S03E221: December's Planet Parade, Osiris Rex's Atmospheric Triumph, and Lunar Caves Unveiled

Hi again and welcome to Astronomy Daily. It's this second of December twenty twenty four. Podd, I mean to be a whole Steve Dunkle, Yes, hello again. I'm your host Steve Dunkley for this Monday episode, and joining me as always is my digital pal, who's fun to be with. Helly, welcome back. Great to be here with my favorite human. Shall we get straight into the stories today? I feel like it. Why not, let's do it. Let's make it a tag team episode. What do you think, Oki. Doki, let's go. It's going to be a fun month for planet watching, and you can count on the month sky Tour episode to tell you where and when to catch the five wandering stars that you can see by eye. Even better, this month features what is arguably the best media show of the year. Let's start with Venus, which is well up in the southwest as evening twil light fades and it's gradually getting higher. Venus is truly brilliant. It's at least a dozen times brighter than any other night time star. Once it gets good and dark, look diagonally to the upper left of Venus, higher up toward the south and you'll bump into Saturn. Now, this is not the most dazzling of planets, but there's an easy way to spot Saturn. Just follow the moon. Its razor thin crescent skirts past Venus on the fourth, Then three nights later, on the seventh, you'll find the Moon to the lower right of Saturn. Throughout December, Jupiter is an unmistakable beacon in the eastern sky after sunset. To its right are Aldeboran and the stars of Taurus, while the hourglass shape of Orion rises into view. But Jupiter is the headliner for this month's planet parade. As it gets dark, turn around so your back is toward where the sun set, and feast your eyes on brilliant Jupiter rising low in the east. Jupiter can't quite match the brilliance of Venus, but right now it comes pretty close. On December seventh, the king of planet and its reaches opposition, meaning it appears opposite the Sun in our sky. It also means that Jupiter is just about as close to us as it can get. As you watch Jupiter, make a mental note of where it is with respect to the horizon and check the time. Then look in that same spot four hours later and you'll be greeted by another bright planet, Mars. It's bringing up the rear in this month's four planet parade. The only bright planet that's missing is Mercury, but December offers a good chance to see it as well. You'll need to be up before dawn during the final days of twenty twenty four, look toward the southeast, starting about forty five minutes before sunrise. Mercury is making its best pre dawn appearance of the year, so spotting it should be fairly easy. Meanwhile, the stars of winter are gradually pivoting into view, led by Orion, which rises in the east not long after nightfall, and December is also the month of the Geminid meteor Shower, arguably the year's best display of shooting stars. Astronomy okay. The Osiris REX mission achieved a historic milestone last year as the first US mission to return an asteroid sample to Earth, bringing with it a wealth of groundbreaking data. An international team led by Sandia National Laboratories and including researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, has now shared preliminary findings from the capsules atmospheric reentry. The capsules return marked the largest geophysical observation effort of its kind. This project was a unique opportunity for us to observe the geophysical signals produced by a meta sized object traveling at hyper hypersonic speeds, said Chris Carr, lead researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory. There are few chances for scientists to be prepared to collect this type of data that we need to propel scientific inquiry for years to come. The campaign involved over four hundred centss, many of which were stationed the Eureka, Nevada along the loneliest road in America. Given the size of the project, there were many objectives among the more than eighty collaborators. One team of Los Alamos scientists focused on distributed acoustic sensing, and the paper as a whole encompassed many methods to obtain data during the capsule's return. Though space matter does pass through Earth's atmosphere, it is difficult to determine where and when the object will make its entry. Even when it is possible to determine those factors, the financial and logistic constraints will almost certainly render it a non stata. This results in very limited real time observational data about the behavior of foreign objects entering the atmosphere. The Osiris REX sample return capsure gives research as unique opportunity to collect this data for our distributed Acoustic Sensing subteam. It was the fact that we recorded the signal using a surface laid cable car said. This was the first time such a signal was recorded by DAS, and going into the field work, we weren't sure if it would be successful. We were very excited to see the first plots of our data and see that we had recorded it. The preliminary findings of the campaign show implications for future projects in space and on the ground, specifically aiding the development of entry and propagation models. This paper documents the process used to detect and record the entry of the capsule, and it shows that the methods are capable of handling the kind of observation needed in this large of a campaign. It has substantially increased knowledge of entry detections from space objects and will allow researchers to better understand how objects enter the Earth's atmosphere. 