One Million Satellites, Space Mushrooms & the Search for Martian Shorelines

Hello again, thanks for joining us. This is Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Duncle. Thanks for joining us. We've got a big program today. It is jam packed. We've got twenty seven at least twenty seven, maybe six stories. Here's one. I don't know if you've heard the song one million bicycles in Beijing. It probably wasn't a big hit. But now we're talking one million satellites in space. Yep, it's a possible thing. Some good news out of Chili, though, we'll talk about that Artemis two. Not bad news, probably not surprising news or launch delay. Space mushrooms, Yes, they are real and they are very yummy. Apparently perseverance is going AI and they have discovered or confirmed a Martian shoreline. We'll talk about all of that on this episode of Space Nuts fifteen, Channel ten nine. Ignition Big on Space Nuts or three two one Space. Us as when actually bought it, Neils Good and taking a break from a little sojourn to a horrible part of the world in Australia is Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large. Hello Fred, Hello, Hello Andrew. Greetings from Nelson Bay. Yeah, dreadful, dreadful place I spent much of my youth in Nelson Bay, just north of Newcastle. It's just it was a sleepy little fishing village when I used to go there, but now it's just nothing like that. Well it's been discovered, hasn't it has? You know, two hours from Sydney, it's half an hour from Newcastle. It's not really it's abound to be a target and it's still got its charm though. I have to say, as we were talking a few minutes ago, I've been coming here for forty three years, nearly in fact is it's forty three years and it's as you exactly as you've said. It's very, very different, but it's still geographically it's a lovely spot with Port Stephens, this huge expanse of water with you know, islands in it and hells all around. Really quite remarkable. It is lovely. Yeah, I miss it a lot. Last time we were there was for a beach wedding, but that's going back a few years. But even then it didn't look like the you know, the fishing village that I grew up Isabel. While we're talking about different places, I was having a bit of a I don't know what you'd call it a jibe at Colorado's cold weather on a recent episode, and I got a note from Michael who said, on the podcast, you were concerned about the frigid temperatures in Colorado. Unfortunately, we've just had one of the warmest Decembers on record, with daily highs offen ten to fifteen degrees celsius. That's a winter in Dubbo. Until this weekend, January was on track to be well above normal with highs around seven to ten. And to add insult to injury, our mountain snow packs the worst on record. And while our. USB fifty ski industry is getting hurt, the real problem is that they rely on melting snow for water and they didn't get a lot of snow this year. So yeah, that's a scary one. And I think a lot of places in the world rely on snow for the spring melt for their water supplies. So hopefully that's just a one off in Colorado. Got a lot to talk about, Fred. Let's start with this news that we received during the week. It's been highly publicized Elon Musk SpaceX has put in an application to launch possibly one million satellites million. This is a completely from Project to that of the Internet service that he's been working on. This this is another kettle of fish. It is it's an orbiting data center. So in fact, space Access basically teamed up with another company, an AI company, and together there is this plan to launch three, sorry, not three hundred thousand, a million satellites between five hundred kilometers and two hundred two thousand kilometers in altitude and probably quite interesting inclinations not far from the equator, and also some which will be in polar orbits. What's the idea, Well, you you basically harness the Sun's energy using these these spacecraft in order to how your data center, and you link them by lasers essentially optical links. And so. You know, the whole thing then engages with starlink to send the data up and down to the Earth. So it's a it's a wild idea. It fills astronomers with horror because a million satellites in orbit is just going to completely pollute the sky, especially when you have some of them at two thousand kilometers, which means that they're they're visible for in fact some latitudes that be visible all night. So that's yeah, that's the latest shot horror that is a filing that has gone I think I'm right in saying to the Federal Communications Commission, I don't know whether it's been filed with the International Telecommunications Union, which is the only international body that can basically regulates space flights. There are many national bodies, but the only international one is the ITU. I would guess they would accept it because they accepted a filing back in twenty twenty for three hundred thousand satellites put in by the Ruandan government. But that if it hasn't already, and I don't think it has yet, that will have expired because they've only lost launched one cube SAT rather than three hundred thousand. So it might be a little bit like the Ruandan was something like putting your foot in the door to you know, to stake a claim. But we will see what happens. It's a very interesting development, said one that scares us to death in. The It's certainly a divisive issue, and it's not the first time. As you said, the year before last there were complaints about the Starlink