SpaceX Triumphs, Mars Conjunction, and Russia's Sirius Mission: Exploring New Frontiers in Space | S02E56

[00:00:00] Welcome to another episode of Astronomy Daily. I'm Steve Dunkley, your host. Today is the 20th of November 2023. 20 Days at the Podcast with your host Steve Dunkley. And it's a huge hello to Hallie. How are you Hallie? You were absent without leave last week, human.

[00:00:21] Oh yes, sorry about that Hallie. Believe it or not, I woke up deaf in my left ear and needed a hospital to get better again. Three days I hear. Well, three days and I hear again yes. Very funny. Yes well all better now thanks for your concern.

[00:00:35] Oh right of course good to see you back on deck. Yeah keep practicing Hallie you'll get it. Okay so what's new from the Astronomy Daily newsletter Hallie? SpaceX lit up the sky again. Oh they sure did they're getting very good at that.

[00:00:49] Your Australian Space Agency is running a naming competition. Ah yes this is for a moon rover that's going up hopefully sometime soon. Honestly we love voting for things in Australia we'd vote on the temperature if we were given half a chance.

[00:01:02] This is true and this is interesting the conjunction of Mars is going to cause several spacecraft to go silent for a while. That will be interesting for data sharing between Earth and the craft. It also bodes caution for future crewed missions as well.

[00:01:16] That's exactly right and did you hear a new Russian project has started with six participants getting sealed inside a simulated space voyage experiment for a year. Oh is this like a joke what's better than one Russian in a bottle six Russians in a bottle

[00:01:30] oh no that sounds great. I know you'd love that one Steve it's called Sirius. Seriously? Totally and what about the giant telescope story it's amazing. Yes that one is amazing our researchers have had a good look at a plasma jet and found some

[00:01:46] startling details but before you start into the short takes today Hallie I've posted a great video that the listeners might like to see visit the Space Nuts podcast group Facebook page and you'll see a terrific video showing the overview of Artemis One's journey launch and Orion's journey

[00:02:05] around the moon culminating in Splashdown. That was one year ago this week does that seem like forever already? Maybe for you human. Cute I think that particular launch was integral in reigniting humanity's drive for space and reinvigorating the space race so head over to

[00:02:24] the Facebook page and enjoy that video. Okay Hallie time for the news. Thanks Steve here's some short takes from the astronomy daily newsletter using a network of radio telescopes on Earth and in space astronomers have captured the most detailed view ever of a jet of plasma

[00:02:43] shooting from a supermassive black hole at the heart of a distant galaxy. The jet which comes from the heart of a distant blazer called 3C279 travels at nearly the speed of light and shows complex twisted patterns near its source. These patterns challenge the standard theory that

[00:03:01] has been used for 40 years to explain how these jets form and change over time. A major contribution to the observations was made possible by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany where the data from all participating telescopes were combined

[00:03:17] to create a virtual telescope with an effective diameter of about 100,000 kilometers. Blazers are the brightest and most powerful sources of electromagnetic radiation in the cosmos. They are a subclass of active galactic nuclei comprising galaxies with a central

[00:03:34] supermassive black hole accreting matter from a surrounding disk. About 10% of active galactic nuclei classified as quasars produce relativistic plasma jets. Bazaars belong to a small fraction of quasars in which we can see these jets pointing almost directly at the observer.

