Fraser Cain: Hi, everyone. I'm Fraser Cain. I'm the publisher
of Universe Today. And I have been a space and astronomy
journalist for over 20 years. Now, the format on this channel
is I answer a bunch of questions, I interview a bunch
of people. But there's a lot of news that is happening, breaking
all the time in space and astronomy. And we're just like,
not bringing it up apart from interviewing people. So we
thought we would add a new segment to the show. This is
just an experiment. So really give us your feedback. Tell us
what you think. But I'm going to cover a lot of the news that,
you know, I'm having to process this news as I run Universe
Today, as I write my newsletter, as I talked to scientists, and
it's all kind of in my head. And I figure you know, some people
like to read a newsletter, and some people like to have the
newsletter videoed at them. So this is a video segment on the
news.
Alright, the first news item is that the US Space Force has
released a trove of data on Bulleid and fireballs, and Space
Force, I'm sure you're all aware, right? This is the
mashed together various departments of the military, the
US military, Air Force, Army, etc, let's can provide space
reconnaissance and satellites and so on. And they have been
tracking, essentially satellite debris, anything that's going on
in space. And one of the byproducts of this is that they
have been tracking fireballs, meteoroids hitting the Earth's
atmosphere. And they've been storing this data. And in the
last week or so they decided they were going to release all
of this data to scientists, so that they can use it for their
own scientific exploration. And now they've been tracking these
bolides and fireballs since 1988. And then they decided to
release it's about 1000 events into the hands of researchers.
And this is really important because we know that the Earth
is in this like cosmic shooting gallery, there are meteors and
asteroids out there all the time hitting your atmosphere, one of
them could be a lot worse. And the more data that astronomers
can get, the more they're going to be able to get a sense of
what our risks are going into the future. And so having this
data go from Space Force to the scientists is a really good
thing.
All right, so the next piece of news is that physicists have
measured the W boson. And what they measured doesn't exactly
match the Standard Model of particle physics. So what's
going on? Now, bosons are a way to communicate forces between
various objects. So the photon is the Boson for the
electromagnetic force, there's a bunch for the strong force, and
the W boson is one that translates force for the weak
nuclear force. And it has been fairly well measured in the
past, but now, physicists at Fermilab have used the collider
detector to measure the W boson with incredible precision. Now,
the theorised maths for the W boson is 80,357 mega electron
volts plus or minus six, and they measured it at 80,433 mega
electron volts plus or minus nine MeV. Now, those numbers
sound almost exactly the same, and they're very, very close.
But the problem is that the error bars for those two
measurements don't overlap. And so essentially, their
measurement does not line up with a very careful estimate for
what it should be, according to the laws of physics as we
understand them today. Now, what could be going on? One
possibility, of course, is that there's an error in measurement
that the machine gave the wrong number, there was some extra
noise in the signal, and they weren't able to measure the
number as accurately as they needed to. But the other
possibility is that our understanding of the laws of
physics are incomplete. And we know that I mean, we know that
you can't take quantum mechanics and gravity and mash them
together. They just are incompatible oil and water. And
yet, obviously, we live in a universe, the laws of physics
seem to happen. You can both experience gravity and the
quantum mechanic level. So what's going on? And right now,
nobody knows. The One possibility is that it's just an
error, it'll get worked out. The other possibility is that it is
this crack is this opportunity to understand more about the
laws of physics and maybe start to push research towards being
able to finally merge these various incompatible forces,
according to our theories. Now, this is just sort of a tiny
version. I did a much more in depth interview with Dr. Paul
Sutter, who is a particle physicist by training, and we
spent about half an hour going
Unknown: into the depths of this. And actually, this is very
similar to result that we had about a year back for the muon g
minus two experiment. In fact, during that I had Paul come and
explain that one to me. So we'll put a link in the show notes,
you can definitely check out that interview, the one we just
did, and just get excited about how particle physics are still
moving forward.
