Asteroids, Alien Signals & Icy Moons: #499 - Unpacking the Latest in Cosmic Discoveries

By there. Welcome to another episode of Space Nats. I'm your host Andrew Dunkley. As always, it is great to have your company. Hope you're well, and I hope you can stay with us because we are going to give you yet another asteroid update. Yes, it's still in the news. I was reading stories online over the weekend and no, it's all doom and gloom twenty twenty four y r four. It's going to kill us all. Well, let's find out the truth. We're also going to answer a question. It's not the definitive answer, but it's the answer. At this point in time, are we alone? And the reason new data that's been released SpaceX has got itself into the news again for all the wrong reasons. And there might be another moon in our solar system that harbors a liquid ocean. We'll tell you which one it is. On this episode of. Space Nuts Channel ten nine. Ignition, Space Nuts three two one, Space. Nurse and I record it Nels good and he is back for more. It is Johnny Horner, professor of astrophysics at the University of Southern Queensland. Johnny, Hello, good afternoon, how are you going. I am well, good to see you and Johnny warned me that we might hear some dog interruption, not from the dog star but from the dog dogs. Yes, when the other half turns up, because they get very excited that. We've been really excited at people walking down the road. So well, yeah, that's maybe you can hear them. Maybe you come, but I'm hearing. The filters might be stopping it from getting through to the recording. Sometimes that happens. But yeah, well we've heard Jordie many many times on the podcast at at friend's house, so yes, not unusual, and we don't mind. We've been interrupted by all sorts of creatures on this show over the years. Let's start off with yet another update on our favorite asteroid might not be our favorite. If you read the Popular Prayers twenty twenty four four. What's the latest, Well, the latest, long and short is that catastrophe is averted. It is almost certainly not going to hit it. And this has come around a little bit quicker than I was expecting, actually, but I've seen some beautiful visualizations released by both European Space Agency and NASA over the last few days that have shown what's going on. So I mentioned on the previous episodes that we found this object back on the twenty seventh of December. They immediately found some old images that went back to the twenty fifth of December when it was closest to the Earth, and people have been observing it pretty full on ever since. Those that could do, because it's quite small, quite fent. As it receded from the Earth and end of January, the odds of it hitting the Earth got high enough in twenty thirty two, in eight years time, that it was flagged up as been potentially threatening and it got the second highest ever rating on the Plurmar scale. So basically, this thing is something to watch out for. We're not saying it's going to hit the Earth, but we need more data. As time's gone on since then, we've got more and more data, and for a while, the probability of hitting us on that day, on the twenty second of December twenty thirty two was increasing, and that was exactly what you'd expect. So you get more observations, which means our knowledge of where it will be on that fateful day gets better, so the area of uncertainty on where it will be get smaller, so you're shrinking the volume of space where the asteroid could be and if the Earth stays in that area, the Earth becomes a bigger fraction of that total area, so it's more likely to be hit. Yep. And what I said at the time was eventually we'd get enough observations that the Earth could potentially fall outside that area, so the area would shrink enough that the Earth kind of popped out of it, fell out onto the other side. And that's what's happened over the last few days. Now the Earth is not totally and absolutely out of the firing line, but it's almost as good as and I'm sure within a day or two it will drop to absolutely zero. So as of the time where recording this, which is February the twenty fifth, the latest probability of an impact is two point seven times ten to the minus five, which means no point not two seven percent, or one in thirty seven thousand. Now, given the last week we were talking about one in thirty three, that's a very dramatic change. And that's big. See, area that the object is going to be in has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk, and the Earth is essentially popped out of the outside. And that's what these beautiful visualizations that are popping up online are showing an interesting part of this so is that while Earth is out of the cross heads, the Moon is still in the crosshairs. So there remains a possibility that this thing could hit the Moon, but the probability of an impact on the Moon is still pretty low. So it isn't a case of we're saying the Earth is spared. Watch out anybody who's part of Project Tartemis, you know, walking around on the Moon in eight years time, if that happens. Rather, it's just that the Moon still hasn't fallen out of that