Speaker 1: 0:14

Happy New Year and welcome to Space Week, where we bring you weekly space for everyday people. We're your hosts, Paul Miller and Blake Brown. We hope you all enjoyed your holidays. Our sure were busy, but we're back and ready to kick off this new year in the year. Hopefully, most of you listened to our 2023 recap episode. If you haven't, I recommend you check it out first, and if you did, you'll already know. We have some Artemis news to talk about, and Japan's lander will be in the next episode because it's scheduled to land later this month. Regardless, we have a lot happening in the Real Miss Space Flight already this year. So here we go. India wasted no time at all and claimed the first launch of the new year with their PSLV rocket or Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle at 9.10 in the morning, January 1st. I got a lot of India and their naming conventions, because you can pretty much know what the mission is going to be just by the name of the vehicle. It's on.

Speaker 2: 1:10

Yeah, that's what it sounds like. I mean, oh hey, this satellite is probably going to be in a polar orbit.

Speaker 1: 1:15

Yeah, polar Satellite Launch Vehicle. Hey, what do you know? So they had two main payloads on board, the first being the X-ray Polarimeter Satellite, or ExpoSat, and the second was the PSLV Orbital Experimental Module 3, or Poem 3. Exposat is India's first dedicated polarimetry mission and will be used to study the various dynamics of neutron stars, black holes, supernovae and more. Now I'm sure if you're anything like me, you're probably wondering what the heck polarimetry is. Lucky for you, I looked this up.

Speaker 2: 1:54

Was this the one where you spent like three hours just learning how to explain it to?

Speaker 1: 1:58

Exactly. Yeah, I learned it in depth so that I could figure out how to explain it best and simply in a short format, and I hope this comes through okay. So, put simply, polarimetry is a technique to measure the polarization of light. So light from stars and other celestial objects, especially those emitting high amounts of X-rays, emit unpolarized light because it oscillates in all directions. So imagine a wave like you would normally picture in your science class. Kind of get that in your head. It's a two-dimensional. It has crests and troughs. It's a wave. Some waves have higher frequencies, meaning they oscillate faster and some slower. We all kind of bring that back now, or kind of PTSD of high school physics and whatnot. Well, not necessarily.

Speaker 2: 2:54

PTSD, but definitely some stress yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:59

So hopefully you've got that image in your head of a wave. Well, in three-dimensional space, light waves from stars don't just oscillate up and down, but also side to side and in every direction in between. These are unpolarized. Have you got that? I think I'm following you, so picturing up and down wave and now just turn that sucker every which way direction. It oscillates in every direction, now, not just up and down, but side to side every which way. Light waves from your phone or a TV screen, on the other hand, just oscillate in one direction and are therefore polarized. So some of you may own a pair of polarized sunglasses. Well, what do they do? They filter light based on its orientation. Have you ever tried looking at a screen with those glasses?

Speaker 2: 3:51

on Plenty of time because we're pilots and they actually suggest not to use polarized glasses because it will mess with your instruments Exactly, or at least the well. They call it glass, but like the digital instruments.

Speaker 1: 4:04

Right, any screens you have, right. So that was kind of my next question, right, is what happened If you looked at a screen with those polarized glasses on what happened? And if you turn the glasses in the right direction, you know, if you tilt your head, just right, that screen became darker. Okay, yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:21

You've probably seen that that screen became darker, maybe even completely blank. That's because the polarized light from the screen has met with the same orientation that your glasses filter out. Okay, so if the screen is emitting light that goes up and down and your glasses filter out light that goes up and down, well there you go. You're not going to see anything. Turning those glasses the other way in, your screen becomes bright again. Make sense. So for you photographers out there, this is essentially the same thing that your polarizing filter on your lens does. You know you might have a circular polarizer that, as you turn, you know it may polarize more or less light. It's a mixture of like two, basically two polarizing filters together, but you get the idea. So, getting back to our original topic, exposat will look at these objects in space with unpolarized light and through a series of polarizing instruments, cut through the glare, just like your sunglasses do, to see the details that lie within. And basically, that concludes today's lecture. I accept Venmo and PayPal. Thank you.

Speaker 2: 5:26

And.

Speaker 1: 5:26

Patreon subscriptions. Hey Now poem three was actually the repurposed fourth stage of the rocket and 10 smaller payloads on board with experiments ranging from fuel cells to tantalum testing, which is an element that is highly corrosion resistant. So they're looking at using it in coatings on spacecraft. But poem three was lowered in altitude to responsibly reduce its lifetime, get this in orbit and the potential to create space debris. So they, you know, purposely lowered poem three to a lower altitude where it will experience atmospheric drag over time and essentially deorbit itself.

Speaker 2: 6:08

Oh interesting, so yeah.

Speaker 1: 6:10

So they're kind of watching out for space debris in that sense. So, hey, thanks India. Our second launch was actually a Starlink launch, but I'm going to wait till the end to cover those. So our third launch of the year still comes from SpaceX, in the form of a Falcon 9 carrying Swedish internet provider OVZone's, I think. Ovzone, ovzone, there we go. Ovzone, there we go. Ovzone, there we go. Ovzone, there we go. That's an extraordinary set. Ovzone 3 is the first privately funded and developed Swedish geostationary satellite ever to be launched. It's also the most powerful GEO satellite ever to be put in orbit, according to OVZone, covering one third of the earth via its steerable spot beams. Over the next three to four months, ovzone 3 will use its internal electric propulsion system I'm guessing this is some form of ion thruster or similar to transfer to its final position. So yeah, it's pretty neat. I mean, it's going to cover one third of the entire earth, which is pretty significant considering most GEOs are limited, I think, in the latitude that they can cover.

Speaker 2: 7:16

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 7:17

But yeah, our next launch marks the inaugural flight of United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan Centaur rocket. Vulcan Centaur is a two-stage heavy lift vehicle meant to replace the Atlas V and Delta IV heavy. Vulcan actually refers to the first stage and Centaur to the second. For example, the Centaur III upper stage was used on Atlas V and the new Centaur V is being paired with Vulcan. You'll find Vulcan in four different configurations, with two, four, six or no SRBs or solid rocket boosters attached. Ula has an easy way of designating the different variants Vulcan is given the letter V, centaur the letter C and then a number for the number of boosters and finally a S or L depending on the size of payload, fairing, standard or long. So, for instance, a Vulcan rocket with two boosters, a Centaur upper stage and a long fairing would have the designation VC2L. That makes sense. So Vulcan Centaur, two boosters, long fairing yeah, vc2l. In the case of our launch on January 8th, it was in the VC2S configuration. So the same as our example, but with a standard fairing.

Speaker 1: 8:40

Vulkan was carrying the Peregrine commercial lunar lander for a company by the name of Astrobotic, and Blake is going to tell us all about it right after this segment. That's right, looking forward to that. So, moving forward, on January 12th in Japan they launched the 8th Intelligence Gathering Satellite Optical. So I'm guessing that's a variant or IGS Optical 8 aboard a H2A202 launch vehicle from Launchpad 1. And I'm going to try my best at this. Good luck At the Tainegashima Space Center.

