Expandable Space Stations, Martian Caves & Rogue Planet Revelations

Hi there, and happy New Year. Welcome to a new edition of Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Duncle your host. Great to have your company. I hope you had a great Christmas and New Year and looking forward to getting your brain crammed full of stuff from astronomy and space science over the next twelve months or so. Coming up in this episode some really interesting stories. A proposal to develop an expandable space station. This is one that you launch and then you put it out into space and then it just sort of blows up, you know, not catastrophically, but it expands and it'll be bigger than the International Space Station. Apparently, strange new. Caves on Mars will cast an eye on that. Oh yeah, that's you think about it. That's a good joke. And observations of a rogue planet. We'll talk about all of that on this new Year's edition of Space Nuts. Fantal ten nine Ignition Space Nuts or three two one Space Nurse. As when I reported Bill Good and he's back for more in twenty twenty six. His name is Professor Fred Wat's an astronomer at large. Hello Fred, Happy Year, Andrew Year to you too, and Marney. Yep, mine he's out at the moment, but I shall pass on your greetings. I can't believe that we know more than a quarter of the way through the century. I know where did it go? It's just it's just flown and it. And I can't keep up. Well, you're obviously managing, because he's still here. I'm still here, Yes, and I must be too because I'm still here. Yes, yes we are, and onward and upward. Did you have a nice Christmas New Year or that getting nice preses? It was great. Yes, it was a quiet festive season because you know, we've been everywhere the two months before, and so we've finally found us our feet again and sort of more or less settle back into home life. Yeah. I might mention the pressy that I've been really enjoying, and that is it's almost like a dongle that plugs into my old iPod. My how old is it? It's eighteen years old now, my iPod still in perfect working order. This is a good advert for Apple. But of course it doesn't have Bluetooth, and all it has is a little audio socket. Yeah, but the dongle you plug in this small box into the audio socket, switch it on and it's live on Bluetooth, and the sound quality is unbelievable compared with a straightforward wire to your headphone. Yeah, isn't it good. It's good that they can come up with technology to make old technology old technology, and iPod work in them in the modern era. It's really meant for people getting on aeroplanes, so you can you can plug it into the audio socket on your your seat back and listen on your Bluetooth headphones. But for me, it's it's just a joy because the old iPod has got far more music on it than any other device that I've got. Yeah, I put all my music on my on my phone. Yeah, it falls off your phone. Mine certainly does, so we can talk about that later. I've had the problem, but yes, we might look into that. Interesting falls off. It's hard to know what my favorite gift is, but I think it's or it might be my rock box. You know how I steal rocks from different parts of the world. Yes, you do illegally. Judy's got a display case for me, fabulous. Yeah, and she brought me a labeler so I could put all the names down. So it's sitting just over there. Next time I show it. Yeah, some good gear in there, everything from a rock from Mount it and to shrapnel from the Western Front. Yeah. I'll pick up anything. Yeah, and I think you've got the odd meteor right in there as well. I might have. You know, it's very hole. Yes and. Yeah, yeah, there's there's a few. I can't remember them all now TD mount t d oh. Yeah. In shall we get. Stuck into business because you know, we could talk about our Christmas presents all day? God are we pathetic? I do apologize to the audience. This is what comes of being just adequate, really, isn't it. We've just been old and dodgy. That's that's what it is. Uh. Let's talk about this proposal to develop an expandable space station. This looks like something out of a science fiction movie when you look at the images. Obviously they're artistic impressions because they haven't actually launched this thing yet, but the idea behind it, and they're talking about putting it up sometime next year as a test case. But you take it on a rocket. Let it out, and then it just expands out into the space you want. You can do whatever you like with it. It's I think you know what we're seeing the future here and at the same time we're looking into the past because in the early two thousands, company called Bigelow Aerospace. Thank you for reminding me of that name ten minutes ago, because I couldn't remember it. Bigelow Aerospace, which actually is the same company on the chain of hotels and motels I think in the USA. But they pioneered the idea of inflatable spacecraft, and I've forgot what the name of the spacecraft were. They had two which were both launched, and one of them had it was full of photographs of people who'd sent their photographs to be put inside this inflatable module, and so they were floating around in weightlessness. They had a camera looking at everybody's picture going past. Yours might have been one of them. Actually, I can't remember if it was that one or something else. It was something like Merlin or Hermes or something that I can't remember what it was anyway, but there were two of them, and they demonstrated pretty successfully