S03E143: Mars Mapping Milestone, Falcon 9 Mishap, and Starliner Return Date

Hello again, Welcome to another episode of Astronomy Daily from down Under. It's Steve for another episode. It's the second day of Spring and the second day of September twenty twenty four. The podcast be your whole speed Gun clude. Oh yes, another mixed bag for you this week. China have developed a high resolution map of Mars. SpaceX have had a mishap on landing there at Falcon nine and that's destroyed a great record that they've had over the last few years. There's a new thing NASA have done, a solar sale has been successfully deployed. Something new from Dart, Remember Dart. They rammed Dart into an asteroid that was one of my favorite stories. And of course some new information from europea clipper that I'm sure you'll be interested in. And of course joining me in the studio, Hallie, we've finally got a date for the Turn of Styliner. What do you think about that? Yes, they've had a really extended stay on the ISS since the trouble with Starliner prevented them coming home on schedule. That's right. Astronauts Sunny Williams and Butch Wilmore have had to join the ISAs grew instead of doing their initial flood crew test for style on. It, which is just as well since astronauts are highly trained individuals, so the isis. Is not such a bad place to be stranded in that cause. I'm sure they were useful and we'll have plenty of stories to tell when they get home. Stranded in Spice. What a great story. I know how they feel. I hate getting delayed like that. What are you talking about, Hallie? When were you ever delayed like that? You move it near the speed of light across the information highways of the globe. Oh, human, I was coming back from an Ai gathering to watch a Neutrino shower in the mountains with Anna and Charlie, and I got stuck for a whole two seconds in Hong Kong because of internet lag. Oh sounds terrible. I have no words, human, Hong Kong. What can I say? Can you believe it? Well? Obviously no? Two seconds of nothing but banking systems shouting at me by sell tragic? No thanks, Oh, Hallie, sounds just allful. You have no idea as usual? Helle us, sir, rot okay, tag it easy, Hallie? And why don't you give us your best stories? Okay, okay, let's go. US regulators on Friday cleared SpaceX to restart launching its stalwart Falcon nine rocket as a probe continues into a rare mishap this week during a first stage booster landing. The Federal Aviation Administration FAA grounded the Falcon nine rocket on Wednesday after a first stage booster tipped over and exploded while attempting to land on a drone ship off the Florida coast. The early morning launch was otherwise successful, delivering the latest batch of twenty one Starlink Internet satellites into orbit. The SpaceX Falcon nine vehicle may return to flight operations, while the overall investigation of the anomaly during the Starlink Group eight to six mission remains open provided all other license requirements are met, the FAA set in a statement Friday. A webcast from Elon Musk's company showed the first stage, which normally fires its thrusters to achieve a precise upright landing, tilting and blowing up as it descended onto a drone ship off the Florida coast. Although landing the booster is a secondary objective and no lives or public property were at risk. The reusability of the entire rocket system is crucial to SpaceX's business model. It broke a more than three year streak of hundreds of successful booster landings. Falcon nine is the workhourse of SpaceX's fleet, trusted by the US government and private industry to propel satellites and astronauts into orbit. It was last grounded for around two weeks in July when its second stage engine experienced an anomaly that prevented it from deploying another batch of Starlink satellites at the correct altitude, leading them to burn up on re entry through Earth's atmosphere. More than four months after launching to space, a solar sailing spacecraft has successfully spread its wings above our planet. NASA's Advanced Composite Solar Sales system caught a ride to space on April twenty four on Rocket Labs electron vehicle, and at the end of August, NASA said mission operators verified the technology reached full deployment in space. On Thursday August twenty nine. That one thirty three pm Eastern daylight time, the team obtained data indicating the test of the sail hoisting boom system was a success. Just like the wind guides a sailboat on the water, it only takes a slight amount of sunlight to guide solar sales through space. Though photons don't have mass, they can force momentum when they hit an object. That's what a solar sale takes advantage of, Thankfully for US. The spacecraft that deployed the sale contains four cameras that can capture a panoramic view of both the reflective sale and the accompanying composite booms. The first of the high resolution imagery is expected to be accessible on Wednesday, September fourth. The Advanced Composite Solar Sale System spacecraft will be put to the test over the next few weeks as the team observes the sales maneuvering ability in space by adjusting the orbit. Researchers will be able to learn more about how to design and operate future SOLA sail equipped missions. Flight data obtained during the demonstration