SpaceX Reveals NEW Lunar Rover!

on today's episode we are getting into the latest space news including astrolab and SpaceX deliver their new flex Rover to the Moon scientists use Barbies to clean Moon dust off of spacesuits and the Hubble telescope discovers a rogue supermassive black hole that is forming new stars in its wake this is the space race before we get into our first story of the day we just hit 100 000 subscribers on the channel and on behalf of the whole team here we wanted to say thank you for watching our content and supporting us over the last couple of years we are so fortunate to have such an amazing community and look forward to continuing to make the best content we can for years to come also stick around to the end of the video for an exciting Channel related announcement and sneak peek into something we've been working on on March 31st Aerospace startup Astro lab announced that they have signed an agreement with SpaceX to deliver their Flex modular Rover to the lunar surface in 2026. astrolab has been working on the design for this Rover for almost their entire existence having been founded in 2019 and unveiling the vehicle last year when they tested a prototype in California's death valley desert the Rover was designed with NASA's upcoming lunar Terrain vehicle competition in mind which will open the field to applicants later this year several companies are likely to forward their own vehicle prototypes to this competition so this new agreement with SpaceX could be jumping the gun a bit if astrolab's new Rover wasn't as impressive as it is the flex is a Mobility apparatus that is as its name implies incredibly flexible its primary function is to transport cargo across stretches of difficult terrain and the Rover is built to carry up to 1500 kilograms worth of gear in its underslung payload Bay but that's just the start of what it's capable of the biggest draw for a platform like Flex is that it's a relatively compact way of getting astronauts around on the surface of the Moon walking in even those new suits is tiring and like with the Apollo missions a Rover would allow for greater range on Eva missions so the flex is equipped as a sort of mobile Outpost it has flexible Wheels to allow for better grip in soft soils like the type covering the moon and a lot of Mars and an adjustable suspension to allow for picking up cargo and driving over Rocky terrain it's got a Deployable solar array that can adjust automatically while driving to keep pointed at the sun and a high gain antenna to maintain a high quality connection with the ground team on Earth but the crew interfaces the standing areas and the onboard controls are also removable pointing to the extra feature that makes the flex Rover incredibly adaptable it can be used as an autonomous Rover there are likely going to be times when the crew is doing other things but NASA still needs payloads moved or samples taken and the flex is designed with a suite of gear to take it from being a crew Mobility Aid to an upscaled exploration Rover it's got navigation sensors mounted on the front to allow it to adjust for obstacles and pick up cargo autonomously and as aside from the High Gain antenna which allows the ground team on Earth or the crew to control the vehicle from the safety of their habitat the flex is also equipped with a tool arm and a mast that looks similar to Mars rovers like perseverance these allow the flex to make use of a variety of loadouts for scientific tasks and of course allows remote operators to see what they are doing through the camera on the Mast the 2022 test of the flex prototype was very impressive with space professionals like former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield helping out with the testing but it was obviously a solid enough prototype that it caught the attention of Elon musk's rocket company SpaceX and the two have agreed to work together all we currently know is that the flex is being designed to fit inside a Starship Lander a variant of spacex's upcoming Workhorse vehicle which is currently in testing but astrolab have said that the vehicle could also be fitted to other Landers like astrobotics finlander this is likely being considered as part of making the flex compliant with NASA's lunar terrain vehicle competition Landing SpaceX as a partner before they even compete is a pretty big win for a startup like Aster lab with only 20 employees the agreement is to have SpaceX launch their Flex equipped Lander to the Moon in 2026 which puts it around the right time for the Artemis 3 mission which will have a Starship Lander bring a NASA crew to the lunar South Pole and possibly also the flex if astrolab lands the contract otherwise this 2026 date is likely to slip to Artemis 4 or even 5 in the late 2020s if they stick with just NASA missions also astrolab renders on their Flex page do show various applications for the Starship flex combo the moon and Mars exploration is obvious but also here on Earth for use in a system of Rapid disaster relief which is why the Rover is built so much more robustly the than other designs we've seen it's intended to survive Earth conditions we'll have to wait and see if the flex beats out the other competitors in NASA's competition this year but it looks like the vehicle will have a future regardless astrolab wants to make fleets of their Rover loaned out for cargo and science work and if SpaceX is just their first partner they'll likely get their wish humanity is going back to the moon and with that reality comes a few others like the need for new spacesuits such as the ones designed by Axiom space but also the need for dealing with problems we haven't faced in over 50 years how to clean Moon dust off of those suits but with the upcoming activity focused on returning humans to the lunar surface scientists at Washington State University have come up with a method of cleaning Eva suits that is reportedly 98 effective and uses liquid nitrogen lunar dust is a very serious problem for astronauts it's mostly made up of silica so not only is it very abrasive leading to faster wear and tear on Eva suits but this dust is electrostatically