Fraser Cain: Hi everyone, I'm
Fraser Cain. I'm the publisher of Universe Today, I've been a
space and astronomy journalist for over 20 years. This is our
weekly news bytes segment where we gather up a bunch of
interesting news that broke this week, and I will explain it now.
I cover all of this in my big weekly email newsletter that
goes out on Fridays, dozens of stories, pictures, highlights,
lots of information, I write every word, it's ad free, I
think you'll really enjoy it. But we understand that some of
you prefer to have the news videoed at you, instead of
reading, totally understood, but if you do want the newsletter,
go to universe today.com/newsletter. Alright,
let's get into the news. We actually delayed the shooting of
this news bytes segment because we wanted to find out if the
Boeing CST 100 Starliner was going to finally launch. And
from what we can tell from the time that we're recording, it
did. Now the the CST Starliner. This is the other commercial
crew program that NASA had engaged with. So of course,
we're all familiar with the SpaceX Crew Dragon, which can
carry four astronauts to the International Space Station. And
unlike past space vehicles, in this case NASA pays per seat,
they pay about $50 million per seat in the SpaceX Crew Dragon.
And NASA also contracted with Boeing to build the CST 100
Starliner. And this is the same thing a capsule capable of
delivering astronauts to the International Space Station, it
has room for five people. And we're not sure you know, NASA
will probably be using all five seats from from mission to
mission. And it also has thrusters on board. So that can
help boost the International Space Station, similar to what's
done with the Russian Progress. So if there's some falling out
with the Russians that are able to launch the progress anymore,
there will be the Starliner to be able to do this. Now the
problem is that the Starliner launches on an Atlas rocket. And
the United Launch Alliance isn't building Atlas rockets anymore,
they've contracted all of their final Atlas rockets to Amazon to
launch their Mega constellation. And so in the future, these
things are going to be launching probably on the Vulcan rocket,
but we haven't seen the first test of the Vulcan rocket. So
it's been a long complicated journey to get to the point that
the CST Starliner is ready to fly. There was a problem back in
2019, when it was first supposed to do the tests that it just
did. Today, were supposed to demonstrate its capability of
being able to launch dock with the International Space Station.
I won't go into all the details. But there has been a series of
delays, issues, a lot of technical changes that had to be
made. And it all culminated on today another test. So at the
time that we're recording Starliner just completed its
orbital insertion. And that was the part that it failed last
time. So hopefully, this time, it has gone farther, more
successful. And now it will dock with the International Space
Station with this successful test, it should be able to go
and get flight proven. And the next step is that the crew
members are going to be flying a mission to the International
Space Station. And they're actually at the Kennedy Space
Center right now and all the astronauts watching the flight
of the spacecraft that's going to be carrying them to the
station. So I know a lot of people are SpaceX fans, and I am
too but it sure is great to have two separate spacecraft capable
of carrying human beings to the International Space Station.
redundancy is a good thing. A competitive marketplace is a
good thing. And now it looks like we're closer to having like
a vibrant private space launch capability, which is pretty
exciting. China's continuing to expand its plans for space
exploration. We've been covering the exploits of China in space
exploration, pretty much since the beginning of Universe Today.
And the Chinese have actually had a long term plan for what
they're going to do in space. They wrote their first version
of their document back in 1992. And they had sort of a three
stage plan. The first stage was to just send capsules to space
capable of sending humans to orbit and they were able to
achieve that. Then they wanted to build some short term space
stations to test out the ability to do spacewalks, docking,
orbital maneuvers, things like that. And they've been able to
test that out. And then the last piece of the puzzle was to build
a more permanent space station. And they've done that with the
Tiangong space station. So with all of those main goals
completed in the last couple of weeks, we've learned that China
has put out the next series of plans what they plan to do
beyond that. Now the plans are very vague, but they've created
a brand new agency within the Chinese space agency that's
focused on their plans for Lunar exploration, the chief designers
name is Hong Jin. And he is going to be focusing on all of
the missions that will be carrying China to the Moon and
beyond. Now, we don't really know what it's going to be. But
there's this mural that they painted inside the office for
the crewed lunar program office. And so you can kind of get a
sense. There's like, rovers, there's landers, there's various
bases, orbiters, various stations that are going to orbit
with maybe inflatable elements, you know, we're not really sure
what this is going to look like. But we do know that they're very
focused on continuing the exploration of the Moon. Now, a
lot of people ask me like, well, you know, like, what does this
mean? Should we be nervous, like, the Moon is not a place
that the military really matters, like, you can't launch
a nuclear missile from the Moon, and have it arrived on Earth at
any reasonable amount of time. So what it's about is China
demonstrating that it is a technological superpower, that
it has the ability to build its own space capability to launch
humans to the Moon and beyond. Obviously, in the early days, a
lot of this technology was stolen or purchased from various
other nations. But we're at the point now, where China is
starting to develop a lot of its own space hardware that other
nations aren't doing aren't focused on. So it really is
