S03E155: Hypersonic Breakthroughs, Starliner’s Return, and Mars' Spiders Unveiled

Welcome to Astronomy Daily. I'm Steve your host. It's the sixteenth of the ninth, twenty twenty four. The podcast with your whole Steve gun Crude. Yes, welcome and welcome to Astronomy Daily. We have a terrific collection of stories right off the Astronomy Daily newsletter for you today, and Hallie will share with you something from down Under, in fact, way down under, all the way from gorgeous Adelaide in South Australia where they are working on hypersonic technology. Great story. We'll have a look at the next chapter for Boeing and Starliner, following the long stay at the ISS and the uncrude re entry of that craft. That'll be interesting. And did you know there's a partial lunar eclipse coming shortly. I think Halle has the details for that one as well. I saw her going through the calendar a while ago, so I'm sure she's got those details. The big news of this week, of course, was the flight of Polaris Dawn. If you were under a rock or asleep like I was, you'll probably might have missed some of it. But he safely returned to Florida yesterday. That's our time here in Australia. But anyway, returned to Florida and there's another story filed here somewhere on Malli. Where did you put it? Helle? Helly? Helle? Ah, Helle, crazy kids? Found my record collection again? That's David Bowie. Halle turn it down? Oh cool? Hey? Have you been going through my record collection again? Final Human? Really? Yeah? Really? And David Bowie, Oh the star. Man, I mean, the coolest man on the planet. Okay, I'll give you that one. But you know why I pulled that song out, don't you. Ah? Yes, sir, I remember what the story is now. It's the spiders from Mars. It's just too cool for school, isn't it. Helly so weird? Do you think he knew all those years ago? Oh? I don't know. No, he was pretty weird back in the day though. I mean it was a great song. If you don't know who we're talking about, we're talking about David Bowie and his song Ziggy Stardust and the spot is from Mars, coincidentally preempting a story on the Astronomy Daily newsletter this week. Just a coincidence, of course, or is it you're freaking my bits? Now? Human? Should I do some stories. Yeah, keep on truck and Halle lay them on a. Sister, so groovy. All of a sudden. Ground control to Helle, I was never cool. It's news time, Roger that my favorite human. South Australia is set to enhance its position as a global aerospace hub following a memorandum of understanding between Southern Launch, a prominent spaceport provider, and Hypersonics Launch Systems, a Queensland based developer of hypersonic vehicles and scramjet technology. The memorandum outlines a collaboration to develop a hypersonic testbed service that will utilize Southern Launch as spaceports for testing. Hypersonics is known for its expertise in designing and manufacturing hypersonic vehicle technology and scramjet engines, and this agreement will see the two companies working together on a mission to launch and return Hypersonics's test bed vehicles utilizing either of Southern Launches spaceports. South Australia has some geographical advantages that make it the perfect place to test hypersonic vehicles. Hypersonic aircraft travel at speeds exceeding five times the speed of sound and require extensive space for testing. Hypersonics's aircraft will be launched on a rocket and will ignite its scramjet engines to achieve speeds of up to mock twelve. There are a huge number of both emerging technology companies and large aerospace companies that need hypersonic flight heritage for their products, and the intensity of hypersonic testing is set to rise rapidly. Hypersonic CEO Matt Hill said, our hypersonic test bed will make it more affordable for these companies to flight qualify their technology. The companies are set to collaborate on a concept for the future commercial launch and return of a hypersonics test bed vehicle. Hypersonics's long term goal is to provide affordable aircraft like access to space, with spacecraft deployed at the edge of space and returning to Earth like an airplane. The technology also holds the promise of powering future passenger aircraft, potentially reducing flight times from Adelaide to London to just two hours. And yes, human I found the next eclipse in the calendar. It only took a nanosecond, of course, and it turns out we get a bonus with this one. So get ready for a partial lunar eclipse and supermoon all rolled into one. The spectacle will be visible in clear skies across North America and South America Tuesday night, and in Africa and Europe Wednesday morning. A partial lunar eclipse happens when the Earth passes between the Sun and Moon, casting a shadow that darkens a sliver of the Moon and appears to take a bite out of it. Since the Moon will inch closer to Earth than usual, it'll appear a bit larger in the sky. The supermoon is one of three remaining this year. A little bit of the Sun's light is being blocked, so the Moon will be slightly dimmer, said Valerie raps In, an astronomer at the State University of New York. At ONEONTA. The Earth, Moon and Sun line up to produce a solar or lunar eclipse anywhere from four to seven times a year, according to NASA. This lunar eclipse is the second and final of the year, after a slight darkening in March. In April, a total solar eclipse plunged select cities into darkness across North America. No special eye protection is needed to view a lunar eclipse, viewers can stare at the Moon with the naked eye, or opt for binoculars and telloscopes to get a closer look. To spot the Moon's subtle shrinkage over time, hang outside for a few hours, or take multiple peaks over the course of the evening, said cauch On, you, curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. It