What Voyager-2 Really Saw // Moon Landing Failure // Major Missions Delays

we finally learn the true color of Neptune Vulcan succeeds while paragan fails delays for Artemis missions and a rocket that eats itself for more thrust all this and more in this week's space bites so when the Voyager spacecraft flew past Neptune in 1989 I was in my final year of high school I remember this really vividly looking at the pictures and they were this really deep blue color that was very different from the sort of light blue color that we saw for Uranus and I've always wondered like why the difference in color they're essentially the same kind of planet is it some distance from the Sun is there some other kind of chemical process going on in the atmosphere of Neptune uh no no they're actually the same color and so what happened was back in the day when Voyager did its flyby of Neptune it had a lot of really interesting features on the surface of the planet there was clouds and storms and so they pushed the colors into a little bit more extreme to sort of reveal these features so that they could then study them and then they also released those images and then they just kind of stuck until we've got this light blue color of Uranus and then this much darker blue color of Neptune and so some astronomers said like is this really the color that Neptune should be like if you could see it with your own eyes what would it look like and so what they did is they went back and they took the original data that was gathered by Voyager of the two planets of Uranus and Neptune and then they compared that to data that had been gathered of Uranus and Neptune through the Hubble Space Telescope and groundbased telescopes and when they calibrated everything they got a new more accurate picture of the color of Neptune and what do you know Yus and Neptune kind of look the same except you could see some storms on the surface of Neptune so this is the color of Neptune Diamond rain on ice giants speaking of the ice giant planets astronomers have thought for a while that there is Diamond rain going on inside these planets so what you've got is organic molecules in the atmosphere and layers of Uranus and Neptune and then you've got this really high pressure temperature environment that is squeezing these organic chemicals together to form diamonds and then these diamonds rain down inside the planet down towards the core and now researchers have been able to mimic the conditions inside Uranus and Neptune using using what's called a diamond Vice and so they generate the enormous pressure and temperature and then they have the chemicals that you would find inside these planets and they were able to create these diamonds and so they get a much better sense of what's going on inside these planets and what they found is that in fact these things probably form at lower temperatures and lower pressures than they had originally thought and so that means that they're higher up and so they fall longer so more Diamond rain I'm not sure exactly how far deep in into the planet you'd have to go to actually see the beginning of the diamond rain and so one idea is that this movement of these diamonds inside the planet is actually affecting the magnetosphere of Uranus and Neptune and so that maybe by measuring the magnetosphere of those two worlds you might be able to detect and map the presence of those diamonds inside the planets all right we've got some good news and then some bad news so the good news is that the United launch Alliance Vulcan rocket finally lifted off for the first time and this has been a long Time coming back in 2014 Ula announced that they were building their next Generation rocket and it was going to be a competitor to the Falcon 9 which is pushing this idea of reusability and so instead of like trying to reuse the first stage booster they're essentially looking at what are the most expensive parts of the rocket let's reuse them step by step and so for example originally they were planning to catch the engines with a helicopter and then later on they changed their idea to use an inflatable Arrow shell that will land the engines in the ocean and they can retrieve them so we finally got a first test of the Vulcan rocket on January 8th and it worked perfectly it lifted off it hit its exact trajectory it was trying to go for now it didn't test any of those reusable components yet this is just like does the rocket work the reusable Parts come next but that was all great now if you want to learn more about the Vulcan rocket I've got a cool interview with Tory Bruno who is the CEO of United launch Alliance and he talks a lot about sort of the plans for Vulcan and S looking into the future and so now here we are time for the bad news and that's the payload so on board the Vulcan rocket was an astrobotic paragr Lander and this is a private commercial lunar lander and it's carrying a whole bunch of payloads you've got some NASA payloads on board there were some private payloads on board and almost immediately we saw that there were some problems with the Lander it was trying to reorient itself toward towards the sun it wasn't able to do that and over the next few hours we learned that it was leaking propellent and just a couple of days ago astrobotic announced that there's no way that they're going to be able to make a soft landing on the moon with the condition that the Lander is in and so they're not going to be able to get to the moon