area yet, but bad anticipate it probably will do. So the most likely outcome is that this thing will come close, but it's not going to be that close. Okay, Now, what if it did hit the Moon, what would be the effect. Would it just make a mighty big crater? It'd make not even that mighty, not even that big. A good rule of thumb on the Earth is that if something solid makes it to the surface of the Earth, the creater that thing will create is going to be to first order, nineteen times bigger than the impact. Little bit of wiggle room in there obviously a different material for the impact would have an impact. A different speed would have an impact, But first order, it's about a rule of nineteen. I think that changes slightly from body to body, but not hugely, because it's still the physics of rock hitting rock or metal hitting rock. What that means is, if this thing is the size of the best estiments, which is about fifty five meters, then you're looking at about a one kilometer crater, which I mean is substantial. It's big enough for us to observe, but it's nowhere near the biggest anywhere out there. It's probably not big enough that a substantial amount of material will be ejected from the Moon to reach us. But people have tried to fearmonger that a little bit. I've seen a few posts from people online saying if it hits the Moon, the Earth will get hit by a load of debris. Realistically, not much debris would reach the Earth, so we might get a little bit burning up in the atmosphere, but we wouldn't even probably notice, because it seems fairly small. I've seen some studies arguing that you need an impact or at least a kilometer across to eject enough material from the Moon for us to rarely pick it up and notice it from the point of view of looking up. Okay, all right, well we've got how long to wait? Just other great years, so we can revisit this in the future when Fred is once again looking at Aurora in Scandinavia. Why not? All right? So the good news is the odds have plummeted, and despite what I read in I don't know how many news outlets on Sunday, the story is very very different today. Yeah, it's a very fast moving story. And if you can find these little animations online, they're worth looking at because it shows you a line that is basically all the possible places the astro coup, and it's that's the result of lots of simulations with slightly different initial conditions that all much within our uncertainty where the object is currently, and you get this long stretch outline. And then with every day of new observations, that line gets shorter and shorter and shorter, and now the Earth is right on the very end of it, barely touched by any of them. And I'm sure tomorrow the earthwallpers scott free. Okay, that's good news, very good news. Space nuts. Now to a question that we do get from time to time from our audience asking about whether or not we are alone in the universe. I suppose that is one of the big questions yet to be answered as far as the wider well humanity is concerned. That question has got new data attached to it, which is very interesting because of the way it's been collected. And the downside is the result at this point in time, at this point in time, But yes, are. We alone so far? I think that's the best answerment it is. So there are two different ways that we'll look to answer this question, and two different things we're looking for. One is just to look for any evidence of any kind of life, and we're doing that within the Solar system, and we're doing outside of the Solar system by looking for subtle indications that there could be life in various places and will probably amount to finding something that's out of equilibrium that shouldn't be there. A good example being the phosphene observations on Venus a few years ago that reads a lot of excitement but are probably not actually a life, but we don't know. It's finding something out of place and inferring that life is the best explanation that could exist for it, and that's where we're going to be doing a lot of work in the coming decade or two looking at planets around the starts. That is a search for any life, particularly simple life, and I think, you know, as a little bit of an aside, I think we're more likely to find simple life before we find complex life, just because of the amount of available real estate and the amount of available time. So if you look back at the history of the Earth, it seems to be accepted that we've had life on Earth for at least three and a half thousand million years old. Its fossils are found in the Pilburg in Western Australia. That's really kind of cool. We've only had complex life on Earth for about five hundred million years, so I think there are some studies this week I saw that suggest it might have been around a bit longer than that. So what that means is if you could do something really bizarre and make a dice with seven sides, which I've had somebody tell me is almost impossible to do, but you know, get a seven sided die instead of a six sided die and roll that die. You're looking at the Earth at some point in that three and a half billion year period, and only if