#415: From Starliner's Slip to Lunar Lights: A Glimpse into Tomorrow's Space Tech

[00:00:00] Hello again, thank you for joining us. This is Space Nuts, the podcast about astronomy and space science.

[00:00:07] My name is, I forget, my name is Andrew Dunkley, your host. It's good to have your company.

[00:00:12] Coming up on today's edition, we've got quite a few things to talk about.

[00:00:16] The ups and downs or certainly not ups of the Boeing Starliner. We'll have a quick chat about that.

[00:00:23] Lighting up the moon with reflectors is on the agenda and using satellites to predict crop yields.

[00:00:30] Yes, they look down from space and go, oh, that looks crop.

[00:00:33] And we're going to look at a special anniversary with Professor Fred Watson all coming up on this edition of Space Nuts.

[00:00:52] One, two, three, four, five, five, four, three, two, one. Space Nuts. Astronauts report it feels good.

[00:00:58] And here he is, the man of the millisecond, Professor Fred Watson, astronomer at large. Hello, Fred.

[00:01:05] Hello, Andrew. That was a pretty crappy introduction you did there, I have to say.

[00:01:11] Yes, I have to agree with you. Master my introductions are.

[00:01:19] How you been? Oh, well, thank you.

[00:01:22] Hold it still. Still, it's going strong. Still a struggle at large.

[00:01:26] Yes. Fair enough. All right. Let's let's get started.

[00:01:33] I want to talk about the Boeing Starliner because they would have been reading stories about it for the last week or so.

[00:01:39] They were so ramped up after years of delays.

[00:01:42] We were finally going to get it off the ground and, oh, it slipped on a banana.

[00:01:48] I don't know what happened, but it's it looks like another delay.

[00:01:52] It was. Yes. So the crew of two.

[00:01:54] This was going to be the first crewed mission of the Starliner and it was going to wind up at the International Space Station and probably come back from there as well.

[00:02:04] And the launch was set for Friday, our time.

[00:02:08] I think I'm right in saying that. I can't remember. I get so many.

[00:02:12] I'll take your word for it. Launch dates in my mind.

[00:02:15] You know, these days you can look forward to a launch pretty well every day.

[00:02:20] Anyway, it was recently maybe it wasn't Friday.

[00:02:23] I think that might have been Changi 6 that launched on Friday, which was also successful.

[00:02:29] The Starliner, however, I think they got to within two hours of liftoff.

[00:02:36] Might be exaggerating there.

[00:02:38] And there was a sort of vibrating valve, I think, on the rocket itself rather than the Starliner, which caused the launch not just to be paused, but to be scrubbed.

[00:02:52] That was the official term, scrubbed.

[00:02:55] And in fact, you can find online, you can find the dialogue between Mission Control and the two astronauts in the capsule.

[00:03:04] I've actually got it. Houston.

[00:03:07] Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep thing.

[00:03:13] Something like that.

[00:03:14] I think that's how it went.

[00:03:16] I mean, Houston or its equivalent in 21st century speak said we're scrubbing the launch and you could tell.

[00:03:27] You know, just the it was Roger.

[00:03:31] Yeah, wasn't Roger.

[00:03:33] It was Roger. Roger.

[00:03:36] I think the LAC, yeah, that's like that.

[00:03:38] I mean, you know, I think they'd be happy to scrub anything that was imparting a risk to the launch.

[00:03:45] So I think you'd be happy with that.

[00:03:47] But yes, the disappointment when you're all you basically keyed up because, you know, within a matter of hours, if not less, you're going to be docking at the International Space Station.

[00:03:59] The last I heard was that it's scrubbed for at least 10 days.

[00:04:03] And in fact, I've just saw some photos this morning of the assembly, the basically the rocket booster with the Starliner on top being moved back to the kind of servicing bay that they've got there.

[00:04:19] Something a bit like that, you know, vehicle assembly building that there is at pad 39A.

[00:04:25] Anyway, so it's scrubbed for a while.

[00:04:27] So hopefully we will catch up with better news soon.

[00:04:30] It was pretty exciting.

