The Sound of Galaxy Eating Black Holes Bends Space-Time - Deep Space Updates June 28th

foreign Scott Manley here it's June 28th it's time for another batch of deep space updates and boy do we have some massive views in this episode but we're gonna start with the launches starting on June 15th when China launched a long march 2D and it carried 41 satellites on it and this is a record for China now most of these satellites were called burglint one garafen uh there were actually three different varieties of these uh and these are basically Earth observation satellites the company that launches them does uh commercial Earth Imaging and they sell this the content onwards they've actually been launching satellites for a long time I think like some other satellites can resolve to as low as like half a meter resolution and previously they've been launching these satellites on well basically every rocket I think in their Chinese Fleet okay so 18th of June there was a falcon 9 carrying Satria which is a an Indonesian geostationary orbit com satellite built by thela selenia um the 20th of June there was a Long March 6 carrying XI and 25 into sun synchronous orbit now it's probably an Imaging satellite but we never know what these secret launches Long March 6 by the way is the sort of light version of the cryogenic uh your long march series it's smaller than the five and smaller than the Long March 7. on the 22nd of June there was a falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg carrying 47 starlink satellites in group 5-7 this was in the middle of night I stayed up past midnight to watch this and try to take a photo and the clouds just did not cooperate with me but I'll take it this launch was notable because it went from Vandenberg into a launch into an orbit that was like 43 degree inclination which I think is the lowest that's ever been achieved from Vandenberg and so this required going down along the coast Landing like off of Baja California while the second stage makes a 10 degree dog leg to bring the inclination down low enough very impressive stuff they're very impressive capabilities uh soon after there was a Delta IV heavy one of the penultimate Delta IV heavy from the East Coast nrol 68 also known as USA 345 this was a super super secret launch into geostationary Earth orbit and since the Delta IV heavy is one of the biggest things capable of throwing stuff into geostationary orbit this is almost certainly another Orion signals intelligence satellite we've heard about these things I've did a video about it in the past it's not clear just how big this is but it some some people believe that it folds out to be like a hundred meters across which is just stunningly big but yeah super secret uh spy stuff going on 23rd of June there was another Falcon 9 carrying 56 starlink satellites from Florida this is another batch into group five it was 5-12 so that meant they were also going into a 43 degree orbit but they took a much easier way to get there there was 46 from Florida versus 47 from Vandenberg where they have to make that dog leg but it obviously helps in terms of cadence if you're able to use all your launch sites and on 27th of June Russia launched a soyuz from vostokni with a forget second stage it was carrying a meteor or meteor weather satellite but also GK launch Services who was running the mission they had it was a ride share with like 30 other small satellites mostly for educational institutes around Russia Belarus but there was also you know Partners from Malaysia and the UAE and I'd love to say more about the science and the the studies that they are actually doing these small satellites are from universities they're doing things like space weather astronomy x-ray astronomy Earth observation and of course a communication test beds also in the last couple of weeks there have been a couple of really important sub-orbital launches so on the 18th of June rocket lab made their first launch of their haste platform that's where they take a an electron and they just allow more payload on it so they can drop the vehicle back into the atmosphere and perform re-entry Hypersonic you know testing of payloads and so this mission was called Scout Arrow at the time there was not a broadcast but somebody did turn up to actually stream it from the ground and we found out later that it was the Dynamo a payload which is a technology demonstrator for Dianetics don't know anything else about it also a couple of weeks later a week or so later France carried out a flight test of their Vmax Hypersonic glider they launched out of a launch site on the west coast of France over the Bay of Biscay and yeah it was visible from both France and from Spain and yeah military launched we don't really know that much about it now we had expected to have the final launch of the ariad 5 however they found technical problems were in the testing of pyrotechnic lines which are kind of important for stage separation so they scrubbed the launch and have rolled it back so that they can actually replace these and verify you know to the best of their ability because your pyrotech makes they work once you you can't test them you just have to make sure that you're very very sure that they're going to work so currently the launch is scheduled for July 4th but anyway through biggest news I think you know for me as a science type of person is in the last few hours we've heard that the nanograph collaboration has phoned the long sought hum gravitational waves uh from giant black holes all around the universe so we all gravitational wave astronomy we obviously have ligo that has been able to find these chirps right there are events where two black holes spinning around each other spiral down into each other very quickly and they form these like frequency chirps as the as they get closer and closer the frequency Rises and then they disappear and that is sort of their final merger moment and these are happening commonly enough that we've observed something like a hundred of these events but these are small black holes these are black holes of a few Stellar masses maybe tens of Stellar masses we know that there are super massive black holes things with hundreds of thousands millions maybe even billions of solar masses in the hearts of some galaxies and if you do the math then you should you see that these things are much much more powerful but because the black holes are big the orbits take longer and these should be emitting gravitational waves at a much lower frequency and we're talking frequencies of you know nanohertz frequencies where things can take months days years perhaps to oscillate so there has been a project for the last 15 years to accurately measure the timing