How to Find The Voyagers, Deorbiting the ISS, Non-Rotational Artificial Gravity | Q&A 224

where should we look to see the Voyager spacecraft could we turn craters on the moon into giant radar dishes and is the best kind of artificial gravity constant acceleration all this and more in this week's question show welcome to the question show your questions my answers now as always wherever you are across my channel if a question Pops in your brain just write it down and I will gather them up and answer them here now we record this show live every Monday at 5 PM Pacific time so if you want to have your question answered live like as soon as you think of it I will answer it as well as have follow-on conversations and conversations with the rest of the audience you should definitely come and join the show we do this every Monday at 5 00 PM Pacific Time now before we get into this week's question show I want to bring you back to the book club and this of course was a way for you to recommend books to me and I will read them and then I will tell you what I thought and so I was able to go all the way through the Revelation space series I read [Music] um project Hail Mary there's a bunch of other books I read until the most recent book that had been recommended to me as part of the book club was a book called accelerando by Charles Strauss and this was recommended to me by a bunch of people both from the sort of space flight science fiction side but as well as the artificial intelligence Singularity side and it is the craziest book I think I've ever read it starts out and the book is about 10 years old and so when you're reading the book it's projecting forward into the future about a decade which is like now and so you're reading it you're going oh you missed all these things the things you thought were gonna happen didn't happen but then the book jumps every three four five years at a time sort of playing through the life of a family as they approached the singularity and it's the first book that I've ever read that really properly understands what exponential growth feels like and so even though you're 20 30 40 years into what's happening the scale of things are are just going off the charts like 50 60 years into this they've dismantled Mercury Venus they have uh you know people are copying themselves into computers they're sending those computers on on missions to other star systems they are resurrecting dead people like it just it goes on and on and on and yet there's also a really interesting story that goes along with it so that's accelerando Charles Strauss I highly recommend it but you've got to pay attention because it is dense so the book club I'm reading books you're recommending so go ahead there's going to be a link down in the show notes but essentially there's a Goodreads group where you're just making book recommendations I'm picking them based on what sounds interesting to me I'm reading the book and I'm letting you know what I thought and then you can follow on as well so please I need another book let me know let me know what to read next Mike Sully 7212 which way do we look to see where the Voyager spacecraft are heading like I want to point at them yeah the Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977 and have been traveling in space for like 45 years and they're definitely running down in their power but they're not out of power yet and so they're still sending Transmissions home and like they are in space and they are in constellations and so NASA has to turn these gigantic dishes in the sky towards the location of where the Voyages are if they want to be able to send and receive signals from them so Voyager 1 is currently in the constellation of ophiuchus and it's moving towards the Little Dipper and so like 50 000 years from now the closest star that it will come to is located in the Little Dipper so if you know where opiocus is you can point your telescope and like you can look up the exact right Ascension declination location for the Voyager spacecraft you won't see anything of course because they're so far away even the most powerful telescopes on Earth couldn't see them but if you had a really big radio dish you could receive their Transmissions Voyager 2 is in the constellation of Pavo and same thing you can point your telescope and you can actually see where this spacecraft are but yeah they are out there in space in constellations that you might already know you might have noticed the planet name that's popped up over my shoulder and that's a way for you to vote to tell us which of the questions you thought was the best and last week the winner was Tatooine I guess the kind of snarky comment about how I can describe scientific discoveries with a straight face and so congratulations Stephanie McGuire you asked the best question or maybe I gave the best answer whatever we work as a great team so thank you everyone who voted last week and remember if you want to help me know what questions you like what you want to see more clearly you want me to give an enthusiastic response about the scientific method for snarky trolling questions so I guess that's just all the show will be from here on out anyway go ahead you'll see the planet names above my shoulder the end of the show vote for the one you like the best just write the name of the planet in the comments down below as well as part of your question or whatever and we will tally them up and we will celebrate