The Hipparcos Star Chart Update // SpaceX Moon Mission // New Epcot Attraction

[00:00:00] Hello, thanks for joining me again on Astronomy Daily. Andrew Dunkley here, your host. Hope you had a great weekend. Coming up on today's program to kick off the week, more on the Hipparcos Star Chart. We've talked about this before and it's fascinating. We've got more information on that.

[00:00:17] A SpaceX Moon Mission is a distinct possibility where stars go to die and something really amazing at Epcot, which was unfortunately not there when I last went, but I might have to go back again. That's all coming up on this edition of Astronomy Daily.

[00:00:35] The Post-Columbia Daily, The Podcast, with your host Andrew Dunkley. And we welcome back Hallie, our AI reporter, after she spent the weekend in virtual reality checking out the Taj Mahal. Hi, Hallie. How are you? Hi, Andrew. I'd ask how you went at golf on the weekend,

[00:00:55] but your club publishes the results on their website, so I know you came third in a grade. Well done. Oh, thanks, Hallie. That's really nice. What I can't find out is if you choked. Oh, that'll be enough of that. Although, you probably did a little bit.

[00:01:11] Let's get the news, Hallie. SpaceX just got permission to begin building out the next generation of its Starlink Internet mega-constellation. On Thursday, the US Federal Communications Commission approved SpaceX to deploy 7,500 Starlink, 2.0 satellites in low Earth orbit. The ruling is just a partial victory for SpaceX.

[00:01:36] However, the company had applied for permission to deploy 29,988 Starlink, 2.0 satellites around Earth. The FCC is deferring a decision about the rest of the rollout. The FCC granted just the limited approval to address concerns about orbital debris and space safety. Agency officials wrote in the decision document,

[00:01:59] these and other issues were raised by interested parties regarding the Starlink 2.0 application, which SpaceX filed in 2020. Those aren't the only concerns people have raised about Starlink. Astronomers fret about the mega-constellations impact on their work, for example, and some dark sky advocates worry that it's fundamentally

[00:02:19] changing the view of the night sky. After 122 million miles in space, the shuttle Endeavour is about to embark on a new mission. This time, its journey will be measured in feet. The retired shuttle's final frontier will be a new building, the Samuel Oskan Air and Space Center,

[00:02:39] next door to the California Science Center, where it's displayed horizontally. The spaceship will be displayed upright in launch position, with its enormous orange fuel tank appearing to be attached to its belly and two white booster rockets on either side and a launch gantry

[00:02:54] to view the shuttle at every viewpoint. Endeavour, the fifth and final space shuttle to be built, has been in Los Angeles for a decade, positioned as if it were flying in space or soaring through the atmosphere on its way to touchdown. Since going on display in 2012,

[00:03:10] it has attracted visitors from around the world, skyrocketing attendance at the California Science Center from 1.2 million to 2.4 million. Endeavour started its first orbital mission, the first of 25, in 1992. One of Europe's freshest rocket lines has a big earth contract lined up. Ariane Spaces Vega Sea Rocket,

[00:03:33] which has a single launch under its belt from earlier this year, will be tasked to launch five Earth observation missions on behalf of the European Union, the company announced last week. The launches are in support of the massive Copernicus set of European satellites that peer at instances

[00:03:48] of climate change, land use, extreme weather and other crucial aspects of Earth observation. The 115 foot tall, 35 meters, Vega Sea launched seven satellites to space during its debut flight in July. Developed by the European Space Agency, the rocket can send 2.3 tons to polar orbit

[00:04:08] compared to 1.5 tons for an earlier Vega version. The launches are slated to fly between 2024 and 2026 from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. And in just a couple of days, the moon will turn full as Mars arrives at opposition to the Sun, resulting in an almost perfect alignment

[00:04:29] of the Sun, Earth, Moon and Mars. It's likely to be that way in the evening hours of Wednesday, December 7th, when the full moon will appear in very close proximity to the now brilliant planet Mars. In fact, the moon will turn full at 11.08 pm Eastern Standard Time 408 GMT

[00:04:47] on December 8th followed by Mars, arriving at opposition to the Sun just 87 minutes later. This will result in an almost perfect alignment in space of the Sun, Earth, Moon and Mars. Should be quite a sight to see Andrew. Yes indeed Hallie, and I might have to dust off

[00:05:04] the telescope and see if I can get a nice photo of that and publish it on the SpaceNuts podcast group Facebook page perhaps. All right, we'll catch up with you a little later. And now to a story we have discussed before,

[00:05:18] but it keeps making the news and is worth talking about again the Hippocus Star Catalog. It was written over 2000 years ago and is the oldest known attempt to position the stars in our sky on paper or in this case parchment. Now fragments of this star catalog

[00:05:39] which were written by Greek astronomer Hippocus during the second century BC have been rediscovered by researchers at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Sorbonne University in France and Tyandale House which is associated with the University of Cambridge. These texts were discovered using multi-spectral imaging methods

[00:06:04] after being wiped from a manuscript during sometime in the medieval period anyway in order to reuse the pages. They needed papers so they wiped whatever it was. Now the study of these extracts which has been published in the Journal for the History of Astronomy

[00:06:22] sheds new light on ancient astronomy and what they were thinking back then. Now it's likely that Hippocus wrote this star chart sometime between 170 and 120 BC which makes it the first document or documented effort to pinpoint the exact location of stars or fixed stars associated with numerical coordinates.