of Pulses from pulsars nearby they're looking mainly at pulsars within 20 000 light years or so and the measure these versus atomic clocks they look every couple of weeks at these objects and see if the pulses have shifted a little and they have observed shifting and moreover they've observed the shifting of the frequencies between various pulsars is correlated in a manner that suggests that the distance between them is being dilated by low frequency gravity waves so we're talking about shifts or in distances of like one meter per light year so they've been doing this for 15 years and Publishing null results and now they think they have evidence in the amount of data they're collected now they're reporting and detection at a 3.5 to 4 Sigma level so that's like a better than 99 confidence that this is a real signal and not something that's just risen out of massaging the data but you know there's a small chance that it isn't and they're going to continue looking at it but this is important because it shows that gravitational waves can now be found at much much lower frequencies now you can do this it means you can study an entirely new type of gravitational universe and you can start to think about perhaps cataloging and discovering supermassive black holes that aren't necessarily active but are certainly emitting huge amounts of gravitational waves as opposed to jetting out you know matter and creating active Galactic nuclei this is a big deal it's another step forward that will transform the way we look at the universe and that's why I'm excited about it the other big news of the last week is only tangentially related to space flight because yes uh we all know by now about the Titan submarine that was down visiting the Titanic and its primary link to space flight is the fact that well it is a bit like a spacecraft in that it's carbon fiber and has life support but it did have a pass passenger called Hamish Harding who had flown on new Shepherd to space he had also visited the Challenger Deep on the limiting fact or submersible but this time he was going to see Titanic in the Titan and uh he is not coming back along with the four other passengers well one of who one was actually not a passenger he was the CEO of Ocean Gate now I've talked about this last week in great detail while not being entirely sober today we saw debris getting brought back to the your Shore and getting offloaded we saw the hemispherical end caps and the equipment in the tail module actually not being completely crushed so it's very clear that this is not a failure of the titanium caps it's something to do with the carbon fiber pressure vessel and you know it is interesting that there was this talk about the the CEO saying oh you don't do titanium and carbon fiber well it turns out that we uncovered this paper from 1988 where the US Navy was working with a drone called the advanced unmanned search system that went even deeper and used a carbon fiber pressure of pressure vessel with titanium end caps and they went even deeper depths and then they went into great detail about the exact construction of this but actually if you look at the size of this thing it's a scaled version in terms of its wall thickness so uh yeah at this point you know they've pulled the stuff back to shore There is almost certainly little bits of human remains that have been squished in there but not anything that's recognizable and it is sad but yeah it's not really space flight uh but I was definitely interested in in all sorts of levels just like I am super interested in the fact that we had a presidential visit in my backyard and I saw you know Marine One flying over getting escorted by Ospreys and some local pilot in a Mooney decided to take off without checking the the no terms and was intercepted by Jets because he just decided to fly south yeah uh yeah I mean you know that's all sort of not interesting for you but sort of relevant is the fact that the FAA have announced new airspace closure plans for launches Florida that will actually allow more aircraft to get closer because the you know the Rockets have now proven themselves to have more control and therefore they can shrink down the the no-fly zones around it or the temporary flight restrictions around them uh there was actually like Aviation safety magazine I think a recent issue was entirely devoted to the interaction of the faas like National airspace system and space launchers but anyway you guys aren't interested in that either you are probably interested in Starship and yes Starship there was some uh some big talk in the last couple of weeks so there was a spaces space Ashley Vance and uh Elon Musk talking about Starship and the big thing that came out of this is that this next launch of Starship is going to use hot staging that is instead of doing this ridiculous thing where it rotates fast and lets go and then this thing flies away and then it lights its engine they are just gonna light the engines on this second stage while the first stage engines are still firing they are gonna they're gonna use the three Center Raptors firing at 50 thrust and now we had actually seen some Hardware around that could fit the bill off like exhaust vents these are rings with laser cut bars so they're structurally strong but they also have room for gases to exhaust presumably this will also require some sort of Shield over the top of the booster tanks um but they claim that this will get them about 10 extra in terms of payload and I'm not 100 convinced on that and truthfully there's a lot of other variables are flying around as they redesign all these things so they might get 10 overall but definitely it's gonna improve their performance if you think about it they are adding extra mass to the rocket but it is all extra mass that is on the first stage and typically if you add seven tons to the first stage then you lose one ton on the second stage right that's roughly how it works so you can add a lot more mass to the first stage and not lose nearly as much mass on the second stage that get how that works but a lot of it is probably losses in that flip maneuver that they planned now I'm not clear at this point how the engines on the first stage will operate because by the time they're getting to Stage separation they'll have burned through most of the propellant they will have probably shut down a bunch of their engines but this thing will presumably have to produce thrust at much much lower levels so they might have I I don't know they might have just one engine running at one point to provide illage and to provide um you know thrust vector control so they can begin their flip back but presumably it sounds like they're keeping all the engines