Fraser Cain: Next, we're gonna talk about everybody's favorite
space telescope, James Webb Space Telescope, we've been
watching the ongoing progress of James Webb, it launched back in
December. And now here we are in April, and it's still getting
ready. We've seen all of its parts unfurl, all of its
actuators work perfectly. And so far, like every single part of
this telescope has gone exactly according to plan. With the Sun
shield out, it's been able to cool itself down to about 40
Kelvin, or 40 degrees above absolute zero. And this has
allowed it to test out all of its instruments, except for one,
and that one is called MIRI the mid infrared instrument. And
Miri needs to be a lot colder needs to be below seven Kelvin.
And this week, engineers at NASA announced that they've been able
to get the instrument down to 6.4 Kelvin, which is even colder
than necessary. And so you're probably wondering, like, why
does this instrument have to be so cold, it's because it is
observing in infrared. And so when you're observing objects
that are just giving off a tiny little bit of heat, you want to
minimize the amount of additional heat that's coming
from your instrument from your telescope from your
surroundings, that would interfere with your signal. And
so they've got a special helium coolant that runs on this one
instrument that gets it a lot colder than the rest of the
Space Telescope. So now that MIRI is online. Essentially, all
of the main instruments onboard James Webb are ready to go. And
now we're really getting close. We're probably just a couple of
months before those, see those first, proper science images
coming from James Webb, your patience will be rewarded.
Alright, so the next news comes from the space tourism field,
and his company called Space prospective, and they're
building a balloon that will carry you to the stratosphere,
about 30 kilometers altitude. And, unlike, say, Virgin
Galactic or Blue Origin, which are rockets, and take up very
quickly, they give you a few minutes of zero gravity, and
then they returned to Earth. With space perspective, you will
fly in this balloon up to 30 kilometers altitude, it'll take
several hours, and then the balloon will come back down
somewhere in the ocean, and it will be retrieved. And they
released pictures of what the lounge is going to look like.
And so it's pretty cool. Like you think about it, you're going
to be sitting in this fairly spacious lounge in a very
comfortable seat, you will fly up to this very high altitude,
you'll get an incredible view of the Earth even be able to see
the curvature of the Earth which hopefully will shut up flat
earthers. And then you will be able to come back down there was
going to be like a bar on board. There's a bathroom, snacks, it
sounds like a very civilized way to appreciate that really high
view of the Earth. And, like I'm hoping that you'll even be able
to get a that overview effect, this experience that astronauts
get when they fly to space, when they look back down on the
Earth. And they see the curvature of the Earth. It gives
them just this sense that we live on this one world that
there aren't national borders. And so if there's a way that
regular folks can take flights on this balloon, now it's going
to start at $125,000 per flight. So obviously, that's not exactly
regular people, but it's cheaper than the 55 million that it
costs to fly to the International Space Station. So
it's a good start. And I gotta say, if I could fly on Blue
Origin, or Virgin Galactic, or this, I would take this, you
know, if I wanted zero gravity, I'd fly in the vomit comet. But
to be able to just see the Earth from a really high point of view
for a long period of time, I would be tempted to try flight
on this when they bring the price down or, or give me a free
trip. Now the altitude isn't quite as high as you're gonna
get with Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic, you're only going to
30 kilometers, not say 100 kilometers, you're not crossing
the Karman Line, but you're still going to get that really
great view just feels a lot more civilized. So is it space
tourism? I'm going to say yes, because you're definitely going
higher than on an airplane or any way to get there normally on
Earth. But you decide.
Now, we did a pretty cool discussion about space tourism
on our Discord server. And we do one of these every week on
Wednesdays. And so if you want to join the discord server
there, we'll link in the show notes. And you can join us on
Wednesdays for this cool conversation but different ideas
in space and astronomy and not just like a podcast but actually
a discussion where you can talk to me and the rest of the people
listening and have the back and forth and it's a lot of fun. So
check it out on our discords
are next story is that scientists are working on
technology that will allow Martian astronauts to be able to
make their own fuel, from their wastewater from their showers
from the toilets, etc. And as you probably know, when you fly
to another place, whenever you fly out into space, the mass is
incredibly critical. It's enormous ly expensive to carry
any kind of mass in orbit. And so the more you can recycle or
gather locally, the better it's going to be. And so this
technology, in theory, will allow water that has sort of run
out of uses they, they've recycled as much as they can for
drinking for coffee for things like that. And then they can
still process it one more time and turn it into fuel, that then
they could run hydrogen fuel cells for their, for their
station, or maybe even like break it up into hydrogen and
oxygen, use it for propellant. So a lot of cool ideas. And so
you can see, there's just, there's so much of this
technology that people are going to have to come up with, to make
living in these really inhospitable places, like Mars,
like the Moon like deep space, and each incremental technology
that can be figured out, we'll make this more successful and so
anticipate 1000s more technologies like this are going
to have to be developed.