network and the blinding of telescopes. Astronomers got upset about that. Elon Musk has actually rejected those claims and probably rejict these ones too. I mean, it has to be said, he's not he hasn't really. Of all the Internet supply companies, of course, Starlink is the one that's most populous. They've got nine thousand, a little bit more than nine thousand spacecraft in orbit, and SpaceX has worked with the astronomical community to try and minimize their effect. Of all the companies, they've been the most forthcoming. But it's hard to see how when you put it up to a million satellites, how you can reconcile that with astronomy. And I might add, actually, as we speak, there is a meeting going on in Vienna at which the issue of what we call dark and quiet sky is the idea of satellite consolations, that will be discussed this week and. Then it's okay, be interesting to see what comes out of that. We'll leave that one there, but I'm sure there'll be more about it going forward. Maybe let's go over to Chile, because we talked about energy project that was being tafted for that part of the world, which was going to be very close to some of the most significant telescopes on Earth. The problem with this energy plant that was going to be basically the size of a small city, so the lighting would have been a major issue, but that seems to have all been scrapped. Indeed it has, so the problem was you're quite right. There are two mountains in Chile which are notable for astronomy. They've both got optical telescopes. One is Sarah Paranel, which houses the VLT, the four to eight point two meter telescopes of the very large telescope as it's called, and about it's about twenty kilometers away. On the other side of the valley is a mountain called Sera Amazona is where the biggest telescope in the world is being built, thirty nine meter ELT, or extremely Large Telescope. And in that valley it's where an energy company aes and Ease They had plans for a factory to use solar and wind energy to make green hydrogen. And as exactly as you've said, it was citicized. It filled astronomers with horror because it threatened to put light pollution into a region which so far has been completely dark and which houses perhaps the world's most productive and efficient telescope. Certainly, when the ELT comes along, there is nothing to touch it anywhere else in the world. It's going to be an extraordinary instrument. But it's been canceled. The company has pulled out of the project, and I think they've taken note of the environmental damage it would do to astronomy. I think that's been the reason why they've done that, And so all credit to people who've used common sense to you know, to progress things. They'll no doubt put it somewhere else where it might be less damaging because it is a you know, it's an environmentally positive staff green Hydrogen's a great thing to have. But but we don't want it there. No, no, But hopefully they will be able to put it somewhere else because it does sound like a good project moving forward, but just not there, not in that place. Yeah, hats off to them for making that decision. It must have been difficult because that's a that's a ten billion US dollar project, that's very big. That's a lot of big. I suppose that that's the ultimate nimby, isn't it nimby process? But my backyard, we've got a lot of nimbi projects around here. I can do you wind farms, solar farms, the Inland Rail. It's all causing a lot of people who get a bit nimby. This is space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson, open anglit. Lage space Nuts. Okay, Fred, speaking of the boon, Let's move our attention to Artemis to that mission we talked about last week, which was getting ready for its wet rehearsal and a few other tests and a few checkovers. Mostly things went well, but they did find a hydrogen leak and that set them back another month. It's a bit like groundhog Day, isn't it really, because this is exactly what happened with Artemis one, and in fact, at one point I think they took the whole spacecraft back into the vehicle assembly building to try and fix the hydrogen leaks. So yes, the wet the wet dress rehearsal was this past weekend our time as we are speaking today on the recording and the hydrogen leak, I understand it. It's the place where the pipe fits into the tank. You know. It's like and your car. It's where you stick your fuel bowser in hose into your petrol tank. Ex It's a little bit more complicated than that. But I think that's where the league has been, and it's sufficiently it's warying enough to the engineers and the administrators who are overlooking Artemists two that what they've done is they said, well, actually we need to do another wet dress rehearsal when we fixed this problem. And that means postponing at the artemist too, launch from this month, which was what we hoped to next month, which means March at the earliest. So yes, a push back in the you know, in the process. Will I leave the launch vehicle on the ped at this stage? I think at the moment that's the plan. I haven't heard any hints of it being taken back to the vehicle assembly building. That's you know, that's a big process, is a major step to have to do that. So they will, certainly, I think, be looking at trying to fix it on the pad forehand. Okay, and if they can't, yeah, they might have to roll back. Yeah again again, you know, it's all about safety, that's the most important thing. And yeah, you know, they want to get this right. So it's better to be a month later