like not even hard landing on the moon but it's not going to be space debris and so just a few hours before we started recording they said they were powering up all of the science instruments on board the Lander and so they're going to find out what can be done from space with the cargo that they have on board still it is disappointing it would have been great to have another Lander capable of going to the Moon it just shows us how tough this is more delays for space missions now are you ready to be shocked shocked well not that shocked so we got an update from NASA this week about the timelines for the Artemis 2 and three missions now the original plan was that emis 2 was going to launch around November 2024 and like that's pretty soon and that's going to be that Apollo 8 style flyby of the Moon there's going to be four astronauts on board they're going to fly past the moon return to Earth and they're going to demonstrate that the Orion capsule can keep astronauts alive for the duration of this journey and we got an announcement that Artemis 2 is being pushed back to 2025 and N decided there was a bunch of safety concerns they'd learned a lot in the Artemis 1 Mission they had concerns about the batteries the ventilation system the temperature regulation and so they just want a little more time to make sure that all of these things are in place but the bigger issue is going to be Artemis 3 and of course that's when humans are going to set foot on the surface of the Moon the delay from Artemis 2 is going to Cascade onto the delay for Artemis 3 and so originally Artemis 3 was going to launch in 2025 and now has been pushed back officially to 2026 and like this is not a surprise um we were all expecting that these were going to be delayed it's a brand new new technology with the capsule with the space launch system and then of course the lunar lander that's going to be provided by SpaceX and we're still waiting for that successful test of Starship not to mention the test of cryogenic propulsion transfer not to mention building the moon version of Starship that can land astronauts on the surface of the Moon so it's not surprising that they're pushing the timeline back hopefully this is the last time they're going to push it back but really at this point all eyes are going to be on SpaceX to successfully launch Starship and demonstrate its reusability to demonstrate spacebase refueling and to demonstrate letting on the moon like there's a lot to do and then one other item that's on the critical path are the space HS those need to be developed and complete in time for the Artemis 3 mission so there's a lot of pieces that need to come together and it's not surprising that NASA is expecting it's going to take more time and we got another delay this time from the Japanese space agency's Martian moons exploration spacecraft and this is is the spacecraft that's going to be flying to Phobos it's going to be collecting a sample and bringing it back to Earth and originally it was supposed to launch in 2024 and then we got the announcement that they're pushing that launch back to 2026 and the main cause of this delay is with the rocket that they're going to be using which is the H3 and this is a new rocket that was developed by the Japanese space agency that had a problem with its initial test last year it was able to launch but the upper stage failed to operate it wasn't able to reach its desired altitude and so there's going to be another test probably in February of the H3 and then if that works then hopefully we'll know that it's going to be a successful safe platform to put this very precious spacecraft on top and so now we're looking at 2026 for the launch of the MMX but can you imagine like we're going to get a sample of Phobos return to Earth it's so cool yeah I mean I love all things jacked said like that's on my bucket list is I like I really want to interview somebody from jaxa just about like like what's the philosophy there so i' I've really got to set that up all right now I'm going to talk about how you can see a rocket launch at the end of this show so stick around for that let's get on with more news Osiris Rex sample capsule is finally opened so after Osiris Rex delivered its sample capsule to Earth containing bits of an asteroid benu there was a problem and that was that NASA Engineers couldn't get the capsule open they're able to shake out some of the material and like confirm that there is indeed asteroid stuff in there but two of the Fasteners that keeps the top and the bottom on this capsule were cold welded and it's a very pristine environment that they're attempting to work with these samples and so they had a approved short list of gadgets that they could use to try to open up the sample capsule and like angle grinder was not on that list and so in order to finally get it open they had to design a new tool out of the right material out of this highgrade stainless steel they had to make sure that it wasn't contaminated in any way they had to get it into the chamber where they're working with the sample capsule and then finally they were able to use it to open up the capsule and get at those samples a selfing rocket all right I think this is one of the coolest stories oh I don't want to pollute the vote but this is so cool all right now Rockets have stages and that's because although they're mainly made out of fuel once the fuel tanks are emptied then you've got all this leftover fuselage