#427: Martian Mysteries & Space Health: Unveiling Cosmic Secrets

Hi there, Thanks again for joining us. This is Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Dunkley, looking forward to your company. For the next little while. Will we be talking astronomy in space science. And on this episode we've found a weird rock on Mars. It just sort of stands out like a pustule on a face and that's kind of what it looks like. Also an unusual side effect to space travel, and it's a positive one sort of. And the James Web Space Telescope in the news again it's spotted an asteroid collision. We'll talk about all of that soon on Space Nuts. Fifteen second is in channel ten nine ignition sequence Space Nuts side or three two Space Nurse as and I report it Bills good and here to unravel it all is Professor Fred Watson, astronomer at Larch. Hello Fred, Hello Andrew. Not very large at the moment. I'm sitting at home, but I'll be last see. Yes, it's good to see. I've just come back from a little sojourn to China and had a fabulous time and what a lovely country, beautiful people, really nice people. And it was the one of the time frames we were there was the weekend of a public holiday and national public holiday, the dragon Boat Festival. They basically shut down everything for the week and it brings people from the far north of China down into the big cities. And we were warned that a lot of them have never seen Westerners in real life before, and we could expect some weird interactions. And sure enough, especially people like my wife who were blue eyed and blonde, got mobbed, absolutely mobbed. Photos. Yeah, there was one stage there, she's sitting down and three women just converged on and sat down, hugged her and got their photo taken. And at one point, this is hilarious, they pushed one of the men who was a bit too shy over to sit with my wife for a photo. It was amazing. Yeah, and sneaky photos being taken of us all the time as we travel around the country. Yeah, you don't think about it, really, you're so used to the way things are with us. Everybody knows everybody kind of, But in China there's still a lot of people who've never seen a white person upfront. And yeah, it really excited them. It's nice to be not to be able to excite people for some reason or another, but to a terrific trip. Got to see so much, climbed the Great Wall, nearly killed me. Went to Tianneman Square just after the anniversary of that fateful Day in nineteen eighty nine. Security was very tight, but what an amazing place. And I went to the terra Cotta Warriors Fred which was an optional tour, and I thought, we're here, we can't not do it. And it was the best thing I did. It's just, you know, we were gobsmacked. It was like a rugby scrum of twenty thousand people to get in there and have a look. But it's just just a maze. It just a maze. It's enclosed in the building, isn't it the site? Yeah, and this is fully excavated. Now, No, that's just one pit of three that they've opened up. It's the biggest. It's probably an area the size of a soccer stadium that's undercover with all the soldiers lined up in the pits. But they told us there are six hundred of those pits surrounding the tomb of the Emperor. So yeah, there's still a lot to discover out there. Incredible, extraordinary, Yes, lovely people and I think one of our favorite nights was going out to have a meal and finding a place called a hot pot where it's like a sushi train. The food just goes around on a conveyor belt, but you've got to cook it yourself. And we didn't have a clue what to do. And no, it spoke English, and the family next to us was so lovely and helpful, and we talked with Google Translate and it worked over there, believe it or not, because Google is not usually something that works in China, but we had a terrific time. Terrific time. Highly recommend it. Ah, Now, Fred, we better get down to business. They found a weird rock on Mars, and this is another discovery by the rover that's basically wandering around looking for science of past life on Mars, but it's looking at rocks as well. And this is a curious discovery because it sort of stands out like a sore thumb or a pimple. This one really remarkable when you see the image that's come back. It's the Perseverance Rover, which is at Jesuro Crater and it's been exploring the river delta that used to represent flow of water into the crater probably three billion years or so ago, and there's a remarkable image that's been sent back by Perseverance which shows sort of a hillside which is strewn with boulders, all of which are dark in color, except one that stands out vividly as being much much lighter in shade. And it's actually textured as well. It's not just it's not just sort of white looking, but it's got textured through it. And it has been identified as something called a north of site I hope I'm saying it right, and north of side, which is a rock that's currently found or that we believe has come from the crust of a rocky planet, fairly deep in the crust. Now, these things are quite common. An AUTHO site is quite common on Earth and on the Moon as well, but I thought to be very rare elsewhere in the Solar System. And so this has certainly caused, you know, a great deal of interest among the Perseverance mission controllers, and it's basically one that will be the subject of further research, although curiously what they haven't done is gone up to it and taken samples of the rock, and that is because