We finally see the real damage
to James Webb, two more helicopters are going to Mars.
Watch out, the sky might be falling. NASA needs your help in
designing a telescope, and teaching robots to die. Hi,
everyone. I'm Fraser Cain. I'm the publisher of Universe Today,
I've been a space and astronomy news journalist for over 20
years. This is our weekly Space bites news segment. Let's get into the news. We
finally know how bad the damage is on Webb. A few weeks ago, we
reported on a fairly surprisingly large micro
meteorite strike that hit James Webb Space Telescope. And last
week, NASA released a very detailed report on how Webb is
going so far. And they included a section on the micro meteorite
impacts that have happened. To date, there have been six
impacts on Webb, so about one a month while it's in space, and
this is what they expected. But the one was surprisingly large
and actually caused some lasting damage to the telescope, it hit
segment C3, which is down on the bottom right hand corner of the
telescope. And we've got some pictures, you can actually see
the damage that was done to that one mirror segment. Now,
according to NASA, the damage is detectable. And they were able
to reorient that mirror to minimize the amount of damage so
that that segment is still outperforming the original
expectations for how it should be doing optically. And then of
course, when you add in all of the segments, the entire
telescope is doing dramatically better than what they
anticipated. So it's going to happen, there's going to be more
of these impacts throughout the lifetime of the telescope.
Hopefully, none will be as bad as this first one. But still
Don't panic, this zoom expected, it's still producing some
amazing images. And speaking of images, here is an amazing photo
of galaxy IC 5332. And this is another spiral galaxy that was
imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope. And just for
comparison, here's what this same galaxy looks like when it
was photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Now, the image
processing once again, was done by Judy Schmidt, aka SpaceGeck,
on Twitter, and she is, in my opinion, the best image
processing person out there. And so she was able to dig into the
raw web images, pull this data down, convert it into layers
into Photoshop, and work with it until she produced this image.
She used four separate data images from Webb, each one
corresponding to a different wavelength of infrared light.
And then she merged the images together one for red, one for
blue, one for green, and then another which gave the
background grayish tone of space itself. And what you're looking
at is a galaxy, but you're really seeing the infrared
bright parts of a galaxy. And these correspond to the spiral
arms, the knots of gas and dust where new stars are being
formed. That's why it looks so different from a visible light
telescope. Now, of course, you couldn't see this with your own
eyes. But if you could, like, I don't know, feel the heat from a
galaxy with your hands but not feel the visible light, you
would feel the heat. This is what a galaxies temperature
might feel like in the infrared. China has launched a new module
to their Tiangong 3 space station. Now this new module is
their science module. It's called Wentian. And it was
launched on July 23, and docked with the station on July 25. And
this is the second to last new module that they're going to be
adding to the station, there's one more module called Mengtian.
They're going to be adding in October and then at that point,
their station will be complete. And this will overall make the
station about 1/5 the size of the International Space Station.