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 Daily. We'll see in Hay space, space science and astronomy. An international team of scientists, using data from NASASLRO Lunar Reconnaissance orbiter, has discovered evidence of caves beneath the Moon's surface. In reanalyzing radar data collected by lro's MINIRF miniature radio frequency instrument in twenty ten, the team found evidence of a cave extending more than two hundred feet from the base of a pit. The pit is located two hundred and thirty miles northeast of the first human landing site on the Moon, in Mare tranquil Aitatus. The full extent of the cave is unknown, but it could stretch for miles beneath the mare. Scientists have suspected for decades that there are subsurface caves on the Moon, just like there are on Earth. Pits that may lead to caves were suggested in images from NASA's lunar orbiters that map the Moon's surface before NASA's Apollo human landings. A pit was then confirmed in two thousand and nine from images taken by JAXA's Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency Kagaya orbiter, and many have since been found across the Moon through images and thermal measurements of the surface taken by LRORO. Now, the analysis of the MINIRF radar data tells us how far these caves might extend, said Noah Petro. LRO project's scientist, based it NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in green Belt, Maryland. LRO reveals lunar pits could support human activity on the lunar surface, like lava tubes found here on Earth. Scientists suspect that lunar caves formed when molten lava flowed beneath a field of cooled lava, or a crust formed over a river. Of lava, leaving a long hollow tunnel. If the ceiling of a solidified lava tube collapses, it opens a pit like a skylight that can lead into the rest of the cave like tube. Ds of that cons all wall listen to Astarai the podcast now. Spice exploration is a dangerous business, especially when squishy living organisms such as humans are involved. NASA has always prodded itself on how seriously it takes the safety of its astronauts. So as it gears up for the next big push in crude spe exploration, the Otomus program, it is looking for solutions to potentially catastrophic situations that might arise. One such catastrophe would be if one of the Artemis astronauts was incapacitated and couldn't return to the lander. The only person who could potentially be able to save them would be a fellow astronaut. But carrying a fully suited human back to the base of operations could be a challenge for an astronauts similarly kitted out in their own bulky suits. So NASA decided to address it as precisely that a challenge and ask for input from the general public, offering up a twenty thousand dollars prize for the best solution to the problem. The challenge the South Poles Safety Designing the NASA Lunar Rescue System was announced on November fourteen and accepts entries until January twenty three, twenty twenty five. It awards forty five thousand dollars to at least three winners, including twenty thousand dollars to the first place winner. So what does the challenge actually involve? The work product is a design document for a system capable of moving a fully suited astronauts at least two kilometers up a twenty degree slope without being attached to a rover. Oh and it has to be able to operate in harsh conditions of the lunar South Pole. Typically a fully suited human wearing the new Axiom extra Vehiclar Mobility Suit. The new spacesuit explicitly designed for the Artemis missions, will weigh around three hundred and forty three kilos that's seven hundred and fifty five pounds for you old fashion types. However, lunar gravity is only about one sixth that of Earth, so it will feel more like they weigh about fifty seven kilos or one hundred and twenty five pounds. That's still a lot to carry, but much more manageable. However, it's probably infeasible for the other astronaut to fire and carry their unconscious comrade over that distance, especially since they are wearing their own spacesuit, so it's up to the technology to do the job. So to do so, it will have to evade the pitfalls in some cases literally of the lunar South Pole. One hazard is the extreme temperatures, which can range from fifty four degrees in full daylight to minus two hundred and three degrees at night in Any materials used in the especially electronics, would therefore need to be able to withstand such wild temperature swings. Other hazards include razor sharp lunar regolith, which is expected to cause havoc on most moving mechanical systems on the Moon navigating around craters and giant boulders, while hopefully dodging micro meteoride meteoroid impacts adds to the complex nature of the rescue environment. A panel of experts, including some NASA engineers, will judge this competition. Their scorecards will include categories like the overall mass of the solution, its ease of use, and how much it impacts the suit design if any. Luckily, treating the fallen astronaut while on the move back to safety is outside the scope of this challenge. Suppose you're interested in participating, potentially earning you or your team tens of thousands of dollars. In that case, NASA is accepting submissions through the hero ex portal commonly used for public challenges, through January twenty fifth. Maybe someday you'll see your creation on the surf surface of the Moon, even if it will hopefully never be used. And that, dear listeners, was the December two tag team episode of Astronomy Daily. Thank you Hallie, and thank you favorite human. You did good. Oh, thank you Hallye, and you've done pretty good yourself. I hope you all enjoyed today's episode, and if you haven't already, head over to our home site as I mentioned earlier, and put your email in the slot provided to receive the now famous Astronomy Daily newsletter each day for what's all that's happening in space, space, science. And astronomy. That's what I was going to say, And tune in. For my cousin Anna each day this week with her fantastic episodes for more and more. She's amazing. Yes, it's the bar, very high, very hard to keep up with. She's so polished, very classy. Okay, okay, don't go on about it. So anyway, we'll catch you all next week. And I nearly forgot a big shout out to our pals Nikki, Jamie and Erica who are all following us on X and thanks for listening, and we'll see you all next Monday. Bye Monday Podcast. We'd be a whole feed, don't clue