Speaker 1: 9:21

Hopefully that was right, close enough. It will head to a Sun synchronous orbit, or SSO, at an altitude of about 500 kilometers. Now, sso is a type of polar orbit where the satellite is in sync with the Sun. Okay. Therefore, it can pass over the same location at the same time every day, which is very useful for an intelligent satellite that wants to see how some place changes over time. You know, hey, okay, now I'll go ahead and get our Starlink launches out of the way, because we have not one, not two, but three launches from China I'd like to talk about, before you tell us about Peregrine. First up was Starlink 7-9 that launched on the night of January 2nd out of Vandenberg in California. A Falcon 9 launched 21 V2 minis from Space Launch Complex, or SLC4E. The mission included six direct-to-cell phone satellites. So I don't know, I think over the next several years, maybe even by the end of the decade, we're going to see a huge increase in global internet coverage and speed, as well as cell phone. I mean, what do you?

Speaker 2: 10:29

think Honestly. It's pretty promising technology. Just think about the fact that maybe you're only communicating with a data center, like your local ISP. That's then transmitting all your data up to space, then to the server, or up to the satellite, to the next satellite, then to the server. It'd be much quicker than sending it entirely over a cable across the land.

Speaker 1: 10:57

Yeah, yeah, I mean even fiber optic. Yeah, I think it's probably just going to end up being a more direct way and it's probably going to be the way forward for both home internet and cell phone, I think. Yeah, moving on, we had Starlink 6-35, january 7th out of SLC40 in Cape Canaveral that launched 23 satellites. Starlink 7-10 was in the early morning hours of January 14th at SLC4E, again at Vandenberg. This was this particular booster's 18th flight.

Speaker 1: 11:30

Wow so we're up to 18 now. That's crazy. I remember I think we covered I want to say it was, was it 16 on our last kind of record booster that we covered. But yeah, now we're up to 18.

Speaker 2: 11:43

It might have been 16 or like 15 or something like that, somewhere around there.

Speaker 1: 11:46

Yeah, 18's quite a lot for a single booster to be reused. That's awesome, that's awesome. And finally we had Starlink 6-37 out of SLC40 at the Cape also on January 14th, starlink SpaceX's 300th successful launch.

Speaker 2: 12:05

Hey, I remember watching those, like when they were first starting out and they were testing the Falcon 9 and even the Falcon Heavy back then at their testing facility up in, I think, mcallen, mcgregor, texas or something I can't remember, somewhere in Texas and they were taking it up to altitude and it was coming back down and it would crash.

Speaker 1: 12:31

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 12:32

I remember that.

Speaker 1: 12:33

Yeah Well, they released. There was that video. It was like how not to launch a rocket, or something like that.

Speaker 2: 12:39

Yeah, yeah, exactly, it was pretty comical and that was back in. Oh man, that was back in high school for you and me.

Speaker 1: 12:45

Yeah, I think it was a long time ago. I mean, they come like very, very, very long way. It's been really cool to follow SpaceX's development, for sure. Now I tell you what I'm going to go ahead and change things up and give you guys a break from me, as well as myself a break. Blake, why don't you go ahead and tell us about Peregrine, and then we'll dive into China? Yeah.

Speaker 2: 13:05

So Peregrine is a lunar lander that was launched by Astrobotic. You briefly mentioned that. So Astrobotic is a Pittsburgh based space startup. Say that 10 times fast has announced that, despite their best efforts to slow this leak that happened upon launching and calculate new mission profiles so that they could land on the moon, their lunar lander won't make it to the moon.

Speaker 1: 13:32

Yeah, I think I saw this Pretty unfortunate.

Speaker 2: 13:35

In fact it's due to crash into the earth, but more like burn up in the atmosphere. But we have to give you guys some drama so we get more clicks, right, yeah.

Speaker 1: 13:44

Hey.

Speaker 2: 13:45

So, despite the propulsion anomaly, payloads are working as planned, which is sort of good news, but it's like, well, it's not where we wanted it to be, so what's kind of the point?

Speaker 1: 13:56

Yeah, I mean that really sucks. If you're going to try and send payloads out to the moon and now we're falling back to earth, you say right.

Speaker 2: 14:03

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1: 14:04

Yeah, so they're just not really going to complete their mission goals.

Speaker 2: 14:08

Yeah. So Astrobotic is kind of like you know, put a spin on it and put some positive news out there. So they did announce that they were still able to charge up the battery on the lander so that the payloads could operate. And so also to the payloads we're able to like, conduct some science experiments and such, and it's not at their intended locations. So what value does it really provide? I'm not 100% sure. I will talk about payloads, but not necessarily the scientific ones, just the ones that are on board that were kind of interesting or very cool. So the payloads on board the Peregrine Mission One were quite diverse, just five small robots from Mexico. I didn't look too deeply into these. They sounded really cool, just like itty-bitty little robots that were going to roam around on Mexico.

Speaker 1: 15:01

I think, yeah, on the moon, whoops. Yeah, let's go say. Yeah, let's go say Like, go roaming in Mexico. Yeah, right Now, I think that was supposed to be like Mexico's first lunar mission.

Speaker 2: 15:15

It was. Yeah, I did see that. Then there was Iris, which is a small five kilogram shoebox size lunar rover designed by Carnegie Mellon University students. I think that's how you pronounce it.

Speaker 1: 15:29

Yeah, carnegie Mellon, mm-hmm.

Speaker 2: 15:30

Carnegie Mellon yeah, a bunch of time capsules, most notably memorial time capsules, with ashes of famous people such as Star Trek creator, gene Roddenberry, presidents George Washington, john F Kennedy, dwight D Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.

Speaker 1: 15:47

No way, I didn't know that they had them on board.

Speaker 2: 15:49

Yeah, I was looking at the payloads on board this lunar lander and I'm like, well, they have some of these famous people ashes on here.

Speaker 2: 15:58

I think there were also some other Star Trek casts, but they didn't specifically mention those, so I wasn't able to find anything and I didn't want to be like, oh yeah, this guy was on board too. Right, yeah, throw the information. It is important to note that it wasn't like 100% of their ashes, it was just like a small amount such as, like I believe the number was like anywhere from five to 10 grams worth of these person's ashes. So that's interesting. Yeah, not much. Now, something that was also really cool is Gene Roddenberry actually had it in his will to have some ashes sent to the moon, Scattered to the moon, that's neat yeah.

Speaker 2: 16:35

And the presidents. Well, these presidents are presidents George Washington. Awesome, that's actually kind of cool.

Speaker 1: 16:40

Yeah, I imagine some of these guys are in their will like Washington. I didn't know that we had Washington's ashes Same. I read that and I was like what the heck yeah.

Speaker 2: 16:51

Hey, what do you know? So a little bit less about the failure and more about what the Peregrine lander actually is. It's a small class, a small class lunar lander, and includes many payload options, both strong thrust capabilities, such as being able to insert itself into lunar orbit on its own and perform a soft landing, and it also has onboarded high power communications. Now, high power communications. I don't know specifically what that means. It's just like oh hey, we're able to get radio to the moon anyway. So what exactly?

Speaker 1: 17:26

Well, it might be boasting that considering our recent you could say failures as well. But even the successful landings, I think, have had some communications issues. So maybe they're saying, hey, if we did land, we wouldn't have those same problems. Yeah, maybe that's my guess, I don't know.