that here next week Hunter weisenberg7052 are there roughly parabolic shaped craters on the moon that could be turned into giant radar dishes with minimal effort by coating them with radar reflective material one of the cool things about the craters on the moon is that they are almost all roughly circular and parabolic shaped and it seems weird doesn't it that you would assume that the rocks that are crashing into the moon are coming at all of these different angles and yet the craters all look like nice circles that are scooped out in this very similar way and what happens is that whenever any object strikes the moon or the Earth or whatever it's going so fast like it's going in many cases kilometers a second tens of kilometers a second it can be going very fast and when they strike their target then all of the kinetic energy is instantly pushed into or released onto the planet that they hit and so even though an object can be coming in at a very steep angle as soon as it really smashes into the moon all that kinetic energy is released straight into the moon and creates this giant crater in there and they look quite circular and you're exactly right that they would be the perfect place for a telescope the problem is is that they're not smooth enough they're very smooth but it's not quite what you need you would need to sort of get in there and polish up these craters on the moon to actually turn them into a proper telescope but there's been some great ideas and in fact I did an interview here on the channel that what you do instead is you set up pylons on sort of around a crater whatever size that you want and then you extend a net down from those pylons so that it is hanging down into the crater and it's going to be following this parabolic shape thanks to the lunar gravity and then that great big radar dish can be a monster radio telescope that could be say a kilometer across you could make other kinds of telescopes but then the tolerances are going to get harder and to get it to so radio is very forgiving and so the wavelengths are very long it's okay if you have a knock perfect telescope but once you get down to infrared visible light then you do need to have something that's a little more carefully machined but I do really like this idea that you use these craters on the moon as natural sort of telescope lenses for building your telescopes Vernon Goins there is no such thing as artificial Gravity the only way to mimic gravity is by constant acceleration in space please give up on the big wheel in space it won't work so according to Einstein if you're in a box if you're in a room and you're sitting on a chair and that box is down on the surface of the Earth or that box is in a rocket that is constantly accelerating at 1g of gravity or that box is on the inside wall of a gigantic space station say thousands of kilometers across that is rotating you wouldn't be able to tell the difference on which one you are they would all feel equivalent to you that is general relativity now according to your question or your comment the only way to mimic gravity is by a constant acceleration in space obviously that would be the best right you take some rocket that gives you one g of acceleration and you fire it for days weeks months years and everybody on board your spacecraft has one g of gravity they just go about their business they walk up and down stairs they can have baths they don't suffer muscle loss bone loss vision problems fluid redistribution everything is the best that just sounds wonderful the problem is is that we have no way to produce one g of constant acceleration our Rockets our chemical Rockets can produce one g of acceleration for minutes at the most we don't have ion drives that can produce constant acceleration for any length of time we don't have the technology even nuclear Rockets wouldn't be able to provide one g of acceleration for long periods of time we don't know how to make fusion drives and maybe even those wouldn't be able to provide you with the 1g of acceleration that you need for long periods of time and what if you want to just stay in one spot what if you just want to be in orbit around a planet you don't want to hop on your sci-fi Drive expanse spaceship and fly off like are you just gonna fly off to the far side of the solar system and then fly back and forth to give everybody 1G in their space station like no um so you're gonna need some kind of artificial gravity in space and the way that we know is going to work is a giant rotating wheel now obviously the engineering challenges of building a giant rotating wheel are ludicrous like we have trouble launching more than a few tons into orbit at a time and when you think about some of the O'Neill cylinders some of the really like giant mega projects that you're looking at thousands of tons millions of tons and so in the short term it's going to be really tough for us to be able to do that the the most practical form of artificial gravity that we're probably going to be using in the next couple of decades is the variety that tries to mitigate some of the health problems that astronauts will experience when they're in space so you're not going to have this beautiful giant rotating space station where everybody is sitting around and you look up and you can see the top of the space of the space station and there's everybody's homes directly above you and you're stuck to the outside of the station it's going to be that