that an inflatable spacecraft is a viable proposition. And you know, you might think, oh my god, what happens when you get a micro meteorite, But it turns out that you can put, you know, various fabrics, the sort of stuff that you put in bulletproof vests. You can actually layer the fabrics that use in the inflatable module so that it will be moderately resistant to micrometeorites. And that I think might have been what sparked this new idea. I'm not sure whether the new proposal owes anything to bigger Ow Aerospace, And it might be the same company with a different name, a company, sorry, go ahead now, it could be I was just a company company called mac Space, And basically they've unveiled something a proposal which is called the Thunderbird Station Love the name which has been announced with in the last week or so, and it's it's a large inflatable habitat that's got much more internal volume than your typical thing that you launch that is rigid. In fact, I think it's it's I can't remember the exact dimensions, but it's it's something like three times the volume of a standard ISS module, one of the the modules that goes to build up the International Space Station. So the main factor it's launched in a compact form, but it expands to twenty times it's launch volume once it's in orbit and you don't need to assemble it. You press a button and there's a hiss, I guess, and there it goes. You've got your inflatable module. And so there is a flight being planned on a SpaceX right shair mission, as you said, next year, in which we might see a test version of one of these they're so called Mission Evolution flight to validate the on orbit deployment of the module and actually test it's you know, how resilient it is to micrometeoroid impact. So interesting stuff, Yeah, it. Is, And this is probably just the beginning of a potential new way of dealing with space tourism. Because at the moment you can go up and do a little bit of floating around and then come back down again. You don't get a heck of a long time up there. And yeah, yeah, but this could take it to a whole new level. And I think that was the motivation behind Bigelow's ventures earlier in the earlier in the century. So yeah, but it clearly, you know, it clearly has merit. If you can make it with the right degree of protection, you are finding a cheap way of getting large volumes into space of course, the downside of that for astronomers is that these things, being big, are going to be much more reflective than your average spacecraft. I've got a scenario in my head. Look, I think I found planet. Not what's that? That's thunderbird got in a way, Yeah, that's exactly it that you've got. You know, you've got satellite trails basically interrupting your observations. We're already seeing it with Starlink in a big way, with something like I think it's eight thousand now, but they're operational, and that's going to go up to twelve thousand, probably by the end of the decade, and maybe more in the next decade. What I guess the macspace project has in its favor is that these won't be launched twenty at a time like the Starlink satellites are, because you won't need that many of them, So they'll be probably more like in terms of space rarity, more akin to the International Space Station, although I'm sure the plan is to have many of them, but perhaps not hundreds or thousands enough to satisfy the needs of people wanting to put experiments into micro gravity. And as I understand that that original idea from bigger lower aerospace was looking at commercial space stations and smaller stations for other purposes, and I think I found some of the names they had. One named Nautilus, okay, there was Space Complex Alpha, Space Complex Bravo, and another one called Skywalker. Apparently none of whichering any bells. No, didn't remind me of anything either. But this is probably a step towards better ways of putting hardware into space. But I don't doubt that the day will come, Fred where you'll be able to launch a purpose built space station which will rotate and give you gravity, and you'll be able to spend a couple of weeks up there just giving the rest of the planet the bird or whatever it is you do when you go up. I don't know what you do when you get out there. You know you float, and. I'm sure you do yes at the moment. So I think I saw I seeing so many headlines over the holiday break, but I think I saw one. Was it a Chinese or be a Russian mission being planned which would have an artificial gravity system, So something that will rotate about an access to give you artificial gravity, which we know will work, and as I've mentioned before Tom Spilker, who is married to Linda Spilker, the great Cassini mission scientist and Saturn scientists. She's I think she's still working on some of the missions designed to go and look at Titan or Enceladus, those moons of Saturn. Her husband is somebody who specializes in designing artificial gravity systems for orbit, and I think he's worked with NASA, and so we might see something popping up out of their media pages sometime down the track as well. That would be interesting. Yeah, it's generally a matter of time before we we get there, And yeah, this sounds amazing and it reminds me of those pop up caravans. You know, they were invented a long time ago. But you go and park your caravan, push a button and the whole thing opens up and there you are. You've suddenly got more space. And that's more or less what this is about. And you