Titan's Dragonfly Test // New Nuclear Rocket // Shadow Universe

the Titan dragonflies coming together NASA is considering a new kind of nuclear rocket getting more warning for solar flares and pinpointing carbon dioxide emissions from space all this and more in this week's episode of space bites I want to just wrap your mind around this idea in a little over a decade there will be a nuclear-powered helicopter flying in the atmosphere of Titan Saturn's largest moon it just seems like science fiction and yet this is a thing a mission that's actually been approved and is actually under development and just to snap us into reality we got a really cool test of one of the rotors so you know I say it's a nuclear-powered helicopter but it's actually not either of those things it's not a helicopter it's an octocopter so it's like one of those drones with eight rotors at Each corner it measures about four meters across 12 feet across so it's going to be really big and it will be nuclear powered sort of it has a type of power system on board called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator which is just a decaying chunk of plutonium that is very hot and is able to then use a temperature differential to generate electricity to power all of its instruments and these rotors and we got a concrete test the thing is actually happening with a wind tunnel test called the transonic Dynamics tunnel this is a NASA facility it's a wind tunnel but unlike regular wind tunnels where they can test different aerodynamic forces and shapes and so on they can fill the wind tunnel with other gases and so they're able to mimic the atmosphere of Titan and then fly these rotors in this Titan atmosphere they're able to turn the rotors on and off and be able to change the tilt on the blades and attempt to say recover from various emergency situations and just show that yes indeed these rotors will work in Titan's atmosphere you still have to be patient spacecraft won't launch until 2027 but that's like four years away that's not too long now like 2019 that was when we first learned about covid and and if you can wait that many sleeps then you'll have a nuclear-powered helicopter fly to Titan and then it's going to arrive at Titan in 2034 and then it's going to fly around on Titan Imaging the rocks and the boulders of the craters and the sand dunes it won't make it to the methane Seas but still to learn a tremendous amount about Titan and still I can't wait to see these pictures NASA is considering a new nuclear rocket design I've mentioned this that we're all over the new Nyack grants and we are covering these stories over on Universe today and we got a couple of them this week but the one that really caught my eye is a bimodal nuclear power propulsion system there are two forms of nuclear propulsion considered for space one is called ntp or nuclear thermal propulsion and what happens is you've got some nuclear reactor on board your spacecraft it gets incredibly hot and heats up a propellant like say hydrogen and then blasts hydrogen out the back of the spacecraft and it goes in the opposite direction and this allows for a very high thrust much higher thrust than a chemical rocket system and it's been thought that a nuclear thermal propulsion system could knock months off the flight time of going to Mars the other form of a nuclear propulsion system and it's actually kind of similar to the Titan dragonfly that we talked about it's called the nuclear electric propulsion system and what happens here is once again you've got a new clear reactor on board but instead of using the nuclear reactor to heat up the gas you generate electricity and then use the electricity to power like a really powerful ion engine of course a very powerful ion engine is a bit of an oxymoron that even the most powerful ones that you can create they're not very powerful what they have going for them is they're highly efficient they just sit propellant they use electricity and you can fire them continuously for very long periods of time accelerating your spacecraft over long periods and so the idea of this proposal is to put the two ideas together have one reactor that is both generating heat that's used for the thermal propulsion system but also be generating electricity that you're then using for your fancy ion engine by fine tuning and mixing those two propulsion systems at the same time and they're also thinking of some other ideas like adding a version of a supercharger similar to what they do with cars they think they can get the power up to about four or five times as powerful as a chemical rocket and they think that they could bring the flight times down to Mars to about 45 days so just six weeks from when you launched Earth to when you reach Mars Just 45 days and one of the other big advantages is that we don't have to wait for these windows of opportunity to fly to Mars right now you can only go to Mars once every two years the times when Mars is at its closest point but with a propulsion system that powerful you can kind of fly to Mars whenever you want or have fairly large shoulder Seasons when you can go to Mars and when you can return so if you need to send material to Mars quickly or if you need to evacuate astronauts from Mars back to Earth you've got a lot of options and options provide a good safety margin for these kinds of missions that are inherently really dangerous now this is a niac grand it's just the initial investigative steps but the two underlying Technologies the nuclear thermal propulsion system and the electric propulsion system those are both