Big JWST Breakthrough // Moon Success VS Failure // Three New Moons

we've learned what happened to the odys is Lander slim survived the lunar Knight experience a fiery trip from orbit to the Utah desert and web completes one of its major science goals all this and more in this week's space bites last week we opened up with our reporting on the intuitive machines odys landing on the moon and when we wrapped up our coverage last week we had received a weak signal from the Lander but we didn't exactly know what had happened and of course over the last week plenty of details have come out and the first one the one that was just like filled the comment was the thing fell over and yes yes the odys is Lander fell over but the story is a lot more complicated than that what we learned was that odyss was equipped with a Laser Rangefinder That was supposed to find its distance to the surface of the Moon and there were a couple of manual changes that needed to be made to push it from its test mode into its actual operations mode and unfortunately there was like a pin that needed to be removed there's a wire harness that needed to be adapted and those weren't done before launch and there was no way to physically make these changes and so the Laser Rangefinder just wasn't functioning and we reported last week that they were able to successfully hack into a NASA instrument that was able to provide roughly the same job and they were able to use the instrument but there was too much of a delay and so the last time that they got was about 12 minutes before it made its actual landing on the surface of the Moon so it had to use its own onboard sensors to visually locate a landing spot to measure and judge how quickly it was coming down to the surface and it came in too quickly so you could see the moment where the leg snapped right there now with it fallen over on the side its solar panels were pointing away from the sun does that sound familiar to the Japanese slim Lander same problem except I guess it was not upside down it was over on its side its solar panels weren't optimally pointed towards the sun its transmitter was pointed down into the regolith or away from the earth so it wasn't able to send a lot of data home quickly but they were still able to test some of the experiments on board the Lander and Report the results back to NASA and the commercial Partners on the Lander unfortunately we didn't get that eagle cam selfie camera to show off the landing and people were wondering why didn't we get lots of pictures and video and all kinds of stuff about the landing and the problem is that its solar panels weren't providing enough power to run the transmitter to be able to send this data back as quickly as you wanted but we do have a few pictures now of the lunar surface so it's it's there it's just sideways now the time that I'm recording this episode it's estimated there's just a couple of hours left before they have to shut the spacecraft down and probably by the time you see this it will have been shut down and then we're going to have to wait to see if it survives the lunar Knight and they can try to recover more data more information next cycle around now was this Mission a success or a failure I'm going to talk about this some more at the end of this episode so stay around for that speaking of surviving the lunar Knight the Japanese space agency's slim Lander survived the lunar Knight now every time we have one of these small spacecraft land on the surface of the Moon the question is will it survive and that's because the temperatures drop down extremely cold it kills the batteries 14 days of frigid temperatures is really hard on a spacecraft and we've seen Lander after Lander die as soon as it goes into lunar Knight a few have survived but most don't make it and it was expected that the slim Lander wasn't going to survive especially because because its solar panels weren't pointed directly at the sun it was also upside down and yet when lunard day returned Jaa was amazed to see that they were getting a transmission coming from the Lander and ironically the spacecraft was too hot it was above 100° C because it was in full sunlight and so now they're going to wait for the conditions to improve for the temperature to get more reasonable for more power to make it into those solar panels and hopefully they'll be able to continue this science but we did get another picture from the surface of the Moon from slim so it's not dead yet and hopefully it'll be able to survive more of these day night cycles on the moon and I guess it's like it's a way to learn how to survive these day night cycles on the moon which is pretty exciting to me it's got to be so tricky someone should I I should try to interview about like what would it take to engineer spacecraft to do this dwarf galaxies illuminated the universe all right this is pretty big news in my opinion but first I want to give you a little bit of background information so the farthest that we can see in the universe is the cosmic microwave background radiation and this is the radiation that was released when the universe had cooled down to the point that it had become transparent and the first light that could finally Escape out into the universe got out there and that was about 380,000 years after the big bang once that light got out of into the universe then the universe continued to expand and get cooler and everything went dark and this is known as the Dark Ages and then for some reason the universe lit up again and this is known as the Epic of reionization and the question that astronomers have always had is what drove the Epic of reionization why did all of this cold hydrogen and helium gas get ionized to the point that it was able to to start sending out light into the universe the key to this is that you need a source of ultraviolet radiation very powerful ultraviolet radiation and so astronomers thought of a bunch of sources like maybe it was the first primordial Stars these pop three stars that were super big and were pumping out ultraviolet radiation another possibility is that it was like really massive galaxies that were collecting together large stars and putting out radiation maybe it was quazars that are incred incredibly intense firing out ultraviolet radiation and you