the mission team believes that there will be more of these An author site in the rim of the Jesuro Crater, which is kind of where they're heading for, and so they expect to see many more of them. And the reason for that, Andrew, is that if these things are rocks that have come from fairly deep in the crust of Mars. The Jesuro Crater is an impact crater. It's an ancient impact crater which was caused by probably a small asteroid hitting the surface of Mars maybe three point five getting on for four billion years ago, And the thinking is that they're likely to find these remnant rocks from the crust around the rim of the crater. So rather than sort of spend time analyzing this particular one, they are expecting to see more as they traverse up the rim of the crater. But if they don't, they'll come back and have a look at this author site, which by the way, has been given the name of I Took Up Point, which is one of the landmarks of the Grand Canyon. Ah. Of course, well, that makes that makes perfect sense. It does stand out. I mean, when you look at the landscape, the soil is or the regolith is red. The rocks are mainly reddish to grayish, but this one is white. It looks like a big hunk of chalk, really it does. It's actually a minerraal call Feldspar, which is one well known on Earth linked to lava flows, and it's white because of its rich silica content. The other ones are probably basalts, the darker rocks. But the yes, as I said, the north site is Feldspar. Well, ba'sal that's like, that's as common as dirt, isn't it. Well, it is dirt. That's what makes dirt. Yeah, when it's worn down, it turns into dirt. So yeah, and of course basalts rock, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, Well this is somewhat volcanic, isn't it. From what I've read, it's got a I read the definition, the granitic magmas appear to be produced by partial melting of lower crustal rocks. Yeah, so that's sorry, volcanism is involved, but it's it's it's definitely lava flow stuff rather than volcano stuff, if I can put it that way. Yeah, so it'd be really interesting, you know. Sorry, go ahead, Andrew, I was going to say. My first thought when I saw it was pummus. Yes, that's that's a really interesting comparison, because you're absolutely right, it does look like it looks attle bit more solid than Pummis, if I can put it that way. Pummis, of course, is again it's volcanic rock that's been that's been exuded from the earth in water, and so you get all the steam know that was formed creating the voids in Pomis. So it does look a bit like Pomis, but perhaps only in its color that the close up of the rock that I've seen, it does look quite solid. It's got a hard edge to it that looks as though, you know, it's broken at some point there must be another half of it somewhere or something like that. Very interesting, and I think what, you know, what we should be looking out for is future mention of these and author sites when they are found or if they're found on the rim of the Gesuro Crater. Yeah, well, the funny thing will be not funny. The funny not funny thing will be if they get to the rim of Gesero Crater and don't find any and go, yeah, we should have just you know, we should have done that, should have done it, should have done it. You know, of course, samples of what you think of but they said, you know the comments that I've read, if they don't find them on the rim, going to come back and actually start digging, digging into this one, so we'll see more more of its contents. Yes, indeed, and it certainly will give us a little bit more information to work with in terms of the history of the red planet with white specks. Now let's move on to a really interesting story about space travel and health. Now we've talked about space travel in the past and how it can have negative effects on the human body muscle wastage, bone wastage, particularly with male astronauts, potential damage to the eyes. But this story goes back a couple of years to a civilian mission which was aimed at looking at the effects of space travel on the human body, and what they discovered is astounding. Yes, it is. I mean, the the bottom line is that, you know, space travel is bad for your health in some of the things that it does, but you recover very quickly when you get back to Earth. That's one of the findings. So the backstory is exactly as you've said, Andrew. This goes back to September twenty twenty one when there was a mission which was carried out using one of the crew Dragon spacecraft that manufactured by SpaceX, and it was four astronauts who were effectively space tourists. There weren't people who'd had years of training and years of physical preparation to get them ready for a space flight. They were just ordinary people. They probably had a little bit of training. It was funded by a billionaire who was one of the people who rode on the trip. And as I said, they flew in crew Dragon for almost three days, so this wasn't a spaceflight that linked with the International Space Station. They were in the capsule for those three days. What I didn't know until I read up on this, you know, to talk to you about it, I didn't know that the docking ports on the spacecraft. So you remember the crew Dragon a lot like the old Apollo spacecraft. They're conical in shape and at the nose end there is a doorway and that's basically what you essentially dock into the International Space Station with and can transfer astronauts through