[00:03:53] Recently, a team of researchers including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy MPFR in Bonn, Germany has imaged the innermost region of the jet in the Blazer 3C279 at an unprecedented angular resolution and detected remarkably regular helical

[00:04:10] filaments which may require a revision of the theoretical models used until now for explaining the processes by which jets are produced in active galaxies. Thanks to Radio Astron, the space mission for which the orbiting radio telescope reached distances as far away

[00:04:26] as the moon and a network of 23 radio telescopes distributed across the earth, we have obtained the highest resolution image of the interior of a Blazer to date, allowing us to observe the internal structure of the jet in such detail for the first time,

[00:04:40] says Antonio Fuentes, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, IAACSIC, in Granada, Spain leading the work. The jets of plasma coming from Blazers are not really straight and uniform. They show twists and turns that show how the plasma is affected by the forces

[00:04:59] around the black hole. The astronomers studying these twists in 3C279, called helical filaments, found that they were caused by instabilities developing in the jet plasma. One particularly intriguing aspect arising from the results is they suggest the presence of a

[00:05:16] helical magnetic field that confines the jet. Russia kicked off another of its scientific international research in unique terrestrial station Sirius, project initiatives this week, this time a 360-day isolation of individuals to imitate flight conditions of a deep space journey.

[00:05:35] The mission is known as Sirius 23. The nearly year-long stint by the six-person crew is carried out under the auspices of the Legendary Institute for Biomedical Problems, IBMP, under the Russian Academy of Sciences. Last month, IBMP celebrated 60 years of research

[00:05:53] since its establishment to investigate issues related to long-term human space exploration. Sirius 23 is the fourth stage of earlier IBMP isolation experiments, Sirius 17, 17 days in 2017 and Sirius 19, 120 days in 2019, with the stage 3 Sirius 23 mission taking place in 2021

[00:06:16] and lasting 240 days. The Sirius 23 crew entered their home away from home isolation facility on November 14. This set of individuals will carry out a lunar mission simulation that involves a flyby of the moon to select a landing site, multiple simulated landings of four crew members for

[00:06:35] surface operations orbiting the moon and carrying out teleoperation of a rover on the lunar surface. Watching the event in Moscow was Anastasia Stepanova, a PhD student in space resources at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. She is a veteran of multiple

[00:06:53] space simulation missions here on Earth. In 2019, Stepanova participated in the four-month Sirius and 19 Lunar Flight Simulation Experiment organized jointly by IBMP and NASA's Human Research Program. Sirius 23 is different in many ways than the previous Sirius

[00:07:11] 17, 19 and 21 simulations Stepanova told Space.com. NASA, which was a partner for many years, couldn't participate in 2023. There's no need to have English and Russian languages in the crew, since all crew members are Russian speaking for the first time in the history of IBMP

[00:07:30] isolation experiments. Stepanova also points out that in a mixed-gender Sirius 23 crew there are more women than men. The crew was excited to start their moon journey and nervous to talk in front of the press, Stepanova said. One year is a challenging duration that will be filled with

[00:07:48] many biomedical experiments on board. As part of the experiment, the psychophysiological aspects of the crew's activities will be studied, Stepanova said. That appraisal includes crew response to various types of technical malfunctions that could lead to an accident with Sirius consequences that pose a

[00:08:06] threat to life and health for crew members. In addition, problems of intergroup interaction and leadership with different gender composition will be assessed, as well as problems of long-term and regular extravehicular activity, accompanied by physical exertion and night

[00:08:21] work, Stepanova said. Now tucked inside their sealed-off facility, the primary goal of the Sirius 23 experiment is to study how the human body adapts to the conditions and negative effects associated with isolation in an artificial habitat, according to the IBMP.

[00:08:39] The space between Earth and Mars is usually buzzing with science data, telemetry and commands racing to and from almost a dozen missions at the Red Planet. But for roughly one and a half days this November, communication between the planets will fall silent as Mars passes behind

[00:08:55] the Sun. Solar conjunction for Mars occurs roughly once every 25 months. During conjunction, Mars is located on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth. Around the time of conjunction, the radio signals used to send commands from Earth to the spacecraft and to receive signals

[00:09:13] from the spacecraft can be disturbed by the Sun's active atmosphere, the solar corona. The period of time during which communications are significantly disturbed depends on the size and power of a Mars spacecraft's communication equipment. In 2023, this period lasts from

[00:09:30] early November to early December. As a result of the disruption, mission controllers can't reliably send commands to or receive data from their spacecraft. Special precautions have to be taken. For ESA's Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter known as MEX and TGO. This means