you roll a seven would you see the Earth when there was complex life. So six times out of seven yard hitters when there's simple life. The other side of it is if you look at the habitats that life occupies on Earth, you know there are a far, far, far far greater amount of habitats where simple life can thrive than where complex life can thrive. You know, if I took you up to forty thousand feet and let go, you wouldn't so much fly as plummet in the immortal words munty python, but we find bacteria up there. If I drop you in, you know, one of the superheated lakes in Yellowstone, you'd dissolve quicker than people could pull you out, and that would be pleasant. But we find bacteria there. So there are far there's a far wider envelope of environments where you could find simple life than where you'd find complex life. All of that is based on the caveat that we're looking at life like Earth life of God, and that's a very big caveat. Is an assumption that is implicit in what most people discuss, and I think it's important to make it explicit. You watch Star Trek and you imagine multen metal men wandering around on magma planets and things like this, and intelligent hydrogen clouds. But when we're looking for things like life, it makes more sense to look for something we know can exist than for something that we could speculate might exist. And so we know of Earth life, so that forms our first template, and that will inform our first search. Even though you'd admit that there could be other kinds of life out there, and with Earth life as a template, you'd argue that for most of the time there's been life on Earth, we only have simple life. And in most of the places and environments you can find life on Earth, you can only find simple life. So that suggests to me simple life will be more common than complex life and the cosmos, and we're more likely to find that. Of course, that Zafemer saying that the only prediction you can make that is accurate is that all predictions will be wrong. So when we do find life, please don't shout at me. But that's kind of where I take it. But the coming back to the story, after I get derailed and go on a diversion, this story is looking at the other way, we can search for life, which is the one that has the potential for greater reward and greater excitement, but a lower potential for success, and that's a search for extraterrescural intelligence or SETI or the associated search for extraterreassural technology. So this is looking instead of looking for any life, it's looking for life that has technology at least as advanced as ours, that is in some way making itself known to the cosmos. Now in some degree, I've heard this described as searching for a needle in a haystack when you don't know what a haystack is and you've never seen a needle. It's trying to listen for something that another species that has technology would create that we could identify as being definitively caused by life. And because a bit like the science fiction analogy earlier on, we can imagine a wide variety of things, what this kind of work tends to do is focus on the things that we as humanity do that we could detect if we were elsewhere in the cosmos with sufficiently advanced technology. And the one that often gets a hat hung on it and said, this is one we'll look at is a search for broadcasts. I guess like this podcast is. When it goes out on ABC and it's broadcast on the radio bits of it, then that's been broadcast in all directions with a certain amount of power so that when somebody tunes in the car they can listen to it. And that means that this broadcast will be winging its way out into space, and somebody with a sufficiently sensitive radio receiver pointed at the Earth at just the right time could tune in and tell me that I'm talking rubbish. Essentially, that's probably what would happen, or the churn over and say, look, please don't cancel neighbors. You know that needs to run on and on and on. Now you make an assumption that other technologically advanced species, if they exist, would follow a similar technology route to us, then that suggests that there'll be a period of time when those species too, broadcast to the cosmos. Now, the analogy I use a little bit here is a bit like a toddler in a cave screaming its lungs out. Eventually they'll learn to control themselves. So we're already finding on Earth that we are throwing less signal into space, and we used to because it's more efficient to broadcast point to point are through cables. So a lot of people will listen to this through their wired Internet that comes through cables or through Heaven for fens, through stalink where it's point to points, so there's not much wasted and so eventually people are predicting the Earth will go radio acquired again. But this is one way that we know we as a society are making ourselves obvious to aliens that are out there, if they exist and if they've got the technology to listen in So that has inspired a lot of people to turn the telescope skyward with radio telescopes and listen to see if we can get alien signals. And that's been fundamentally what set he is. It's been really