can configure it to whatever needs arise. So it doesn't it's a one size fits all, but what you do on the inside's up to you. By the sound of it. Yeah, that's right, Yes, so that's kind of what you want. It's just like a you know an office block where you rent out the space and your clients take whatever they need to do their work. Yeah, laboratories or engineering centers or offices whatever. Yeah. So we will look forward to that test flight in early twenty twenty seven from max Space. If you want to read all about it, you can do so on space connect online dot com dot au. This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson. Let's take a break from the. Show to tell you about our sponsor, anti Gravity A one. Have you ever wished you could actually feel what it's like to fly, not just control a drone from the ground, but truly experience the air around you. Well that future has just arrived, introducing the Anti Gravity A one, the world's first all in one eight K three point sixty drone, and it's officially available. Now this isn't just another drone, It's an entirely new category. It's the most intuitive flight system ever created, easy for beginners but still offering full FPV controls for seasoned pilots, and the whole drone weighs in at just two hundred and forty nine grams. 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They have found caves unlike any found on the planet before, and we've got the kinds of caves on Earth. That's correct. I thought you'd like this story because Mars are Mars tragic. So the scientific paper which is published this week, I think in the Astrophysical journal Letters, which is one of the major astronomy journals and space science journals in the world, and the paper which is by I think entirely Chinese authors. I'm not sure, maybe maybe there are other nationalities in there, but principally Chinese authors. It's called water driven Accessible Potential Castic Caves in Hebrus Valets Mars, and the subtitle is implications for subsurface habitability. In other words, could living organisms be found in these in these caves or evidence of their having been living organisms? So what what these scientists have done is and you know this again is a beautiful illustration of the fact that we've got so much archival data now, not just on the universe at large, but on the planets as well. What they've done is they've basically surveyed space borne photographs as Mars by using data from various spacecraft. I'm sure they've used, you know, the high rise camera on the one of the Mars orbiters Mars Global Surveyor is an Alder orbitter that they used data from. So these spacecraft have got a huge wealth of information about the planet's surface which has not all been trolled through. Yeah, you know, we're still seeing images that have probably not really been examined before. And what they've done with these data is looked at a region called Hebrus Valleys, the Hebrews Valley, I guess you'd translate it as which is in Mars's northwest. So it's very much in the region of Mars that is less mountainous. The southern hemisphere of Mars, as we've talked about many times before, is mountainous. It's many covered in craters. The northern hemisphere is much flatter, many fewer craters, and at a lower level it think it's about three kilometers on average lower than the lower than the southern hemisphere. That's something called the Martian dichotomy, by the way. So what they've done is they've looked at what looked like pits in the in the in the landscape. And that's not that unusual to find things like that, because we know of many features that sort of speak of as being I mean the speak but they you know, what you see tells you that they are probably lava tubes. They're probably you know, places which we have here on Earth as well. I think you and I have both walked through lava tubes in Hawaii, which are like long caves where the lava was flowing and gradually dried out and you're left with a you're left with a long cave. So these are quite different. The newly discovered ones are what are called skylights, So that tells you that they are openings in the roof of caverns. But the structure of them and the sort of features around them and the landscape that they're in suggests that these are not lava tubes because that sedimentary rock that they're in, it's not it's not volcanic rock. So there's some of the data that they've looked at shows in the surrounding rock around these caves carbonates and sulfates uh. And so that's basically a water you know, a water driven rock or a water formed rock uh. And there's they're suggesting that what you're seeing is caves that have formed by water underneath the surface flowing and dissolving the bedrock. And that's what we on Earth call cast topography. Hence casting your mind forward or backwards whatever you said at the beginning, Andrew. So it's a you know that that gives you a landscape that's punctuated often by giant sinkholes, which is a bit a bit topical at the moment because they've just got one in Melbourne. That's probably to do with tunnels being dug. It's a big sinkhole in a sports oval that has not become popular. It's eight meters across. I don't think that's anything to do with water soluble rock, but probably more like might be tunnel. I don't know anyway. Cast scenery generally on Earth is this limestone within limestone regions, and there are places like that in the United Kingdom, not very far from where I grew up in