charged so just going for a single walk can lead to build up so bad that the seals on a suit no longer work the old way of removing this buildup during the Apollo years was to use brushes to clean the soup suits but because the dust is so coarse it causes the suits to degrade much quicker and it didn't even clean them that well in the first place sort of like trying to brush off charged Styrofoam peanuts but worse the dust would get everywhere and give the astronauts lunar hay fever as the dust is toxic to human cells and would cause watery eyes and sneezing breathing in lunar dust is similar to breathing in fiberglass according to researchers so the team at WSU put together an experiment to test a theory using some unorthodox dummies they got some Barbie dolls roughly one-sixth scale to a person and clothed them in a similar sort of Kevlar to the skin of an Eva suit then because getting any lunar material is a long and difficult process they used some volcanic ash collected from the 1980 eruption of nearby Mount Saint Helens which has similar properties to lunar dust right down to the static charge and covered the miniature suits with it after that it was just a matter of blasting the Barbies with some liquid nitrogen and the researcher's hunch was proven correct over 98 percent of the stubborn Ash was knocked clear of the toys this is due to the lead-in frost effect which happens when a liquid hits a surface that's hotter than its boiling point in the nitrogen's case anything above minus 195 degrees Celsius counts as boiling so once the droplets hit the suits they explode expanding over 800 times this was more than enough to strip away clinging particles and it isn't harmful to the astronauts which is a big win the team was able to post their full study on February 10th in the journal ACTA astronautica but they had already sent their preliminary findings to NASA's Artemis program in 2021 when the team won the agency's Breakthrough Innovative and game-changing idea challenge it takes some time for academic studies to reach the public but I guess it works out for this team since they've published just in time for Barbie to be popular again an accidental discovery of a truly terrifying space phenomena is causing a bit of a stir in astronomy not only because of what it is but because it was entirely luck that it was found at all in a report published to the astrophysical Journal of letters Hubble researcher Peter van dokum and his team detailed the discovery of a rogue supermassive black hole normally these Stellar phenomena are formed at the center of galaxies they're truly mind-boggling gravitational force holding billions of stars in orbit around them however once in a while two or more of these monsters crash into each other or brush close enough to cause a disruption when that happens one or both of the enormous black holes are sent careening into space at incredible speeds but we can't often see them because well it's very difficult to spot a black hole under normal circumstance stances even if it is super massive we usually find them by measuring radiation or spotting gravitational lensing the Distortion of light caused by large gravity Wells this time however Peter discovered this by thinking it had to be a mistake the Hubble program is an international effort that often Farms out work to other institutions while pieter was going over some images from the orbiting Observatory he spotted what looked like a streak on the image this is a normal thing to happen usually a cosmic ray hitting the instruments causes this exact sort of streaking but when Pierre filtered out the usual cosmic ray artifacting on the image the streak was still there confused he decided to do some follow-up spectroscopy at the WM Keck observatory in Hawaii using the instruments there to filter and study the different light sources coming from the streak he had seen in the image that's when he discovered a monster supermassive black hole screaming through space at speeds so fast that it could cover the distance from the Moon to Earth in just 14 minutes and that streak newborn Stars Peter explains it best saying we think we are seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form Stars so we are looking at Star formation trailing the black hole the current theory for this phenomena is that about 50 million years ago two galaxies merged and the supermassive black holes at the center started orbiting one another in a binary system then one more Galaxy likely got drawn in absorbed some of the momentum and got shot back out again from there it seems that this Rogue black hole doesn't just swallow everything in its path that's not exactly how gravity Works in this case instead it encounters gas and pushes it into a Long Trail stretching 200 million light years twice the diameter of our own Galaxy all the way back to its origin and in that wake stars are beginning to form this insane Rogue black hole is scheduled for closer observations by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra x-ray Observatory to see if the theories about what Peter and his team were seeing are correct but that might take some time regardless those are some images I desperately want to see alright Channel announcement time for those of you who held out until the end we are working on some merch we had intended to release it when we reached a hundred thousand subscribers but we ended up hitting that Milestone faster than expected so instead we've got a preview of our first shirt design and we'll have a few more coming soon for both the space race and the Tesla space channels let us know what you think in the comments below meet us back here every week for more updates on everything Aerospace industry and Interstellar exploration related make sure to give the 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Channel: The Space Race

Views: 126,433

Keywords: spacex, lunar rover, moon rover, flex rover, astrolab, astro lab flex, nasa, nasa ltv, spacex rover, spacex lunar rover, spacex moon rover, spacex moon, spacex news, astrolab flex rover

Id: QdWQ5qfj9Yo

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 12 2023