This episode is sponsored by Blinkist.
Blinkist puts all the need-to-know information from thousands of nonfiction books
and condenses them down into just 15 minutes.
Go to Blinkist.com/SciShowSpace to learn more.
[ intro ]
Space is risky business, and scientists and engineers can spend
decades developing, constructing,
and testing equipment before a spacecraft gets anywhere near the launch pad.
So, we got some exciting news last week when NASA announced
that the Psyche spacecraft team got the green light to start putting everything together.
If all goes well, the Psyche mission will depart for the asteroid Psyche in August 2022.
The asteroid is officially designated 16 Psyche,
and it’s orbiting the Sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The rock is about 226 kilometers across, and based on things like its size and presumed mass,
it seems to mostly be made of metals like iron and nickel —
the same metals found in Earth’s core.
That’s not to say that, like, Psyche came from Earth.
But researchers do think the asteroid may be the core of an old protoplanet,
one that formed and was mostly demolished by collisions
during the formation of the solar system.
So by studying this far-flung asteroid, scientists might be able to learn more about Earth’s insides,
which are way more difficult to visit despite being literally right underneath us.
But! Before it gets to the asteroid, the spacecraft has to launch,
and before it launches, it has to be put together.
So, NASA spacecraft go through a few phases.
It starts with Phase A, where the team develops a basic concept for the mission.
And it ends with Phase F, where the mission is officially shut down.
Until recently, Psyche was in Phase C, where the goal was to finalize the craft’s design,
and manufacture all the scientific instruments and other components.
But now, after a thorough review, the news last week was that those goals had been accomplished!
The mission was approved to enter Phase D.
This means the team gets to start the assembly process...
and go through even more testing.
And eventually,
Phase D will turn into Phase E after Psyche launches and reaches outer space.
When the mission arrives at its asteroid in 2026, nearly a decade after it was approved,
it will give us our first opportunity to study a metallic asteroid up close —
as opposed to the stony ones we’ve been to before.
Over nearly two years, Psyche will study the asteroid with a suite of instruments to
confirm what it’s made of, how old regions of the surface are, what its gravitational field is like,
and if it has a magnetic field frozen into its rocks.
In particular, that magnetic field will be especially interesting —
because Earth’s magnetic field is generated by its core.
So if Psyche has remnants of a field like this,
that could confirm the asteroid really did start as the core of a protoplanet.
And if it doesn’t?
We might just learn something unexpected about the early solar system, instead.
Not too far from Psyche, Mars’s moon Phobos has also been in the news lately.
Last week in the journal Nature Geoscience,
scientists reported a way that we might be able to study the moon in the future
to learn about what Mars looked like in the past.
So, Mars has been losing its atmosphere for billions of years,
thanks to things like interactions with the air and particles from the Sun.
We can tell because there’s ample evidence
that the planet used to retain liquid water on its surface. And on Mars in particular,
you need a certain amount of air pressure for that.
So, where did the gas go?
Well, a lot of it just escaped into space.
But in this new paper,
one team proposed that some of those atoms got trapped in the soil on Phobos.
And that future explorations could actually sample them and bring them back to Earth for analysis.
Now, Phobos isn’t a moon you hear a lot about. Which is a bummer, because it’s great!
Despite being only 27 kilometers across at its widest point,
it’s actually the larger of Mars’s two moons.
It also orbits super closely to the planet, about 60 times closer than our Moon is from the Earth.
And although it’s small, we have a lot of questions about it —
including how it got there, and now, if it’s hiding some of Mars’s old gas particles.
In their paper, this team used more than four years of observations from NASA’s MAVEN orbiter.
They studied the types of charged particles in Phobos’s orbit,
figuring out which ones came from Mars, and which came from the Sun.
Then, they calculated how many of those Martian air particles could actually fall onto Phobos,
and how deeply they might be buried.
In the end, the paper found that the moon
would have been absolutely bombarded by these particles throughout history.
And that they could be preserved a teeny fraction of a meter beneath the moon’s surface.
Like, like less than a hair’s width underground. So, really not a lot of digging required.
Right now, only one side of Phobos faces Mars, so that might be the best place to take a sample.
But there could also be a range of atmosphere records all over the moon.
They could even include air from billions of years ago,
back when Mars was covered in liquid water.
So, studying these particles could help us understand what the planet used to be like.
And the great news is, we could learn more soon,
because there’s already a mission to sample Phobos in the works.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s MMX
mission is expected to launch in 2024. And five years later,
it will return the first samples of Phobos’s surface.
So just like Psyche, we’ll have to wait to know more.
But it’s sure to be worth it.
While we’re waiting on results from Psyche and MMX,
there’s plenty to learn in the meantime. Actually, there’s so much to learn and so much to do
that finding the time to learn something can be easier said than done.
And that’s part of what led the Blinkist team to make their app.
Blinkist takes the best insights and key information from more than 3000 nonfiction books,
and condenses them into 15 minutes of material you can read or listen to.
Their library includes topics from self-help to health to history, and even some space books —
like “An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth” by Chris Hadfield.
It’s all about his story, and what his time in space taught him about life here on Earth.
Our Content Manager, Alexis Dahl really enjoyed it.
If you’re interested, the first 100 people to go to Blinkist.comSciShowSpace
will get unlimited access to the app for one week.
They’ll also get 25% off a full membership.
You can learn more at Blinkist.com/SciShowSpace.
[ outro]