And now for the bad news. When they launched that module, the
booster rocket went all the way up into orbit, you got this 54
meter long 23 metric ton booster rocket that is now in orbit and
is going to return on July 31. Somewhere. We know that this
booster is going to return about as far north as northern Spain
and about as far south as the bottom of Africa. But it could
really return anywhere in that zone. And we don't know where
because it all depends on the atmosphere of the Earth how much
air resistance the booster is experiencing. And so as that
date gets close During closer, astronomers, we'll be able to
work out with more accuracy where it's probably going to be
coming down. And so when this usually happens has happened
many times in the past, as we get closer and closer, you'll be
able to track the location of the booster. And we'll know
which orbit is actually going to come crashing down. Most likely,
of course, it's going to crash into the ocean. But there is
always a chance that it's going to crash on land and caused
damage. So just keep an eye out for a booster rocket returning
from space. Now, this has happened before with boosters
making it all the way to space from China. And the way they
would fix this is to save a little bit of fuel on the rocket
so that it could actually do a controlled burn at the
appropriate place and crash itself deliberately into the
ocean, as opposed to it just coming down in a random area. So
hopefully this one won't hit anybody. And hopefully in the
future, China will take a little more responsibility for their
booster rockets. But if you're wondering what are
your chances of getting hit by a piece of space debris, the
chances are very low. When you think about some like really
rare things. About 13 people a year are crushed by vending
machines. 10 people a year die from Shark attacks. So
researchers have estimated the chances of an upcoming piece of
space junk actually killing someone, it's about 6 to 10%
over the next decade. So definitely less likely than
being crushed by a vending machine, but still not zero. Of
course, one of the big problems is that the people who can be
hit by the space debris are probably not the people who
actually launched the rocket. So just another example of the
tragedy of the commons. 2 more helicopters are going to Mars,
NASA and ESA are in the process of designing their sample return
mission, this will be a mission that will be flying to Mars in
2027. And 2028 is going to be two separate spacecraft. One
will be an ascent vehicle, it's going to fly to Mars land on the
surface, and then it's going to wait for samples. And then it's
going to fly those samples up to space, it's going to meet with
the orbiter portion of the mission, which will gather the
samples and fly them back home to Earth. The two missions are
going to be launching in 2027 and 2028. And as part of this
design process, NASA and ESA gave us a bunch of more refined
ideas about how this mission is going to work. And originally,
the idea was that they were going to send a chase rover that
would land and run along the surface of Mars picking up the
samples and then bringing them back to the ascent vehicle. But
the new plan is that perseverance itself will keep
all of its samples on board, it will arrive at the ascent
vehicle, it'll hand over all the samples, and then it will carry
that to space. But they're also going to be adding to
helicopters similar to ingenuity. And so these
helicopters will be able, theoretically, to gather samples
on their own as well. And so if perseverance has too many
samples, and it just can't hold on to them all with its hands,
then it's going to be up to these helicopters to gather up
additional samples and bring them back to the Ascent Vehicle
perseverance is already collected 11 samples and so it's
probably going to bring a few dozen back to the ascent
vehicle. There's a pretty cool easter egg in Google. If you
search for the ingenuity or ingenuity helicopter, you get
this tiny little ingenuity helicopter flying around on your
search engine. And it will just fly around back and forth. While
you're working with Google. It's pretty cool. Check it out. We
might need to teach robots how to die. I'm sure you're familiar
with this idea of von Neumann probes. This is the idea that
was popularized by John von Neumann decades ago, he said
that you could build a self replicating robot probe, you
just send one or a few out into space, they go to a star system
at that star system, they manufacture copies of
themselves, those go to other star systems, make more copies
of themselves, and so on and so on. And in fact, if these
spacecraft are able to travel at about 10% The speed of light,
you only need about 10 million years to fully explore the
entire Milky Way, which is pretty great. I mean, can you
imagine us getting detailed information from every single
star system in the entire Milky Way. We just have to wait 10
million years. Now the downside of this idea is what if you
don't turn them off? What if they just keep replicating?
Well, then they would go and they would eventually turn the
entire Milky Way into self replicating robot probes that
kind of gray goo berserkers. So that's a bad idea. So
researchers are suggesting that we need to figure out a way that
we can turn these robots off once they've built enough copies
of themselves. And it's similar to what we have in our own DNA.
We have these things called telomeres, which are at the ends
of our DNA strands and every time the cells replicate, the
telomeres shorten eventually the cells are no longer able to
replicate. And so you don't end up with just never ending
replication of your cells, because that's why we get old
and die, but still. So we could see these robots
having a set life and then they stop replicating themselves once
the entire Milky Way has been fully explored. Of course, it's
science fiction, but it's a really cool idea. Maybe we don't
need to start thinking about it quite yet. The most sensitive
Dark Matter detector has come online. Now, we still don't know
what dark matter is. And so the ways to search for it are
numerous. There are telescopes that are trying to map out dark
matter across the Universe. There is the Large Hadron
Collider that attempting to manufacture dark matter here on
Earth. And then there are experiments that are listening
for the impacts of dark matter on to other particles that were
familiar with. And a new very powerful Dark Matter detector
called Lux Zeplin, just came online. This is a giant tank of
liquid xenon, located in South Dakota, far underground. And so
because it's so far underground, it's completely protected from
cosmic rays and other forms of radiation that could interact
with xenon. And the hope is that some random particle of dark
matter, whatever it is, will wander through this chamber
interact with one of the particles xenon, produce a
cascade of particles that are detected by various sensors that
are arrayed all around it. Now they did a first run, they
haven't actually detected anything, but it is the most
sensitive one that's ever been created. And so hopefully, in
the future, it will be able to find particles of dark matter.
