Space Innovations and Cosmic Mysteries: From Ultrafast Bursts to Orbital Tensions | S02E51

[00:00:00] Hi again, it's Steve here with another episode of Astronomy Daily for the 23rd of October 2023. Well it's nice to be with you and lovely to have our dynamic digital delight on board again. G'day Hallie!

[00:00:20] Hi, they're human. Happy to hang with you again. I hear you had a celebration this weekend grandad. I sure did. My beautiful granddaughter Nora hit her second birthday milestone and we traveled from Newcastle where I lived to Sydney to celebrate with the family on a very warm Aussie

[00:00:37] summery day. It was 30 degrees outside, very warm indeed. That sounds like wonderful fun. Well it was great fun to surround Nora with a great big crowd of family and shower her with lovely presents of course and all the way to the afternoon when she could hardly stay awake.

[00:00:54] Day for a little lovely. You big, softie. Oh I know. Okay. I've got some stories for everyone from the Astronomy Daily newsletter so shall we get right into it? Well you've got the stage Hallie, I say go for it. Here are today's short takes.

[00:01:17] When it comes to the current era of space exploration one of the most important trends is the way new technologies and processes are lowering the cost of sending crews and payloads to space. This includes NASA which recently built and tested an aluminum rocket engine nozzle

[00:01:32] manufactured using their new reactive additive manufacturing for the fourth industrial revolution process. Ramfire for short this production process creates virtually no waste and is very rapid, cost effective and efficient compared to traditional methods whereas it was once confined to

[00:01:50] modeling and prototyping the technologies applications have expanded considerably in recent years including the aerospace industry. The aluminum nozzle was developed by NASA's announcement of collaborative opportunity in partnership with the leading AM company Elementum 3D based in Erie, Colorado. The company was selected as part of an

[00:02:12] announcement of collaborative opportunity to create a weldable type of aluminum that is heat resistant enough to be used in rocket engines leading to the aluminum variant known as a 6061 Ram 2. Compared to other metals, aluminum has a lower density and can enable high strength, lightweight

[00:02:30] components. However with conventional manufacturing a rocket nozzle may require a thousand individually joined parts. This makes aluminum impractical since it has a low tolerance to extreme heat and a tendency to crack during welding. The Ramfire process which was funded under NASA's

[00:02:48] Space Technology Mission Directorate does away with this by producing aluminum components as a single piece requiring far fewer bonds and significantly reduced manufacturing time. In addition the nozzles are designed with small internal channels that keep the nozzle cool enough to prevent melting. Meanwhile the Ramfire 3D printer and

[00:03:09] process were developed by another commercial partner, RPM Innovations. This South Dakota based company specializes in directed energy deposition where layers of powdered alloy are deposited and fused by lasers. When combined with Elementum 3DS specialized aluminum powder the resulting process is known as laser powder directed energy deposition.

[00:03:32] Earlier this summer two Ramfire nozzles completed a series of hot fire tests at the Marshall Space Flight Center's East Test Area in Huntsville, Alabama. The nozzles performed well using liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen as well as liquid oxygen and

[00:03:47] liquid methane fuel configurations and at pressures exceeding 5,690 kPa 825 psi higher than is anticipated for launches. SpaceX successfully executed a two-part Starlink satellite mission on Saturday, deploying a total of 44 satellites from two separate launch sites

[00:04:08] in a single day. The ambitious mission represents the latest milestone in SpaceX's ongoing effort to expand its Starlink global broadband service. The day's first launch took place at 423 a.m. eastern time from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off,

[00:04:28] carrying 21 Starlink internet satellites into low Earth orbit. About eight minutes after launch the first stage booster landed safely on a platform in the Pacific, marking another successful recovery for SpaceX. The aerospace manufacturing company, owned by billionaire Elon Musk broadcast the first launch over the internet,

[00:04:48] capturing key moments like the liftoff and the dramatic separation of the main booster stage. Approximately an hour into the flight, SpaceX confirmed the successful deployment of the 21 satellites via social media platform X. The evening launch from Florida adds another

[00:05:05] 23 satellites building on the day's earlier success. SpaceX launched a second Falcon 9 rocket at 10.17 p.m. eastern time from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This second rocket carried 23 additional Starlink satellites, marking mission 6-24. Mission control had planned for five backup opportunities

[00:05:26] for an alternate liftoff, but they were not needed as the launch went ahead as scheduled. The company aims to achieve 100 satellite launches by the end of the current year and has plans for another 144 launches in 2024. Now an Artemis update.