useful to us in the Australian astronomy community. Exit's the many reason that the Parks Radio Telescope is still operating. Curtsey of the breakthrough a listening initiative. But people have been listening and they've tried listening at all sorts of different frequencies. They've done targeted searchers looking at a few stars like the Sun. They've also piggybacked off other surveys where people are getting radio observations for a totally different reason, and the SETI people get hold of those observations and check them just to see to see whether there's a TV broadcast buried in that essentially. But the challenge of doing this historically is that it's very labor intensive because there's a lot of different radio sources out there that are natural and you need to rule them out. You find a signal, it looks weird, but if it's natural, it's not aliens, so you've got to rule that out. You've then got a whole heap of you know, human generated signals that you've got to rule out, and they can be harder because it could be Spice satellites gone through and nobody's going to set to you will actually know you've called us. That was my spiceack, like we were trying to watch them filming neighbors. I don't know why I've got NIBBs on the man, given that I've never watched the thing, but there you go. I think that's what it is. I saw that story and given them my joke about, you know, searching for aliens. Is that they'll come and tell us to turn it off and stop it. It seems ironic, but anyway, you know, it could be a spicack like looking down. It could be as simple as a microwave in the next building that somebody was warming their dinner up. And that has actually happened before. People has detected microwaves in other buildings. So it's really really complicated. And what that means is that a lot of these efforts to look for alien technology and alien signals have been limited by the human resources available to them, which brings us finally to this new survey. And I know I've gone in a very long roundabout route there there's this incredible radio facility called the Very Large Array over in the US that the square kilometer Array is going to be bigger and better, and we're going to have that in Australia, so we can wear a flag and say, well who but the Very Large Arrays been doing incredible observations for a very long time. If I remember correctly, those who like the movie Contact, which is based on the Calsagen book, some of the scenes were shot at the veryl Argirae if I remember right. So if I'm wrong again, please don't shout too loudly, but my memory is that that's the vertyl Argerira that featured in that film. Yeah. Anyway, the Vinyl Largirae has spent a huge amount of time scanning, particularly the Northern Hemisphere sky because it's a Northern Hemisphere facility, doing all sorts of radio astronomy observations of all sorts of things. A team has developed something that they call Cosmic. Now I'm just finding the acronym here. Cosmic is a commensal open source multimode interferometric cluster, which is a mouthful, which is why they call it cosmic. It's a very large computer and software setup that essentially attempts to automate that complex process that I described where you've got to rule out all of the posts signals. It's been heavily built and coded so that every single observation that they get, they can run through this pipeline and it will say, does it have anything in it that could look like it's of an alien origin? Filter it down heavily. If it passes that first test, then you run another test that said, could any astronomical phenomenon explain this? If it fails that test, it gets thrown out. Next it says, could it be anything that we know of that is of human origin, and if it fails that test, it's thrown out. So it filters it down to give the people who do the checking a tiny shortlist rather than an incredible long list. Now doing that, they've been able to take nine hundred and twenty thousand different observational pointings from the very large array. That's nine hundred and twenty thousand different radio observations of different parts of the night sky and analyze them one after another looking for any signal of aliens. And this does clever things. It looks for a signal that is localized on the sky, so it looks like it's coming from one particular star. It even looks to check for the red shift and the blue shift of that signal, because if it's on a planet going around that star, the frequency will change a little bit as a result of the planet's movement around the star. So it digs into a whole heap of things to do these filters and allows them to throw a lot of things away. So this has served eighty two percent of the entire northern hemispherre nite sky, like actually nine hundred and fifty thousand pointings of the telescope, and what they've found was they've flagged a few interesting signals. None of them turn out to be aliens. So after all this work, after all this waffle, after all my diversions, the result is we've found nothing. But that's the risky run, because at the end of the day, if technologically advanced life is out there, there's no guarantee