or even longer than have something go horribly wrong, which we've certainly witnessed in the past. And we talked about the anniversary of Columbia last week, and it's you know, those things are still strong in people's minds. You've got to avoid that at all costs. So, yeah, hopefully they'll find them find the problem. Maybe it's a proo valve, that's just you know, yeah, it could be. The real problem is hydrogen atoms are so small. Yeah, they're the smallest of all atoms, so they fit through any tiny crack we had. At one time when I was working as an astronomer at something Spring Observatory not far from you, one of our telescopes used photographic plates back in the day, and to sensitize them, we called it hyper sensitizing. We actually had to bathe them in hydrogen for a period of something like ten hours before they were used, and that increased their sensitivity by several orders in fact. But the problem was keeping the hydrogen where you wanted it. It tends to leak. It's a very leaky gas because of the small size of the atoms. Yeah, and we'll just look at the Hindenburg. Certainly leaked there, that's right. Yeah, Although didn't they figure out many many years later that it wasn't the hydrogen leaking that was the problem. It was the what do they call it, the stuff in the fabric that was the problem. Yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't actually the hydrogen that was the issue. It was it was the static electricity in the fabric. But it was the lacquer. I think the lacquer. That was my Yeah, that could be it. That was my understanding that it was static electricity. Yeah, and story. But yeah, Artemis too, still on the launch pad. Probably the schedule is March the sixth at this stage, but maybe that will change depending on how the next test goes or the wet rehearsal or whatever they do. They did want to try and do more than one, so yeah, well I've got an opportunity now they have to. Now this story I find fascinating and I think you've got a personal connection with some of the people involved in this. But they have basically grown mushrooms in space and then they brought them back and had lunch. That's right. This is actually a friend of ours, Sarah Webb, who's done in Melbourne. She's an austrophysicist andard science communicator, which is how we've worked with her in the past, but she runs a project to basically engage with the International Space Station on behalf of school students. And so this particular project was designed by twelve by Sarah and once sorry Sarah and one of her colleagues, plus twelve high school students from Hailbury College in Melbourne, and a lot of help from professional mushroom growers. What they did was they packaged up not the mushrooms themselves, but the things that essentially act almost like the roots of the mushrooms, which are called massolium, a word I didn't know because I'm not a mushroom expert, the small filaments that essentially the root network of mushrooms. So that's what they sent up. They were in space for a month on the International Space Station. They came back again with a crew change, and so what the researchers did was to send take these massolium filaments and plant them and turn them into mushrooms. And it works. It works well, and so they've now written a rather nice conversation piece which is entitled We Ate Space Mushrooms and Survived to tell the Tale, which is I think quite a nice title. It is rather I was just looking up what the most expensive mushrooms in the world are, and they're the Yatsa gunbu caterpillar fungus, and they cost fifty to sixty three thousand dollars per pound because of their rarity, and apparently they've got medicinal properties and they grow them on the Himalayas. I've got a feeling these mushrooms, which are based on the Lion's main mushrooms, would be a bit more expensive than that by the sound of it. Yeah, they might be by the time you're figure in the cost of the International Space Station. That's right. The Lion's main is the one. It's a species that it's actually the one that they ate. And it's just to put this project in context, it's really, you know, thinking about how you might grow fresh food for astronauts on long whole space missions. You know, if you've got people going to Mars, you're going to have six, seven, eight months in the spacecraft. Can you, as they say in their conversation article, how can you continue to nutritionally support those astronauts? And that is essentially one of the motivations for looking at things like growing things in space, giving them the checkout to make sure that they don't turn poisonous by their zero gravity environment, things of that sort, and that's what they've done with this so very nice experiment. Yeah, I've been doing a lot of research on how you would feed people on a space for a long haul mission, and that's one of the solutions to have basically small farms on the ship, hydroponics and things like that and grow your vegetables and your fungi and whatever else will grow easily in space, and supplement the other stuff that you have to take with you, which would be the proteins. But yeah, it's a really interesting story what they can do with food. I mean, if you're going to spend a year out in space or whatever, you can't just rely on packets of chips and you won't get out of the hatch when you get home. But yeah, nutrition is very important, and yeah, they've got to get that right too in time. It's all. It's not an easy thing, is it going into space? When you can consider all