[00:04:31] It will be, you know, Boeing's first crewed mission to space.

[00:04:36] Yes.

[00:04:37] Well, I'm sure it will happen.

[00:04:38] But as we've said many times in the past, safety first.

[00:04:42] So just being ultra careful and who can blame them for that?

[00:04:46] All right, let's move on to the moon, to the moon and back.

[00:04:52] This is a really interesting story because we're looking at there's so much interest in the moon.

[00:04:56] We've got a lot of missions either there or on their way there and they're not too distant future human missions coming up soon.

[00:05:04] I know China is looking at putting a base there, whether it's on the surface or in orbit research base of some kind.

[00:05:11] And it's just going to get bigger and bigger.

[00:05:14] And the moon's got a lot of attention because well, it's got resources there that people want.

[00:05:19] But when you get there and set up bases and have people there long term, there are challenges.

[00:05:24] And one of those is light.

[00:05:27] That's a problem.

[00:05:28] It is.

[00:05:29] And yes, you know that you're absolutely right.

[00:05:31] The South Pole in particular, which is a very heavily cratered region of the moon surface, is attracting international attention because we have evidence from a number of spacecraft, actually notably an Indian one.

[00:05:45] Chandrayaan, I think it was called, which the evidence supports the notion that there is water ice on the floor of these craters because being at the South Pole of the moon,

[00:05:57] they, the craters themselves never see the sun overhead or anything like overhead.

[00:06:04] And so it's always at an angle low down in the sky and in most cases so low that it never rises above the walls of these craters.

[00:06:13] And so, sorry, the craters.

[00:06:15] And so the floor of the crater is basically, yes, it's got ice on it, which may have been there for millions, perhaps billions of years.

[00:06:26] But that ice is basically unobtainable because there's no sunlight, so you can't melt it.

[00:06:34] Nor can you use electrical power to decompose it into hydrogen and oxygen, which is what everybody is keen on doing.

[00:06:42] It gives you a free supply of oxygen to breathe and hydrogen plus oxygen to make rocket fuel.

[00:06:48] So that's why there's so much interest in the ice in these craters as a potential resource for future exploration of not just the moon, but the solar system generally.

[00:06:57] So there's the problem.

[00:06:59] Solar power especially is a problem because these never see the sun.

[00:07:03] And that sort of thinking has led a group of scientists, some at Texas A&M University, some at NASA Langley Research Center to think about how you deal with this.

[00:07:16] And they have basically done the obvious.

[00:07:19] They said, well, why can't we reflect the light of the sun down into the crater?

[00:07:24] So you focus it onto the solar panels and you've got a mirror near the rim of the crater.

[00:07:32] So that's the plan.

[00:07:34] The research, which is still apparently in quite an early stage.

[00:07:41] What they've done though is to use fairly sophisticated modeling systems, computer models, to show what will be the best kind of surface and the best sorts of materials as well to use.

[00:07:57] And it's no surprise that a parabolic shape comes out as being the optimal.

[00:08:02] That's because a paraboloid focuses light.

[00:08:07] That's what many telescope mirrors are made of, a paravoidal mirror that focuses the starlight onto it to make an image which you then magnify with an eyepiece.

[00:08:17] So what you do with your mirror is steer it.

[00:08:20] So it's always basically pointing at the sun in such a way that it reflects the light down to your solar panels and have it on a mounting that will track the sun as it goes around the sky.

[00:08:33] Now, the other thing that I think is new about this is, well, two things here.

[00:08:40] One of the problems is you want to make your mirror as big as possible in order to collect as much sunlight as possible.

[00:08:48] But reflectors are not very easy to fold up into the cargo bay of a spacecraft or at least, you know, it's cargo pod in the nose of the spacecraft.

[00:09:00] And so you need something that will fold up.

[00:09:02] Now, we've encountered this problem before, Andrew, in a well-known thing called the James Webb Telescope, which was indeed folded up because it was made of 16, sorry, 18 hexagonal segments that could be folded away.

[00:09:17] What they think of for this though, because the optical surfacing requirements are nowhere near astringent, what they're thinking about is using new materials and in particular something which is called a

[00:09:31] self-morphing material, which has actually been developed at Texas A&M.