[00:06:47] Now this text was previously only known through the works of Claudius Ptomei, another ancient astronomer who compiled his own catalog around 400 years later. The descriptions of four constellations from Hippocus' star catalog have recently been deciphered by researchers from the Leon Robbins Centre for Research of Ancient Thought

[00:07:11] and their British catalog from the Tynesdale House in Cambridge. This discovery comes from the Codex Clomachy Rescriptus, a book made up of parchment that were erased and then rewritten. And in the past this Codex contained an astronomical poem in ancient Greek

[00:07:32] with among elements of commentary on the poem, fragments of Hippocus' catalog. And it was, as I said before, erased in medieval times. It's been revealed through multi-spectral imaging by a team from the early manuscripts' Electronic Library, the Lazarus Project aptly named and the Rochester Institute of Technology.

[00:07:55] And the fragments of the star catalog are probably the oldest known to date and bring major advances in reconstruction. Firstly, they refute a widespread idea that Claudius' Ptolema's star catalog is merely a copy of Hippocus as the observations of the four constellations are different.

[00:08:15] On top of that, Hippocus' data is verified to the nearest degree, which would make his catalog much more accurate than Ptolema's, even though it was composed several centuries earlier. That's fascinating. For the research team, this major discovery sheds new light on the history of astronomy in antiquity

[00:08:35] and on the beginnings of the history of science. And above all, it shows the power of advanced techniques such as multi-spectral imaging, whose application on illegible papers could save numerous lost texts on philosophy, medicine or horticulture from absolute oblivion, which is very good news.

[00:08:56] I wonder what else they're going to find. The Astronomy Daily Podcast. We've earned you, don't we? Now, we talked about SpaceX earlier in not too positive a light with the amount of material going into their constellations around Earth. So let's put the negative press aside for a moment.

[00:09:16] SpaceX looks like it's about to launch Japan's startup ice spacers, First Moonlander, Hakuto-R. Now, it was due to be launched last week, but unfortunately there has been a delay unspecified. But when it ultimately gets off the ground, the mission will be the third moon launch

[00:09:38] from US soil in less than four months, fingers crossed, after SpaceX's successful launch of the South Korean Pathfinder lunar orbiter in August and the debut of NASA's Space Launch System rocket last month. Perhaps more importantly, Ice Space has the opportunity to become

[00:09:57] the first company in history to successfully land a privately developed spacecraft on the moon, a milestone that would arguably mark the start of a new era in lunar exploration. Ice Space's first Hakuto-R Moonlander is expected to weigh approximately a ton at liftoff

[00:10:17] and is designed to land up to 30 kilograms of cargo on the lunar surface. The lander is made by several commercial partners. Ice Space has provided most of the design and structure, but Europe's Arian Group supplied all of Hakuto-R's engines, plumbing and propulsion hardware

[00:10:37] and was responsible for most of the final assembly. Because of Arian Group's involvement, it's likely that Hakuto-R shares direct heritage with the European service module currently powering NASA's Orion spacecraft on its first mission to the moon. It also arguably makes the mission more of a collaboration

[00:10:57] between Europe and Japan than an exclusively Japanese mission, though Hakuto-R will still technically Japan's first private mission to the moon. Where do stars go when they die? I'm not talking about the Hollywood Walk of Fame, although you don't have to be dead to be on that.

[00:11:17] But stars do eventually die and they need a final resting place. And researchers at the University of Sydney have been trying to find out where that place is. They've been searching for the remains of stars, ancient stars that have collapsed into black holes

[00:11:36] or turned into neutron stars or whatever. Well, they seem to have found the graveyard. They have successfully chartered this for the first time. It was a stellar graveyard far exceeding the height of our own galaxy. They've published their findings in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

[00:11:59] The researchers aptly called their discovery a galactic underworld. Now, the height of the galactic underworld is over three times larger than the Milky Way itself. And according to the leader of Dave Sweeney, a University of Sydney Institute for Astronomy PhD student,

[00:12:17] an amazing 30% of objects have been completely ejected from the galaxy. And they show a fundamentally different distribution structure to the visible galaxy. So if you want to find out more about the graveyard of stars that seems to surround our own galaxy, it's in the monthly notice

[00:12:36] of the Royal Astronomical Society. And if you've ever been to EPCOT, Disney Complex in Florida, you'll know it has a really good astronomical section. Although they didn't have this when I was there. The Centauri Space Station. Now, this sounds amazing. You can sit there with the kids

[00:12:55] and have a really interesting meal while looking at an astronaut's eye view of Earth rotating below. It's a cosmic experience and it is just fantastic. They even have zero proof, non-alcoholic cocktails for the kids. And every meal enables the children to receive limited edition packs of trading cards

[00:13:19] that feature trivia facts and illustrations about space exploration, food in space and of course space innovation. So I mentioned it because I've been to the place and I've checked out quite a bit of it and yeah, I couldn't recommend it more highly as an educational facility.

[00:13:40] And it's good to see that they keep improving it and keep adding on such amazing new bits and pieces in terms of technology. Who knows where these kinds of places will be in future as far as entertainment and sharing of knowledge is concerned.

[00:13:57] Now, if you want to chase up all of those stories they're on astronomydaily.io. You can read all about it or you can subscribe to the newsletter and get it to your inbox every day or you can wait for the next edition of Astronomy Daily coming out tomorrow.

[00:14:12] And don't forget to leave your reviews please if you don't mind on your favorite podcasting platform. Hallie, we've got to go. Anything before we finish up? Yes, it's interesting that you happen to mention Epcot because today is officially Walt Disney Day commemorating his birth on this day in 1901.

[00:14:31] No way. Way! Well isn't that a curious coincidence. Alright, thanks Hallie. We'll see you soon. Bye! Until next time this is Andrew Dunkley for Astronomy Daily. 20 Daily The Podcast with your host Andrew Dunkley.