you've got these rocket engines it's additional weight that the rocket is trying to carry to space and so they use stages you use up all of the propellant in one stage you ditch it overboard now use up the propellant in the next stage you ditch that overboard and that allows you to get kind of the maximum amount of payload to space with a minimum amount of propellant so there's an idea that's been going around for decades and that is like what if the rocket could consume itself as fuel and so you wouldn't need to kick a stage away because you would be just like burning up the stage into the engine and so some engineers in Scotland were able to demonstrate this in action now they call their rocket the oroborus which I think is really clever you know that snake eating its own tail and so what happens is as the rocket is firing it starts to consume its own fuselage which is made of plastic and the plastic is a fuel and so it's reducing the weight of the rocket at the same time that it's getting more Thrust out of the fuselage and that will allow a rocket to carry a heavier payload have smaller propellant be more efficient overall obviously like having a fully reusable rocket is like the best way to go but if you have a smaller rocket and it can't be fully reusable imagine if you don't need staging because the rocket is just kind of gobbling itself up as it's going to space I love the idea every week we do a vote on our Channel where you tell us what you thought was the best news of the week week and the winner this week was the 3,000-year-old Sky Map which is great only 3% were excited about the nyak 2024 and I deeply disagree but we will try to prove you wrong with all of our coverage of naak and maybe you'll come back around and revise your vote now if you want to vote for this week's episode it's going to show up in your YouTube feed we put it onto the community tab but just as you're scrolling YouTube you should see the vote and you can tell us what you think if you want the best chance you should be subscribed to the channel and then also click on the notification Bell and then you'll see all the new stuff that we do a primordial Dark Matter Galaxy astronomers were doing a survey of 350 galaxies using the green Bank Observatory this is a radio Observatory and the plan was that these are very low surface brightness galaxies they were planning to map them out but they punched in the location of one of the galaxies wrong and so they got all the data they were expecting and then they got data on a section of space that just like they weren't planning and what they found was a region that had all of the gas of a galaxy but no stars so it was like dark matter gas no stars and this is a puzzle and one of the ideas is that it's isolated it's far enough away from any other galaxies around it that it didn't have any tidal interactions no Supernova bursts no quazar blasting radiation at the Galaxy which could trigger star formation this is helping astronomers understand how the interaction between galaxies can allow them to go into star formation and develop their larger structure the mystery of Titan's magic Islands when NASA's Cassini spacecraft scanned the surface of Titan it detected these bizarre methane lakes and seas if that's not already weird enough one of the features they found was these mysterious islands in the middle of the Seas and so researchers termed these magic Islands because they were kind of surprising that they would be there and now a new paper's come out that's trying to explain where these magic Islands come from and so what happens you've got this really complex chemistry going on in Titan's atmosphere you've got the presence of methane you've got nitrogen you've got sunlight and you've got all these chemicals interacting and it's believed that you then get this rain of material down onto the surface of Titan it's collecting on the ocean and then it's kind of getting gathered up into these islands I don't know kind of like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch but organic molecules and it's thought it's like some kind of like spongy island in the middle of one of these methane seas and it's too bad like it really is too bad that the dragonfly Mission isn't going anywhere near the Titan seas because there's so much interesting things to see which is why we need to have like a sailboat or a submarine go to the season Titan we do a lot of space content for you I mean I hope that we are one of your most trusted sources of space and astronomy news and we couldn't do this without the help of our patrons now if you support the work that we do obviously the best reason is to ensure a completely independent space news organization thank you for that but also if you become a patron you get a lot of other benefits like for example you'll get no ads on Universe today for life and trust me it looks better without ads we do a special Patron only question show where you've pretty much got 100% chance of getting your questions answered by me we've got a special Patron only audio feed and like a lot of other features you get access to our interviews early and other cool stuff so if you want to be part of this amazing Community go to patreon.com Universe today a solo brown dwarf found with auroras here in the solar system we've got a lot of planets that have magnetospheres and because of that and their interactions with the solar wind they get auroras we're sort of thinking about