[00:09:38] So what you do is you have what they call shape memory materials and change the shape in response to changes in temperature.

[00:09:52] And you'd certainly get a change in temperature when you go to the South Pole of the Moon because the temperature when the sun's not there drops to about minus 150.

[00:10:02] When the sun's there, it's about plus 150.

[00:10:06] And so I think there's a bit of give and take in those levels, but it's that sort of order.

[00:10:12] So shape-morphing materials that will kind of basically pop into the right shape when the sun gets on them are a nice idea.

[00:10:20] And maybe this is a way to the future for the South Pole of the Moon.

[00:10:25] Maybe. Are you ready for this one?

[00:10:28] Give it to me.

[00:10:31] On reflection, that's a good idea.

[00:10:34] You should be on the radio.

[00:10:37] Oh, God.

[00:10:39] No, thanks.

[00:10:44] How much light are we talking about generating here?

[00:10:48] A Mirrorsworth, I guess.

[00:10:50] There is a comparison, Andrew, and I've forgotten the name of the place, but there is a valley in Norway, southern Norway.

[00:10:58] It's not that far from Oslo.

[00:11:00] It's a valley that doesn't see, there's a town in the bottom of the valley that doesn't see the sun for, I don't know, a couple of months around the winter solstice, which of course means kind of November, December, January, that sort of time.

[00:11:13] And so they have a mirror on a hilltop that does see the sun and basically beams a pool of light.

[00:11:21] I think it's a flat mirror rather than a parabolic one.

[00:11:24] Beams a pool of light down into the town square so that people can, you know, people who suffer from SADS, what's that? Seasonal something disorder?

[00:11:35] Is that?

[00:11:36] Winter blues.

[00:11:37] Yeah, winter blues, which is pretty serious in those Scandinavian countries.

[00:11:41] So people can get a taste of sunlight without having to get on a jet to go to New York or somewhere like that.

[00:11:49] The other thing that comes to mind with this is, and this is a bit off the track, but you can't, you have got to watch out for those focusing mirrors because there's a story.

[00:12:03] It's probably four, three or four years ago now, a new building in London which had a glass surface as a skyscraper, glass surface that was slightly curved.

[00:12:15] And it was basically melting cars.

[00:12:17] Yeah, it was melting the insides of cars.

[00:12:20] Come back to their car and all the plastics melted onto the floor of the car.

[00:12:23] Wow.

[00:12:24] This building's focused the sunlight onto it.

[00:12:28] So that's not what you want.

[00:12:29] The other problem I heard with buildings like that is it causes bird problems.

[00:12:36] They don't realise it's actually a solid object because they can see a direct reflection of what's around and behind them.

[00:12:43] So they go straight into it.

[00:12:45] Thousands of birds get killed every year from these situations.

[00:12:49] That's right.

[00:12:51] That's likely to be an issue for the lunar astronauts.

[00:12:54] On the moon?

[00:12:55] Yes.

[00:12:56] It certainly is on the Earth.

[00:13:00] Yeah.

[00:13:01] You mentioned how cold it gets down in those craters on the moon.

[00:13:05] I stand to be corrected, but I do believe that at the bottom of some of those craters, it's the coldest place in the solar system.

[00:13:17] As far as I'm aware.

[00:13:19] Yes.

[00:13:22] It's going to be...

[00:13:24] You're right.

[00:13:26] There are record breakers for the coldest place in the solar system.

[00:13:29] And I think I've read the same thing as you have.

[00:13:33] The bottom of those craters, they never see the sun.

[00:13:37] And you know, thermal temperature losses, the thermal radiation that you get from those into the blackness of space probably do make them very cold indeed.

[00:13:50] Yeah, I mean, I could be wrong about that.

[00:13:54] And there are so many very cold places in the solar system.

[00:13:58] I think actually...

[00:13:59] Down the bottom...

[00:14:00] Sorry, go on.

[00:14:01] I was going to say...

[00:14:03] Yes, yes, yes.