the doorway into the space station. So that wasn't needed because they were never going to be anywhere near the space station. In fact, they weren't quite high higher in space I think about six hundred kilometers than the space station did is space stations at about four hundred kilometers. And so rather than have just a wasted door that wasn't going to be used, they had a transparent window, a kind of cupola, a bit sort of miniature of the one that's on the International Space Station, and so they got some brilliant views of Earth from orbit. But cutting to the story itself, one of those astronauts, which is I guess what they were because they were flying in space, whose name is I think I'm pronouncing this correctly. Haley also know is a doctor effectively or certainly has training in medical science, and she was basically the medical specialist on the flight, and for the three days she took pretty regular blood samples, biopsy samples from skin samples that were designed to show what the short term effects of spaceflight are, given that this was on a three day mission, but the fact that they had so many samples taken meant that there was a treasure trove of medical information which was brought back with these astronauts. And what's happened is that they were distributed to more than one hundred institutions all around the world, in order to do an analysis of all of these things. And in fact, there was a kind of special issue of the journal Nature last week which presented several papers which were related to exactly this. And so one of the things that these data show is that it's within a few hours of your being in space in weightless conditions, your body starts changing, and that those changes are fairly rapid. They're basically to do with the you know, the sort of the changes in your blood. There's changes to your skin, the proteins, your kidneys, your genetic makeup changes slightly, all sorts of other health indicators actually change very quickly. But as I mentioned minutes ago, something like ninety five percent of these changes come back to normal within three months. One that, and I think this is the one that you're really referring to, that it's an astonishing one is to do with the telomeres, which are the caps on the ends of chromosomes. They've been likened to the little caps on the ends of a shoelace. So telomeres are, yeah, they're an important part of our makeup at a microscopic level, and they normally what happens as you age. The telomeres in fact, they shorten. Actually, fiz dot org have got a typo there in their article about this because it says their lengthen as you asually don't they shortened. But what happened within you know, almost hours of these astronauts being in space, they started lengthening, so that you know, it's almost like time running backwards. The telling me has actually started lengthening. And they you know, they're an indicator of your well being, your longevity and things of that sort. So that was really quite remarkable. When they got back to Earth, they started shortening again the telomeres, and they shortened just rather more than they would have done had they not gone into space. So while when they were in space there was this reaction by the body that was almost like reversing aging, they caught up with it when they got back to Earth. The telling me has shrunk back to their original length. Wow, I mean yeah, I mean I'm looking at some of the wording that's been used in the story, and you know, anti aging and reversing the that sort of thing, which is probably a little bit of creative license. But could this be studied? Could we learn something from this fact? Well, that's right, that's exactly what you know has come out of this, whether you could whether you could have I don't know, face creams or something like that, or skin creams that would rejuvenate your your body to its youthful appearance. I've got an idea. I've got for an idea. Look, well, I mean this is happening in space. Space is sort of a big void. So I think if we just sold empty jars to people and said rub this on your face, we could make a mint. The problem is, and I've struggled with this, Andrew, is getting zero gravity into a jar that really is mine? Ricky. Maybe you could take a jar up in the space open in space, then steal it again and bring it back. What would happen then you just get some of the moldy air from the International Space Station or whatever that you're bringing back. Apparently MIA was the worst one, you know, the space station that preceded the International Space Station of Russian venture. Apparently that was not very wholesome by the time it was finished its occupancy, which I think was in the early two thousands, late nineteen nineties. Actually, maybe they could use the robotic arm to take the jar out, take the lid off then put the lid back on and then you've got space in a jar. Yes you do. Yeah, you've got a jar with a vacuum in it. But as I said, the really important thing in this study is getting rid of gravity, and that's a lot harder. Yeah, yeah, that's that's the problem, isn't It's the zero G. Maybe the day will come years years from now where they will have hospitals in space for people who gain benefit from zero G or even the health resource. Yes, yeah, you'd never know. I think that's a distinct possibility. But they were fascinating findings and if you want to read about them, you can go to the fizz dot org phys dot org