And all of these experiments are very important. I mean, of
course, it would be amazing if they actually found dark matter,
Nobel Prizes all around. But the other job is to constrain dark
matter to figure out what it isn't. And so with the
telescopes with particle colliders with experiments like
this, astronomers are figuring out what dark matter isn't
trying to figure out what its maximum masses or its minimum
masses are, what its cross section might be, how it may
interact with gravity and electromagnetic radiation. And
so, over time, the places that dark matter can hide will just
continue to shrink. NASA wants your help designing a star
shade. A star shade is one of the coolest ideas that
astronomers are thinking about as a way to be able to observe
exoplanets. So consider the situation right, you've got this
sunlight star with an earth like exoplanet orbiting around it.
Now, from our perspective, the star is about a million million
times brighter than the planet and so the planet will be lost
in the glare of the star. The solution is that you block the
light from the star and then that way the planet will be
revealed right next to the star. And one of the coolest ideas to
do this is to build a star shade. This is a giant kind of
flower petal like spacecraft that flies out in space 10s of
1000s of kilometers away from the telescope. And then it
passes so that the central part of the star shade blocks the
star, but the planet is visible in the gaps around the petal
shape formation. So far, the star shades have been proposed
to launch with other space telescopes, like you could
launch a star shade to go with James Webb, or with Hubble. But
there's a really cool idea that you could actually launch one of
these star shades and it can be used by observatories here on
Earth. And so that would save you having to also launch a
space telescope to go along with the star shade. And NASA is
looking for the public's help to design the star shades. They
want to figure out ways to fold them sort of origami problem,
but also materials problem how to make them light enough, and
how you could actually launch them into interesting orbits so
that they would work with ground based observatories. So if
you've got an idea for a star shade, there's a $7,000 prize in
it for you. Now, I did a really cool interview with Dr. John
Mather, who's Of course, the mind behind the James Webb Space
Telescope, won the Nobel Prize for helping to map the cosmic
microwave background radiation. And he is actually the one of
the greatest proponents behind this idea of a starshade that
would orbit the Earth and be used by some of the biggest
telescopes here on Earth. So you're definitely gonna want to
check out that interview that I did here on this channel. And I
also did an interview with Dr. Marcus Jensen, all about
starshades. So if you want to understand more about Star
shades before you attempt that $7,000 prize, check it out. lava
tubes on the Moon are surprisingly
comfortable. the Moon is an extremely inhospitable place, of
course, you've got this constant streaming radiation, you've got
this low gravity, but the temperatures range in the
daytime, it's 127 Celsius. And then at nighttime, it goes down
to minus 173 Celsius. That's a gigantic temperature range. And
as you can imagine these vast temperature ranges cause all
kinds of havoc on electronics on heating cooling systems. It's
bad but There's a place on the Moon where the temperature stays
exactly 17 degrees Celsius or 63 Fahrenheit. And these are lab
tubes. Now these lava tubes are like the lava tubes that we have
here on Earth, but they are dramatically bigger because of
the very low gravity on the Moon. Here on Earth, lava tubes
can be 10s of meters tall. On the Moon, they can be hundreds
of meters even kilometers tall. You could fit an entire lunar
base inside one of these lava tubes and have room to spare.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been napping the
surface of the Moon and it's found many examples of these
lava tubes and sees the collapse skylight where there's a
latitude in the material has fallen down. So here's an
example of one picture where you can see where the Sun was almost
directly overhead, and you're seeing the bottom of the lava
tube. And that's about a 100 meter drop. And so you can
imagine future lunar bases are going to be inside lava tubes
where the temperature is comfortable, where there's no
radiation to harm the astronauts. You just have to
figure out a way to get in and out of the lava tube if you want
to explore beyond that. If you want more information on any of
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