[00:14:07] We've got the delay problem here, Andrew.

[00:14:10] We both try to talk over one another.

[00:14:12] I'm going to just continue.

[00:14:14] I think the coldest place in the solar system is in a laboratory somewhere in the United States where they've artificially created temperatures just a few micro degrees above absolute zero.

[00:14:26] So, in fact, I think I've read that much.

[00:14:29] Either that or it's their management style.

[00:14:33] Probably that too.

[00:14:37] Yeah.

[00:14:38] All right.

[00:14:39] So, yeah, lighting up the moon, a very interesting concept and one that will probably come to fruition.

[00:14:47] We'll shed more light on that down the track.

[00:14:50] And you can find out more about it at phys.org.

[00:14:54] This is Space Nuts.

[00:14:55] This is Space Nuts.

[00:14:56] Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Fred Whatser.

[00:15:04] Space Nuts.

[00:15:05] Now, Fred, we mentioned an anniversary at the head of the program.

[00:15:09] Ten years of HIPPEE.

[00:15:12] Yeah.

[00:15:13] And it isn't, you know, for a start, it's such a brilliant acronym.

[00:15:18] But you're absolutely right.

[00:15:20] HIPPEE has been going for 10 years.

[00:15:22] HIPPEE is spelt not H-I-P-P-Y, but H-I-P-P-I.

[00:15:29] And it's an acronym for the High Precision Polarimetric Instrument.

[00:15:37] So H-I-P High Precision P-I Polarimetric Instrument.

[00:15:44] That acronym has actually been very useful in the last day or so because people are wishing it a HIPPEE birthday

[00:15:51] because it's 10 years old.

[00:15:54] So HIPPEE birthday.

[00:15:56] I'll tell you my reaction.

[00:15:58] I've got the shakes.

[00:15:59] Oh, yeah.

[00:16:00] So I have.

[00:16:01] HIPPEE HIPPEE Shake.

[00:16:03] For goodness sake.

[00:16:05] That's right.

[00:16:07] Some people will get that.

[00:16:08] Yeah, they will.

[00:16:09] Two of them.

[00:16:10] I got it.

[00:16:11] Two of the other ones are somewhere.

[00:16:14] So it's well, you know, to tell the story, what was celebrated yesterday and just for reference yesterday, our time was the 8th of May, 2024.

[00:16:27] On the 8th of May, 2014, HIPPEE was first used on the Anglo-Australian telescope.

[00:16:34] I was at that time the astronomer in charge of the Anglo-Australian telescope.

[00:16:37] So I remember it all pretty well.

[00:16:39] But what I didn't realize at that time was just how powerful an instrument this was and what an illustrious life it was going to have down the track as it has done for 10 years.

[00:16:53] So that machine has been evolved.

[00:16:56] It's now, excuse me, HIPPEE 2, which is the, you know, it's the improved version.

[00:17:03] It's been used on the Anglo-Australian telescope.

[00:17:06] It's been used on the Gemini North telescope at Mauna Kea.

[00:17:11] So one of the biggest telescopes in the world, the 8.2 meter telescope and a number of other telescopes as well, both in America and in Australia.

[00:17:21] So it's got a fabulous track record.

[00:17:25] It's brainchild again.

[00:17:27] Sorry, no, it's father figure, if I can put it that way, who was a colleague and friend of mine by the name of Jeremy Bailey.

[00:17:36] He, when he sent out a lovely notice yesterday, advertising HIPPEE's 10th birthday, and it's not online.

[00:17:43] It's just something that we know between astronomers.

[00:17:46] He basically included a list of all the publications that HIPPEE has resulted in, which come from 8418 individual polarization measurements.

[00:18:00] That's pretty impressive.

[00:18:02] Now, what does it do?

[00:18:03] What does it do?

[00:18:05] It just sits in a corner and goes, hey man, this is so cool.

[00:18:11] Yeah, I think it'd be quite good if it did that.

[00:18:16] The, sorry you've put my train of thought in an entirely different direction.

[00:18:25] You're now reflecting on your youth.