the logistics involved in feeding and disposal of waste and you know, all the other things that go with it, quite quite extraordinary. But I wonder what they were like, Like I think the report basically suggests that they were quite yummy. Yes, that's right, exactly, that they were very tasty. Yeah, I wonder do you think space changes the taste of well, you know, that might be one of the tests that you do. You take my celium that's been to space and my celium that hasn't and try to contrast the two. I'm sure they've done that too. Yeah. Maybe it's a great story. You can read it at the Conversation website. Yes, it's called We Ate Space, Mushrooms and Survive to tell the tale. I love it. This is Space. That's with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson. We choose to go to the Moon and this decay and do the other thing because they are easy, but because. They are MUDs. Now, Fred, we're going to dedicate the last section of the show to Mars, and this was a story that caught me a little bit by surprise. We've talked a lot about the Perseverance rover and what it's up to. These two stories actually involved perseverance. Baha had this one. Yeah, Perseverance has gone aire. No more human drivers. We've left it up to the computers. They've that's right, so it's the story is really about the first ever drive on Mars fully planned by artificial intelligence, and it happened actually the end of last year. The two demonstrations carried out on December the eighth and December the tenth last year, and it's all about how you plan a route across the terrain of Mars with no manual input, and so it's a process that usually is performed by humans, as you might expect people on Earth, pouring over the maps that we've got, the high resolution images that have been taken by Mars Reconnaissance orbiter and things of that sort. So what they've done is given all that to the AI machine and said, okay, we want to get to there, how do we do it? And basically that's what they've done, and it's there's a very nice report on this on the space dot com website that gives us a map showing the planned and the actual routes that were taken by the Perseverance rover, and it just goes to show how close the actual route was to the plan route, which means that you know, they didn't encounter unexpected obstacles and things of that. That's very unlike when I used to go in the car with my grandmother. She yeah, I remember one day we turned into the highway and was on the wrong side of the road. Anyway, that's not a problem on Mars. You know, there isn't the wrong side of the road on Mars. That's right. I suppose you know getting off that your beaten track is, but there isn't a beaten track. That's the other thing, So you're always on virgin territory when you're driving a spacecraft on Mars. I think I think it's a step forward because I think there's quite a lot of you know, work goes in to the human planning of the roots to Mars. It's it's it's a labor intensive process. In fact, I might read a little bit from that space dot com article which is really quite sums up that the whole process. Because Mars is an average one hundred and fifty million miles or two hundred and twenty five million kilometers from Earth, communication delays make real time control impossible. The decades, mission teams have instead planned daily routes by hand. Human drivers analyze the terrain and rover status data, then map out paths using waypoints. Typically space no more than about one hundred meters three hundred and thirty feet apart to avoid hazards. And then these plans are sent to Mars via the Deep Space network where the rover executes them. So this is really you know, step forward. If you can get AI to do all that, then the other mission scientists can go and do something else like analyze what the what the sample you know, sample gatherers are telling us about the terrain on Mars. Yeah, it's a big late forward and when you think about it, I mean they've done it pretty tough, trying to make decisions about where to go and how to do it. And if you have to make a direction change, the time factor is like four minutes up to twenty four minutes to get the message to perseverance, and then you've got to wait that time again for the message to come back saying no we hit a. Rock, that's right, yes, so yeah, exactly. So you know that's why you've got to upload the instructions beforehand. And if AI can help with that, so much the better. Yeah. Incredible. Yeah, I mean you hear a lot of doom and gloom about AI from certain commentators. You know it's going to be the end of humanity. That's the extreme. But it's so useful, Like even in general day to day stuff, it is so very useful. I was trying to look something up the other day and I could not get the wording right in my browser for it to look up what I wanted. It doesn't happen often like that, but it was driving me nuts. So I just went to AI mode and went, I want to know this, and it went ding ding ding done. It's truly impressive stuff, really impressive stuff, and we're only at the very dawning of it, aren't we. Really, It's only in the early days. And it makes me wonder, Fred what we can use in terms of AI as day to day people. What have they got going in secret in the dark rooms of the military and places like that. Their AI systems must be amazing. Yeah, that's where it really starts worrying, when you let robots go off and kill people. Yeah, it'll happen one day, I don't doubt it. But a fantastic story about perseverance using AI technology