Mexico. Mexico, indeed, Slovenia has the most wonderful system of cast caves, which I had the pleasure to go and explore with a colleague from the University of Lubliana a few years ago. Sensational stuff. If we find the same thing on Mars, that is going to be remarkable. But the point that the authors of this paper are making is that that might provide a suitable habitat, suitable environment for microorganisms because you're protected from the radiation of the from the sun, the particle and ultra violet radiation and you know, it could be that living organisms have found a place where they could evolve and develop. So there might be evidence of microbial life there, which suggests that this part of Mars's surface might be a good place to send a rover. Yeah, and I think that's the bottom line of the article. Yeah, I've thought of a name for it. If they want to send it rover down, they could call it spilunka. Call it what spilunk Isn't it called spelunking when you go down caves and. Might oh well because of spileology. Yeah, yeah, it's splunking. They could call it spilunka. I like that, Yes, yes, sorry, that went over my head. Actually I learned that word when we visited Hawaii and they told us how people go traveling down lava tubes, not the tourist ones with electric lights in them, but actual, you know, uncharted ones or ones that they know about that, and they're just like, it's like mountain climbing, but the opposite. Yes, yeah, you can get into all kinds of trouble. Oh, yes, you can, especially. With underground systems and things of that sort. It doesn't float my boat, have to say, the idea of climbing into a cave with a with a not a snorkel, but you know, basically breathing apparatus. It's been a couple of famous cases over the years of people who didn't come back because they got themselves into difficult situations and it is a really dangerous. Thing to do. But what's another interesting thing about these caves is there they're enormous. Yes, that's right, they're not They're not small, they're and you know, they they've it's I guess again it to use a metaphor, it speaks loudly of the of the volumes of water that must have have basically flowed down them in the in the millennia ago when they were being formed, because I guess we're you know, we're we're seeing evidence of water driven ocean and we know that perhaps three and a half to four billion years ago Mars was wet, but isn't now, so we're looking at very ancient water flows. But yes, it says that there must have been a lot of water there. It is. It's a remarkable piece of work. I hadn't looked at the original paper in great detail, but will do because it's such an interesting topic and They've done a lot of very careful work on this. Yeah. Some of these cave openings are over seven hundred meters wide, Yeah, which is extraordinary. Three hundred and fifty seems to be a common number. Some of them are around almost double that. It's double that. Yeah. It sort of makes you wonder why we're really seeing these things before. I suspect what has allowed these authors to make the deductions that they have is because they've used many spacecraft high rise, as I mentioned, the high resolution camera and Males of Reconnaissance orbitter and the Mass Global surveyor. These these spacecraft are basically giving giving you different angles on the same features on the surface and seeing the surface under different lighting conditions. So when you when you take all that information together, that's when you can start looking effectively at three dimensional views of what these what these dark splodges on the surface mean. They're dark because you're looking down into a into a cave. And yes, you're absolutely right with the things that are, you know, hundreds of meters across, they're not small. Here's a question, how would they go as potential future human habitat? I think that would be very much on the agenda too. Just because you you really want to find if you can a region of Mars's surface that protects you from the environment which is very, very inhospitable, not just because the atmospheres are on zero point six percent of the Earth's atmospheric pressure, but simply because of the radiation, the fact that there's no magnetic field on Mars to protect you from that, and that's sort of that sort of thing, the UV radiation from the Sun. So people have certainly suggested the lava tubes as future human habitats, but these might be even more appropriate, being as we say, they're very large and probably you know, environments that would lend themselves to perhaps building a structure inside that would allow you to work in normal atmospheric pressure. I suppose the question becomes one of whether or not that's a part of Mars where we know there's an advantage being there. I mean, it might be a great cave to put a dwelling in, but you if you know, we need anywhere you need to be. But if it's also a place where there may have been a microbial life there, it is going to be a place of interest, and that of course you want to make sure that you're not building your your underground dwelling on some poor animals habitats, even if the animal itself is long gone. Again, that comes back to some of the ethical considerations in regard to the exploration of Mars. Yes, yes, well maybe we should talk to Elon Musk about habitats on Mars and human ethics. I'm I'm not going to buy into that one. I'm going to get you one day. Yes, it's a great story. If you want to read about it, you can