[00:18:28] Well, I'm actually reflecting on two people who we, and I won't say where they were or how we met them, but two people that we basically named Cheech and Chong because that's what they were.

[00:18:39] Oh yes, that's right.

[00:18:43] So the clue is in the acronym, high precision polarimetry instrument.

[00:18:50] And polarimetry is about measuring polarized light.

[00:18:53] You can do it in radio waves as well, but that's with radio telescopes.

[00:18:56] This is an optical polarimetry instrument.

[00:19:00] And, you know, I'm sure Jeremy would cringe if he heard me saying this.

[00:19:04] Jeremy Bailey, the father figure along with many of his colleagues at the University of New South Wales, I should mention that.

[00:19:10] That's where it was developed here in Sydney.

[00:19:13] I'm sure they'd cringe at this analog.

[00:19:16] But yes, polarizing sunglasses.

[00:19:18] We're all familiar with polarizing sunglasses and what they do, they take out the glare from a reflective surface.

[00:19:26] And that's because if light falls on a reflective surface, it becomes polarized.

[00:19:31] And what that means is that the vibrations of the oh here we go.

[00:19:39] These are my golf glasses.

[00:19:41] Mr polarizing sunglasses.

[00:19:43] Are they super polarized? Fabulous, that's good.

[00:19:46] Now for those of you listening to this who can't see, Andrew looks extremely glamorous with a pair of polarizing sunglasses on.

[00:19:53] I'll take the real glasses off.

[00:19:55] I wish you'd keep them on all the time because, yeah, it all fits with the hippie image, I have to say.

[00:20:03] I'm cool.

[00:20:04] But if you, now if you kind of lift those off your head, Andrew, keep looking through them.

[00:20:11] Pull them forward so that you can turn them round through a right angle.

[00:20:17] If you see what I mean, pull them forward and then twist them.

[00:20:20] No, not that way.

[00:20:21] The other axis.

[00:20:23] Yeah, that's all right.

[00:20:24] That's it.

[00:20:25] So when you look through one of those now, you're actually doing the opposite in terms of polarized light to what you do the other way.

[00:20:34] And you'll see light that scattered off a reflective surface.

[00:20:38] And if you then turn them back to the way they normally should be, that will disappear.

[00:20:42] Oh yeah.

[00:20:43] That's amazing.

[00:20:44] I've never noticed that before.

[00:20:45] Then again, I never wear them sideways.

[00:20:47] No, you don't.

[00:20:48] Yeah, that's true.

[00:20:49] You don't wear them sideways.

[00:20:50] You'd look ridiculous if you did.

[00:20:53] Anyway, so what's happening there is the way light waves vibrate, the vibration, the electromagnetic vibration of a propagating light wave is in kind of in all directions.

[00:21:08] But to put the polarizing sunglasses on, what you do is you just basically stream out most of those directions so that you've got these waves which are effectively representing a flat surface.

[00:21:21] I'm not really explaining it very well, but you're confining the vibrations into one plane, if I can put it that way.

[00:21:31] And that's what a polarizing sunglass does.

[00:21:34] Now Hippie does that too, but in a much, much more sophisticated way.

[00:21:39] And whereas you're, you know, if you used your polarizing sunglasses to measure how much polarization there was in a beam of light, you might get it to one part in 10, something like that, and accuracy of that kind.

[00:21:52] Hippie can do that with an accuracy of one or two parts per million.

[00:21:58] And so it is incredibly high precision, hence the name Hippie High Precision Polarimetry Instrument.

[00:22:05] So it's got this unique ability and it hasn't been surpassed by anything else in the world to make these really superbly accurate measurements, all in a box about the size of a loaf of bread, which means not only was it very cheap to make, it's also one of the smallest

[00:22:24] front line instruments in the world. In fact, Jeremy and his colleagues sent around a lovely photograph showing Hippie on the back end of the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii.

[00:22:41] The caption is, a very small instrument on a very large telescope.

[00:22:46] Hippie weighs 15 kilograms, but in order to mount it on the back of the telescope, they've got to add two tons of counterweight so it doesn't just spoil the balance of the telescope because most astronomical instruments weigh several tons.