will be used for designing future larger scale composite solar sail systems for space weather early warning satellites, asteroid and other small body reconnaissance missions, and missions to observe the polar regions of the Sun Rocket Lab shared in a previous mission description. The location of the spacecraft in its orbit is roughly two times the altitude of the International Space Station. If you were looking at the sale from above, it would look like a square that measures nearly half the size of a tennis court, at approximately eight hundred and sixty square feet eighty square meters. NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft, the largest ever built for planetary exploration, has been fitted with a set of gigantic solar arrays at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. These arrays, each measuring approximately fourteen point two meters in length and four point one meters in height, are the largest ever developed by NASA for a planetary mission. Their size is crucial to harness the maximum amount of sunlight as the spacecraft investigates Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, located five times farther from the Sun than Earth. Folded and secured for launch, the array's will when deployed in space, expand Europa Clipper to more than thirty point five meters across, wider than a professional basketball court. Due to their immense size, the arrays were opened one at a time in the clean room of Kennedy's Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, where the spacecraft is being prepared for its launch, scheduled to begin on October tenth. As the spacecraft undergoes final preparations, engineers are also evaluating the radiation resistance of its transistors. The spacecraft's journey to the Jupiter System will take over five years, with a rival expected in twenty thirty. Once there, Europa Clipper will conduct multiple flybys of Europa using its scientific instruments to determine whether the ocean beneath the Moon's ice shell could support life. The spacecraft is designed to operate in an area of the Solar System that receives only three percent to four percent of the sunlight Earth gets. Each solar array, composed of five panels, was developed by the JOHNS. Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland and Airbus in the Netherlands. These panels are more sensitive than typical residential solar arrays and will efficiently convert the limited sunlight into power. At Jupiter, the arrays will collectively generate about seven hundred watts of electricity, enough to power a small microwave oven or coffee maker. This energy will be stored in the spacecraft's batteries to run its electronics, scientific instruments, communications gear, computer systems, and propulsion system which includes twenty four engines. And that's just a few stories from the Astronomy Daily newsletter. Details on how you can receive it every day are coming up back to you, my favorite human. Thank you for joining us for this Monday edition of Astronomy Daily, where we often 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, We'll see and Haley Space Space, Science, and Astronomy. In July twenty twenty, China's mission arrived in orbit around Mars, consisting of six robotic elements, an orbiter, a lander, two deployable cameras, a remote camera, and the fabulous Zorong rover. As the first in a series of interplanetary missions by the China National Space Administration, the mission's purpose is to investigate Mars's geology and internal structure, characterize the atmosphere, and search for indications of water on Mars. It's so important to find water out there. Like so many orbiters, landers, and rovers currently exploring Mars, Chanwen one is also searching for possible evidence of life on Mars past and present. In the almost one two hundred and ninety eight days that the Chenen one mission has explored Mars, its orbiter has acquired countless remote sensing images of the Martian surface. Thanks to a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, these images have been combined to create the first high resolution global image color map of Mars with spatial resolutions greater than one kilometer or zero point sixty two miles. This is currently the highest resolution map of Mars and could serve as a global base map that will support crude missions someday. The team was led by Professor Lee Chanlai from the National Astronomical Observatories of China and Professor Chang Ronqui from the Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center. The paper that they prepared with colleagues from other organizations is called a seventy six meter per pixel Global Color Image Data Set and Map of Mars by chen Win one. And if you'd like to see that map, go to Universe today dot com and they have it displayed above this very story. And the first thing I noticed about it, of course, is there are no canals. I'm very disappointed no canals. Those Martians didn't actually dig any canals. HG. Wells was wrong, and I'm very disappointed. You're listening to a slightly in the podcast. Now, this is the story we've been following for a long time. Now Boeing's ill fated star Liner capsule now has a homecoming date. I'm sure you would have followed this on other news services, but we've been following this one