would get this bubbles opening up in this original cold gas that was then ionizing and releasing this light out into the universe but one other idea is that it was dwarf galaxies that these sort of first primordial galaxies coming together they were actually putting out more ultraviolet radiation than you would expect and an interesting analogy for this is for example look at the large Melina Cloud this is a much smaller Galaxy than the Milky Way and yet it has regions of star formation that dwarf anything that we have here in our galaxy the largest star formation regions that we know of are in the large melenic Cloud which is a dwarf Galaxy now James web has confirmed that dwarf galaxies are the source of the ultraviolet radiation that created the Epic of reionization they were able to make this discovery by using gravitational lensing they were able to use these lenses is to push farther into the universe than web could do on its own and it was able to see the signature of these dwarf galaxies embedded in these large cocoons of gas that their ultraviolet radiation is pushing out from these dwarf galaxies the bubbles of material are expanding and opening up gaps that then the light is able to escape and web was able to pick it up the James Webb Space Telescope had four major science goals it was to observe planets orbiting around other stars to understand star formation to understand how the first galaxies formed and to figure out how the first light in the universe came what began the Epic of reionization and now with this discovery it's taken a major step forward to uncovering the source of this time and so this is I think really huge news and really interesting so now we know where the reionized light came from and on a side note at the time that we're recording this the James web Space Telescope cycle 3 announcement just came out and so these are the targets all of the places that web is going to be looking at over the course of the next year it's a gigantic document too much to digest in one day but we will take a look at it and sort of see if anything interesting has been chosen and maybe we'll report on that in the coming weeks every week we do a vote on our Channel where you tell us what was the most interesting story of the week and this week was I think the biggest Landslide I've ever seen which was 69% for odyss lands on the moon that was huge so uh thank you everybody who voted we post this vote into the community tab on our Channel um within 24 hours of when we post the latest space bites you can get from the community tab or if you're just scrolling on YouTube just scrolling scrolling and you see the vote go ahead take a second vote tell us what you thought it really helps us understand which of the stories you find are the most interesting now the best chance to do this is to subscribe to the channel click on the notifications Bell and then you will see the votes that appear in your stream new Moons for Uranus and Neptune good news astronomers have found three new moons in the solar system one is orbiting around Uranus and two are orbiting around Neptune and these moons are small like they just measure between eight and 15 km across so the one for Uranus brings the total of moons at the planet at 28 and the two additional moons bring the count at Neptune up to 16 astronomers used the very large telescope and the Gemini telescope which are two of the largest telescopes on Earth over several nights making just dozens of 5minute exposures watching for anything that changed in the environment around both of these PL planets to turn up these new moons and they measure in this sort of 8 to 15 km across range which is very small when you consider the enormous distances but consider that we have identified moons down to about 2 kilm at Jupiter and 3 km at Saturn so let's assume there's going to be a lot more moons to discover around both of those worlds in the future a new Space Telescope will help us find near Earth objects now we're all waiting for that next generation of monster space telescopes Nancy Grace Roman the habitable worlds Observatory Ariel a lot of really interesting space telescopes are still coming but one that's kind of slipped under the radar is the spectr photometer for the history of the universe or sphere X and this is an all Sky survey it's going to have both infrared and Optical and it's going to be doing kind of a similar job to the uclid mission so it's going to be mapping the entire sky over the course of about 2 years it's going to identify 300 million galaxies measure them take their Spectra as well as 100 million stars in the Milky Way and that's important because we've got all of this other data that's coming from the Gia Mission they'll be able to see the spectroscopic information from sphx and compare it against the motion data from Gaia and try to sort of figure out where stars came from where they're moving around in the Milky Way but because it has this infrared capability it's going to be able to to do another job that was really never intended and that is to find near Earth objects to find the potentially hazardous asteroids that are buzzing around the Earth all the time it has a very similar instrument set to the neowise mission which found about 3,000 neear objects it's going to be in a sun synchronous polar orbit so it's going to be away from the earth and give a different perspective be able to see the kinds of asteroids that we just can't see down from the surface of the Earth Earth and it's going to be launching in 2025 so we're just about a year away from another new Space Telescope that's going to be mapping the entire sky but also finding potentially hazardous asteroids if you like the work that we do here at Universe today why don't you to consider joining our patreon this is a way for you to directly support the journalism that we do for me to be able to hire more writers more researchers more video editors and produce better and better science reporting as a completely independent space media agency as a patron you get no ads on Universe today you get behind the scenes information we do a patron only question show once a month that is like three hours long so if you want to be able to get your questions answered definitely become a patron go to patreon.com SL Universe