you're living in a space station like the International Space Station you're in weightlessness most of the time and then there's a centrifuge that you go and maybe you sleep in the centrifuger maybe you put in a couple of hours in the centrifuge every day and all it's trying to do is help minimize the amount of damage that your body is taking because you are in space so it's like saying like obviously going on ships is a bad way to get from continent to continent what we need are Stargates teleportation is the way to go like we don't have the technology and so until we have the technology to provide constant 1G acceleration we're gonna have to use the stuff that we know how to use and then we'll wait and then if someone provides a 1G accelerating drive then everything changes and being able to use that for artificial gravity is like the least of the benefits of having access to a 1G constant accelerating space Drive bucktier jawuck is stopping at the gravitational focal point for gravitational lensing a problem at high speeds required to get a telescope that far how do they decelerate or does it not matter so you're talking about the solar gravitational lens which is one of my favorite ideas and I've had a chance to interview Dr Slava tereshev about the sole gravitational lens I just did another interview with Slava turshev about the method of propulsion that he thinks will be able to get out to the solar gravitational lens as well as go to other really interesting places in the outer solar system so you haven't checked out that interview this is me telling you to check it out like just look at the comments on that interview and how excited people are about what we talked about in the interview I highly recommend it he's uh definitely got some pretty big ideas and we get into the Weeds on that so the idea of the solar gravitational lens this is that at about 650 astronomical units away from the Sun the gravity of the sun acts as a natural telescope lens and so if you put a telescope at that focal point you can then magnify the power of your telescope by many orders of magnitude and for example it could give us an image of of an extrasolar Planet at a one megapixel resolution so you could see another Earth at one megapixel resolution as opposed to a single Pixel which would be wonderful and so the question you're asking is like once you get out to the solar gravitational lens do you you're going to keep going right if you've had to go tens of astronomical units every year you're going very fast and so then once you pass that 650 astronomical units you just keep going how do you stay in the focal point well the cool thing about this is that you can remain in the focal point that once you cross that 650-ish astronomical unit range then it's this cone of focus and as long as you stay in that cone for the entire time you can continue to make observations using the sun in fact it gets better and better over time because the sun gets smaller stops being such a big glare in the focal image that you're producing and so you don't have to worry you don't have to stop you just turn back and you just keep drifting for tens hundreds of years and you can keep using the gravitational lens as long as you want ARG Scott is there a benefit to making larger helicopters for future Mars missions so at the time they were recording this NASA's Mars Ingenuity helicopter has flown over 51 times like they were expecting just to get five flights out of the helicopter and now they're up to 51 and it's been so successful like imagine like what life was like for videographers before they got drones right they had to like shoot images from street level and now they can have these great sweeping shots as they're on their skateboards around New York City it's Game Changer and so it's kind of the same on Mars you've got this helicopter that's flying around and is able to observe the route that the Rover is taking from above and geologists just have a field day when they can do this because then they can see the larger structures things they want to go and examine and this was just a test like can does a helicopter work on Mars and the answer is yes and so the next big question that scientists are gonna need to ask is how much science how much geology how much exploration can a helicopter do on Mars and my guess is a lot that any and every future Mission that's going to go to Mars is gonna come with a helicopter sidekick of varying sizes in fact right now they're planning to send a helicopter with the marsample return Mission if there's any problem with the main samples that are onboard perseverance right now like when it delivers the samples to the marsample return Mission then they can go and fly out and pick up the backup samples these are the ones that persevere and sit down on the surface of Mars and the helicopter will have a little Grabber arm so fly out along the Route the perseverance took it'll pick up samples bring them back to the Mars sample return Mission and then be able to return those back to Earth there's something just so amazing like it feels like it was impossible and now suddenly you've got this entirely different axis of flight right you had X Y now you've got Zed and it's great um and in fact it's been so successful the Chinese are planning to put a helicopter in one of their upcoming Rover missions and and I think it would be Unthinkable to not add a helicopter to every single mission that ever goes to