do that at the Daily Galaxy dot com website, or you can read the paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. This is Space. That's Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Fred Watson. Let's take a break from the show to tell you about our sponsor, nor VPN, and we're very proud to have partnered with NordVPN so that we can get you more secure online no matter what you do, where you are, or how you do it. Now, if you sign up using the code word Space nuts, you'll receive four extra months absolutely free top tier VPN protection at a fraction of the cost. With NordVPN, what you get is access to over seven seven hundred servers worldwide, ultra fast connections, advanced features like threat protection pro and mesh Net, and secure usage for up to ten devices simultaneously, so you pretty well covered. You have to admit now, this is a great opportunity, and if you'd like to take advantage of it, visit NordVPN dot com slash space nuts to claim your exclusive offer today and remember, with nordvpn's thirty day money back guarantee, it's risk free. It's a great investment, a small price to pay for your online security and privacy. Stay secure, stay connected, and keep exploring the cosmos with confidence. NordVPN dot com slash space nuts nord vpn dot com slash space nuts and don't forget the code words space nuts at the checkout rogue space nuts. Our final story, Fred takes us to another planet, which is a little unusual. We've spoken about rogue planets before, but now we've got I believe, observations of a rogue planet. Now, these things are hard to spot because they don't orbit a star. They're just floating out there like a space station and turning up who knows where. But apparently they've they've observed. One yes in a new way and that's because I think that these things are relatively commonplace in terms of being found on particularly on so is looking at what's called gravitational microlensing, because that's really the only way to find them, because exactly as you've said, they are not illuminated by a parent star. I always think road planet is a slightly you know, it's a non complementary name. I think orphan planet is a nicer one because we think some of these are orphans in the sense that they've been booted out of their parent Solar System by gravitational interactions. But as you say, they are dark, they're not illuminated by their parents star. They do have very low levels of infrared radiation because there are as with the Earth and the planets of the Solar System, there are sort of low level nuclear processes going on inside. That means the planet is radiating its own heat to some extent. I think, if I remember rightly, Jupiter radiates one point eight times as much energy as it receives from the Sun. I think that's the figure because of the nuclear processes in it. So that would be true of a road planet as well. So if you've got really sensitive infrared equipment In fact, things like the James Web Space telescope will do the trick. Then you can find it. But the sort of standard method of finding these things is by, as I said, gravitational microlensing. What does that mean. It means that you take repeated images of a patch of sky that has stars in it, and most of the sky has stars in it when you look through big telescopes, So you take repeated images of the same patch of sky and look for changes in the brightness of the stars. Now, sometimes those changes are because the stars themselves are variable, they vary in their light output. Sometimes there are changes because it's not a star, it's actually an asteroid, so it means it's moving in your field of view. But one of the potential changes and you can spot it because what we call the light curve, the way the light behaves with time a very characteristic shape. That is, when you get something dark or less bright than the star behind it, it passes in front of a star, and because of Einstein's general theory of relativity, we know the gravity of that dark object will warp the space around it and behave like a lens, and the effect of this lens passing in front of the star is to give you this light curve which has got a really strong peak and side lobes. The shape is very characteristic, so various planetary systems have been discovered that way. You see a star going past and that has a different shape, and then a planet goes past and that's got this little pointy light curve shape, and you know you've found a planet around a star. But if you just get the point like curve, the small one, then that's a planet on its own basically, which is when we call it a row planet. So this observation is of a road planet, and it's been made in exactly that way by gravitational micro lensing, but it's been observed from both Earth and space. That's the thing. These are simultaneous Earth and space measurements and that allows you to check the timing very accurately of the gravitational microlensing. The space telescope was the Gaya Space telescope, which has been surveying stars for the last fifteen years or so. I think. Because you've got two observations from places that are separated in space, that allows you to say a little bit more about the objects. Because the trick with these things is you only see this thing once you see a gravitational micro lensing peak, and then it's gone and all your information is in the shape of that light curve. But if you got two, like from two different vantage points, you can get a little bit more. And so what