Speaker 2: 17:44

Astrobotic also has another lunar lander called the Griffin lander, their medium class lander, boasting even more capabilities. So stronger payload, probably stronger thrust as well, because it has to account for more weight, and then, hey, maybe more high power communications. Hey, I did read this and this isn't in my notes, but I did read something about the Griffin lander being the original plan for them to send up to the moon. It was supposed to be what they were sending, but then they kind of scrapped that idea and they're like, well, maybe it might be better to start small, start a little bit smaller.

Speaker 1: 18:19

Exactly.

Speaker 2: 18:21

So, all in all, it's a very promising little lunar lander, despite its first mishap. I believe Astrobotic will fix the issue and make the necessary improvements to ensure it doesn't happen again. Astrobotic was attempting to make history as the first commercial lunar lander to land on the moon. It was slated to be successful until the fuel leak, which actually happened, they said, upon launch.

Speaker 1: 18:49

Yeah, I mean that's not surprising. I haven't really looked into it, but yeah.

Speaker 2: 18:54

Yeah, they said it happened upon launch, as they started detecting the catastrophic fuel leak, if you would, and then they eventually were able to get it to slow down, but not enough to where they had enough fuel remaining after the fact to perform the landing.

Speaker 1: 19:12

Gotcha. Yeah, I imagine they were able to maybe remotely close some valves, but not enough so to completely stop a leak, exactly.

Speaker 2: 19:21

So, despite Astrobotic's failure, nasa still intends to continue its ambitious commercial lunar program called the CLPS Initiative or, and this is very fitting Commercial Lunar Payload Services Initiative. So, just to put it very briefly, its commercial company has been on delivering lunar payloads for NASA and Astrobotic Astrobotic. Astrobotic was one such company.

Speaker 1: 19:49

Can't wait to see the first Astrobat.

Speaker 2: 19:53

But yeah, you know, space is hard dude. So much can go wrong because there are so many like itty bitty little pieces that are engineered to like such small tolerances. It's like crazy.

Speaker 1: 20:05

Exactly, and we have so many new companies and whatnot that are just getting into space for the first time and you know, kind of speaking of which, not a company, but entire country that's kind of new to the scene is China. Now, of course, they've been doing this for, on the grand scheme of things, a while now, but not nearly as long as countries like the US and Russia.

Speaker 1: 20:27

Not to the successful degree that we've been at, so yeah, yeah, I mean they're kind of playing catch up, but they're doing it really really quick. I mean we have some really really cool stories ahead. So before we get into China, I just want to say I'm going to try my best to pronounce these, but as always with anything Chinese, russian, middle Eastern or Japanese, it's likely I'll be a bit off.

Speaker 2: 20:48

So yeah, we're Americans. We only learn one language.

Speaker 1: 20:51

Yeah, bear with me, as is in America. So getting on with it. China's first launch of the year came on January 5th Now, by the way, thank you, spacecom, for covering these Honestly, I would have missed them otherwise. So, hey, shout out to them, here we go, hey look my guy, quite Zhao, won a solid rocket, meaning it's a booster.

Speaker 1: 21:22

Once it's lit it ain't shutting off. Lifted off from the Zhukuan satellite launch center carrying four Taimu One weather satellites, joining two other sets of four launched in December of last year. See, I had three right there, guys off the bat. I have no idea, but hey, we're going to keep going with it. You tried? The Zhukuan Mu satellites detected changes in signal from navigation satellites as they pass through the atmosphere in a process known as GNSS radio occultation or GNSS RO. So I'm going to kind of back up here and explain things because we're moving quick. Put simply, as GPS signals beam across the atmosphere, in ionosphere they bend and react. These satellites intercept these signals and measure that to help with weather forecasting, climate monitoring and ionospheric research. Ok, kind of following now.

Speaker 2: 22:23

More or less?

Speaker 1: 22:26

Now here's a fact that we missed in the recap episode China conducted a national record of 67 launches in 2023. That's quite a lot, considering SpaceX reached 96. Soon enough, they will eclipse SpaceX. I could see it as an entire nation. I could definitely see that. I know they have really big outlooks for 2024. Here we have no idea how many, but yeah, I could definitely see China being a huge player in space this year.

Speaker 1: 22:59

Next up, india isn't the only country seeking out black holes in X-ray emissions this month. China launched their Einstein probe on January 9. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with ESA and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, will study new X-ray sources in the cosmos, for example, black holes, neutron stars and supernovae, just like India. Instead of using fancy polarized sunglasses, though, the Einstein probe uses a wide-field X-ray telescope to look at the sky in a wide field of view, in a follow-up X-ray telescope that will, as the name implies, follow-up on prime targets with a zoomed-in view. The mission has a planned duration of three years, but could be extended should astronomers feel the need. And last but certainly not least, was Orion Space's Gravity One, which lifted off for its debut aboard a ship on January 11. Yeah, they launched this thing off a ship in the water, okay.

Speaker 2: 24:04

So like a SpaceX ship platform thing or what.

Speaker 1: 24:07

Yeah, except they're not landing on the ship, they're taking off from it.

Speaker 2: 24:10

Wow interesting.

Speaker 1: 24:10

Yeah, I think it was in the Is it the yellow sea or something? Gravity? One successfully carried three Dunyao One weather satellites to orbit. It's a four-stage vehicle with five solid rocket motors strapped together, with the center motor igniting just before booster separation and two upper stages that also use solid fuel. It's become China's most powerful commercial rocket and the world's most powerful solid-fueled rocket to achieve an orbital mission. So pretty big in the fact that they launched this thing off a boat. Hey, props to them.

Speaker 2: 24:52

Yeah, that's crazy Wow.

Speaker 1: 24:55

It can carry 14 and a half tons to low Earth orbit. Orion Space is Orion Space is Orion. Space is developing Gravity Two, which will have a liquid-fueled core and solid rocket boosters capable of lifting 25.6 tons to LEO, as well as Gravity Three, which combines three Gravity Two core stages, similar to Falcon Heavy, and will lift 30.6 tons to LEO. So I don't know. In my eyes, gravity Three isn't really that efficient. I mean, falcon Nine lifts 25 tons, but a Falcon Heavy can do 70, versus Gravity Two that does 25.6 tons. Hey, that's good, but then you got Gravity Three that only does 30.6. So you strap two extra rockets together and you only get five more tons of payload.

Speaker 2: 25:49

Yeah, wow.

Speaker 1: 25:52

But hey, I guess there's a need, right.

Speaker 2: 25:54

There must be. I mean, maybe it was a proof of concept kind of thing, especially because of the oh hey, this is a massive rocket off of a boat right. So maybe that's what they're going for. Let's go get the boat out into the Atlantic Ocean or the Pacific Ocean or wherever, and then, hey, we can launch it.

Speaker 1: 26:16

Yeah, you could be right. Yeah, proof of concept is not a bad idea.

Speaker 2: 26:22

But yeah, all of these things that are kind of starting to look more and more like SpaceX, and SpaceX just seems to be the way to go. Let's talk about SpaceX, right? All right, we mentioned briefly in our year and review episode that there was a failure of Starship's second launch last year, I believe in November. Spacex has announced that they now know the cause of the failure, which was propellant venting caused the loss of the second stage, the Starship itself.