China's goal to be seen as a peer, and maybe even the best
space explorers out there. So we'll see how this all turns
out. Obviously, they're very tight lipped about what they
release and announce to the outside world. You know, they're
not like NASA sort of putting all this material out online all
the time. So we have to kind of read between the lines, we have
to pick up hints, we have to learn Chinese to be able to find
out what's going on. But one other interesting note that's
kind of come up this is there's sort of tentative plans to send
humans to Mars by 2033. So once again, we'll keep an eye on all
of this and let you know as it unfolds, Lisa is now going into
the refinement phase. The Lisa mission is the European Space
Agency's Laser Interferometer space antenna. And it's going to
be a space based detector for gravitational waves. Of course,
we've got the gravitational wave detectors here on Earth. And
they have their limits, they're able to detect fairly rapid
mergers between dense objects, like two neutron stars colliding
or two black holes, or a black hole or neutron star, maybe they
can detect white dwarfs colliding. But that's the
various limit. But they're not able to check the very slow
longer wavelengths, like say, merging supermassive black
holes, or, or maybe the background gravitational wave
radiation across the Universe. And Lisa is designed to be able
to fill in all of the parts that the ground based observatories
aren't able to do. We saw LISA Pathfinder mission launch a few
quite a while ago, actually. And it demonstrated some of the
underlying technology that will be required for the detectors
that will happen with Lisa. And so Lisa is continuing to move
along. And they just completed the feasibility phase of the
mission. So they're very certain that they're able to do it. The
next step, they're now going into is the refinement stage
where they take all of the technologies, trying to figure
out exactly how they're going to work. And then the final version
is going to be called the implementation phase. And if
this all goes as planned, Lisa is expected to launch in 2034,
for what feels like forever, like it feels like we've been
talking about Lisa for a long time. And yet, it's still more
than a decade away. But hopefully, when it does launch,
it will be able to detect some just amazing gravitational
waves, it's got 2.5 million kilometer long arms, where it
will be sending these signals as well as gravitational waves flow
over they will reach one one of the spacecraft or one of the
other spacecraft. And they will be able to register these
gravitational waves as they pass this, this three spacecraft
constellation, so it's going to be a very sensitive instrument,
put your understanding of the Universe to the next level. But
still, we got to wait 12 years. I can't wait to look at this
picture. Does it look like a doorway to you? It looks like a
doorway to me now, but it's not. this is just a rock. Now this
picture was taken by NASA's Of course, Curiosity rover on May 7 2020,
to have the mass cam instrument on the rover and it looks like a
door like it really does look like a door but what it really
is, is it's a fracture of ancient layers of sand that have
hardened into rock and And it's a fairly zoomed in portion of a
much larger picture, you can see various similar kinds of rocks
across this entire landscape. But just the way you get the
shadow and the shape of the rock, it really looks like a
doorway on the surface of Mars. And we see this all the time,
there have been so many like, you can think about the famous
face on Mars, the pyramids, we've seen a Sasquatch on Mars,
there's been, there have been dozens of very familiar objects
seen on Mars. And of course, they're all just rocks. And so
the technical term for this is Perry odilia. And this is where
the the human eye, our brain is looking for certain kinds of
very familiar objects. That's why you see various familiar
shapes in clouds or in when you stir coffee, things like that.
There's something that the brain catches on to, and it convinces
you that it's real until you see a higher resolution image or you
see it from another perspective, or the shadows change. So I
don't know whether we'll ever get another picture of it. You
know, Curiosity is moving on. But it is just another one of
these pareodelia's on on Mars. If you enjoy the work that we do
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that you're giving us. So definitely go to
patreon.com/universetoday, we finally see a nova in real time. We've recorded a nova on
Universe Today many times in the past and Nova is where you've
got a white dwarf star a dead star, it's a binary partner it
is stealing material from this partner, and the material wraps
around the white dwarf and forms this shell. And when enough of
this material coats the outside of the white dwarf, it detonates
in a thermonuclear explosion, and then clears itself off and
then starts again, gathering up all this material. And when a
when a nova goes off, then the star brightened significantly.
In some cases, it'll take an invisible star that is now
visible with the unaided eye. But a lot of times, you can see
the small telescopes, and they brighten over the course of a
few days, they can last a couple of weeks, and then they dim
down. And then years, decades, centuries later, the whole
process happens again. But astronomers always find them
after they happen. But for the first time, they caught one
happening in real time. They were using the E Rosita mission,
which is an x ray telescope, and they were able to just through
pure chance, be looking in the field of view when they saw this
white dwarf explode as a nova. And they were able to then track
this initial fireball phase through to the the sort of
brightening and then the cooldown phase. And it's pretty
exciting to get this information in real time. Now that you
Rosita is a mission that is on the Russian Spectre RG
satellite. And I think we mentioned a few weeks ago that
as part of the Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Germany shut down a
lot of its organization with Russia, and this is one of them.