website. This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunpley and Professor Fred Watson. Let's take a quick break from the show to talk about our sponsor, Nord VPN. And as you've probably heard, I've just come back from overseas with Judy doing a trip throughout China, and of course in China you do have restrictions on access to the Internet, particularly the likes of Google and Facebook and WhatsApp and a few others. You can't use them unless you have a VPN. Now, this is in a Wi Fi scenario. You can access a little bit more when you're using your mobile phone in the normal scheme of things, but if you're using Wi Fi, you generally are restricted. So Nord VPN was extremely useful in that regard and so very helpful to enable me to access stuff that I normally access at home day to day that I couldn't get to without a VPN in China. Now, our sponsor has got some great deals going and some exclusive deals for space Nuts listeners, and as I've mentioned many times, you can sign up for all sorts of different levels of service over different periods of time, depending on what you need and what sort of price you're willing to pay. You can get a big discount at the moment, which we've talked about before, for extra months when you sign up. But here's an interesting little bonus that they've got on offer at the moment for a short time. It's a it's an e SIM eSIM data and if you buy any two year Nord VPN plan you can get up to ten gigabytes of free mobile data on sale. 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They have been fabulous supporters of us, and look, honestly, they are the best in the business when it comes to virtual private networks and all those other amazing tools. The cross platform password manager, I would buy that on its own. It is the best thing since slice spread. That's NordVPN dot com slash space nuts. Check it out today. Now back to the show. Okay, we've checked all space nuts. Now to our final story, Fred, and this one is involving something we never talk about, the James web Space Telescope. What I find really what I felt really interesting about this story is that it has observed something a long way away that is probably very difficult to witness, even if you're standing right in front of it. Well, that's right, yes, so's it's a very clever piece of you know, detective work, and that's kind of what astronomy is all about. And it concerns a star which rejoices in the name of Beta Pictoris, which is a young star. It's only about twenty million years old, so it's very much in its infancy, and it's surrounded by a disc of dust. Now, dust is the raw material of planets, and we took it call it dust, but it is kind of in many ways better to imagine smoke, because that's more or less what it's like. And it's circulating around this star. But the story goes back actually to two thousand and five when another infrared spacecraft called Spitzer, another of NASA's great observatories, that was used to observe Beta Pictories and sort of analyze the disc of dust, and they found one section of the disc that was very rich in a particular kind of dust silicates of a certain type, which basically revealed that there was different sorts of dust in this particular part of the disc of the dust disc, and that really there wasn't really an understanding of what was causing that that you know, it was the analysis of the spectrum of the dust with infrared, which you can do, that showed these particular peaks that came from, you know, a certain type of dust that was presented in the literature but not really analyzed in depth. So now move forward to today and the James web Space Telescope which has looked at the same bit of the Beta Pictoris dusty disc and finds no trace of that earlier dust that was revealed by Spitzer. And so what they're suggesting this is very very fine dust apparently that we're talking about here. What they're suggesting, and this is scientists by the way, from Johns Hopkins University in the United States, they're suggesting that what we were seeing back in two thousand and five was the debris from a collision of baby asteroids which are resident in that dusty disc. So actually probably not that small. The asteroids they think were probably one hundred thousand times bigger than the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. So they're fairly substantial, but they are still asteroidal. They're not planets. They're small objects which are probably you know, the precursors to planets, because we think that planetary formation something that starts small and builds up gradually. So what they're saying is that the dust that was seen to in two thousand and five was from a collision of asteroids, and the reason why we don't see it now is because it's been blown away by the radiation from the star itself. The solar wind from Be to Pictoris itself has cleared that area of this very fine dust that was seen before, and that is why this interpretation has been you know, has been arrived at by the Johns Hopkins University team. There's not really any other explanation for why you should see these dust particles one time and then twenty years or nearly twenty years later, find they've gone altogether. And so yes, they have a cogent story to tell, and it's you know, illustrates just how wild early solar systems are, because that's what we think happened in our solar system. There's a gradual build up of objects, but that was often interrupted by collisions between these