Speaker 1: 26:51

Huh, okay.

Speaker 2: 26:52

So their explanation kind of still doesn't exactly demystify it completely. It kind of sort of explains it, but also it's like well, what caused the fire anyway?

Speaker 1: 27:05

Yeah, what caused the venting? Where'd it come from? Yeah, I got you.

Speaker 2: 27:09

Yeah, so Elon Musk announced that the Starship was to vent propellant because it didn't have a payload, because so it would be too heavy, right?

Speaker 1: 27:20

Yeah, well, yeah, you've got more propellant than you need.

Speaker 2: 27:23

Yeah, so he also claimed that the Starship would have made it to orbit if there was a payload on board. So them having to vent the payload caused a fire, which then led to the explosion.

Speaker 1: 27:37

Interesting See. Now, in that case, why wouldn't you just load less propellant unless that's just something by design, I mean maybe your center of gravity and whatnot's off, I guess.

Speaker 2: 27:50

Must be something like that, but even still it's sinking like but if there's a payload on it, I don't know, maybe they could have just strapped a huge ballast on it.

Speaker 1: 28:01

Yeah, strap some ballast to it, right. Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting cause of failure, but it makes sense.

Speaker 2: 28:10

Well, yeah, but it makes sense. But what caused the fire? Right so venting the propellant itself.

Speaker 1: 28:18

Yeah, yeah, venting shouldn't cause a fire in the first place. Exactly, yeah, that's kind of what I'm getting at, exactly.

Speaker 2: 28:24

And an interesting note is that also caused the stage one explosion. So they only announced a cause of failure on the Starship. So the stage two and not the super heavy which is what lifts it that also exploded.

Speaker 1: 28:44

Did they? I can't remember, maybe you don't remember either. Did they separate before the explosion, or were they?

Speaker 2: 28:49

still they did. So pretty sure they did.

Speaker 1: 28:54

Hmm, man, that's a good question. I wonder, because that explains why Starship would explode. Okay, if you're venting on the second stage that is now separated and it starts a fire, that one's going to explode, okay. Now, the first stage is now independent and under its own power, yet it exploded. Well, it turns around right, it turns around and it's supposed to land, right.

Speaker 2: 29:22

Like, yeah, it's supposed to start a burn, so maybe it's possible that, like the venting fuel, it wasn't far enough away. It was hot enough for that burn to then explode.

Speaker 1: 29:33

Catch catch that one. That's, that could be it. Yeah, that's interesting. Wow, we'll have to go back. I'm going to go back and look at the video and see how far apart they were, because it may have been a commanded abort kind of explosion, it's possible when they just said you know, hey, starship's done, we're just going to blow up the booster, we don't need to worry about it today.

Speaker 2: 29:54

Well, remember we talked about it briefly in the recap episode, but it did have like severe engine failures, like a bunch of them.

Speaker 1: 30:03

Yes.

Speaker 2: 30:05

So I wonder if they meant to like abort that one. I don't know, man, like the whole article that I read on this was just a like a little vague. It was vague, but also it seemed like SpaceX themselves was was a bit vague about it.

Speaker 1: 30:24

They could be protecting themselves from investors or something you know, not trying to scare anybody off.

Speaker 2: 30:29

Yeah, something like that. I don't know, it's interesting to think about. I do think that because it turned around and burned. Maybe they weren't far enough, but they vented fuel and then that, that caught, and then yeah, basically, kind of chain into it. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 30:44

That's interesting. We'll have to kind of look into that.

Speaker 2: 30:47

So, despite all this failure well, I say all this failure- second one must believe there is a very solid chance that they make it to orbit on flight three, which has been slated for February. So look out for our coverage on that.

Speaker 1: 31:00

Yeah, it's going to be very, very soon. All right, we've already teased this one in our recap episode as well, but we got news regarding Artemis. Unfortunately, NASA has announced that Artemis 2 and 3 are both delayed again. Artemis 2 will no longer launch in November of this year and is now slated for September of next year.

Speaker 1: 31:26

Wow, that's actually a huge delay. It's a one-year delay, yeah, and Artemis 3 suffers the same fate. They now have a scheduled launch of September of 2026, so one year after Artemis 2. So, yeah, both flights have been delayed a year now. The reasons behind the delays are mostly because of safety concerns. They want more time to ensure that the new heat shields are up to the task. Remember, in Artemis 1, they had some issues with the heat shield. It suffered some sharring, which it's supposed to do, but it was more so than they expected. They want to test a new abort system, so the system that would detach the capsule from the rocket in case of an emergency. New life support systems. And they want more time to finish developing new crew training facilities at KSC. In my understanding, these facilities will be the same ones that they're going to use to practice new ingress and egress procedures of the capsule, so could be important as an on-pad emergency may come up.

Speaker 2: 32:29

Yeah, exactly Kind of like what happened with the tragedy of Apollo 1.

Speaker 1: 32:34

They learned a lot with Apollo 1. They decided, okay, we need to redesign the emergency egress mechanics of the door. We can't do a bolted door like this. There was a lot that they learned on that, so yeah. So again, it's delayed another year, but it's for good reason. So it is what it is Some good news.

Speaker 1: 32:55

However, ax3 is targeted for January 18th. It's Axiom's third private astronaut mission to the ISS and is expected to last about 14 days. The crew is comprised of four members, all from different countries. Mission commander Michael Lopez is of dual nationality American and Spanish. He was born in Madrid and raised in California. He's a you could say, retired NASA astronaut, I guess, because now he's with Axiom Mission pilot Walter Filode is from Italy, mission specialist I'm sorry, alper, alper Gezerovsky, from Turkey. In fact, he's the first Turkish astronaut, so this is a very big deal for him and his country. I watched a video over him briefly. So this is really exciting for Turkey, really happy for them as a nation for this yeah, that's cool. And mission specialist Marcus Wundt from Sweden. So, yeah, really looking forward to this launch and I'm really excited for this crew. That's AX3, and you'll hear about that next episode.

Speaker 2: 34:07

Yeah, that's super exciting. One thing that I love seeing is new players in the space game. It fills me with happiness that more and more people are taking an interest in exploring the final frontier. Our friends over in the Middle East, the United Arab Emirates, have joined the fray in that they will develop and build an airlock for NASA's lunar Gateway Space Station.

Speaker 1: 34:29

I'm really excited for Gateway. I can't wait to see.

Speaker 2: 34:32

Gateway is super, super cool.

Speaker 2: 34:34

So, for those of you that don't know about Gateway, this is a space station that will orbit the moon, just like the International Space Station orbits Earth. It's called Gateway, which I think is a fitting name, as it's our Gateway quote unquote to establishing a long term presence on the moon. The first elements of Gateway are slated to be launched no earlier than 2025. So Gateway is also a big part of the Artemis missions. So as we get more and more updates on the Artemis missions, we'll also probably get more updates about Gateway, which is super cool?

Speaker 1: 35:11

Yeah, because all we've heard so far is up to Artemis 3, which is just our first landing, and we haven't really heard anything as far as building Gateway goes, which could be into at least Artemis 4 later.