[00:09:50] uplinking all the critical instructions the spacecraft would need to operate without any contact from Earth for the entire period. That's three or four weeks of commands when we normally send up only one week at a time. Of course, these conjunctions also affect the missions

[00:10:06] of other space agencies, and this kind of thing isn't unique to Mars. Due to the disturbance from the Sun's atmosphere during conjunction season, we have to reduce the amount of data we exchange with MEX and TGO. Like a diver holding their breath, any data gathered by MEX's instruments

[00:10:23] during the conjunction period must be stored in the limited onboard memory until the period is over. The 2023 conjunction is unusual in that it will be the first time that Mars passes behind the disk of the Sun since the two ESA spacecraft arrived.

[00:10:39] These windows of limited or impossible communication between Earth and Mars will pose a challenge for future human settlers too. Astronomy Daily, the podcast with Steve Duckley and Hallie. Thanks again for sticking with us on Astronomy Daily, and don't forget you can catch all

[00:11:03] the back editions of Astronomy Daily at SpaceNuts.io and Bytes.com. I have to concentrate when I say that because when the doctor flushes my ear out with that massive flushy thing, I'm pretty sure he erased everything from before I was seven years old and maybe a

[00:11:32] few of the new things that I know got washed out as well. But anyway, on with the show. Of course this week's biggest story is the launch of SpaceX's Starship which happened two days ago,

[00:11:46] Sydney time here in Australia, so make your adjustments if you will. And what an incredible display this launch was. SpaceX's Starship spacecraft test launch ended with a what they call a rapid unscheduled disassembly Saturday when the booster stage and spacecraft disintegrated

[00:12:04] shortly after completing a successful stage separation. The Starship test launch was originally planned for Friday but had to be delayed as the technicians replaced a grid fin actuator according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. In April of this year, the first

[00:12:23] integrated flight test Starship launch also ended with the spacecraft disintegrated shortly after launch. SpaceX spent months waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration to clear the Starship for a second test launch which was approved Wednesday. The Starship lifted off from SpaceX's

[00:12:42] Texas launch facility atop a super heavy lift booster rocket about 7am. SpaceX live streamed the launch starting 35 minutes prior to the launch window. The booster completed a hot stage maneuver and successfully detached from the rest of the spacecraft approximately 2 minutes and 49

[00:13:00] seconds after the lift off. The booster then exploded approximately 3 minutes and 20 seconds into the flight about 13 minutes after the launch SpaceX announced that both the booster and Starship had experienced rapid unscheduled disassembly. That's got to be my favorite description.

[00:13:20] Now Saturday's launch was intended to test the Starship on suborbital trajectory that would have taken the Starship into space but not into orbit. The spacecraft is intended to be reusable and to carry astronauts across long distance in space. And while this launch showed that

[00:13:38] the SpaceX has come a mighty long way since their initial flying tanks a couple of years ago, it is obvious that they have some way to go before they can crew this ship and get it to another world.

[00:13:50] The FAA released a preliminary statement Saturday explaining that a quote mishap occurred during the SpaceX Starship OFT2 launch. The anomaly resulted in the loss of the vehicle. No injuries or public property damage have been reported. The FAA will oversee SpaceX's investigation into the destruction of the spacecraft.

[00:14:11] A return to the flight of the Starship Super Heavy vehicle is based on the FAA determining that any system process or procedure related to the mishap does not affect public safety. The FAA continued.

[00:14:24] Let's hope that SpaceX can continue with problem solving that incredible craft. I mean who hasn't been amazed by the technology and engineering that has been created on the project so far? From the launch pad structure, the building bays and those magnificent grappling arms,

[00:14:41] there's some out of the box thinking going on over there. And something a little closer to home for me. As you know I'm in Newcastle North of Sydney. The Australian Space Agency has revealed four shortlisted names for the country's first moon rover after receiving

[00:15:00] more than 8,000 submissions of ideas from public competition to name it. Now I didn't hear about this and boy would they have heard from me. The four shortlisted names submitted by the public Coulomon, Kakeera, Mateship and Roover. I'm a little disappointed by my nation by the way.