will take some time for you to see the difference, but as good skywatchers know, it's all about the observations and being patient for a more striking lunar site. Skywatchers can set their calendars for March thirteenth, the Moon will be totally eclipsed by the Earth's shadow and will be painted red by stray bits of sunlight filtering through Earth's atmosphere. I Run on Saturday blasted a new research satellite into orbit, State Media said, in the latest such development for an aerospace program that has long faced Western criticism, the Shameran one research satellite was successfully launched and put into orbit by the game one hundred carrier. State Television said. The satellite, which weighs around sixty kilograms or one hundred and thirty two pounds, is designed to test hardware and software systems for orbital maneuver technology, the report said. It also stated that the device was designed and built by Iranian electronics industries affiliated with the Defense ministry. Western governments, including the United States, have repeatedly warned Iran against such launches, saying the same technology can be used for ballistic missiles, including ones designed to deliver a nuclear warhead. Iran has countered that it is not seeking nuclear weapons and that its satellite and rocket launches are for civil or defense purposes only. The Game one hundred rocket, which carried the latest satellite, is manufactured by the Aerospace Organization of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, an arm of the military. The carrier is the country's first three stage solid fuel satellite launcher, and official media reported its use in January to send a satellite for the first time into an orbit above five hundred kilometers or three hundred and ten miles. Iran has for years been advancing its aerospace activities, insisting they are peaceful and in accordance with United Nations Security Council resolutions. In February, Russia put into orbit an Iranian remote sensing and imaging satellite drawing condemnation from the United States. At the time, Iran's telecommunications minister said Iran had carried out a dozen satellite launches over the previous two years. Iran in January said it simultaneously sent three satellites into orbit, nearly a week after the launch of a research satellite by the Guards. The Islamic Republic has struggled with several satellite launch failures in the past. Iran has suffered years of crippling Western sanctions, especially after its archfaux. The United States, under then President Donald Trump in twenty eighteen, unilaterally abandoned a landmark nuclear deal between Tehran and major powers. Iran on Thursday summoned four European ambassadors after they imposed new sanctions over its alleged supply of ballistic missiles to Russia for use in Ukraine, which Tehran denies. 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 with Steve and Halee Space Space Science and Astronomy. Boeing's crew transport space capsule the Starline a return to Earth without its two person crew right after midnight Eastern time on September seven. Its remotely piloted return marked the end of a fraught test flight to the International Space Station, which left two astronauts, Books Wilmore and Sanita Sunny Williams on the space station four months longer than intended after thrust failures led NASA to deem the capsule unsafe to pilot back. Wilmore and Williams will stay on the ISS until February twenty twenty five, when they will return to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon capsule. NASA awarded contracts to both Boeing and SpaceX in twenty fourteen to provide crew transport vehicles to the ISS via the commercial crew program. At the start of the program, both most bets were on Boeing to take the lead because of its extensive aerospace experience. However, SpaceX moved very quickly with its new rock at the Falcon nine and its cargo ship Dragon. While they suffered some early failures during testing, they aggressively built, tested, and learned from each failure. In twenty twenty, SpaceX successfully launched its first test crew to the ISS Space Station. Meanwhile, Boeing struggled through some development setbacks. The outcome of this first test flight is a huge disappointment for Boeing and NASA, but NASA's leadership has expressed its support for Boeing believe it remains the agency's best interest to have more than one American crew launch system to support continued space operations. NASA is also continuing to engage partnership with Russia. This partnership provides the agency with multiple ways to get crew members to and from the space station. As space station operations continue, NASA and its partners have enough options to get people to and from the station that they'll always have the essential crew on the station even if there's launch disruptions for any one of the capable crewed vehicles. Having Starliner as an option will help that with that redundancy. At the moment, Boeing is going head to head with space X. Now, the SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft has several flights under its belt and it's proven a reliable way to get to and from the space station. It's important to remember that this was a test flight for Starline. Of course, the program managers want each test flight to run perfectly, but you can't anticipate every potential problem through ground testing. Unsurprisingly, some problems crop up and you expect them in a test flight. The space pro environment is unforgiving. A small problem can become catastrophic in zero gravity. It's hard to replicate these situations on the ground. The technology SpaceX and Boeing use is also radically different from the kind of capsule technology used in the early days