So this instrument onboard Spectre was put into safe mode
waiting for the end of hostilities in for a more
reasonable international collaboration between nations,
so we won't hear from Rosita again for a while. Insight
probably only has a few months left. NASA's InSight lander has
been hard at work for about four years on Mars, and its job is to
listen very carefully with a seismometer to the interior of
Mars for all of the quakes that are happening and is detected
hundreds over 1000 and some fairly significant quakes as
well. We reported on one that was fifth magnitude, which is a
little unnerving to be in a in an earthquake of that of that
level. The mission was originally supposed to go for
two years but it's been I'm working really well. And they
extended the mission all the way to four years. But as with all
spacecraft on Mars that are powered by solar panels, this
awful, clingy Martian dust is depositing onto its solar panels
and getting thicker and thicker and blocking the view. When
Insite started, it had about 5000 Watt hours of power every
Martian soil every day on Mars. And that is down to 500 Watt
hours per day. So it's now has 10% of the power that it
originally had. And at a certain point, it's just not going to
have the power to be able to run its instruments. And so NASA has
decided that probably by the end of the year, they're gonna have
to shut it down. Now, I want to just like get right to the why
don't they just like, I'm sure in your mind, you're like, why
didn't they just put a little brush on it, or blow it off with
some compressed air or have a squeegee or something. And I
promise you, NASA has thought of this, that they have looked at
the problem of dust on Mars, and how it coats the solar panels as
a very serious problem. They were quite lucky with the Spirit
and Opportunity rovers, because you get these dust devils that
have been passing by and they've been, they called them cleaning
events. And fortuitously these dust devils would clean off this
dust. The dust itself is electrostatically charged, it
clings. And so you can't just sweep it, you can't just tilt
your your solar panels and hope that it's going to just fall off
this stuff is like sticky. I'm sure you've, you've experienced,
like electrostatic dust in your life. And so they're gonna need
to come up with some other special solution to do it. And
so whenever NASA has to consider like, do we want to add some
kind of dust cleaning system, this adds weight, it adds
complexity, it adds cost to the mission. And when they've got a
very specific budget, they've got a very specific timeframe,
they can't just go and add this additional complexity and
functionality to the mission. So once again, a Mars spacecraft is
about to run out of power, thanks to Mars dust. Right, and the last story that I want to
talk about could be one of the most exciting events that will
happen astronomically in generations, or it might be
nothing at all. So there's a meteor shower that happens every
year around the end of May called the Tao Herculids. And
these are caused by the comet 73 P. So longer name, but I'll give
you 73 P. And back in 1995, common 73 P broke apart and
brightened significantly in the sky, it increased by a factor of
400 was quite bright, a lot of great pictures taken of this
comment at the time. And what's happened is the Earth is about
to pass through the trail of the comment at this point when it
broke up. And, and so there's a lot of issues that have to come
together. But some some astronomers have been making
some estimates that if we do actually pass through this
broken up trail, then we could see a lot of meteors every hour.
And so when you think about like you wrote and you watch the the
Perseid meteor shower, you see about 60 meters, and you see
about a meteor a minute. During a meteor storm, you can see as
many as a meteor a second, and I saw the Leonid meteor storm in
1998. And it blew my mind. But there have been more powerful
storms than that back in 1966, there was a storm that had 10s
of 1000s of meteors per hour. The possibility and again, I say
this is a possibility, do not send me a complaining email if
you don't see it. But there are estimates that we could see as
many as 40 meters a second, which is more than 100,000
meteors an hour, like 140,000 meters an hour. It's a ludicrous
number of meters, but it will happen in a very quick period of
time. So you're going to want to be outside at the right time to
be able to see it. So what's the right time, may 30. For people
in the Pacific Time Zone, you want to be out there at 10
o'clock, 10pm Pacific Time, or 1am on May 31, Eastern Standard
Time, or 5am. Or Oh 500 Greenwich Mean Time. And those
are the times who will have night when we pass through this
meteor trail. And again, it could be nothing. It could be
nothing happened. It's just a regular Tao Herculean meteor
shower, or it could be the greatest meteor storm in our
lifetimes. And I don't know which one it's going to be. But
I'm going to be out there watching and I hope you do too.
So again, set your clocks that your calendar may 30 31st. We
had a lot of great interviews this week, which you should
probably check out. Had a great interview With Dr. Steven
Sweeney about beaming power in space, talking about how
satellites could send power to other satellites and how that
can be used in other ways, even down here on Earth, I
interviewed Dr. Ashish Goyal about the lunar crater radio
telescope about putting a giant radio telescope into one of the
Moon's craters on the far side, to give us just an incredible
view into the Universe. And then I talked with Dr. Jonathan Jiang
about sending humans to the outer solar system. What would
it take to send humans beyond Mars to Jupiter, Saturn? What
kind of timeframes are we looking at? Very interesting. As
I mentioned, I write a newsletter every week, goes out
on Fridays, you can get that at universe today.com/newsletter. I
also do a podcast, essentially an audio version of all of the
videos that I do here on Universe Today, as well as
additional interviews with me stuff that you won't hear
anywhere else. Just go to Universe Today to comm slash
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you get your podcasts. And thanks to everyone who supports
us on Patreon, thanks to all the interplanetary researchers, the
interstellar adventures, the Galaxy wanderers, your support
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consider supporting us at patreon.com/universe today. All
right, those are all the big news stories that we had this
week. We'll see you all next week.
