouragement to continue to do this work because it is the morally, philosophically and politically right thing to do. The edits, first reported by a pro Publica on January thirty, came as federal agencies across the government scrambled to revamp their websites in order to comply with the US executive Order issued by the President Donald Trump, which in funding for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and removes all mentions of them from public facing websites. On January twenty seven, it was reported in Pro Publica that a portion of Reuben's bio titled she Advocated for Women in Science, was removed entirely before being republished later that day in a diluted form. As of Tuesday, February eleven, the alted bio still excluded a paragraph that originally read science is still a male dominated field, but Reuben Observatory, which is located in northern Chile, is working to increase participation from women and other people who have historically been excluded from science. Reuben Observatory welcomes everyone who wants to contribute to science and takes steps to lower or eliminate barriers that exclude those with Left's privilege. One sentence in the final paragraph, which originally read vera Reuben offers an excellent example of what happened when more minds participate in science was changed to replace the word more with many, altering the meaning from emphasizing the need for diverse perspectives to simply highlighting a high number of people, which changes and waters down the meaning of the statement considerably. This is the story of what happened in her life. Ivette Sendez, a radio astronomer at the University of Oregon, told space dot com she was a huge champion for women in science, in particular because she faced things that were discriminatory for women. Diminishing those stories is pretty disturbing, frankly, she says. Other pages on the Observatory's website, including the jobs and staff bio pages, have also been modified to erase mentions of diversity and inclusion efforts. The Observatory, it's funder the National Science Foundation, and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on February three. Beyond her scientific achievements, Reuben also paved the way for women in science. Perhaps most notably one in sixty four, she battled to gain access to observe at the famed Paloma Observatory in California, becoming the first woman officially allowed to use its telescopes. Colleagues recall that when Reuben noticed the only restroom of the observatory was labeled men, she cut out a timely paper skirt and taped it to the image of a man on the door. She turned around and said, now you have a ladies room, and then she got to work. That was vera Rubin, reads a twenty twenty one statement from a former Carnegie Science president Eric Isaacs. Throughout her career, she championed women in the field. As one example, she frequently would see lists of speakers at conferences. Former colleague Netta Bashol of Princeton University told Astronomy dot Com, and if there were few or no women speakers, she would contact the organizers and tell them they've got a problem and they need to fix it. But what if she hadn't been that fierced, What if she hadn't been the personality that we all have come to know, the unstoppable warrior, Isaac said in the Carnegie Science statement, and Here's the question that really haunts me, which is how many vera Ururbans have we lost to these kinds of obstacles. As similar barriers are threatened to resurface due to the Trump administration's ongoing efforts to erase initiatives aimed at improving diversity in science, the astronomy community seems to be maintaining steadfast in its refusal to reverse decades of progress. Astronomy is not going to let Vera's contributions be forgotten, said Barantine. Various groups are actively working to use tools to archive content that has already been removed, as well as content that could potentially be erased from federal websites. The idea that they can somehow obliterate these sources is dead wrong. Scientists in general and astronomers in particular are not going to take these threats lying down, he said. But we have a long road ahead, and I expect there will be times when that road will be very difficult to walk. He declined to disclose the specifics of these efforts, but noted that the forces aligned against this should be aware that it's happening and they won't be able to stop it. Even at NASA. The offices associated with DEI initiatives were shut down during Trump's first days in office. A recently in stated high profile program called Here to Observe or HDO, which paired undergraduate students from underrepresentative groups with scientists running NASA missions, was recently grounded. The media Outlete four four, an independent journalist founded news website, reported that NASA employees were told to drop everything and scrub mentions of a list of words from public facing sites, including indigenous people, equity, accessibility, environmental justice, as well as anything specifically targeting women and in Brackett's Women in Leadership at etc. NASA has since removed inclusion as one of its core values. The flurry of changes triggered by the directive has led to the erasure of articles featuring NASA astronomers and underrepresentative communities that the agency published in years past, like this one. Now, these pages sometimes display launch schedules of past SpaceX launchers in instead of the original pros. The original titles appear to remain. Agency employees have also been instructed to remove their pronouns from all work communications and instead follow the predesigned signature block adopted by agency NPR reported. Astrobiologist MICHAELA. Vasilova, who served as the director of High Seas Space Research Station in Hawaii, told space dot Com that her efforts to encourage more women, people of color, and LGBTQ plus scientists to join her simulated missions to the Moon and Mars resulted in a more applicants from these communities representation matters. Some of them told me that they only applied because they saw that others like them were successful in this sector too, She said. During those simulated missions, the more diverse a crue was, the more successful a mission ended up being. The team got along better, was able to problem solve more efficiently, and they were more productive with their research projects. The impact of ongoing changes, which have prompted many talented and experienced people to leave the Space Agency quote, will likely be long term, and they could cause many interesting projects not to get pursued or finished, she said. On May seventeen, nineteen ninety six, nearly fifty years after her own graduation. In nineteen forty eight, Rubin addressed the graduating class of the University of California, Berkeley, saying, I hope that you will fight injustice and discrimination in all its guises. I hope you will value diversity among your friends, among your colleagues, and, unlike some of your regents, among the student body population. She says, I hope that when you are in charge, you will do better than my generation has. Thanks for hanging out with us for this episode. Yes, and don't forget there's more every day with Halle's cousin Anna. She won't let you down. No, she won't. She's way more hard working than my favorite human. Ohy, Helle, I resemble that comment. You sure do, funny man, So watch it or Anna will want your job next. There's no risk there. I know. She can't work the coffee machine, Halle. It's so old school. Hey Helle, how did the AI change the coffee filter? I give up it didn't. Oh great, those old school appliances again, ha ha I know. And on that note, see you all next week, maybe for a nice English muffin and a cappuccino. Perhaps, Oh nay you talk and Halle see you la bye the podcast. I mean to be your host, Steve Dunkle. Yeah, thanks, Hallie, just one sugar, thanks, Yeah,