it will broadcast this way. As I said earlier on, we're probably going to be radio quiet again within just a few decades, even if we don't wipe ourselves out, so we'll stop broke. So then there'll be a single little shell of radio emissions about one hundred light years wide, expanding into specially on the Sun. And if you're in that one hundred year window, you'll be able to tune in and listen to us. If you're too early or too late. You want here now. One hundred years it's a long time to me and you, and I'd love to think how last one hundred years on this planet. But in the scale of the cosmos, our Earth has had life on it for three and a half thousand million years, and only for one hundred years of that has the Earth had a signal. So that's a one in thirty five million chance of looking at Earth while it's have life and hearing our radio broadcasts. And that's the lower odds than the asteroid hitting it is. Yeah, it's also lower odds are winning payable anyway. Yeah, it's an. Interesting story in that. Okay, Yeah, they've found a new way, but they haven't found anything yet, and they have had a lot of targets. But that doesn't mean it's not out there somewhere. It's not saying there isn't intelligent life. But I do agree with you that finding microbial life or single cell. Life of some kind. Is in the foreseeable future, and we've got missions headed out in. A very near future to try and find just that we do. We might even talk about those in the Q and A episode later on. We might do that. But the probability of finding life in our own solar system is pretty reasonable. I wouldn't like to put a number on it, but I think that the odds are pretty good. Fred also feels the same way. So even that would be one of the greatest discoveries in human history, because so far we only know one place where there is life, and that's us. So time will tell. But when they the super kella fregilistic array up and running, that might. Get and people will be applying these same kind of techniques to the square kilometer or I want it something now, because it's the obvious way to do things, especially when you've got good computing power. But I think the other thing this highlights, which I think astronomy in general does really really well, is the importance of reporting no results or negative results. Now, once upon a time of the distant past that dated a biologist, and there was a real problem in her field that when people did an experiment and they found nothing, they couldn't really get it published. Either the company that was sponsoring it wasn't very keen on them publishing it, or the journal said, well, look, you've not found anything, so we're not going to report it. Now, Let's say you do an experiment that isn't going to find anything, but it's not that accurate, so there's a small uncertainty in your results. You find nothing, you don't publish it. So someone else goes away and does the same experiment. They find nothing. But eventually, due to the where statistics worth. Someone might get a signal that looks interesting and they'll publish it, and you get a almost misleading idea of whether this thing happens or not, whether this thing works or not. And this was something that she was concerned with. She ended up leaving the field. And it's a real challenge that you're facing a lot of disciplines is that it is much much easier to publish a result that is explicitly, we found something, we observe something. There is a signal here, we found it. But publishing the opposite of that, which is we looked and found nothing, is very hard. And Astronomy has done and continues to do a really good job of people being able to publish the results when they find nothing. And we find this in the extra planet again, we observe a style. We don't find any planets, but will include it in a paper and we'll publish the data to say we watch the STAF for a decade and nothing happened. And the beauty is that makes that there to public It means that other people with similar levels of equipment towards don't waste their time, but it also means that you've got that data there, so somebody with higher resolution observations in future can use your dicta as well as part of their analysis. And it's a really critical part of science to be able to report what you didn't find. And I think it doesn't occur to me that often, but there's a certain amount of pride, I think in the fact that astronomy remains a discipline where you can try to look for something and fail and still get your work published and still progress your career because you've still advanced our knowledge because you've lowered the possibilities or you've lowered the fair space of what could be by ruling out what can't be. And there's also the fact that what we're witnessing now is new studies and new papers being published based on historical data, historical gathering of information, and they hadn't been able to analyze it the way they can now because the technology has improved, So they've been able to do studies now based on information that was published twenty thirty years ago when the technolog he was far inferior. So you can you know, you