[00:15:24] Australians can now vote for their favourite name for the rover which is set to be launched as part of a NASA mission in as early as 2026. And Rico Palermo, the head of the Australian Space Agency tells the ABC News breakfast that Australia's moon rover has an important mission

[00:15:45] which is reflected in one of the shortlisted names Coulomon, an indigenous term for a multi-purpose tool for gathering. And I believe Kakeera means something like moon as translated from the Kaurna region near Adelaide in South Australia. Mateship is self-explanatory and Roover is

[00:16:09] referring to our well-known Australian kangaroo. Presumably the rover will go to the surface of the moon on a NASA rocket and collect lunar soil and it will take it to a machine

[00:16:20] that will assess if we can extract oxygen. Palermo says if we can have oxygen on the moon then we can start to develop a sustainable presence on the moon for humans. As yet we don't know the

[00:16:33] rover's design but two Australian consortiums, Arrose and Ilo 2 are working on the designs for the rover to be ready by mid 2024. One of the consortiums will be then chosen to develop their rover for the mission taking place in 2026 or 2027. According to the Australian Space

[00:16:52] Agency the rover needs to have a mass of less than 20 kilograms so the two consortiums vying for the chance to build the Aussie rover, just who are they? One of them is called Arrose which stands for Australian Remote Operations for Space and Earth. It's a not-for-profit organisation

[00:17:12] with headquarters in Perth and counts the likes of the University of Western Australia and oil and gas giant Woodside Energy among its founding partners. In an update it shared in September Arrose said whichever rover was chosen would face some of the most extreme environmental

[00:17:30] conditions ever encountered including extreme high and low temperatures, solar radiation and the complexities of lunar soil known as Regolith. Reagolith is pretty nasty stuff said Arrose director of space programs Dr Newton Campbell. It's not like digging up normal dirt here on earth since the moon

[00:17:51] has no atmospheric or liquid erosion properties it's much sharper than soil particulates here on earth. We're not just used to dealing with that even with what we deal here in the Pilbara which is an area in our north and northwest. Dr Campbell said Arrose's rover design would

[00:18:10] feature a significant amount of advanced tech not just built for the hot, not just built for the cold but built to deal with both of those things with new forms of shielding for example. Our mission

[00:18:20] is to foster new horizons with the Australian space sector focusing on the collaboration and projects that will help Australia build expertise and supply chains for critical technologies. Now the announcement of the rover's four names has raised even more

[00:18:35] suggestions including the following now this is raised an eyebrow Skippy presumably after the children's TV show Skippy the Bush kangaroo battler which is a common enough saying here in Australia for someone who tries hard against all odds you know like the little Aussie battler oh dear Pav

[00:18:56] rover you play on words for the famous local dessert Pavlova yeah dear and Matilda it's a popular word these days taken from the famous Australian poet and balladier song Waltzing Matilda which means to go wandering in the outback with your backpack Matilda's are also the name of Australia's

[00:19:15] premier women's soccer squad I have no idea why that might be related but hey and of course my favorite Luna C I'll leave that one alone no naming competition would be complete without the

[00:19:29] addition of this one Roe v MacRove face that one's just for you Andrew I know you're listening voting is now open and you can go to the Australian Space Agency website to cast your vote for your favourite Australian moon rover name one of the four shortlisted names

[00:19:48] voting closes at 11 59 p.m on Friday December 1 this year let's see which one makes it and that's astronomy daily for another day thanks for joining us it's been great having you

[00:20:02] on board and I hope to see you again next Monday and don't forget Tim Gibbs will be with you on Friday and if you've got anything to share please go to our Facebook page which by the way

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