[00:23:00] So what's it done?

[00:23:04] Polarization is really useful for tracking magnetic fields in distant star systems, distant galaxies, because what happens is that magnetic fields tend to align the particles in clouds of dust, and we call it dust but to anybody else it's smoke in space.

[00:23:26] And those clouds of dust actually are essentially magnetic, they will align along the field lines of a magnetic field and the dust also polarizes the light that passes through them.

[00:23:39] And so what you've got is an instrument that can measure very accurately the magnetism at very great distances.

[00:23:47] You know galaxies at the other side of the universe can have their magnetic fields measured, not because you've got a bar magnet to hold up or anything, but because you've got a polarimeter.

[00:23:58] And that's the kind of science that it does. But it can also, and I love this, Jeremy once told me this and I've been blown away by ever since.

[00:24:07] You know that you probably don't know but again you should check this with your polarizing sunglasses if you're on the golf course with those sunglasses on Andrew, and you have a shower of rain and you see a rainbow,

[00:24:21] check the rainbow out through your sunglasses and do that same trick of turning your sunglasses through 90 degrees.

[00:24:29] And you'll see that the light from the rainbow is very, very highly polarized.

[00:24:34] So polarizing angles it disappears altogether. So rainbows are things that polarize light very efficiently and Hippie is capable because of this, of detecting rainbows in the atmospheres of exoplanets.

[00:24:51] Working that one out you can find rainbows on other worlds in orbit around other stars. What a brilliant thing to look for.

[00:24:59] I don't know whether Jeremy's ever detected that, I think the last time I spoke to him he hadn't, but it's certainly one of the possibilities for this kind of astronomy that you might be able to detect rainbows on other worlds.

[00:25:11] What a wonderful, incredible, what a great instrument. Happy birthday to Hippie as 10 years old. In fact we'll go Hippie, Hippie, hooray.

[00:25:21] Yes. I'm glad you said that because I wish I hadn't.

[00:25:28] No, I'm glad you did. There were several emails back to Jeremy yesterday that said exactly that. Hippie birthday.

[00:25:35] Hippie, hippie, hooray. Yes, they are the stealing your overrides.

[00:25:40] All right. To our final story today, Fred and this one is the use of satellites to predict cropped yields. Now this sounds like it doesn't sound beyond the realms of possibility.

[00:25:53] I'm sure 50 years ago they would have said hogwash can't be done, never happen. But it is happening.

[00:26:01] It is. It's basically a framework that has been put in place to essentially, and this is actually coming from one of the press releases about this idea and arises in Cornell University in the United States.

[00:26:24] The idea is to produce this framework and by that I mean a kind of, you know, a system framework that would let you predict agricultural yields using minimal data.

[00:26:38] That's the trick here. You're using as little information as you can from a spacecraft to be able to predict the agricultural yield of what's on the ground.

[00:26:49] And the reason why that's important is that if you've got, you know, if you're a farmer in Australia, you're a farmer in the United States, farmer in Europe, you would have resources that would let you do that on the ground.

[00:27:07] And you'd be able to go and check your crops and say, well, this is going to be a bumper harvest or this is going to be not a croppy harvest if I can quote you from the beginning.

[00:27:17] It's going to be rubbish.

[00:27:21] But if you imagine yourself in a developing nation with yields that might be highly dependent on weather conditions and virtually no technology to be able to use to work out whether your crops going to fail or not.

[00:27:39] That is the whole idea of that. And so the basic premise of this whole work is that from space, you can measure essentially the color of the crop.

[00:27:55] And by that I mean not just whether it's green or, you know, green or yellow, but the subtleties of its spectrum.

[00:28:04] So you can look at the spectrum of a paddock or a field of crops from space and analyze that, analyze the colors in it.

[00:28:15] And what you can look for is something called chlorophyll fluorescence.

[00:28:20] Now we're all kind of familiar with chlorophyll. It's what gives grass and trees the green color.

[00:28:27] And basically it's the photosynthesis mechanism in crops.

[00:28:33] It's what actually allows light to turn the chemicals in those crops into useful things that nourish it and also provide oxygen.