Speaker 2: 35:22

Yeah, exactly. Well, we're starting to hear about it now, which is great. So I'll tell you the truth, I wasn't really aware that the UAE had much interest in space at all, but I'm glad they do. I know I mentioned them briefly one time when we talked about China establishing partnerships for a joint moon base. The UAE basically signed an agreement with China that they were going to help them establish moon base on the moon, of course. So the UAE established the UESA back in 2014, which had its goal to establish a pan-Arab space agency, just the same as ESA, which is the European Space Agency Okay, gotcha. So the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center will build the crew and science airlock module for NASA, who will use it on Gateway to further enhance our capabilities of exploring the moon. But I genuinely cannot wait to see this mission in action, as I firmly believe that this is one of our first steps into becoming an interplanetary species.

Speaker 2: 36:32

Yeah for sure, which would be really cool, because I want to go to Mars one day yeah, probably not in my lifetime, but it Well, I mean tickets to Mars one way have kind of been sold.

Speaker 1: 36:43

if you want to say it's been sold, they have, I know they have, I'm trying to come back.

Speaker 2: 36:47

Yeah, I know, I know, yeah.

Speaker 1: 36:51

So I'm on a round trip.

Speaker 2: 36:53

That's probably not going to happen Maybe, but yeah. Well, you know what they could do, like a fly by kind of thing, right? Oh hey, you fly like 100.

Speaker 1: 37:02

It's like Artemis too, but to Mars.

Speaker 2: 37:05

Yeah, fly by, just send me up, I'll go.

Speaker 1: 37:08

I think the problem with that that we have, though, is that Because I've thought about that is we have a window to reach Mars, and then we have to wait, like several months until you could send another mission again.

Speaker 2: 37:21

So I think, I don't know, maybe it wouldn't work out, but if they were able to figure out like some kind of way to give us like a gravity Capture orbit or something or Give us like a gravity assist and then get us back to Earth. To get us back even faster. I don't know man, It'd be cool, but when I start, when I start Orbital Mechanics?

Speaker 1: 37:40

we'll look into that.

Speaker 2: 37:43

You will be the scientist that figures it out.

Speaker 1: 37:46

I'll be sitting here on Space Week figuring out the calculus for all this.

Speaker 2: 37:52

Back to reality. Yeah, it's great to see UAESA has come this far, in that they're helping NASA achieve its lunar goals, and the airlock module is, of course, a vital operation of the Gateway Station, in that, of course, the astronauts living on board can't get into the station without the airlock module. Yeah, so the UAESA. They signed onto a document called the Artemis Accords back in December of 2023, which the Artemis Accords are a document signed by 33 countries that set out the principles and collaboration practices for NASA's Artemis program.

Speaker 1: 38:38

This sounds like we're talking about like the Constitution and history class all over again.

Speaker 2: 38:42

All right, we've signed the Artemis Accords.

Speaker 1: 38:46

Where were the Artemis Accords signed?

Speaker 2: 38:47

and then what you hear? Yeah, no, we're just like spitting out little factoids like, sorry guys, pop quiz tomorrow, yeah. So all in all, I'm really happy we're going back to the moon. The Artemis mission has been seriously on my radar for a really long time, ever since they announced them, and I've just been kind of loosely keeping up with it because, unfortunately, progress seems to be a little slow, especially with NASA. They just want to make sure everything's right. It's got to go through rigorous safety training. The astronauts have to go through rigorous training as well. I mean, all in all, space is slow.

Speaker 1: 39:29

Yes.

Speaker 2: 39:30

Unfortunate, but it has to be. It definitely has to be, because otherwise we have accidents and you can't disaster. This is something that we can't really have that many mishaps on, yeah, but yeah, I kind of like Harkin Artemis back to, let's say, the space program effort, because I was even really A thought. Well, I can't really remember the peak of the space shuttle program Me either.

Speaker 1: 40:04

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 40:05

Which is unfortunate, because that would have been really cool. I of course wasn't alive in the 60s and the 70s to really see the space program efforts back then, when they first landed on the moon and there was Gemini and then Apollo and all that other stuff. So I'm kind of thinking Artemis is my generation's Apollo if you would Exactly.

Speaker 1: 40:27

I feel the same exact way. I mean, I remember first learning about Orion, like early, early, early on. You know, we were told about Orion and it was before Artemis. I feel like they announced Orion before Artemis, which seems kind of backwards.

Speaker 1: 40:42

But, yeah, I remember in school going to KSC or not KSC, jsc, and seeing kind of like the first little like poster billboard that they set up for Orion, I was like this is so awesome, man, we're going back to the moon, this is going to be so cool. And then they were just kind of, you know, hinting at the idea of Mars. So, yeah, it's just been really really neat.

Speaker 2: 41:06

But yeah, I mean, we've learned so much from the Apollo program and we have so much better technology nowadays. It's just overall, I think everything's going to go a lot better.

Speaker 1: 41:17

Yeah, I agree, I agree. Now some of you may remember from an episode long ago. I talked about the Space Shuttle Endeavour exhibit in LA. For those of you who don't remember or weren't here, they are taking Endeavour from Horizontal and putting her on vertical display for the first fully authentic shuttle exhibit as it would have been seen on the launch pad. So today I'm going to give you guys a brief update on the progress.

Speaker 1: 41:45

In December they finished lifting and installing the solid rocket boosters into place, so that's what I was talking about before. Their placement was key because the alignment of everything depends on them. If they're off just by you know literally millimeters, it could mess up the alignment of the external fuel tank, which was next. The external fuel tank, however, was successfully moved on January 10th and hoisted into place on January 12th, right on schedule. The tank known as ET-94, external tank 94, is NASA's last remaining tank built for flight. It's 154 feet long, or 47 meters, and weighs 65,000 pounds. So I know it's at 154 feet long. Now that's vertical, that's 154 feet tall. I think the final display is going to be something like over 20 stories tall.

Speaker 2: 42:40

Oh, wow.

Speaker 1: 42:40

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 42:41

I knew they were tall, but dang.

Speaker 1: 42:43

Yeah, it's crazy. Endeavour herself is now being shrink, wrapped to protect her from dust and dirt, very similar to what NASA did with Atlantis when they moved it into position at Kennedy. So, yeah, we were talking about how kind of tall this is, you can see, but it's a mock up at Kennedy of the external tank and the solid rocket boosters, so you can get an idea of how tall it is. Now Atlantis is the real deal at Kennedy, but the SRBs in the tank, I believe, are both mock ups when you go to Kennedy.

Speaker 1: 43:13

So, you'll have to go to LA for the real deal. In total, project completion is said to be done by the end of the year, but it will be longer than that before you can see her again, since we have to wait until the new science center is ready to open.

Speaker 2: 43:28

Who says we can't go outside the fence and get some binoculars? Yeah, hey, I mean you could try.

Speaker 1: 43:32

Yeah, get on us and get on a high building and with a scope, and check it out by all means.

Speaker 1: 43:42

But no, if you haven't seen Atlantis at Kennedy, oh my God, you got to go see it. It's really really cool. The whole experience is neat. We've talked about it before and we'll probably cover that again on one of those early launch Patreon episodes we were talking about doing. I finally had the chance to go to Kennedy the other day and it was really neat, so we'll talk about that there. Anyways, NASA has officially rolled out their new X-59 supersonic research jet.