We got a cool picture from NASA this week. It was from the
perseverance rover that finally saw its own parachute and bash
shell. Now when perseverance launched about like, over a year
ago, it had a pretty cool parachute. And you probably seen
that it had this encoded message on the parachute, that when you
decoded it said dare mighty things. And then the parachute
dropped onto the surface of Mars, and perseverance began its
operations. Now normally, NASA will send the rover back to its
landing system to take a bunch of pictures. But in this case,
there's a lot of fairly dangerous terrain in between
where perseverance was and where the parachute and back shell
ended up. And so it took this fairly circuitous route, and
finally got within striking distance of the parachute and
back shell. And hopefully we'll get some better pictures
shortly.
Unknown: Speaking of rovers, the European Space Agency has been
testing out rover ideas to explore the south pole of the
Moon. And of course, the south pole of the Moon is of great
interest to really all the space agencies. When we go back to the
Moon, probably most of the missions are going to end up at
the South Pole because that's where there could be permanently
shadowed craters containing water ice. And water ice is
going to be this fantastic resource for propellant, for
oxygen for the astronauts to breathe for kind of so many
purposes, water to drink, etc. And so we have to know if these
craters are truly filled with water, can it be harvested,
what's it going to take. And so the European Space Agency has
built this testing facility where it is 200 tons of
simulated lunar regolith. And then they've put meter sized
boulders strewn across this landscape, and then a bunch of
smaller obstacles as well. And they've invited 12 teams to
build prototype rovers that can rove around in this area.
Fraser Cain: navigate around the known hazards, these bigger
rocks, but also deal with smaller surprises that that the
space agency has put into this field. And they were looking to
map it out and to centrally acquire resources that are
located in this giant field. And they started with 12 concepts,
they've now narrowed the group down to five. And they're going
to be getting a prize and additional funding to continue
developing their concepts so that as the humans as the robots
returned to the south pole of the Moon, we're going to have
Unknown: better understanding better methods to find those
resources on the Moon if they're there. And that should make
living on the Moon just a little bit easier.
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and the last story is that a bunch of Apollo 11 Moon Dust
went for auction in the last week. Now, this is kind of never
happened before all of the samples that were brought back
during across all of the Apollo missions. Were
Fraser Cain: taking care of very care
Fully by NASA. And in fact, they've been opening up some
sealed packages of these samples over the last couple of years,
as modern equipment has been able to catch up, but there was
like a little bit of a loophole. when Neil Armstrong set foot on
the Moon back in Apollo 11, he had this special sample bag on
his pants. And the goal here was that the first thing you could
do within the first few minutes of being on the Moon, he would
scoop up a little bit of regolith, tuck it into this
pocket, and then they would continue on with their mission.
But if there was some problem, they weren't able to get their
samples, they could evacuate the Moon come back to Earth, and at
least they would still have some lunar material that could be
studied back here on Earth. Now, of course, the missions were
fine, they were able to come back home. And so this wasn't a
priority. And then the sample bag was cleaned out, mostly. And
then it was sold
privately, and then it ended up on an auction site, and someone
picked it up for $995. And was to noticing that there was still
like a little bit of dust inside this sample bag, had it
analyzed. And it turns out that it was indeed from the Moon.
Now, the bag has since been resold on auction. And now this
tiny little amount of lunar dust just sold for a little over half
a million dollars. So it's like one of the only private ways
that a person can get a sample of the Moon, which is pretty
cool. All right. Well, those I think were the top stories of
this week. So again, this is just a new experiment. You know,
we're always trying new ideas. So please let us know what you
think. Did I not have enough news that I spent too much time
not go into enough detail? Let me know what you think all of
this news that I covered here today. These are stories that
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