auroras now as the sun is approaching its solar maximum but we know that there are probably magnetospheres on exoplanets and in fact there's been some tentative evidence where astronomers have detected the radio emissions coming from auroras around exoplanets or they've detected the Aurora and then assumed that there's an exoplanet there but now astronomers have found auroras on a brown dwarf and this is surprising because this is just an isolated brown dwarf it's not part of a star system and so there is no solar wind that is interacting with the brown dwarf to create Aurora so astronomers have a couple theories one is that there is methane in the atmosphere of the planet that is interacting with just the interstellar plasma that the brown dwarf is pushing through as it's moving through the Milky Way and that's causing the Aurora another possibility and this is really intriguing is that it has like a large Moon so the interactions between the brown dwarf which is like like a big Jupiter and this moon are creating the auroras so more research is needed another start dimmed like Bal juice now we all remember when Bal juice started dimming a couple of years ago and this is not the only star like this to have dimmed another even bigger star called RW sephi did something very similar now this star is way bigger than Bal juice if you could put it in the solar system it would engulf the orbit of Jupiter it's one of the biggest stars that we know about and it's located about 16,000 light years away it's known to be a variable star and astronomers have been studying it's like like Bal juice it's at the end of its life it could explode as a supernova any day Century Millenia from now and they watched it dim significantly but much more than bju did it dimmed by about a third astronomers were able to track the surface of this star they could see that the surface was getting a lot blotcher and there were these convulsions of material off of the surface of the star and so it was going through enormous amounts of mass loss this is what these big stars do at the end of their lives as they go through these pulsations they have these enormous sunspots enormous flares and coronal mass ejections that blow off all this material and eventually they die in a supernova explosion and so we're watching another star go through its death throat and so you can compare and contrast between Bal juice and RW sephi and try to figure out like what is truly the end stage of one of these hyper giant stars now I want to continue this series of things that you can see and do with rocket launches but first I'd like to thank our patrons thanks to hey Twilight douy Stewart Steven caki David Richards Mark Anis Joel yansy Antonio lyara Dustin cable Vlad shipin moo George David guilan Andre gross Jeremy M Josh Schultz and Jordan Young Who support us at the master of the universe level and all of our other supporters on patreon for the last couple of weeks I have been encouraging you to go and see auroras to get set for the upcoming eclipse and there's like the third thing that I always tell people should try to experience in their lifetime if they can and that is to watch a rocket launch and if that's like on your bucket list it's a surprisingly easy thing to be able to do people who live on the east coast of the United States anywhere close to Florida but there's other launch sites as well have just like they watch rocket launches they just go about their day but you can go and turn this into holiday and so what I recommend is book a holiday in Florida near Cape Canaveral go to a place called Coco Beach which is right on the ocean it's beautiful you've got a really nice view directly over to Cape Canaveral and there's so many Rockets launching from Cape Canaveral now that if you book like a week vacation with your family you should get like one to two rockets going off but like time it if you want to be really careful about it and then at the appointed time when you're sitting on the beach making sand castles look up and you'll get a chance to see a rocket launch but while you're there you can make it even better you can go to the Cape Canaveral Center which is like you should go to this anyway which is you get a chance to see old Rockets space shuttle Saturn 5 it's amazing and they put on special events when Rockets are going to launch and so you can sit you can watch a rocket with lots of other people and you know as a journalist we get like a little bit closer to the rocket launches but not much and it's essentially the same thing and so if you've always wanted to watch a rocket launch there are so many Rockets going now that you stand a really good chance of being able to see one so book a trip do do something fun with your family go see a rocket launch it's an experience like nothing else in this world I mean if you want to see me experiencing a rocket launch here's a video that we did about this exact trip where we went to Florida to watch the Osiris Rex rocket take off it's kind of amazing now as we're watching them try to open the capsule the whole thing comes full circle all right thanks a lot we'll see you next week

Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 150,848

Keywords: universe today, fraser cain, space, astronomy, space news, superconductor, Euclid, esa, James Webb, just, room temperature, lk99, LK-99

Id: fyZUQxnnbXg

Length: 20min 51sec (1251 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 12 2024