[00:28:45] Chlorophyll fluorescence means that if the sun is shining on it, then you get chlorophyll fluorescence being formed.

[00:28:53] And then it's a reddish color that's emitted by photosynthetic tissues.

[00:29:00] And you can measure that from space and you can do it pretty accurately.

[00:29:05] So it means that you're not, you know, you're not really getting an instant measurement of what the yield will be.

[00:29:14] But it does tell you about the health of that crop on the ground, how well it's doing and what sort of, you know, what sort of yield you're likely to get at the end of the day.

[00:29:25] And so, yes, it's very much aimed at first of all, as I said, developing nations, but also the fact that a lot of traditional cropping methods are starting to break down because of climate change.

[00:29:38] And so climate change again is very much an important part of this story.

[00:29:42] Yes. One of the crops that's under major threat is coffee because they need to grow coffee beans at high altitude and it's getting too warm.

[00:29:52] So it's only a certain height they can go and it could jeopardize future coffee crops.

[00:29:58] Satellite technology is synonymous with agriculture these days.

[00:30:02] And in my part of the world where we have big, big, huge farms that grow wheat and canola and sorghum and you name it, the harvesters are actually satellite controlled.

[00:30:15] They're all geo-controlled from space.

[00:30:18] You can you sit in the cabin and watch movies while it just does it all by itself.

[00:30:23] It's quite incredible. All satellite controlled.

[00:30:26] It is remarkable. And that comes from, it's probably now six years ago.

[00:30:31] I seem to remember this was part of the 2018 kind of kickoff when the space agency was formed.

[00:30:38] Geosciences Australia got grants to do exactly what you've said, to use satellites to control planters, harvesters, all the other agricultural machines.

[00:30:51] But it's more than just giving the driver a rest.

[00:30:54] It's about high precision farming so that you can go within a millimeter of the edge of your paddock where you know the ground falls away.

[00:31:03] You can get so close to that you can have very, very high efficiency in the yields of the land.

[00:31:09] And that was what they were talking about at that time. How you can improve the yield by high precision farming.

[00:31:15] I imagine it would also be that they'd be able to calculate the best combination of maneuvers to get the crop off with the lowest amount of fuel use.

[00:31:26] Things like that. It's quite amazing.

[00:31:29] But yeah, crop. I can see this being an incredible tool going forward for farming, being able to just take a peek at your crop and going, okay, I'm selling the farm or I'm going to buy another one.

[00:31:44] That's right. That's it.

[00:31:45] Depending on yields. Yeah, fantastic.

[00:31:48] That story, if you're interested is on seed daily.com.

[00:31:53] I know we do have a lot of people in agricultural areas that do listen to us as seed daily.com is where you'll find that story.

[00:32:00] Fred, that brings us to the end. A reminder, if you'd like to listen, like to visit our website, you can do that at space nuts podcast or com or space nuts.

[00:32:11] If you've been following us on YouTube, don't forget to subscribe below and please leave reviews.

[00:32:17] Reviews are very handy to spread the word and get more people on board with space nuts.

[00:32:22] So yes, please leave reviews on whatever platform you use.

[00:32:26] We'd really appreciate that. Fred, as always, it's been a great pleasure and we will catch up with you again real soon.

[00:32:34] Probably could be minutes.

[00:32:36] Well, it could be that's a bit unlikely, but it could be.

[00:32:40] Thanks, Fred. We'll see you soon.

[00:32:44] Sounds great. Thanks, Andrew.

[00:32:46] Fred Watson, astronomer at large part of the team here at space nuts and Hugh in the studio who's been watching all sorts of crop on his television lately.

[00:32:56] And I'm not really going to get into that too deeply.

[00:33:00] Scary stuff.

[00:33:02] Scary stuff. And for me, Andrew, thanks for your company.

[00:33:05] I will join you again as we'll Fred on the next episode of space nuts.

[00:33:09] See you then. Bye bye.

[00:33:11] Space. You'll be listening to the space podcast.

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[00:33:25] This has been another quality podcast production from bytes.com.