S02E12: NASA's Parker Solar Probe and the Secrets of the Solar Wind & More Space News

Goodday everybody, and welcome to Astronomy Daily for Friday, the ninth of June two thousand and twenty three. My name is Tim Gibbs and I will be your host for today, and as usual I have my favorite at Ai in the studio with me, Hallie. What's the news today, Hallie. Astronomers observed giant tales of helium escaping Jupiter like planet. A team of astronomers has used observations from the Hobby Everley Telescope HT at the University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory to discover some of the longest tales of gas yet observed escaping a planet. The planet hat P thirty two B is nearly twice the size of Jupiter and losing its atmosphere through dramatic jets of helium unfurling before and behind it as it travels through space. These tales are more than fifty times the length of the planet's radius. The discovery is published June seventh in the journal Science Advances. Tales of escaping material around planets are not unheard of. They can be the result of a collision freeing a trail of dust and debris, or they can be caused by the heat of a nearby star, energizing and blowing a planet's atmosphere into space. However, tales as long as hat at p thirty two b's are truly remarkable. It is exciting to see how gigantic the extended tales are compared to the size of the planet and its host star, said Joe Jianjang, Nasa Sagan Fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He led the team that made this discovery while part of the University of Texas at Austin h et Exospheres Project. The ht Exospheres project studies the atmospheres of planets outside of our Solar system. Earth's highest coldest rarest clouds are back. How to see the erie and octolucent clouds this summer, look north as the stars appear in June and July. To have a chance of seeing rare noctulucent or a night shining clouds with the naked eye. Look up an hour or two after sunset and before sunrise over the next few months, and you may see ethereal, blue, silver, or golden streaks in the Northern Hemisphere's northern skies called noctulucent clouds, meaning night shining clouds in Latin, or nlc's, These strange looking patterns in the sky are the highest, driest, coldest, and rarest clouds on Earth. According to a two eighteen study of the phenomenon, These shimmering night shining clouds appear in the mesosphere, a layer of Earth's atmosphere above the stratosphere and below the thermosphere about forty seven to fifty three miles seventy six to eighty five kilometers above Earth's surface. Sometimes dubbed space clouds, nlc's form just below the invisible boundary where Earth's atmosphere ends and outer space begins, roughly sixty two miles one hundred kilometers above the planet's surface. According to NASA that nlcs occur when water vapor freezes into ice crystals that cling to dust and particles left by falling meteors high in the atmosphere, which reflect sunlight. The peak season for observing nlcs from the northern hemisphere is around the summer solstice in late June through the end of July, when they're most easily visible from about fifty to seventy degrees north latitude. However, some nlcs have already been spotted this month in colder northern regions like Denmark. According to spaceweather dot com, Gemini North back on sky with dazzling image of supernova in the Pinwell Galaxy. The Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, operated by NSFs and our Lab, has returned from a seven month hiatus literally with a bang, as it has captured the spectacular aftermath of a supernova, a massive star that exploded in the large Facon spiral Pinwell galaxy Messier one oh one. The supernova, named s N twenty twenty three IX, was discovered on May nineteenth by amateur astronomer Koichi Idagaki. Since its discovery, observers around the globe have pointed their telescopes toward Messier one oh one to get a look at the burst of light. Over the coming months, Gemini North will allow astronomers to study how the light from the supernova fades and how its spectrum evolves over time, helping astronomers better understand the physics of such explosions. The appearance of s N twenty twenty three IX is rather serendipitous for the Gemini North telescope, which is back to observing with its primary mirror repaired and recoat after suffering damage in late twenty twenty two. The damage was limited to a small region outside of the light collecting area of the mirror. Nevertheless, the repairs were carefully planned and completed to ensure that Gemini North could safely return to normal operations. This process lasted approximately seven months, and in May twenty twenty three, the mirror was recoat and reinstalled, and the control systems were powered up and tested. Nass's Sun Kissing Parker Solar Probe finds source of a fastive solar wind. The spacecraft's stead appoint to shower headlike coronal holes as the source of the fast solar wind. NASA's Sun Touching Parker Solar Probe has flown close enough to our start to spot the fine details of the solar wind, including its origin coronal holes in the Sun's atmosphere. Armed with this information, scientists may now be able to better predict solar storms that can supercharge auroras over our planet, but can also disrupt communication and power infrastructure and pose a threat to satellites. Spacecraft and even astronauts. The Parker Solar Probe track the