to find its way around and maybe it'll miss those rocks now and you can read it at space dot com. Still on Mars and still on the Perseverance River. This is a fabulous story to finish on Fred and this is I think we've talked about the potential for a shoreline being suggested for Mars, but now they reckon they've actually uncovered definitive evidence of it. That's right, Yes, So you're absolutely right. There's for a long time there have been features in just in the geomorphology of Mars that you know, the layout of the land that suggest shorelines from this hypothetical ocean, which the evidence is building probably covered the northern hemisphere of Mars for a long period. We've talked about several stories recently that seemed to be confirming that it was a large body of water rather than just a few lakes that came and went with the climate. So but the you know, we've it's one thing identifying possible shorelines from orbit, but it's quite another to have definitive evidence on the ground. And that's what Perseverance seems to have found now with an analysis of rocks. And we're still talking about Jesuro Crater, which is where the spacecraft is. Remember it's this crater that we believe was once full of water, and there's a river delta on one side of it, which is what perseverance is looking at. But the shoreline hypothesis comes about, and this is actually from studies carried out by scientists and Imperial College in London. What they've done is they've looked at it's an area which is called the margin unit. Interesting, it sounds a bit more like a jazz combo to me, but it's the margin unit. That's the that's the name of this geological feature. And it's got a double whammy in terms of the way it's history has evolved, because there's there's signs of what's been called subsurface water activity, where you've got water that is changing the characteristics of rock. And I think the thinking summarizing it very quickly, and I hope I'm doing the scientist justice in doing this. What you've got is basically starts off with volcanic rock, but that rock is then altered by water and turns out to have, you know, to be sort of carbonaceous. After that carbon dioxide rich water underground circulating underground, it gives the chemical alteration to the to the to the landscape underground. And so that's one of the things that this study has reveal field that that is almost certainly what happened. But the other thing is the fact that they now see evidence of a shoreline. In terms of that basically the layers there are structures in the sandstone, which is kind of what it is. It's this altered rock which match structures, as they say, typically formed by wave action on the shoreline. And a lovely comment from one of the one of the researchers, we are looking at what was once a beach. That's Alex Jones, who is a PhD student at Imperial College and he's the lead author of this study. Yeah, it's fascinating. So I think for me, Fred, the most exciting part of this story is that they are suggesting this discovery pushes back the timeline for conditions that would support life on Mars. So does that mean that the time frame is much larger than they originally thought. Yes, I think that's the bottom line that you know, you're giving yourself a bigger window in which life could form on Mars. So, yes, it is a very nice piece of work. Once again, it's just adding to the growing body of evidence that we are amassing that yes, Mars once had a climate very like the Earth. Yeah, and may may well have had life as a consequence of that, and now that the window is bigger. Yeah, it's my brain is saying it's only a matter of time before we find the evidence and whether or not there's still life on Mars. No one's dismissing that possibility either. No, that's right, exactly. Fascinating story. You can read it at Daily Galaxy dot com, or you can do the geeky thing and read the paper at the Journal of Geophysical Research Planets. Gosh, Fred, we've covered a lot of territory and we're all done. For the day. Thank you very much. Pleasure and great to revisit Mars again, your favorite plavort. Yeah. Well, it's got a lot to tell, hasn't it. That's what makes it exciting. Yeah, we've got so much going on there and there's always news almost every day coming out of Mars. Here. Fascinating. Thanks reg We catch you real soon. That sounds great. See yeah, and don't forget to visit our website between episodes. You can do that at Space Nuts podcast dot com, Space Nuts dot io. Have a look around. You can get your daily newsfeed through our website. You can visit the shop and buy yourself a cap or a shirt, or a mug or a spiral notepad. We've got everything, and don't forget you can send us messages or send us questions through the Ask Me Anything tab at the top. That's all at space Nuts podcast dot com. And don't forget our social media as well. It's a great place to visit other people or meet other people that listen to Space Nuts. That's the official Space Nuts Facebook page or the podcast group Facebook page. There are two, both very busy places. And thanks to Hugh in the studio who couldn't be with us today because he's in Brisbane. That's funny for a lot of reasons that no one will understand, but anyway, we'll leave it there and from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks for your company. We'll catch you on the next episode of Space Nuts. Bye byepats. 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 bytes dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.