well understood prototypes have been built we know they work it's about bringing those things together so the advantages and disadvantages will come together to give you the best possible hybrid rocket I really like the idea there's a problem with the lunar flashlight one of the missions that I reported on a couple of weeks ago was NASA's lunar flashlight which recently launched on a Falcon 9 rocket and the spacecraft is on its way to the moon and in the next month or so it needs to perform a series of trajectory changes so that it can get into its final orbit it's going to bring it over the South Pole of the moon be able to image the bottoms of those permanently shadowed craters on the moon and that's what's going through the testing process to make sure that the spacecraft could actually perform its Mission and they realized that three of its four thrusters aren't putting out the right amount of thrust now they don't really know what's going on their idea is that there's some kind of blockage in the propulsion system and the hope is that if they can fire them a bunch of times they can clear out whatever is the blockage and get them back to full operation if they can't do that then they're gonna have to figure out a way for the spacecraft to still reach its final operations altitude and the goal is that when it actually gets into orbit around the moon it's going to take about four months to reach that final orbit so it might be that maybe it's going to take a much longer period or maybe they'll have to end up in a completely different orbit than they were originally planning so we're not really sure what it's going to be and we don't really know what the problem is but hopefully Folks at Nasa will figure it out in time to be able to save this mission getting more warning from the Sun I've mentioned in the past that I really think the biggest existential crisis that Humanity faces is the potential for a really powerful solar flare to be blasted off the Sun and strike the Earth and because of our highly connected electrical system all of our Electronics all of that silicon that is everywhere our satellites we are very vulnerable to a really powerful solar flare and so if we get more warning that a really powerful solar flare is coming then people can do things like shut down sensitive Electronics disconnect large networks so that they won't cause surges that will cause some kind of catastrophic chain reaction that brings down like say the entire Eastern Seaboard things like that like it's estimated that a really bad solar storm could cause like a trillion dollars of damage imagine if the power went offline for a month that would suck so scientists are always trying to figure out is there any way we can get a warning sign of when there's going to be a powerful storm on the surface of the Sun something that will give us more notice than about a day which is what we get and so what they did was they fed in eight years of observations from NASA's solar Dynamic Observatory and this is a satellite that has been continuously observing the sun they fit in all of this data and they use machine learning to try and notice anything weird about the regions which would later go on to generate flares and what they found was that you do get a bit of an advanced warning there are these little microflares that appear on the surface of the Sun in the regions that will eventually go on to produce flares and they aren't present for the ones that don't produce flares now you don't get much more notice like maybe just another couple of days maximum but it's a really interesting line of inquiry and maybe with more investigation and more data and maybe new telescopes focusing looking for this Behavior we make it to point where we actually have I don't know like a whole week of notice that we're about to have civilization ended which would be great protecting coal plants from space now there are several satellites that are orbiting the Earth right now that are detecting the overall concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and detecting as these this amount of carbon dioxide Rises and Falls throughout the seasons and as it's sort of slowly going up thanks to all of the human emissions but it's all at a very general level but now scientists are able to use NASA's orbiting carbon Observatory satellites there's actually two satellites that are identical and together they were able to actually map a specific coal burning power plant it's the fifth largest coal plant in the world they're able to detect its specific emissions and this is impressive now these satellites were never intended to do this kind of resolution it was more of a general atmospheric observation and not finding these specific emissions and this is great now we've been able to do this before with methane like satellites are able to see methane leaks coming from pipelines or places where people are burning methane when they shouldn't be or when that pipeline from Russia to Europe was sabotaged they're actually able to see the methane coming out from the ocean so it's very useful to be able to see where very specific emissions are coming from so now we're entering this era we'll be able to actually map out specific emitters like this is important right because if somebody has agreed or some country has agreed to shut down various plants or agree to not do burning of forests and things like that and now you can actually track these different emissions you can hold these countries accountable to stand up for the agreements that they make if you like the work that we do why