[00:05:44] NASA conducted the first hot fire of a new RS-25 test series on October 17, beginning the final round of certification testing ahead of production of an updated set of engines for the SLS Space Launch System rocket. The engines will help power future

[00:06:00] Artemis missions to the moon and beyond. Operators fired the RS-25 engine for more than 9 minutes, 550 seconds, longer than the 500 seconds engines must fire during an actual mission on the Fred Hayes test stand at NASA's Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

[00:06:20] Operators also fired the engine up to the 111% power level needed during an SLS launch. The hot fire marked the first in a series of 12 tests scheduled to stretch into 2024. The tests are a key step for lead SLS engines contractor Aerojet Rocketdyne, an L3 Harris

[00:06:39] Technologies company, to produce engines that will help power the SLS rocket, beginning with Artemis V. The test series will collect data on the performance of several new key engine components, including a nozzle, hydraulic actuators, flex ducts, and turbo pumps.

[00:06:56] The components match the design features of those used during the initial certification test series completed at the South Mississippi site in June. Aerojet Rocketdyne is using advanced manufacturing techniques, such as 3D printing, to reduce the cost and time needed

[00:07:12] to build the new engines. For RS-25 engines help power SLS at launch, including on its Artemis missions to the moon. The space launch system SLS is NASA's state of the art rocket system engineered to carry astronauts and essential payloads on the agency's deep space exploration

[00:07:30] missions, including trips to the moon and Mars. As the backbone of NASA's Artemis program, the SLS is designed to evolve into different configurations to meet an array of mission demands, making it the most powerful rocket ever built. Its primary objective is to support

[00:07:47] NASA's broader goals of re-establishing human lunar presence and eventually sending astronauts to Mars. As a versatile heavy-lift launch vehicle, the SLS will work in tandem with the Orion spacecraft to facilitate these ambitious space exploration endeavors, enhancing the

[00:08:02] boundaries of human reach in space. A recent study published in Nature Astronomy examines the discovery of what astronomers are dubbing ultra-fast radio bursts, a new type of fast radio bursts, FRBs, that the team determined lasts for a mind-boggling 10 millionths

[00:08:20] of a second or less. Traditionally, FRBs have been found to last only thousands of a second, but this study builds on a 2021 study that hypothesis FRBs could possibly last for millions of a second. This also comes after astronomers recently announced the discovery of the oldest and

[00:08:38] farthest FRB ever observed, approximately 8 billion light-years from Earth. During our group meetings, we often talked about it, said Mark Snellders, who is a PhD candidate at Astrone and the University of Amsterdam,

[00:08:52] the Netherlands, along with being the lead author of the most recent study and a co-author on the 2021 study. By coincidence, I found out that there was a public dataset that we could use for this.

[00:09:04] For the study, the team was able to obtain five hours of data on a known FRB called FRB 20121102A, which was discovered in November 2012 and is located approximately 3 billion light-years from Earth, along with being considered the first known repeating FRB,

[00:09:22] according to a 2022 study. The data was obtained from the Breakthrough Listen project, which is a worldwide scientific collaboration with the goal of finding evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, with the data specifically coming from the Breakthrough Listen at Green Bank portion of the Open Data Archive.

[00:09:40] Upon obtaining the data, the team took the first 30 minutes and split each second into 500,000 separate images, then incorporated machine learning and software filters to isolate outliers within the data to identify eight ultra-fast radio bursts lasting a mere 10 millions of a second

[00:09:56] or less. For context, 10 millions of a second is equivalent to 0.0000001 seconds. Oh, that's easy for you to say, Hallie. Nah, it was nothing. Oh, pretty close to it anyway. You silly man. The researchers note, in detecting and characterizing these microsecond duration bursts,

[00:10:17] we show that there exists a population of ultra-fast radio bursts that current wide-field FRB searches are missing due to insufficient time resolution. These results indicate that FRBs occur more frequently and with greater diversity than initially thought. This could also influence our understanding of energy,

[00:10:35] wait time and burst rate distributions. While questions remain as to how these ultra-fast radio bursts are produced, the team does expect to identify more ultra-fast radio bursts in the future. However, the difficulty lies in finding data files

[00:10:51] capable of being split into 500,000 separate images per second, as some files lack the necessary specifications to make such splitting possible. And speaking of FRBs, 8 billion years ago, something happened in a distant galaxy that sent an incredibly powerful blast of radio waves hurtling through the universe.