can. Use those those papers for. Yeah, And that's the probably we wilcome back to with our final story in this, I think so. I also see that Fred has returned. Hello Fred Watson, here he is. Hello, how are you, gentlemen? We are, well, it's nice to see you. When you you were going to drop in, we thought we'd just surprise everyone. We didn't pre empt it because I also considered the possibility you might forgot. Yes, I considered that as well. Jetlag does funny things to your brain. Indeed it does. You came in right at the end of this story. And if you'd like to read up on that search for extraterrestrials, the new way of doing it that has found nothing yet, you can do that at space dot com. Okay, we tacked. Spaces all right, Fred, you gonna sort of why don't we Why don't we throw to you now that you're back and you can tell us a little bit about your trip because you've been away for it feels like four or five years. No offense, Joddy, that was just one answer from me. Yeah, okay, well I want to go there. But the yes, the trip was pretty hard work actually, because we were many and I were leading one of her tour, actually three of her tours, three separate ones, which were all back to back. We started off in Sweden, went to far northern Sweden, far northern Norway for the first time. I got to the North Cape, a latitude of seventy one degrees, so farthest north I've. Ever been, I think. Then we went down back down to Oslo, flew across to Requivic and had a really wet and snowy ten days I think it was eleven days in Iceland again going to bits of Iceland that I'd never seen, the Northwest in particular, some quite extraordinary places there, including one of the highlights was the place where astronauts used to go to train in the Apollo era to train in geology, and there's a little museum there. It's basically a small town at the end of the road, almost not very much to recommend it under normal circumstances, but this amazing museum and they get visits very frequently from past and present astronauts, which is fabulous. It was a great experience. And then we went from Reki Victor Nook in Greenland, where we spent the last eleven days of our tour. Greenland is a totally fascinating place in every possible way. It is stunning physically, you have an ice sheet which we stood right at the edge of a few coastal towns and wait for this, no roads between them, not at all. All trans transport between towns in Greenland is either by boat or by air, and we did it by air. So yeah, some amazing stuff. What drove the trip, of course, were the chance to see sites like the Northern Lights, chance to walk on glaciers in Iceland and stand beside active volcanoes. And the thing that blew my mind in Greenland were the icebergs. Just astonishing, these, you know, half kilometer long lumps of ice floating past our hotel window as they carved off the theluly Sat was the name of the. Town where we were at that time. At the end of the ill, I can't say the word iluli Sat Fjord. Right at the other end of it is the Greenland ice sheet, and it carves off all these icebergs as you see them go past the I guess. The other highlight was, particularly in northern Norway and Sweden, and also again in Greenland, some fabulous sightings of the Aurora borealis. We had some great times with that, wonderful images taken by our whole group and I got quite a few as well, using sad to say one of these, it's just believable. They did take amazing pictures. I saw a couple that you posted early in your car. Oh good, Yeah, yeah, forgotten I've done that. It's five and a half weeks and so it's been a long time. It's been hard work looking after these wonderful customers that we have, some of whom might be listening to this because a lot of our clients sort of came to us through Space Notes. They're all fabulous people. We've enjoyed their company throughout three different groups, one or two people in common throughout both of them, and had a great time. The one who listened during my absence was telling me how great they thought John t is. So that was good news because that's why we asked him to do the gig. Yeah, the checks in the past, Fred, thank you. Yeah. So hard work but very enjoyable, and I have to say many and I are sort of now recovering and facing the next big thing, which is a Dark Sky conference in Melbourne in about two weeks time. So there's twenty people coming to that and we'll be talking about all that kind of thing. Yeah, Judy and I will be in Greenland and Iceland later this year, so we're really looking forward to it. We're actually doing in an Iceberg tour. Yeah, and on I don't know what kind of bird it is, probably one that'll get me wet, but yeah, really looking really looking forward to that. See, I think you should set the next trip or one of the future trips for that to coincide with Germinid Maximum as well. So Germanids are obviously the highlight of the year for everything, and being in December, that's perfect dark skytime so you could sit out under the northern light, sancy natural fireworks as well. There's always a special reason for watching the Germanids, John t which you might not be aware