the scientists who did this work have said is that that enabled them for the first time to work out the mass of the microlensing planet, which is about twenty two times the mass of Jupiter, and to say where it is, and it's something like ten thousand light years from the center of our galaxy. I calculated nine seven hundred and eighty, but that's okay, just round it up. Ten thousand. Yeah, it's near enough. Seven hundred and eighty, well done. Yes, three thousand pass six, Yes, from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. And people are saying, well, how close does that put it to us? Well, what we're about eight thousand. Where, Yes, something like twenty five thousand light years away, So yes, you're right, two and a half times further away. So yeah, set of observations is a nice piece of research because and I guess a lot of it is serendipitous. They're fortunate that Geya happened to be looking at the same bit of sky at the same time. I'm not sure whether this was intentional, whether this work was can you give us time on the Geya spacecraft to look at a particular patch of sky because we're going to look at it at the same time with a ground based telescope, or whether it was a serendipitous observation. I need to follow up on that tool. Yes, yes, but it's very interesting discovery. The fact that it came from two sources, yeah and so yeah, and there'll be more of these to be found, and with all the new telescopes that are getting ready to be commissioned also, there's probably so much more ready to be discovered. It's just lurking out there waiting for the right equipment to point at it. Yep, that's quite right, stuff that we didn't even know existed until yeah, that long ago. Yeah, I suppose that's that's a question for your Fred. We might as well ask you know, in recent years, have we seen a real escalation in the number of new discoveries because of technology that's improved. Absolutely, You've only to think of the web telescope itself. You know, we've got almost one story every day coming out from that of real significance. So yes, obviously, the technology absolutely progressively as revolutionized astronomy. It's been the same for centuries really, And the one I'm thinking of that perhaps did more than any other in terms of the giant leap that it made was photography. When photography could be applied to astronomy towards the end of the nineteenth century, and you were suddenly in a regime where you could actually make qualitative measurements of things that people have only really been able to look at my eye, and you could also see things that were much much fainter than the eye would reveal. So that was one of the biggest leaps. Then one hundred years later, effectively we did the same thing but electronically with the charge couple devices and things like that that maybe twenty times more sensitive than a photographic plate. So you suddenly got another leap and bigger and bigger telescopes. Yeah, it's a theme that has been close to my heart because my career is now so long that I've seen a lot of these things firsthand. You know, I was using photographic plates when I started. That was the state of the art. The technology. I remember when I was at school reading about some I was going to say eccentric. Maybe that's the word French astronomer who was trying to make electronic images of the sky, and I thought, that's fantastic, that is super I want to do that kind of thing. But it was still very experimental. Now just you know, press a button, though. It is although you're still using photographic plates. You really need to move on for it. There are some people who do. I know, it's not me. Actually, retro is in at the moment. People. My daughter in law got a record player. Oh good one Christmas. So yeah, well my turn turbles right there. Yeah, I've got one too. It's in a box in a cupboard in a I don't know where it is. It's somewhere around. Here that. I can plug it into a computer so I can digitize anything. Very good. Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. So if you would like to read up on the rogue Planet story and how they discovered it, you can do that at Space Daily dot com. Fred. That brings us to the end of our first program back for the year. Well that's gone quickly, isn't it Sure has its flashing through them. Yeah, no, that's great and welcome to twenty twenty six. Who knows what we're going to see in twenty twenty six, Lots of events. We might talk about that in the next episode. What's coming up for twenty twenty six? You can find plenty of websites where it'll tell you. But I think we're in for an exciting year with the you know, the verr C Rubin telescope coming online and various other pieces of kit which were gonna find results from. It's it going to be very exciting, absolutely all right. Thanks Fred, we'll catch you next time, I hope so. Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large joining us on Space Nuts. And thanks to Hugh in the studio, who couldn't be with us today because well he indulged in way too much Christmas cake. And nuts and you know the stuff. Anyway, apparently seeing someone named Jenny Craig about it, and from me andrewd. Unkley, thanks for your company. We'll see you again soon on the very next episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye Nuts to the Space Nuts podcast well at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bites dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from Knights dot com.