objects, and you know exactly like we think has occurred in Beter Pictoris, which just to type the loose end it is. Yes, it's a long way away, as the crow flies if you're walking, but it's relatively close star. It's sixty three point four light years from our Solar system, so it's within the solar neighborhood, within the Sun's neighborhood. You and I have talked about how our solar system and the planets themselves were probably created early in our existence, and that happened a long long time ago. Is it fair to say that what we're seeing here is the same process, but we're catching it at a much earlier stage in that Solar system, something we obviously could never have witnessed here. And if that system goes on to develop intelligent life, doll not a witness to either, but we have. Yes, that's right, there's a precursor. Actually, just thinking back, and I think this is a story that we covered probably a year or so ago. There's a star culled Formulo fom Alhaut I think it's spelled, which also has a dusty disc around it, and for a while what was thought to be a planet was being observed in that disc by which telescope. I don't think it was the JWST. I think that was before the web telescope came into action. But that planet seemed to be swelling up, but it eventually dispersed, and again it was thought that what had been seen there was the result of a collision. You have a cloud of dust, that's that's the debris from something that's been collided with and that eventually disperses and disappears. I think the headline we had was the disappearing planet because it was originally thought to be a planet and eventually dispersed and wasn't there anymore. That's what we talked about, and this is a similar situation. What surprised me in regard to this story, Fred, though, was like they've made the early observations of the collision and the follow up pictures were only twenty years later issue and the yeah, the dust has gone. It's yes, you don't. You don't think about things happening that fast in Solar system formation with a collision, though, yes, I think you would. You know, we we've seen colliding asteroids in our own Solar System and the debris takes not very long to disperse. What usually happens is because what you're seeing is lots of debris being illuminated by the sun. As that debris spreads apart, it becomes less and less obvious. You can't see the individual bits of debris. All you can see is the effect of the cloud itself, and so it just gradually gets fainter and fainter as the cloud gets more dispersed. I suppose if we just sort of set our watches and weighed another thirty or forty million years, we might be able to see what it turns into. Yeah, we might, Yeah, or maybe even two to three hundred million years, we might see what is turning in. Yeah. But it's certainly proving what a great tool the James Webspace Telescope has become. It's just doing exactly what they promised. It's finding these things that we couldn't have hoped to have seen twenty thirty years ago, and giving us so much darta to work with and so much information. But you'd love to get you, you know, your talents into the Jay James Webspace Telescope for it. No, I don't think I'm clever enough to write a proposal to do that. What I'd have to do is what I've tended to do for a long time, has tag along with a lot of other very clever people who've got the ideas, and I can kind of help it somewhere another. Yeah, gosh, so much more to discover. But it's yeah, of course it's throwing up new questions with all the things is at sees, but it's also coming up with a few answers. That's right, And you're absolutely right what you just said before. You know, it's so many different bits of astronomy, different problems that we're looking at, different questions that we want answered on a vastly different scale. Because at the same time as it's doing all this, it's also looking at some of the youngest galaxies that we've ever seen in the universe, whether early two hundred ninety million years you know, the universe is only two hundred ninety million years old. It's an extraordinary tool. You're absolutely right, Yeah, incredible, all right. If you want to chase up that story, it is at the space dot Com website and definitely a great read to observe something so far away and learn what's happening and sort of correlate it to what our early solar system went through. Is yes, a it's a revelation, like we knew what happened to us, but now we've got physical, physical proof. Fred. That's just about it for another week. Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure Andrew. Nice to see you back home in Suly, Australia, and we'll talk again soon. We will, indeed, Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large. Don't forget though, if you're on social media, don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram or the space That's podcast group where you can talk to each other and share photos and stories, And don't forget to visit our website. And if you're a YouTube follower, don't forget to subscribe. We really appreciate that and we welcome your reviews on whatever platform you use. And thanks to here in the studio who's had a long weekend, and from me Andrew Dunkley. Catch you on the next episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye, Spacenuts. You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at guides dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from sites dot com.