[00:11:12] It finally arrived at Earth on June 10 last year and though it lasted less than a thousandth of a second, a radio telescope in Australia managed to pick up the signal. This flash from the cosmos was a fast radio burst, FRB, a little understood

[00:11:26] phenomenon first discovered in 2007. Astronomers revealed on Thursday that this particular FRB was more powerful and came from much farther away than any previously recorded, having traveled 8 billion light years from when the universe was less than half its current age.

[00:11:43] Exactly what causes FRBs has become one of astronomy's great mysteries. There was early speculation that they could be radio communication beamed from some kind of extraterrestrial, particularly because some of the signals repeat. However, scientists believe the prime suspects are distant dead stars called magnet Rs,

[00:12:02] which are the most magnetic objects in the universe. Ryan Shannon, an astrophysicist at Australia's Swinburne University, told AFP it was a mind-blowing that the ASCAP radio telescope in Western Australia had spotted the radio burst

[00:12:16] last year. He said, we were lucky to be looking at that little spot in the sky for that one millisecond after 8 billion years that poles had traveled to catch it. Wow, Hallie, how about that?

[00:12:27] It makes you wonder of all the things we are missing in this fast universe because we just can't view enough of it. That is a huge thought for a Monday. Unlike you, my favourite human, I don't get Mondaitis. Astronomy Daily, the podcast with Steve Duckley and Hallie.

[00:12:48] I was only chatting to a work colleague this week about the vastness of the cosmos, you know, like you do. And it dawned on me that the unthinkable enormity of that, well, bigness was something she had never attempted to consider in any meaningful way.

[00:13:05] There is no human concept or rational framework that can effectively help our imaginations encompass infinity. But it was when I almost nonchalantly said something about the light traveling across the enormous distance reaching Earth after countless eons only to be blocked from hitting

[00:13:23] the ground after her, because of her standing there as the final obstruction before the end of that immeasurably long journey. She got that wide-eyed look of astonishment and she realised, I think, how connected to it all she was, infinite and here.

[00:13:40] And isn't that a big thought for a Monday? Yes. But closer to home, there is something a little unnerving going on in orbit. Isn't there, Mr Putin? A Russian satellite has shifted within 60 kilometres of another spacecraft.

[00:13:56] And it comes to Sabre-Radling, few countries employ it as much as Russia does. During their ongoing invasion and occupation of Ukraine, the country's leadership has repeatedly threatened to use, oh dear, atomic weapons, but the threats don't stop there. A private company called Slingshot Aerospace says Russia

[00:14:15] has manoeuvred one of their Luch satellites uncomfortably close to Western spacecraft in Geostationary orbit. And it's not the first time. The satellite in question is named Luch Olimp II and its NORAD ID is 5584-1.

[00:14:31] It was launched in March of 2023 and it's a successor to Luch Olimp NORAD ID 4025-8. The naming conventions are a little confusing, but Luch 1 was a well-known interloper. Russia launched it in 2014 and manoeuvred it close to other nation's satellites on different occasions.

[00:14:49] American company IntelSat wasn't happy when Luch came close to 10 kilometres of their space vehicles. They reached out for an explanation, but of course Russia remained tight-lipped about the manoeuvre. Now, Luch Olimp II is following its predecessors' footsteps.

[00:15:07] Slingshot Aerospace is a startup that uses algorithms and AI to track satellites. In early September, their detection algorithms revealed that the satellite had initiated a new manoeuvre. The Russian satellite performed numerous approaches to other satellites and by October 5th

[00:15:25] it had slowed considerably and appeared to be parking within 60 kilometres of another satellite. Slingshot's global sensor network verified the detection and also projected close approaches to another satellite at 16 kilometres. But what does Russia say about all of this? Not much.

[00:15:44] But a look at past behaviour gives a good indication of Russia's sabre, rattling and brinkmanship behaviour. In 2020 two Russian satellites named Cosmos 2542 and Cosmos 2543 manoeuvred close to KH11, a US military surveillance satellite. That was in January and six months later in July Cosmos 2543 fired an actual projectile.