don't you consider joining our patreon now I'm a big fan of educational content and getting that content out to as many people as possible and so as you know as I run the universe Today News Network I have a lot of options for how I can do that I mean I can fund everything with sponsored ad after sponsored ad and put things behind paywalls but I don't like to do that I like to make this content as freely available as possible with the minimum amount of ads and we're able to do that thanks to our patreon community if you see there are no ads in the middle of these videos we do like a two-hour long interview there are no ads in the middle of the interview just whatever is the minimum that I can get away with that YouTube will let me and we don't have any ads in our weekly email newsletter 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other star systems that are much younger than the Sun and now astronomers have found a star forming nebula called hh24 where all of the objects in this they're not even Stars yet they're protostars and in this image they've identified seven separate Blobs of gas that are attempting to turn into stars and in fact one of them has at the point where it could turn into a star and ignite its solar Fusion like any day now and some of these objects they can actually see a protoplanetary disk around the star which is kind of fascinating because the disc where the planets are starting to form is actually coming together before the star itself ignites its fusion and one of the objects in this cluster has actually been ejected you know these objects are interacting with each other gravitationally it's a very chaotic place and one is being pushed out at about 25 kilometers per second it was probably thrown out of the cluster about five thousand years ago and is now careening away off into space I love this as just an example of what the Sun and its nearby environment must have looked like at the very beginning of the solar system you can imagine we were packed in with other stars all around us and their planets and then through the gravitational interactions they all got spread apart and now who knows where they are all the way across the Milky Way measuring the universe with shadows now you're familiar with the Hubble Deep Field and the cosmic microwave background radiation and all of these surveys that astronomers do to map the universe in light looking at different forms of the electromagnetic spectrum they're looking at x-rays looking at gamma rays they'll get radio waves microwaves visible light ultraviolet infrared they've mapped out the universe in all of this Spectra but astronomers have a technique where they can map out the universe with Shadow which is pretty cool what they do is they look at the light that's coming from the cosmic microwave background radiation and it's a very specific temperature it's about three Kelvin and as the photons of the CMB are passing through galaxies Galaxy clusters all of their gas and dust and so on occasionally photons will get a boost in their wavelength and so from our perspective these regions appear like hot spots in the cosmic microwave background this is called the sanyayv zolovic effect and now astronomers have used this technique to map a fairly large portion of the universe with these Shadows of the cause of critical wave background and so like think of some analogies right like imagine when you are like staying on a landscape and you're seeing a cloud and you can see the shadow of the cloud down on the surface of the Earth but instead of it being a darker region it's a you're seeing a warmer region anyway the analogy falls apart but I think you're getting it that you're you're exploring the universe looking for shadows and using that to map out and there's a lot of really great uses for this I mean you can map out the distribution of dark matter Dark Energy where the matter is and not matter in places where you couldn't actually pick out the individual galaxies you can see just these larger Shadows across the sky so it's a very cool technique and there's a really interesting paper and a story that we've got on Universe today about how this is used for astronomical observations all right those were all the news stories that we had today of course you can read more with the links down in the show notes down below you can get even more space news on my weekly email newsletter I sent 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 that we don't publish anywhere else subscribe at university.com podcast or search for Universe 10 and apple podcast Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts a huge thanks to everyone who supports us on patreon and helps us stay independent thanks to all the interplanetary researchers the interstellar adventurers and the Galaxy wanders and a special thanks to Tim Whelan Dave veribioff Josh Schultz and Andrew M gross who support us at the master of the universe level all your support means the universe to us all right that was all the news for today we'll see you next week

Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 383,649

Keywords: universe today, fraser cain, space, astronomy, space news, astronomy news, nasa, james webb, jwst, james webb space telescope, sls, strange star, artemis i, space launch system, moon, orion, fusion, hakuro-r, lunar flashlight, hubble deep field, james webb deep field, jwst deep field, iss accident, soyuz leak, iss leak, asteroid as a space habitat, sierra space, dear moon, everyday astronaut

Id: FneksoJUCh0

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 20 2023