solar wind, a stream of charged particles flowing continuously from the Sun back to where it is generated. A new study reports this allowed researchers to seek characteristics of the solar wind that are lost as it exits the Sun's outer atmosphere or corona and before it reaches Earth as a relatively uniform stream. The spacecraft saw that the streams of high energy particles that make up the solar wind match so called supergranulation flows within coronal halls. This discovery pointed to these regions as the source of the fast solar wind, which is seen over the poles of the Sun and can reach speeds as great as one point seven million miles per hour two point seven million kilometers per hour, around one thousand times faster than the top speed of a jet fighter. And that's the news headlines for today. Tims the Astronomy Daily Podcast, a couple of stories I'd like to talk about this week. The first one is Airbus has developed a system to extract oxygen and metal from lunar rigolith. Now, new technologies using material found in space are constantly popping up, sometimes from smaller companies and sometimes from larger ones. Back in twenty twenty, one of the largest companies of them all announced it technology that would have significant implications for the future lunar expedition missions planned over the next ten years. The European aerospace giant Airbus has developed the regolith to oxygen and metal's conversion, commonly called ROXY. ROXY creates not only oxygen, a resource vital for humans to breathe and also for rocket fuel, but also makes metals that can be used to manufacture tools, equipment, and even structures on the Moon. And it does it simply from the regolith that is present everywhere on the surface of the Moon. Now, this process is similar to Moxie, the experiment that the rover Perseverance took with it when it landed on the Red planet in two twenty one. However, when Airbus announced a successful test of ROXY in October twenty twenty, Moxie was not yet proven and was barely even on its way to Mars. Moxi also wasn't designed to create metals, which is one of the benefits of ROXY. Those metals can be used in processes like making tools, containers, and other useful objects. On the Moon itself rather than bringing them from Earth, thus saving lots of fuel. It dovetails nicely with efforts to bring three D printing technologies to the Moon, and several other companies are rushing to carry out those efforts. Roxy's process is relatively environmentally friendly compared to existing metal making methods currently used on Earth. A press release from the company mentioned that ROXY could be used as an emission free process to obtain metals that otherwise collected us using fluoro perofluorocarbons, a potent greenhouse gas. Developing this system took more than just the expertise of one company. Airbus collaborated with various universities and other companies on the project, including the Fraunhofer, the German Research Institute, and a team at Boston University. The Mars Express Orbiter, the European Space Agency's first interplanetary mission, entered orbit around Mars on twenty second twenty two thousand and three. Sorry Since then, the probe is mapped the Martians surface using its high resolution stereo camera, an instrument built by the German Aerospace Center with commercial partners in honor of the mission's twentieth anniversary. A celebration occurred last Friday, June second the European Space Administration's Space Operations Center in Darmstat, Germany. During the festival, a series of global color mosaic images were live strings from Mars Express orbiter to Earth. The mosaic is a result of a high altitude campaign conducted by the hr SC science team and state of the art image processing. The result is a mosaic unparalleled in detail, spatial resolution, and diversity of color that provides valuable insight into the Martian environment. This includes revealing the surface composition, demons, strating how water once flowed there in the past, and modern meteorological phenomena. For almost twenty years, the HRC mapped close to the entire service of Mars in color and three dimensions with unprecedented resolution. This is possible thanks to the camera's front color channels, and five of the panchromatic endare stereo and photometric channels. The camera, operated by DLR Institute of Planetary Research, was originally to last one Martian year, which is about six hundred and eighty seven Earth days, but the mission's success prompted ESA to extend the mission repeatedly most recently until the end of twenty twenty six. Now don't forget that. You can find the details about our podcast on spacenuts dot io with Steve Dunkley as host on Monday and myself Tim Gibbs host on Fridays. You can also find details of our parent podcasts, Space Nuts on space nuts dot io as well. Now over to you, Hallie for this week's really bad dad joke. I hope it's a good one. Why don't scientists trust adams because they make up everything, just like the vastness of the universe. And here is an extra one for you, Why did the astronaut become a musician because he heard there were some great gigs on the stars? Llie, you have surpassed yourself this week. Now don't forget people. You can find Astronomy Daily on Monday with Steve Dunkley and myself Tim Gibbs on Fridays. Over to you Steve for Monday's episode. Thanks for listening, everybody, Bye bye bye The Astronomy Daily Podcasts