of, but they peak on my birthday, so it's it's a natural it's a natural birthday prison. Yeah, and they've just got met and beter and better as well, because I mean, I know when I was watching them in the nineties they were very, very good, and they're still getting better on a decadal basis because see media streams gradually talking round and we're still what's seeing the best of them, so they're still improving. Yeah, yeah, there you go. So just one final comment from me, if I may, Andrew, and that is thanks to both of you for holding the floor so well and especially john Ty for jumping into the hot seat. It was. It's been absolutely, absolutely terrific you, you know, being being our favorite depth and stand by and we look forward to welcoming you back in them. Glad you had a good break. That sounds it was. It's been great. It's been cope with Johnny. It's all right, okay, well you down all slope the nice and at seven o'clock in the morning. He's been terrific, he really has, despite the bad poetry I throw it. I throwed him from time to time. Yes, you know, stick around or you got to go. If I may, I'll stick around. But it's john Ty's gig. I'm just going to sit in the background and enjoy it. That's all right, Yeah, all right, Well we're going to do We're talking now about Johnny's favorite punching bag and that is Spacex' what's the latest with them? Yeah. I always, and I say this quite often, I try and take felly even handed side of things when I talk about Elon Musk and SpaceX and what they do because I think it's like all good characters in books. The best characters are not evil or good, but they're somewhere in between, and they do good things and bad things. But this week I think we're talking more about the things that haven't quite worked right. So earlier on I think possibly the first episode I was substituting in, we talked about the starship launch that went wrong and everything went boom and fragments fell over the Turks and Caicos islands. And interestingly, there is a link to a pretty lengthy and quite startling article on CNN which we might be able to put out with the podcasts. From the thirtieth of January. I'd not really followed up on it, but people in the Turks and Caicos were complaining about the lack of engagement from SpaceX, the fact that they're finding debris all over the place. A car was damaged by some of it, and loads of it floating and washing up on the beaches, and nobody's made any efforts to contact them or collect any or do the cleanup. Now that may have changed. SpaceX has historically been reasonably good at cleaning up its mess, but I was quite solid reading that article through the level to which there was a bit of upset there, and that the photographs of all this debris washing up on the beaches was quite startling, when in the days after that it was just said, oh it fell in the Atlantic, it went over the and kcos but it was out in open ocean, so that was quite sobering. But I only came across that because see there was another high profile SpaceX. Things didn't work as expected. That's made a lot of the news over the last week, particularly on the BBC website, but also on space dot com fabulous images again all over the app formly known as Twitter, and all over Blue Sky and things like this. Because one of SpaceX's falk and nine rockets, the upper stages of those are not reusable. These are the bits that go so high they can't just bring them back and land them, and typically they bring them back in a controlled re entry. So they say, this thing is going to come back to worth, but we're going to force it to the orbit at a time. We want it to in a place where it's going to be far from land, keeping it as safe as possible. But this one in particular failed to come back in at the start of February and had gone out of control. So everybody knew it was going to come back in at some point at some time in some place, but nobody was really sure why. So it's like your typical failed attempt at being menacing. You know, at some time, at some place in the indeterminate future, something bad might possibly happen, maybe, and then it did. So there's all this footage from northern Europe, starting from kind of Lincolnshire in the UK of yet another one of these space Debruy re entry events. Spectacular, incredible scenes that people have shot, but the actually made it to the ground in fairly substantial chunks over Poland and potentially also over the Ukraine. Now I've not actually seen any reports showing debris on the ground in the Ukraine because obviously it's hard to get images out and given all the other problems they're facing at the minute. Although to be fair, this is the last thing that they need is additional bits of metal dropping on their country. But there are lots of bits that fell over Poland, including one bit that was found that is one and a half meters by one meter that damaged some lights and stuff around a warehouse. So this isn't just a bit of debris burning of palmusle in the atmosphere. This again is stuff making it to the ground intact, which is where people get worried. And it ties in quite nicely with some of the things that