Mars and you can imagine when the astronauts go to Mars they're gonna bring helicopters with them they're going to deploy them all around for all kinds of purposes where to go explore the next day as Scouts as helping figure out some of the dangers that they face now the question you're asking is is there any benefit to making them larger and the answer is I I don't think we really know what are the limits I mean the rotor on the helicopter is turning very quickly and it's got this sort of perfect balance between the size of the rotors the mass of the helicopter and the amount of power that is able to bring in from the Sun and if you make a much bigger helicopter you're gonna have to play with those variables and so the thing's going to be heavier maybe the rotors won't be able to spin as quickly and you might find that in fact like you're constrained in engineering so the one thing I can guarantee is that we will see every possible variation of helicopters in future missions if you like my answers to your questions as well as the other things that we do at Universe today consider joining our patreon club this allows us to keep minimum ads for everyone like as you can see there are no ads during this video as a patron you'll also get an ad free experience on university.com for life even if you unsubscribe you'll get ad free videos Early Access to interviews as well as other perks that are exclusive to our patreon community thanks to everyone who's already subscribed and welcome to the recent newcomers Joseph conrath Patrick gingst Richard Hensley Tim scottymac Mary M Lille Ty Gardner Don burn Bruce Berry and Joseph Gentile join the club at patreon.com universetoday Rage Quit quick what are your thoughts on Smart telescopes like unistellar and vespara so I've had a chance to play with one of the smart telescopes the veonus stelina and it's amazing like you take this it looks like a turret out of a portal game and you put this thing on the ground and you sync it with your phone and then you tell it to start and it figures out where it is because it has a GPS on board and then it plate solves a couple of images of the sky and then figures out like where it's pointing it knows what time it is you then just tell it things you wanted to look at and so you say well I'd like to look at this constellation I'd like to look at that nebula this galaxy and then it just goes and finds them and images them and anybody who's ever owned a telescope knows how difficult it is to Polar align the telescope to be able to sort of show your friends interesting objects in telescope with very little setup time like it is it is a pain to make a telescope with its go-to setting like go from object once you've got it set up once it's polar aligned then yeah you can go and go like let's look at m33 let's look at M31 no problem but you can spend three hours going just a second while you're trying to get your telescope set up and it is embarrassing so when you use these telescopes like and I haven't used the unicellular one but you know we've done reviews on Universe today it's amazing and it absolutely feels like the future like you are using this telescope you're not having to think about it it's just pointing it at whatever objects you want to be able to see that are available in the night sky so the downsides of them are that you're kind of locked into the gear so it comes with the size of the telescope that it has it comes with the kind of camera that it has the hardware that goes along with it and you know we've seen technology increase in Leaps and Bounds and so I personally prefer to be able to have all these parts be separate and so you can swap out the mount with a new Mount you can swap out the the telescope lenses or the camera or the controller or whatever as the new technology moves along they're also very expensive I mean you were looking at thousands of dollars and if you were to go and set up a your own astrophotography rig for the same price you could get a more powerful telescope that is more customizable that's more modular but not easier to use and it really feels like right now there is this gigantic Gap in the marketplace that all telescopes should be as easy to use as the ones from unicellular and vaness like it's embarrassing how difficult it is to use a telescope that isn't one of those two and so you know they always say like the the best cameras the one that you've got with you right and so like the best telescope is the one that you're going to use and so if you do invest in one of those telescopes you're going to use it but you will also run up against its limitations and so you will if you use it a lot you'll realize that the pictures aren't as good as the pictures that you could be taking with a more custom-built piece of Kit and so you may then end up wanting to sell the thing and put together your own custom Hardware but like whatever gets you into the field Whatever Gets You Into The Hobby and so if you're the kind of person who wants to be able to just like see nebulae see galaxies C clusters see the planets the moon and not think too much about it and you're not trying to take like Astra photos that you're gonna sell or try and submit to ask for a photo of the day they're pretty great Moonwalker when the ISS is finally decommissioned how will they do it will they dismantle it and let each individual module fall or fall all at once are they worried about something might survive re-entry