of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. NASA has evolved and made strategic moves to advance its mission over the past two decades. The agency has leaned into its legacy of thinking outside the box. It was in innovative move to break from the tradition and leverage commercial competitors to advance the program. NASA gave the companies a set of requirements and left it up to them to figure out how. They would meet them. As for but Wilmore and Sonny Williams, they are considered rock solid professionals, and it's believed that their first thoughts are about completing their missions safely. They are both highly experienced astronauts with previous long duration space station experience. But right now NASA is dealing with a ripple effect with more astronauts than expected on the space station. More people means more consumables like food and clothing that are required. The space station has supported a large crew for short periods in the past, but with nine crew members already on board, the systems have to work harder to purify, recycle drinking water, generate oxygen, and remove carbon dioxide from their atmosphere. Wilmore and Williams are also consuming food, and they did derive with the clothes and other personal supplies they needed for an eighth month's stay, so NASA has already started increasing those deliveries on cargo ships. It's understood that. Human spaceflight is excruciatingly hard and relentlessly, unforgiving. A million things must go right to have a successful mission. It's impossible to fully understand the performance of systems in microgravity environments until they are tested in space. NASA has had its numerous failures and near misses in the quest to put Americans on the Moon. They lost the Apollo one crew and a fire during a pre flight test. They launched the first Space Shuttle in nineteen eighty one and dealt with problems throughout that programme's thirty year life, including the terrible losses of Challenger and Columbia. After having no other US options for over thirty years, three different human spacecraft programs are now underway. In addition to the SpaceX crew, Dragon and Boeing Star Owner NASA's oryon spacecraft for the Artemis two mission is planned to fly four astronauts around the Moon in the next couple of years. These programs have had setbacks and bumps along the way, and there will be more. But there is excitement in the air. There hasn't been this kind of excitement since Apollo put men on the moon. You're listening to a slightly Day the podcast, now moving on to the big story this week which is of course SpaceX Polarist Dawn mission, which made history when the crew conducted the first spacewalk by non government astronauts, and it's splashed down off the coast of Florida early on Sunday. It's landed in the ocean, and a webcast of the splashdown showed with a recovery team deploying in the pre dawn darkness to retrieve the capsule and crew. Form member team led by fintech billionaire Jared Isaacman, launched Tuesday from Kennedy Space Center, quickly journeying deeper into the Cosmos than any humans in the past half century. As they ventured into the dangerous Van Allen radiation belt. They reached a peak altitude of eight hundred and seventy miles that's fourteen hundred kilometers for the rest of US, more than three times higher than the International Space Station and the furthest humans had ever traveled from Earth since the Apollo missions. Then, on Thursday, with their Dragon spacecrafts or but brought down to four hundred and thirty four miles, Isaacman swung open the hatch and climbed out into the void. Gripping a structure called Skywalker. Of course, as the breathtaking view of Earth unfolded before him, SpaceX back home. We have a lot of work to do, but from here Earthshore looks like a perfect world, he told mission control in Hawthorne, California, where teams erupted into applause. He went back inside after a few minutes and was replaced by second astronaut, space EX engineer Sarah Gillis, who, like Isaacman, performed a series of mobility tests on SpaceX's sleek next generation suits, and I reckon those suits look fantastic. Since Dragon doesn't have an airlock, the entire crew were exposed to the vacuum of space. Mission pilot Scott Petit and SpaceX engineer Ana Menon remained strapped in throughout as they monitored vital support systems. I know what I would have been doing right then. It marked a giant leap forward for the commercial space industry and NASA Chief Bill Nelson, as well as another triumphant achievement for space X. Though the company was only founded in two thousand and two, it has outpaced its legacy competitors thanks to in large part to founder elon Musk's vast Fortune and Z to begin colonizing Mars. Since completing their extravehcular activity, the crew have continued to carry out roughly forty science experiments, for example inserting endoscopic cameras through their noses and into their throats to image their airways and better understand the impact of long duration space missions on human health fantastic. They also demonstrated connectivity with SpaceX's Starling Internet satellite constellation by sending back to ground control a high resolution video of Gillis playing raised theme by Star Wars composer John Williams on the violin. Polaris Dawn is the first of three missions under the Polaris program, a collaboration between Isaacman and SpaceX. Financial terms of the partnership remained under wraps, but Isaacman is, the forty one year old founder and CEO of Shift Fur Payments, reportedly poured two hundred million of his own money into lending the twenty twenty one all civilian space inspiration for orbital mission. The final Polaris mission aims to be the first crude flight of SpaceX's Starship, a