Speaker 2: 44:09

This one I'm super excited for.

Speaker 1: 44:10

Yeah, we've been talking about this for a while now. We've been getting hints over it and ideas of what it's going to do, but it was developed in partnership with Lockheed Martin. As we already know, x-59 is at the forefront of NASA's Quest program, aiming to drastically reduce the sound of a sonic boom and paving the way forward for supersonic overland travel. So up to this point, as we've mentioned, if you've been here we've been limited. When we did supersonic travel with things like Concorde, we were limited to overseas travel because the sonic boom is just so darn loud it disturbs people, it can break windows, all kinds of things. So basically the government's put a stop to it. They said, hey, you can only do this overseas. And now NASA is trying to figure out research to make it quite enough that we can get supersonic travel over land again.

Speaker 2: 45:00

Yeah, that'd be great, like New York to California and what Western in hour, I don't know if it'd be that quick.

Speaker 1: 45:09

I mean I wish, but yeah, I mean much like greatly reduced travel times, right, yeah, x-59 is just under 100 feet long, by 29 and a half feet wide, with a long tapered nose that accounts for almost a third of its overall length. The nose is crucial, though, and is designed to break up the shock waves, to quiet down that sonic boom. Due to the bizarre configuration, the cockpit sits almost halfway down the plane and lacks any forward facing windows. This reminds me, like Spear, to St Louis, and like Charles Lindberg, and all that, yeah, yeah, or maybe like Maverick in Top Gun 2.

Speaker 2: 45:49

There you go, when he's got those side windows with nothing in the front.

Speaker 1: 45:53

That's it. So you know, I wonder if they like kind of took inspiration there.

Speaker 2: 46:00

In the movie? Yeah, probably. But if they took inspiration from the movie the other way around, I'd be surprised.

Speaker 1: 46:07

But instead the Quest team at Skunkworks developed the external vision system, a series of high resolution cameras feeding a 4K monitor in the cockpit, so you kind of get a synthetic display inside.

Speaker 2: 46:20

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 46:21

Yeah, I'm curious what it'd be like to land that. I guess it'd be a lot like landing like a UAV, you know. Yeah, like the Predator or something like that, like the big UAV.

Speaker 2: 46:32

well, you know little quadcopters or stupo easy to land. You just throttle them down until they're on the ground.

Speaker 1: 46:38

Yeah, yeah, it just comes straight down. But yeah, I imagine it'd be similar to something like an unmanned airplane of some sort. First flight is coming soon, according to NASA's reveal trailer, so no idea, but sometime this year, I'm guessing. Fingers crossed, fingers crossed. Moving on into some astronomy topics now, neptune is not what we thought it was. I'm talking about its color, by the way. We've been lied to, deceived, ignorant of the realities in our own solar system. How dare they, how dare they man this whole time? But really, when we picture Neptune, it's a deep ocean, blue, in contrast to Uranus, which is a pale blue-green. Well, here's the sad truth. Neptune actually looks a lot like Uranus or Uranus, but we're too childish to use that.

Speaker 2: 47:35

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Speaker 1: 47:37

The correct shades of the planets have been confirmed with research led by Professor Patrick Irwin from the University of Oxford, published January 4th, officially being released from Mambario on the 5th. By the way, this misconception started when images of both planets captured early on including the images from Voyager 2, were recorded in separate colors. So I'm guessing they took monochrome images with color filters. Yeah, maybe Something of that, like when the colors were combined, neptune was purposely oversaturated to bring out its bands and storms. So you remember kind of like the great blue spot on Neptune. The original images were actually captioned explaining this, but the distinction was lost with time. So of course we come to believe that Neptune is some blue marble.

Speaker 2: 48:30

Also, it's Neptune, that's the Roman god of the ocean.

Speaker 1: 48:34

Yeah, so well, it's not so Ocean-y after all, nasa, how dare you Right? Yeah, just way to ruin it for us. So the new study takes data from Hubble and the European Southern Observatory's very large telescope to rebalance the color to its true form. The results are less spectacular than the images we're used to, with both planets being a similar shade of the greenish blue. Neptune, however, still has a little more blue because of less haze in its atmosphere. But yeah, so all these years you've been looking at your textbooks, learning about the solar system First. You know, come on. First we learned that Pluto is no longer a planet.

Speaker 2: 49:19

And now we learn. I was so mad about that. I know.

Speaker 1: 49:22

And then, now.

Speaker 2: 49:23

Why are you going to bring out this trauma?

Speaker 1: 49:25

man. Now, neptune's not blue. What else is a lie?

Speaker 2: 49:32

My whole life Come on.

Speaker 1: 49:33

NASA the moon has made a cheese.

Speaker 2: 49:41

It's the Swiss's fault.

Speaker 1: 49:44

Swiss cheese, I get it.

Speaker 2: 49:46

Yeah, you better. Moving on from the lies and deceit from NASA, we'll go ahead and talk about this unusual discovery on the astronomers list of ever-expanding unusual discoveries. So this is something they're calling a dark primordial galaxy, and my understanding is essentially is a galaxy made up of nothing but primordial gas.

Speaker 1: 50:15

I've heard of these, yeah.

Speaker 2: 50:17

Really old gas, just put it that way. So, while surveying hydrogen gas in low-surface brightness galaxies, the astronomers have made this discovery of this primordial galaxy. So essentially, they're using radio waves and surveying light in such a way that they're picking up on the hydrogen gases in space. Just super simple. That's kind of just what's going on. The ultimate goal of these surveys, of course, is understanding the scientific way that the universe has been formed. So the goal of this survey, specifically of 350 unique galaxies, using several major radio telescopes around the globe, was to determine the gas and dynamic masses of these ultra-diffused galaxies.

Speaker 1: 51:07

Sorry, are you saying they got like 350 of these things now already?

Speaker 2: 51:12

Yeah, 350 unique galaxies. I believe that they've already had cataloged. I didn't see that specifically in the article, but that's just the way that I interpreted it.

Speaker 1: 51:22

Okay.

Speaker 2: 51:23

Things that they already knew about, that they're just going over. They're going over them now Making a pass with the new instruments or the different instruments. Now, that's kind of the way that I kind of interpreted it.

Speaker 1: 51:34

Okay.

Speaker 2: 51:35

So a mistake was made on one of these telescopes, namely the Green Bank telescope. Shame on you, Green.

Speaker 1: 51:39

Bank.

Speaker 2: 51:41

That's not nice, no mistakes.

Speaker 1: 51:46

Neptune's no longer blue. I'm salty now.

Speaker 2: 51:52

You're mad about Pluto, now you're mad about Neptune.

Speaker 1: 51:54

Oh man, it's the end of the world.

Speaker 2: 51:58

So the Green Bank Observatory actually pointed the Green Bank telescope at the wrong coordinates. Thus they made this very unusual discovery.

Speaker 1: 52:10

Man, I can't imagine how they could have possibly pointed their telescope at the wrong coordinates. I don't know anybody that's done that before.