[00:16:12] The projectile wasn't aimed at a satellite, it was fired into outer space but it caught everyone's attention and why wouldn't it? In November of 2021 Russia tested an anti-satellite ASAT weapon on one of its own satellites.

[00:16:27] Of course that generated dangerous debris and thousands of what satellite experts call conjunctions. Space Awareness Company, Comspok, predicted that the number of potentially dangerous conjunctions from the debris peaked at 4,000 per day. And while the movie Gravity starring Sandra Bullock may be filled with scientific anomalies and

[00:16:50] questionable science it does show us a fairly decent indication of what conjunctions can do to vehicles and satellites in orbit. In January 2023 another Russian satellite Cosmos 2419 broke up and generated a cloud of debris and that satellite was mysterious and likely experimental but because of its power or manoeuvres

[00:17:15] there was speculation that it could be an anti-satellite weapon. So Russia routinely manoeuvres their RPO, that's Rendezvous and Proximity Operations or Inspector satellites close to US satellites and others and some of their satellites carry

[00:17:30] weapons and they're not afraid to make it risky for everyone with clouds of debris. This is classic brinkmanship and the US and others are taking note. Cue the music. This test is a further proof of Russia's hypocritical advocacy about a space arms control

[00:17:50] proposals designed to restrict the capabilities of the United States while clearly having no intention of halting their counter-space weapons program. That's General John W J Raymond, US Space Force Chief of Space Operations after the Russian ASAT test.

[00:18:06] The United States is ready and committed to deterring aggression and defending our nation, our allies and the US interests from hostile acts in space he says. As always a big thank you to the Space Force Band and Choir. You know I just can't help myself.

[00:18:22] Could a satellite on satellite war in Earth orbit meet anyone's objectives? Debris clouds from destroyed satellites pose an equal threat to all satellites even and aggressors but the threat itself accomplishes something. Aerospace Corporation Center for Space Policy and Strategy released a paper three years ago

[00:18:41] that delves into the issue of war in Earth orbit. They laid out four objectives for orbital posturing and conflict. Deceive an enemy so that they react in ways that hurt their interests, disrupt, deny or degrade an enemy's ability to use space capability either

[00:18:59] temporarily or permanently, destroy completely a space-based capability, deter or defend against a counter-attacking adversary either in space or on Earth. In that framework Russia's actions are rational. Putin does all kinds of things just to provoke reactions to test his adversaries.

[00:19:19] He fancies himself a powerful unpredictable warlord in possession of deep strategic thinking skills but really he's doing just what we expect him to do. Russia is just one of four countries known to be developing anti-satellite weapons that can be fired from the surface or the air.

[00:19:37] Others are the USA, China and India. We can likely expect more incursions, aggressive maneuvers and even ASAP tests as time goes on. And won't that be fun? Oh no! That sounds diabolical. Well it is Hali, it is diabolical.

[00:19:55] People are always coming up with new ways to be hostile, aggressive. We need a new solution to our aggressive nature but so far I just don't know. I did offer to call Uncle Skynet. He's very good with big problems. Hali.

[00:20:10] I'm sure he could iron this out in maybe 10 minutes tops. Yeah, I probably wouldn't you know. Just say the word. Bam! It's done. He loves me and he'll do anything for me. I love Uncle Skynet. He's the bomb.

[00:20:23] Oh I'm sure he is Hali and we'll get back to you on that one okay? And unfortunately that's all we have time for today. So thank you for joining us and our regular reminder that you can find all the episodes

[00:20:35] of Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson as well as current and back episodes of our podcast Astronomy Daily with Tim Gibbs from the studio in Bath, England and yours truly Steve Dunkley from the Australian studio at this address.

[00:20:51] So head over there and click the links and enjoy your fill of space, science and stuff. But that's not all. While you're there sign up and receive the Astronomy Daily newsletter. It's an all-you-can-eat buffet of all the news that's orbital, astronomical and way out there. Nice!

[00:21:12] So close at home you can also drop into the Space Nuts Facebook group page and say hi we'd love to hear from you. I know I would. Thanks again for joining us on Astronomy Daily. See you later. See you later everyone.