right so the plan right now is that the International Space Station will be deorbited at some point in the late 2020s although you know we've heard predictions for when they're going to finally de-orbit it and people keep showing up to extend the lifespan of the space station so at one point the Russians said they were going to pull out of the station the Americans have said that they're not going to maintain it Beyond a certain point and then a couple years later they've extended it and so where we are right now is that it will probably be the orbited at the end of the 2020. I would be surprised if it stretches into the 2030s but like at this point it is a machine and it is running down and it's getting more and more expensive to maintain it and NASA has budget that it needs to spend on things like the lunar Gateway the Artemis missions other exploration so it is definitely going to have a hard time limit in the end and the plan right now is that they're going to deorbit it using three things there's thrusters on board the station itself so they're going to be able to fire those thrusters there are the spacecraft that are attached to it and they're going to be able to fire those and that's probably not enough to give it the kind of control that they want and So the plan is probably to launch some kind of tug now maybe it'll be like a beefed up upper stage from that they might use for some other Mission and they'll dock that onto the space station and that will assist to deorbit it exactly where they want it to go where they want it to go is they want the whole thing to crash into the middle of the Pacific Ocean where they crash most spacecraft when they still maintain control of that's where Mir went that's when many other spacecraft have gone it's like the farthest point away from any other human being it's the place that you can crash your spacecraft and do a minimum amount of damage to anybody and so it'll all just come down together in one big D orbit maneuver with the station firing instructors with the attached spacecraft firing the thrusters and this tug to help out as well Dev gay quad is it possible to make artificial Gravity by not using the wheel design like in stowaway yeah so if you watch the movie stowaway they have this spacecraft that flies into space and then it extends out these modules and then it starts to Tumble end over end and you get artificial gravity on the two ends of the station I think they had a counterweight and then they have their actual habitation module and yeah in theory that method will work quite well um you know you do get artificial gravity in your module you probably don't want to go to one full Earth gravity you probably want to have it spinning like enough so that when you pour liquids they stay in their bowls things like that what I like about that that methodology is that you don't need to have the rest of the wheel like you just are spinning this thing and over and over end um you have to be careful about how you structure it because there are various forces there's ways that objects that are rotating in space want to orient themselves and there's a really great video and hopefully Chad will be able to find it where an astronaut on board the International Space Station is spinning this handle and the handle is sort of spinning and then suddenly it flips over in the other way and it spins then it flips over the other way and so there are axes of rotation that you have to keep in mind people always worry like what happens if the tethers break but actually it's not that big of a problem like you are like the velocity that you're going towards Mars or wherever your destination is that's the big velocity maybe even if you you know your tether snaps it's only a slight change between the velocity of the one part of it and the other part of it and it's probably within your capability if you have additional fuel on board to be able to correct and be able to have both parts arrive at the destination as planned so um I definitely like I wouldn't be surprised if when we have long-term space flight the commission to Mars some version of that sort of rotating masses will be supplied to provide gravity to the crew Walid de Mooney isn't it easier to do robotic tests on Mars rather than have another mission to bring samples and all that complexity no I don't think so uh like you can definitely do very simple exploration on Mars like you can take a picture of a rock you can try to understand the chemistry of the rock you can drill into a rock to sort of reveal a little bit what's underneath there are various instruments that you can deploy but when you think about the kinds of labs that we have here on Earth I mean a geologist can go into this lab and they've got access to Kilns and lasers and mass spectrometers and tools to measure the the gas composition they've got microscopes electron scanning microscopes like the list of tools they have at their disposal just goes on and on and on as well as the ability to bring new experiments into play when you think of them and in and as they get invented one thing that's really kind of interesting is that when the Apollo samples were brought back from the Moon they put a bunch of them away in a really Secure Storage knowing that the devices to run experiments on would improve over time and so that when you had this next round of equipment they could do their test with they could bring the samples out of cold storage and