running they can't keep all the engines running because the top one has to build the Starship has to be able to separate also at Starbase they had a massive concrete pour they had been building out rebar underneath the pad in the giant hole and I don't know how many concrete trucks came in but there was an awful lot and while we might think that it would take perhaps months for it to fully cure it looks like they have just they're just going straight to work on top of this thing also the Starship uh you know test article Starship number 25 it finally got a full spin Prime test and then a full six engine uh static fire test so that is operational I'm guessing we'll start going over to booster testing whenever the launch pad is ready they keep saying six weeks till the next launch and it will probably be six weeks until the next launch until it becomes five weeks until the next launch and so on and so forth over at Ule uh they have confirmed that they know that the problem with the second stage that caused the failure back in March uh though their solution is to going to add some reinforcement to the top of the tank so that they don't fail under these conditions and they don't get a leak that reduce produces hydrogen and destroys their test stand that means that they are calling off the July launch at this point they're wrote they're taking the Centaur off the top of the Vulcan that they did their test fire with that's going to go on the rocket ship all the way back to Decatur they'll take a test article off the production line which I saw and they'll ship that over to Marshall which is really close by perform their qualification tests and presumably while they're doing the qualification test they will be reinforcing one of their vehicles for their flight and I won't be surprised if it's the same flight article that was used because they've already done a lot of qualification on it but it might be just as reasonable for them to set up another one either way it's looking like it'll be Q4 before they are actually able to fly Vulcan which is unfortunate and this means that it really won't be operational until 2024 assuming everything works but uh yeah I'm hoping their customers will continue to hold on it's not clear like if there's gonna if they're gonna need to move any national security launches off a Vulcan and onto SpaceX I'm sure SpaceX is is ready you might equally find that you know payloads get swapped back and forth for timing reasons but the number of launches actually ultimately remain the same at Stannis NASA and aerojet Rocket down perform the 12th and final certification test for the rs25e engine that is the next version of the rs-25 engine that will be used on Artemis 5 and Beyond these are the new engines that are being built rather than the old engines which were used on space shuttle missions anyway in deep deep space Betty Colombo flew by Mercury and they published nicer images from this flyby highlighting a bunch of creators on the surface of mercury and everyone noticed there was a new crater there called manly yes manly Creator on Mercury named after Edna Manley a famous artist and sculptor in Jamaica also I believe was it the mother of Michael Manley but yet someone of importance to Jamaica's culture and far more deserving frankly than myself okay I already have an asteroid right ARCA yeah they just rolled out this morning with their um Eco rocket heavy which appears to be a bunch of pipes strung together to look like a rocket I think we're gonna have another hot water Deluge test maybe not a flight it doesn't look like there's any stage separation capability at this point but uh yeah lots of nice videos of course promoting their capabilities anyway back in the US India signed on to the Artemis Accords that's the agreement with it now the US is trying to promote to uh codify the the use of resources from the Moon and uh yeah at this point there are now 27 Nations that have signed on to this but more importantly I think is that any like conversation meeting between uh Narendra Modi and Biden uh they signed an agreement to allow to perform a flight to the space station with Indian astronauts now India is already working on its own crude program the the gaganyan I think is this name of the spacecraft and it's not clear if they're astronauts that are training for that mission one of those will end up going to the International Space Station or if they have somebody else in mind either way we're gonna get someone from India actually an Indian citizen flying to the space station probably next year and most likely flying on a SpaceX dragon now the UK has already signed on to the Artemis Accords but today they unveiled the Astra Carter or at least unveiled the seal so this is actually an initiative by King Charles III who's you know just come into His being as the king of England uh this was a star-studded event with things like a Tim Peake and uh Chris Hadfield and Brian May astrophysicist and guitarist from Queen meeting the King which is interesting uh yeah like the Astro Carter initiative is basically space sustainability I.E please don't launch so many satellites that we have a Kessler syndrome which I am fully behind uh but yeah it's it's just another interesting angle obviously Astro Carter is supposed to be a reference to the Magna Carta which was a document which basically said that kings are not above the law and for stuff to look forward to well I already mentioned that Ariane 5 should have its final flight on July 4th uh we're also looking at China getting ready to launcher Gucci too this is their methane fueled rocket they previously tried it never reached orbit we thought Vulcan might become the first one to get to orbit we thought Starship might well now China's gonna try again it looks like it's getting out to the pad so we could very well see it launched in the next uh couple of weeks and planned for hours from now Virgin Galactic is hoping to fly its first customer flight with three crew members from the Italian Air Force uh doing all sorts of research I don't know what kind of research they're doing but I hope they get their money's worth because it'll be nice to actually see Virgin Galactic finally flying commercial stuff after all these years and of course it's asteroid Day on June 30th so there'll be a whole bunch of events and activities surrounding uh you know saving the Earth from killer asteroids and so with that I bid you farewell I'm Scott Manley fly safe [Music] [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Scott Manley

Views: 117,195

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Id: sWeJzkAo87A

Length: 22min 13sec (1333 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2023