Speaker 2: 52:18

Well, yeah, us being amateur astronomers, we've done that quite a bit. Anyway, they made this unusual discovery of a galaxy made up of only gas. There's no stars whatsoever. All right, if there is, we can't see them. The astronomers do think that they could be there, but we can't see them, so I'm not sure exactly how they're, I don't know. Now I have a question what's that?

Speaker 1: 52:49

I'm kind of rhetorical because I'm sure we both don't really know the answer. How do you defer between a really large nebula and a primordial galaxy?

Speaker 2: 53:02

Specifically a gas galaxy. So that was something that's interesting about it. And I kind of had that question too, because you and I have taken pictures from nebulas and stuff like that. I wasn't sure, but in my mind it's kind of how the Milky Way and Andromeda are very far apart. I'm kind of wondering if this gas galaxy is just very far apart from somewhere else and is on its own. Whereas the nebulas and stuff.

Speaker 1: 53:32

Lie within the galaxies.

Speaker 2: 53:35

Yeah, they lie within the galaxy and then they're exploded Stars or whatever.

Speaker 1: 53:40

Something's fed them, correct.

Speaker 2: 53:42

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 53:43

I gotcha.

Speaker 2: 53:45

That's kind of what I pictured in my mind.

Speaker 1: 53:47

I'm not sure if that's actually the answer. No, I think that's a good way to go about it.

Speaker 2: 53:52

Yeah, so this primordial gas galaxy is known to us as J0613 plus 52.

Speaker 1: 53:58

Surprise, surprise. We always got to do math on these names.

Speaker 2: 54:03

Yeah, so that's J0665. Solve for J, the most surface brightness object, is unlike any that we've ever seen, doesn't show star formation like we're used to, so we're not sure what's going on in it. It's likely star formation hasn't started because the gas within the galaxy is too diffuse, in that it's too spread out. It's also possible that star formation hasn't begun because there's not a nearby galaxy to get it started, so there's no spark. Yeah right, so imagine like maybe like a puddle of gasoline or something like that, and as soon as you put like a flame on it, it boom. You know that's a way to put it. Karen O'Neill, a senior scientist of the Green Bank Observatory, shares all of this information with us, also points out that an object like this is extremely difficult to observe, just because of how low density the object itself is. The instruments of the Green Bank Telescope are sensitive enough to pick it up, but those instruments are extremely sensitive to do so, and I mean extremely, and also I looked up pictures of this thing.

Speaker 1: 55:18

It's huge Really.

Speaker 2: 55:20

Yeah, so picture like radio telescope, right, uh-huh Big.

Speaker 1: 55:27

Oh, is it? Radio telescope is in like disk radio telescope, or radio telescope is in rays, it's a dish, like just a massive radio dish telescope. Exactly, yeah, okay.

Speaker 2: 55:40

So imagine like big old dish radio telescope yeah gotcha. So Karen O'Neill is also telling us that the Green Bank Telescope could be used to find more and more of these objects. There's probably plenty of them out there, but we've just not observed them because they're so diffuse.

Speaker 1: 55:56

Right, you're going to have to be like really looking for them Exactly. Yeah, that's pretty interesting Okay.

Speaker 2: 56:03

Yeah, and I'm kind of like just a random thought just popped up into my head. It's like you know we've talked about like dark matter and all this other stuff. I wonder if that's just like a place where not necessarily like dark matter, but the structure of the universe is kind of convalescing.

Speaker 1: 56:18

Pushing on it, yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, that's kind of a way to go about it. I mean just real quick, felt getting on too big with tangent. You know we were talking about the stuff I was talking about during the recap and everything, and how we can look at dark matter between voids with oh my goodness, web's new sidekick that looks like Hubble.

Speaker 2: 56:41

Oh, I forgot the name of that one already Dang. Look at how bad I am Euclid, euclid. Yeah, that's right. Yes.

Speaker 1: 56:48

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking of. Yeah, going back to kind of what I was saying, if you're looking at the dark matter and the way things are expanding, if the dark matter is pushing on an empty space, the gases could be, could coagulate there, kind of yeah.

Speaker 2: 57:05

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 57:06

That's an interesting thought. But, moving forward, jaxa and NASA have revealed the first images from the Chrism X-ray telescope. It's XRISM but it's pronounced Chrism man. A lot of X-ray stuff going on today, yeah, yeah, no kidding. The X-ray imaging and spectroscopy mission, or Chrism, has taken images of supernova remnant Revenant.

Speaker 1: 57:35

Yeah, the revenant, oh God Get out of Pleasedale, the X-ray imaging and spectroscopy mission, or Chrism, has taken images of supernova remnant N123D and galactic cluster ABEL2319. 2319. That was my first thought too. It came right to mind man. Oh man, that's a Monsters Inc reference for you guys. By the way. Starting with N123D, astronomers revealed silicon, sulfur, calcium, argon and iron using Chrism spectrometer. The supernova is believed to have occurred just 3,000 years ago, so very recent in kind of galactic terms, right.

Speaker 2: 58:29

Yeah, that's like the youngest supernova we've seen. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 58:34

Just about. Unless Beetlejuice explodes, hey, who knows In which case we're not going to see Night Sky for a very long time. So this is going to be lit up by Beetlejuice, but that's a totally different topic. Yeah, so if Beetlejuice ever explodes.

Speaker 2: 58:45

by the way, guys, it's going to be a very different topic. It's going to be as bright as the full moon, which is absolutely crazy because, wow, if you ever go to a dark sky site at night with a full moon, you see your shadow. You see your own shadow and on top of that, you just wasted a lot of time because there's nothing to do out there, because you can't see anything because of the full moon. Been there, done that. Yeah, we make mistakes as amateur astronomers a lot.

Speaker 1: 59:12

It's what we do. You're living to learn.

Speaker 2: 59:14

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 59:15

But the new detail in the spectrum of this supernova allows scientists to determine the abundance of the various elements, as well as their temperatures, densities and directions. From that they can figure information on the star itself and the explosion as it happened. So pretty cool stuff. You can kind of almost look back in time and figure out how they occurred.

Speaker 2: 59:37

So now we're time traveling, exactly, yeah.

Speaker 1: 59:41

ABEL 2319, on the other hand, is an extremely bright galactic cluster, some 770 million light years away and about 3 million light years across. The yeah, yeah, root, Root, root.

Speaker 2: 59:55

Root Root Root Root, root, root, root Root.

Speaker 1: 59:56

Root Root, root Root. So they extended the field. They extended the field. Yeah, it's X T E N D Extend. Under normal light, 2319 is shrouded by a bright golden blur, but under the new X-ray image you can actually piece together detailed direction and structure. So pretty neat. I'm kind of excited for all these little X-ray telescopes coming out. I think we're going to see a lot of the unseen, if that makes any sense.

Speaker 2: 1:00:37

Well, I hope it does. You know, x-ray being x-ray, it's like Just outside of visual, visible light.

Speaker 1: 1:00:47

Yes.

Speaker 2: 1:00:48

It'd be great and honestly, we've seen like ultraviolet telescopes and now we're seeing x-ray telescopes. If you've seen, doesn't James Webb have some X-ray imaging on it? I can never remember.

Speaker 1: 1:01:03

Uh, it's either X-ray or UV, UVIR or something like that Could be both.