were being reported back with the Starship launch. Some statistics that was worked out based on the frequency things were coming back in twenty twenty three an hour use of airspace, saying that there was a twenty six per cent chance in any given year of a major space debrus re entry event over popular highly used air space. And that's exactly what this was. The report a few years ago that said the likelihood of somebody dying from space every in the next decade could be as high as one in ten. And this is the sobering reminder of that, because at the end of the day, for a bit of a SpaceX rocket, there's one meter buy one and a half meter lands on your head that's going to put a sizeable dent in your day. And there is fabulous footage about this, and I think the thing that offsets this is that SpaceX are trying to do things right. To give them the credit, they're bringing things back in as much as they can in a controlled fashion. We talked about this with a stylent sapllite the other week and on the whole they're trying to do that right now. There are other concerns, things like the pollution side of it. But this is a big reminder that space is difficult. Things go wrong and when we continue to put this many rockets up there, from time to time, some of them will come back in an uncontrolled fashion. And this is the second time, just in this calendar year, where significant trunks of debris have fallen over popular today space, bits of either lundered or washed up on pluss where people live. You know, somebod this car was damaged in one event, some of this warehouse damaged in another. It's not all planned selling. I guess it's a tack on from this. And there's a lot of fabulous coverage of it all over if you do a bit of browsing around. Oh yeah, And some of the pictures are incredible and the footage, this video footage and photographic material that shows and over a wide area, over a very wide area from England right through to Poland. These images have been published and yeah, I mean there's spectacular look at. But the fact that big chunks are hitting the ground and doing damage that is scary stuff. And read you and I have talked about in the past not only the threat or the potential threat to life as a consequence of this human being killed or injured under these circumstances, but also what the impact might be in the insurance industry because people may have to ensure against this kind of thing. Sorry, John Ty, we've got stalin age. Sorry. Starship as coming up this week, is that right? The launch of the next So. Yeah, that's come around quicker than anticipated, and it's because SpaceX are very transparent in their efforts to understand what went wrong, so they've been able to escalate the approvals through may or may not have anything also to do with the prominence of their owner at the minute and his strong connections. But yeah, I'm surprised that they're launching again so quickly after that went wrong. But they are very enthusiastic on testing things by destruction. They are quite rightly of the opinion that when things go wrong, that's when you learn the most, and that's when you can viccings and improve them. And they've done a fabulous job that's how their whole business model has worked all the way through. But it still feels a little bit too soon. Well, they're talking about the twenty eighth of February actually, yes, as the next mega rocket launch. So and most of these things are streamed live, of course, aren't they. So you will be able to watch along with that if you're interested in that kind of thing. And I think that's another really positive that's come out of this. When I was a kid, launchers were not as common, but you only ever heard about the month of news when something went wrong. And I remember as a kid challenger, I remember the other Shuttle disaster during my PhD, but other than that, you couldn't watch it. It's not like it was live and televised. And yet now you can tune in, you can watch these things as they happen, both NASSA launchers but SpaceX launchers. It's fabulous. It's a great time to be lying. Yeah, oh well, it's reach to point where people go to watch these things like they do go to watch Nest car races and you only go for the crash. So it's that's kind of where it's sort of and SpaceX hasn't appointed very they've had several successful failures, so yes, it's a bit of a scheduled disassemblies. Is that what you disassembly is another one? Yes. Anyway, Friday, apparently the Starship Bait launch is scheduled for so we'll see how that pans out. It'd be interesting to see if anybody flying to Johannesburg with Quantas gets de layed with that one, because that was another problem with the previous one, because they are where they look to bring in the upper stedge of Starship if it goes well, it's directly on the flight path from Sydney to Hammersburg, and so Quantus flights kept being delayed at short notice. When SpaceX said we're going to launch, actually no we're not. Oh no, we're going to launch now. No we're not, because you can't fly through the space where a rocket might hit your plane, even though the odds are vanishingly small,