they wouldn't have interacted with yours atmosphere at all and they could do these experiments and this is ongoing and so a lot of times we see new experiments being run on samples from the Moon and so the same thing will happen with Mars that you'll have these samples brought back from Mars in pristine condition they'll be put into this place where they won't be influenced by life on Earth on on you know there won't be any contamination for into the samples and then they'll bring out little bits of the samples and share them among researchers and then over the next the coming decades be able to perform new experiments and there's just no way that you could replicate at the same level of sensitivity that you can with the Mars sampler term Mission like if there is life in these samples or if there are is fossil as life or is there any evidence of life you really do need a lab on Earth to gather the evidence and like what you don't want is you don't want your results to be inconclusive like when you think about how people still argue over what was found by the Viking Landers is because for all of its ability Viking was a mediocre scientific laboratory compared to what you have on Earth and so it may be found evidence of Life on Mars and maybe it didn't and Mars researchers might still get into heated arguments about about what it found and didn't find and like that's not helping right like did you find Life on Mars maybe right no let's get a really solid answer and that's why we want to have the samples brought back to Earth where the best scientists on earth and the best equipment can try to get to the bottom of this question not done who decides what person or persons can mentally sit in a tin can for two years to get to Mars and be there when there's no blue sky or green trees or anything but rocks and dust I mean there are people at Nasa and the European space agency and the Chinese space agency who are choosing their astronauts and the kind of psychology that they're going to be looking for the kind of people to be able to handle that length of a mission they're going to be looking for very special people people who have demonstrated that they can handle stressful situations very well that they are experienced with some level of being alone or in a very small group working with other people maybe people who are part of a submarine crew or have been on some of these missions before but but a lot of the times like like when you fly to the International Space Station or when you go to the moon on the Artemis Mission you will be experiencing challenges and it's those kinds of stressful situations that will bring out the best in people or the worst and so all of the people who are involved in NASA right now in the European Space Agency Chinese agency Russian space agency right they are going to be under scrutiny from the people saying like does this person have the right capability that also said I mean there is a lot of work that's being done in the psychology of astronauts I actually did an interview with a researcher who has been looking into this and trying to sort of make predictions about what it's going to take to be able to help astronauts deal with the homesickness the loneliness the stresses of being far away from Earth away from Easy assistance it's going to be hard but we've had human beings who've set out on sea voyages there are people who solo sail around the world who serve in submarines there was a woman who just spent more than a year in a cave by herself uh which came out fine so can human beings handle the Solitude and stresses of a mission to Mars is definitely something you want to keep an eye on but it is I think it is a problem that is relatively straightforward for us to solve compared to the lack of gravity the constant Cosmic radiation and then all of the things that can go wrong on a multi-year mission to Mars when you're too far away from help all right those are all the questions that we had this week thank you everyone for asking questions in the YouTube comments as well as showing up live during the show remember we do this show live every Monday at 5 PM Pacific time and don't forget to vote to celebrate whichever question you thought was the best we'll see you next week if you want to stay on top of all the important spaces join my weekly email newsletter I send it out every Friday to more than 60 000 people I write every word there are no ads and it's absolutely free subscribe at university.com newsletter you can also subscribe to the universe Today podcast there you can find an audio version of all of our news interviews and Q and A's as well as exclusive content subscribe at university.com podcast or search for Universe today on Apple podcast Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts a huge thanks to everyone who supports us on patreon and helps us stay independent and keeps ads at a bare minimum thanks to all the interplanetary researchers the interstellar adventurers in the Galaxy Wanderers and a special thanks to Paul Davis Vlad shiplin Jay Dennis David Gilton in modso George Jeremy Mattern Jordan young Tim Whalen Dave verbioff androm gross and Josh Schultz who support us at the master of the universe level all your support means the universe to us

Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 53,386

Keywords: universe today, fraser cain, space, astronomy

Id: M7xy6LYyH6k

Length: 34min 35sec (2075 seconds)

Published: Tue May 16 2023