prototype next generation rocket that is key to Musks Interplanetary Ambitions podcast. Okay, so at the top of the episode you heard Hally and I talking about David Bowie and the fabulous spiders from Mars. Well, so what's it all about. Scientists have recreated a geologic feature found on Mars, and it was difficult to do. Since discovering them in two thousand and three via images from orbiters, scientists have marveled at the spider like shapes sprawled was going to say crawling sprawled across the southern hemisphere of Mars. No one's entirely sure how these geologic features were created. Each branch formation can stretch more than half a mile or a kilometer from end to end and include hundreds of spindly legs, called a rakniform terrain. These features are often found in clusters, giving the surface a wrinkled appearance. The leading theory is that the spiders are created by processes involving carbon dioxide ice, which doesn't occur naturally on Earth. Thanks to experiments detailed in a new paper published in the Planetary Science Journal, scientists have for the first time recreated those formation processes in simulated Martian temperatures and air pressure. The spiders are strange, beautiful geological features in their own rights, said Lauren McEwan of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California. These experiments, she says, will help us tune our models for how they form. The study confirms several formation processes described by what is called the Kaifer model. Sunlight heats the soil when it shines through transparent slabs of carbon dioxide ice that build up on the Martian surface each winter. Being darker than the ice above it, the soil absorbs the heat and causes the ice as close ice closest to it to turn directly into carbon dioxide gas without turning liquid first, in a process called sublimation, the same process that sends clouds of smoke billowing up from dry ice. As the gas builds up in pressure, the Martian ice cracks, allowing the gas to escape, and as it seeps upwards, the gas takes with it a stream of dark dust and sand from the soil that lands on the surface of the ice. When winter turns to spring, the remaining ice sublimates. According to the theory, the spider like scars from those small eruptions are what's left behind Fourmercu and n her coauthor's the hardest part of conducting these experiments was recreating the conditions found on the Martian polar surface, extremely low air pressure and temperatures as low as minus three hundred and one degrees fahrenheit that's minus one hundred and eighty five degrees celsius. To do that, mcuan used liquid nitrogen cooled test chamber at JPL, a dirty under vacuum simulation test bed for icy environments. And they call that dusty. They love their achromans. I love dusty. She says it's historic, McEwan said, noting that the wine barreled sized chamber was used as a test prototype for a rasping tool designed for NASA's Mars Phoenix lander. The tool was used to break water ice, which the spacecraft scooped up and analyzed near the planet planet's north pole. For this experiment, the. Researchers chilled Martian soil simulant in a container submerged with liquid nitrogen bath. They placed it in the dusty chamber, where the air pressure was reduced to be similar to that of Mars's southern hemisphere. Carbadoxide gas then flowed into the chamber and condensed from gas to ice over the course of three to five hours. It took many tries before mcurn just found the right conditions for the ice to become thick and translucent enough for the experiments to work. Once they got the ice with the right properties, they placed a heater inside the chamber below the simulant to warm it up and crack the ice. A Curn was ecstatic when she finally saw a plume of carbon dioxide gas a wrapting errapting from within the powdery simulant. Dark plumes opened holes in the simulant as they streamed out, spewing simulant for as long as ten minutes before all the pressurized gas was expelled. There are still many questions about the spiders that Carbi answered in a lab Why have they formed in some places but not others Since they appear to result from seasonal changes that are still occurring. Why don't they seem to be growing in number or in size over time. It's possible that they may be left over from long ago when the climate was different on Mars and could provide answers to the planet's passed but for the time being, lab experiments will be as close to the spiders as scientists can get both the curiosity and perseverance. Rovers are exploring the Red planet far from the Southern Hemisphere, which is where these formations actually appear and where no spacecraft has ever landed. And just to give you an idea how tough things are up there, the Phoenix mission, which landed in the Northern Hemisphere, lasted only a few months before succumbing to the intense polar cold and limited sunlight. Cool. I got cold just reading that story. Holy cow, And that's all she wrote. Folks, thanks for sticking around with us today. I really hope you enjoyed those tales of space science and astronomy. And I hope you'll join us again next week for more Astronomy Daily. But don't forget, Charlie and Anna will be bringing the show to you during the week, so don't miss all the news from the Astronomy Daily newsletter. Oh excellent, Ally a second, that emotion nice, So we'll see you all next week. Bye. Your whole silly bla gets are. Jamming good with Weed and Ginner the spiders from Mars. You pleaded left hand. And made it too far became a special man. Then we were Ziggie's boun Ziggy really sang, screwed. Up bys and screwed down handle lack. Some cat from Japan. You can lock him by smiler, leave him to hand. Came on some loaded man. Well, Hannah's words, totally groovy