Speaker 2: 1:01:08

But even still, I swear I've seen some X-ray images from other telescopes anyway and I'm just like, wow, that's a lot.

Speaker 1: 1:01:17

It's really really cool because it can really cut through the glare that we see otherwise in visible light and you can bring out a lot of detail, what they did, if you guys remember that first black hole image that we got.

Speaker 2: 1:01:29

That was X-ray.

Speaker 1: 1:01:30

Looks like a blurry orange ring. They took that and then they went back with like a another kind of X-ray image like instrument. No, it was with polarized. It was kind of like the thing that India's doing.

Speaker 2: 1:01:42

Oh, really, they took it in X-ray. I thought it was X-ray.

Speaker 1: 1:01:44

Well, they did. And then they took another like polarized X-ray instrument and they were able to get kind of like swirling lines from its magnetic field.

Speaker 2: 1:01:56

Oh yeah, yeah, that's right, and it looks really neat.

Speaker 1: 1:01:59

It kind of brings out new detail to it that you wouldn't have seen otherwise. Now, kind of spoiler alert, we got another image of that same black hole, but that's going to be. I want to say next episode as well.

Speaker 1: 1:02:12

It didn't most likely didn't fit into the time frame on this one. All right, we don't have much in the way of nightmare fuel this time around, but I did find a story that'll do. I think it's Potoroo, and unless you're Australian or a zoologist, you have no idea what I just said. But that's okay. I'm going to clear things up.

Speaker 1: 1:02:35

Astronomers have discovered a new pulsar that's racing through the cosmos at 2.2 million miles per hour and rotates 14 times per second. Now to keep from any confusion, because I've talked about pulsars, quasars and blazars before on the show, pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars that emit a beam of radiation along the rotational axis. Quasars are black holes that emit jets of energy as they consume things, and blazars are the same as quasars, except that they're aimed at our faces, so they're coming right at us, coming right at us, but luckily we're outside of their scope. They just look much brighter if we were to observe them Right. And because this rapidly moving pulsar happens to be blowing out a powerful wind, creating a pulsar wind nebula.

Speaker 1: 1:03:27

The discovery was made using the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder, or ASCAP, the Parkes Radio Telescope and South African Mircat Telescope M-E-E-R, capital K-A-T. So I'm sure that stands for something. The team has decided to name the nebula Potoroo after the or Potoroo, whatever your inflection is after the tiny marsupial native to Australia. We don't have those here in America. I'm sorry, I've never seen them before.

Speaker 2: 1:03:59

You haven't seen one in a zoo. Come on, man.

Speaker 1: 1:04:01

I don't think I have.

Speaker 2: 1:04:03

I actually don't think I have either. Normally it's kangaroos or wallabies, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:04:08

To understand the formation of the nebula, we have to understand the formation of the star. So let's take a look at it real quick. Psr-j1638-4713, more calculus names like any pulsar started as a massive star that ran out of fuel and collapsed to a tiny point in comparison, in this case about 12 miles wide. What's left is this extremely dense and heavy neutron star that spins rapidly, surrounded by its ejected supernova material. So yeah, so just imagine that real quick. You know a star several times more massive than the sun collapsing to something only 12 miles wide. It's extremely dense, Just like you, Seriously.

Speaker 2: 1:04:52

I had to. It was right there. You don't have to put that in the episode.

Speaker 1: 1:05:03

But really I think they say like a tablespoon of a neutron star would weigh something like several, several tons here on Earth. They're crazy.

Speaker 2: 1:05:14

Yeah, I know, and thinking about how dense that stuff is, it's just absolutely bonkers.

Speaker 1: 1:05:21

Yes.

Speaker 2: 1:05:22

It's crazy. It's like they say if the entire Earth were to collapse into a black hole, it would be like how big.

Speaker 1: 1:05:30

Oh, it'd be tiny.

Speaker 2: 1:05:31

You wouldn't be able to pick. Well, you'd be able to pick it up in your hand, but you'd be like what is this?

Speaker 1: 1:05:38

A pair of tweezers, yeah, and the heaviest little thing speck of dust you ever pick up in your life. But yeah, so, going back, we now have a brand new born neutron star surrounded by its ejected material from its explosion. So now what's happening is this core star of potoroo is blowing particles into the cooled matter it ejected during its collapse, forming the nebula cloud now 46 times as wide as our solar system. Research suggests that the star is leading away from its wind, leaving the nebula behind it, forming a shape similar to that of a comet.

Speaker 2: 1:06:18

That's very interesting. I wonder if we'd be able to maybe image this ourselves. Probably not.

Speaker 1: 1:06:24

There is one. I don't know if we'd be able to image it ourselves, but there's one in the crab nebula that you can take a look at here. In fact, we'll just kind of pause real quick.

Speaker 2: 1:06:40

Let's look it up.

Speaker 1: 1:06:42

Yeah, okay. So if you look up the M1 crab nebula pulsar or crab pulsar wind, you'll see what I mean. I think some of these are artist renderings. Well, I say that this one is by the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Speaker 2: 1:07:02

Oh, wow.

Speaker 1: 1:07:03

Wow, that's insane. Okay, I take it back. It's not an artist rendering. So if you look at the Chandra website, chandraharvardedu, you can actually find a picture of this in both X-ray, optical infrared and composite. It looks really incredible, but it's a picture of what one of these essentially would look like, not what this particular one looks like, but it's really cool. Yeah, look that up, it's the crab pulsar wind. You find it.

Speaker 2: 1:07:38

Nope, where is it from?

Speaker 1: 1:07:40

Crab, pulsar, wind, nebula.

Speaker 2: 1:07:43

Oh, wow, that's it.

Speaker 1: 1:07:46

Yeah, that's it right there. I thought that was like an artist rendering, but no, that was taken with the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Speaker 2: 1:07:52

Oh, wow, wow, Okay. So we'd have to have X-ray imaging to be able to do something like that.

Speaker 1: 1:07:57

I think. So I think you can see a little bit. If you click on that link. You can see the various wavelengths, composite X-ray, optical and infrared. So if you click optical, you'll see what we would see in kind of like a visible light or I say visible light, but who knows what wavelength they took this in and then if you go to X-ray, you'll see that we get a lot more of the faint and detailed stuff. Infrared, you'll see just a bunch of like cloudiness around it, and then they did a composite with all of it and it really pulls together that like purple and blue image. Yeah, very, very neat stuff.

Speaker 2: 1:08:40

Yeah, wow, that's amazing. Well, that wraps it up for us this week. Thanks for tuning in and listening to us tell you all about the exciting things that happen in the aerospace industry and in space. If you like what you're hearing, leave us a comment, a review and a rating. It helps us spread the word and reach more people. We'd really appreciate all of your kind words. Be sure to check out our website, spaceweekco, where you can find out more about Space Week and keep up to date with our latest episodes. If you'd like to contribute to this show, you can contact us at contact at spaceweekco. We need to listen to your questions all the time, so feel free to give us an email with your questions. We'll try to do our best to answer them on the show.

Speaker 1: 1:09:25

All right, well, that just about wraps things up. Keep your eyes on the skies. This is Paul.

Speaker 2: 1:09:29

And Blake signing off myths.