today NASA tests the lunar starship's docking system when Artemis 3 launches the astronauts are going to be in the Orion capsule they're going to fly to the moon and they're going to meet up with a SpaceX Starship the human Landing system it's going to take them down to the surface of the Moon but they're going to have to dock from the Orion capsule to the human Landing system and so this week NASA announced that they've got their hands on the docking mechanism provided by SpaceX it's based on the docking mechanism on the Dragon 2 which has docked many times in space now they tested it for 10 days on 200 different scenarios for how this docking would work and so you can kind of imagine all of the different angles all of the different speeds you can imagine situations where Starship isn't able to move so Orion has to make the connection or vice versa and they're able to test all of these different scenarios you can imagine now they're moving towards having everything they need for the emis 3 astronauts to be able to transfer to Starship to be able to go down to the surface of the Moon so come on Starship launch already our final images of Ingenuity we've been watching NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter with great interest for many years and after flight 7 2 NASA announced that the helicopter had sustained damage to its rotors and that it would no longer be able to fly and when we saw those first pictures like it looked like a little bit of chips at the end of the wing and I've flown a drone with a few chips at the end of the wing and so you figure like maybe they could adapt people were wondering could they adapt the way it flies well we got new pictures of Ingenuity that were taken by the perseverance Rover and cleaned up by Simon shos and there's your problem it's Miss a rotor so that helicopter is not going to be flying again this has got to be the last picture that we're going to see of Ingenuity perseverance has work to do but also perseverance acts as the relay from Ingenuity to send data to perseverance and then back to Earth and so as perseverance goes over the horizon to Ingenuity it will no longer be able to send its data and so this is the last that we will see of Ingenuity but we're going to see so many more helicopters on Mars in the coming years like what an amazing success of an idea for a mission finally check out this incredible video this is the raw footage coming from vaa Space industry's Capsule as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere there's a shorter version of the video that's about 5 minutes long and then there's a longer version that is completely raw uncut 27 minutes from orbit through re-entry parachutes deployed Landing in the UT Utah desert and someone walking up and recovering the capsule it even has sound and you can hear the buffeting of the atmosphere as it's doing its re-entry I've never seen anything like this and I'm so glad that Vara Space Industries included this camera on their re-entry capsule when they recovered it so go ahead and just watch the whole 27 minute video and just sort of imagine what it would be like to be an astronaut in orbit seeing the Earth down below and then starting to pass through the atmosphere fear it seems rough scary exciting very cool all right I'm going to talk about whether or not odys was a success or not but first I'd like to thank our patrons a special thanks to Steven fer Munley Paul robach Abe Kingston hay Twilight douge Stewart Steven kosaki David Richards Mark anus Joel yansy Antony lilara Dustin cable Vlad chiplin Modo George David gilon Andrew and gross Jeremy murn Josh Schultz and Jordan Young Who support us at the master of the universe level and all our other supporters on patreon after the not entirely successful Landing of the D Deus Lander people were arguing in the comments about whether or not this was a success or not and I actually talked to one of my YouTube Friends Marcus house and he said it was the same thing that people were arguing in the comments about whether or not the odys Lander was a success or a failure and in my opinion it was a success obviously with some caveats like it would have been better if it hadn't fallen over but when you think of how this is a private commercial entity that went from zero to sending a Lander to the Moon their budget for this mission was $250 million and when you consider inflation adjusted the cost of the Apollo program was like $250 billion uh it was a fraction of the price obviously it was a mistake to not enable its laser rang finding system but an easy fit fix like pull the pin and fix the wire harness next time uh but yet it was able to fly to the moon go into orbit of the moon even when the alternative Landing system failed it was still able to find its way down to the surface of the Moon and land kind of safely and if that Landing leg hadn't broken then everything would have been pretty much fine so this is the first test that they did and and we're going to see more tests they're going to fix the mistakes that they made on the first one they're going to improve for next time I know NASA is happy with the results of this Mission they understand what it's like to iteratively test and sometimes see failure with their various missions they understand the space is difficult and complicated and to just have a new company try this out for the first time it's understandable and yet intuitive machines isn't going anywhere they're going to try again and hopefully they will learn from those mistakes they'll make new ones but we will move into this era where commercial companies are regularly flying on Commercial Rockets to the surface of the Moon and if you have an instrument a scientific payload a cool idea that you want to send to the Moon you'll be able to just go down to the Rover store and buy access to the surface of the Moon and that's where this is all headed and I couldn't be more excited about what happens next all right we'll see next week

Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 69,708

Keywords: universe today, fraser cain, space, astronomy, space news, superconductor, Euclid, esa, James Webb, just, room temperature, lk99, LK-99

Id: qUahxtDwe8I

Length: 19min 28sec (1168 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024