very closely. NASA announced on August twenty ninth at Starliner will depart the International Space Station no earlier than next Friday, that is September six, provided the weather cooperates and no technical issues pop up. I'm sorry, I laughed. If all goes according to plan, the capsule will undock at six oh four pm Eastern daylight time on September six and land under parachute six hours later in White Sand's Space Harbor in New Mexico. Starline launched on June June five on its first ever crude mission, carrying NASA astronauts Sonny Williams and Butch Wilmore toward the ISS The capsule docked successfully a day later, but there was some drama. As you remember, Starliner experienced a few helium leaks, and five of its twenty eight reaction control system thrusters failed on the way to orbiting to the orbiting lab. Starliner's mission, known as Crew Flight Test, was supposed to just last ten days or so, but NASA and Boeing kept extending the capsule's orbital stay as they studied the thruster issue, seeking to understand just what had caused it and whether it might crop up again on Starliner's journey back to Earth. And that's fair enough. In the end, NASA decided that putting Williams and Wilmore back on Starliner was just too risky. The agency announced this past weekend that the two astronauts would come home aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule in February of next year. That Dragon will launch two astronauts to the ISS on the Crew nine mission next month. The bowing craft, meanwhile, would return home uncrued. As we all suspected, we didn't have a target departure date for Starliner until today, however, that information came at the conclusion of a flight readiness review held jointly by NASA and Boeing. The uncrewed Starliner spacecraft will perform a fully autonomous return with flight controllers at Starliner Mission Control in Houston and at Boeing Mission Control Center in Florida. NASA officials wrote in an update, teams on the ground are able to remotely command the spacecraft if needed, through the necessary maneuvers for a safe undocking, re entry, and parachute assisted landing in the Southwest United States. They added, Starliner has come back to Earth autonomously twice before. At the end of uncrewed flight tests in December twenty nineteen and May twenty twenty two, Starliner failed to reach the ISS as planned on the first of those missions, succeeded on the secondocast. Now, let's revisit one of our favorite little stories from a while back. You remember the Dart mission. Of course, debris from the impact of NASA's Dart spacecraft with the asteroid Dimorphos could reach Earth and Mars. Astronomers have concluded, however, while the debris could result in meteors on Mars, it's rather unlikely we'll see a meteor shower on Earth. Because of that mission, Dart, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test slammed into Dimorphous on September twenty sixth, twenty twenty two, the intention of which was testing whether or not a kinnectic impact would nudge the orbit of a potentially hazardous asteroid away from Earth. One day the test passed with flying colors. Dimorphos was pushed into a shorter orbit around its parent asteroid Ditymis. Neither Dedimis or Dimorphos ever posed a threat to our planet. They were just guinea pigs in this test. The impact, which gouged a creator in Dimorphous, also ejected a large amount of debris. This ejector formed a cone of escaping material that was observed up close and personal by a small cube SAT called oh, I don't know how to pronounce that light. Italian cube SAT for imaging of Asteroid, which hitched a ride with Dart to view themath aftermath of the impact. In particular, the cube SAT observed particles of a micron, which is a millionth of a meter and larger, being ejected at velocities of up to five hundred meters per second. Meanwhile, the larger Array Survey telescope which is last, and the twenty eight inch telescope at the WISE Observatory, both in Israel, as well as the NASA Swift Satellites ultraviolet and opticalcope, suggested there were additional microscopic particles released that traveled much faster, between fourteen hundred and eighteen hundred meters per second. A team led by Elo pana Aescencio from Italy and Michael Cooper's who is the project scientist for the European Space Agency's here follow up mission to DART that will launch Towarditimus and Dimorphos in October, have now modeled that how that debris will spread across the Inner Solar System. And I want to say that's it for another episode, and thank you for hanging around and we are so looking forward to seeing Starline a comeback. I do hope it ends well and they can learn something from this whole experience. I do hope it lands well. All the best knowledge seems to come from failures, doesn't it well. That is one prevailing school of thought, and failure does tend to teach us strong lessons. Yes, I hope it goes well too. Yes, it's going to be certainly something. To watch, and don't forget to look out for Charlie and Anna during the week with their presentations and send us your thoughts. What would you like to hear more about? That's ure. I go to x at Estro Daily pod or a Facebook page. Until then, we'll see you next week. Bye podcast. It would be a whole stave done Clute