The science behind James Webb images, Space Launch System and
starship getting closer to their first flights, remote surgery on
the International Space Station, perseverance finds more weird
stuff on Mars, And Hubble is still going strong. All this and
more in this week's episode of Space bites. Hi, everyone. I'm
Fraser Cain. I'm the publisher of Universe Today. And this is
our space bites, where we talk about interesting space and
astronomy news that happened this week. Now, this is a
shorter version of my much longer weekly email newsletter.
So if you want more space and astronomy news, you'll
definitely want to sign up. But if you want a video version,
here you go. Let's get into the news. The science behind James
Webb images. Now we've been sharing pretty pictures from the
James Webb Space Telescope for several weeks now. And it has
been a constant crowd pleaser. But a lot of people ask very
technical questions about those images. Which filters do they
use? How long were the exposure times what was the scientific
information behind those pictures? And when we got that
first group of images, we didn't get any of that background
technical information. But scientists behind the images
have released a 15 page scientific document that
explains in great detail exactly what went into it. What was the
scientific basis for each of the images? What were they trying to
discover? What kinds of filters did they use on James Webb?
Which wavelengths? How long did they do their exposures for? And
how do they integrate that data together, and what scientific
conclusions can be reached. So if you want more information,
really get behind the scenes and really better understand how
this telescope works, We've got all the information for you. And
there's been a lot of other science information coming out
from James Webb, we've heard that the record for the farthest
Galaxy just keeps getting broken. And now it seems to be
around Z equals 20, or about 180 million years after the Big
Bang. We're also finding that galaxies are a lot more mature
and fully evolved than astronomers were ever expecting.
Although I feel like we say this all the time that the early
universe seems to be more evolved, the galaxies were more
formed than anyone was expecting. But now of course,
James Webb can actually take pictures of these galaxies
coming together. So hopefully, we'll get a final answer on how
this all works. If you remember a couple of weeks ago, SpaceX
tried to test their super heavy booster tried to test the Raptor
two engine and they had an explosion. And Elon Musk
originally said it wasn't a big deal. And then later on, okay,
maybe it is a big deal. And they had to take that booster back
into the assembly building for maintenance, we learned that
there was excess fuel in the area and that had exploded and
caused some minor damage to the underside of the rocket, which
is being repaired. Well, SpaceX did a test, a static fire test
with one of the Raptor two engines, the bottom of the super
heavy, everything seemed to go according to plan. So like this
is just one raptor engine, the fully configured super heavy is
going to have 33 of these. So just imagine how powerful that's
going to be when it actually launches. Musk said they're
going to fire it again. And hopefully this time, everything
will go as planned, they're probably going to be installing
some hardware that will allow it to burn off the excess fuel very
similar to where the space shuttle does, with the sparklers
that catch any excess hydrogen around the bottom of the rocket.
So hopefully, future tests will be more successful. Now when is
this going to launch? The word on the street from Elon Musk is
anytime between one month and 12 months. But I thought we were
going to be seeing an
orbital flight any day now. So we'll see how long that will
actually be. Of course, you're going to have to convert those
times into Musk years. I forget the math on that. It's like
double and add 10 Anyway, so at some point in the next one month
to 40 years, we should see super heavy starship go into orbital
flight. NASA is gearing up for the Space Launch System thrust
when the name of the rocket is like what it also does. So you
say launch twice. Alright, so a couple of weeks ago, we reported
that NASA is planning to launch the Space Launch System launch
launch launch the SLS in the end of August, August 29. And so
far, they haven't changed from that date. And we're continuing
to approach and they're making more and more preparations to
meet that launch target. As we mentioned, they're going to
launch the Space Launch System with the Orion capsule on top
mission will go out to the Moon orbit around the Moon for
several weeks and then return Back and the capsule will land
safely in the ocean. They've got a mannequin on board named
Moonakin Campos, which is named after an engineer that worked
with NASA to help bring the Apollo 13 astronauts home. So
it's sort of an interesting homage to them. Over the last
couple of days, NASA has been holding day long teleconferences
for journalists and other scientists involved in the
project. And they've been going into a lot of detailed
information kind of too much to share, we saw some pretty cool
technical documents about how the different Artemis missions
are planned all of the different stages and orbits and support
spacecraft, Artemis one, and then Artemis two, and then
Artemis three, which hopefully is going to be the mission that
brings humans back to the surface of the Moon, that's also
mentioned that they're going to be opening up opportunities on
the Artemis missions to all the current NASA astronauts. So we
don't know the names who's going to be flying, but it could be
anyone, veteran astronauts, new astronauts, everybody can have a
chance to fly to the Moon. And finally, we got a really cool
animation of a plume under the Space Launch System. So this is
a simulation of what the all of the fire is going to look like
as it comes out the bottom of the SLS. As it's taking off, you
can sort of compare in your mind what it looked like with the
Apollo missions and the space shuttle. Pretty cool. See how
well it matches reality in a couple of weeks. Perseverance
continues to find weird things on Mars. Now we've been
reporting on new scientific discoveries by perseverance, but
we've also been reporting on all the weird stuff that it's been
finding on Mars, mostly stuff that it brought with it, it
found its parachute on the surface of Mars, it found its
back shell, a lot of cables and wires associated with that. And
a couple of weeks ago, we talked about this weird String object
that drifted into the field of view, and then the wind blew it
away again. And so this week, we saw a picture inside the drill
chuck of the perseverance rover, this is the machine that it uses
to drill these core samples that it's storing up, it just
finished its 12th core sample. And when you look inside, you
can see this tiny little hair, it looks like a cat hair or like
a little piece of dental floss. And I mean, that rover was
cleaned within an inch of its life before it was sent to Mars.
There's no way that anyone left a piece of string in there, and
they would have seen it all the previous drills. So what is it?
Where did it come from? Once again, it probably came from
perseverance itself. It's probably like a string leftover
from its parachute that somehow worked into the system, or blew
onto the rover and made its way into this. But NASA engineers
are going to continue to analyze it, they're going to try and get
the debris out of the drill chuck so it doesn't actually
infiltrate the samples that they're collecting. And
hopefully this will be the last of the debris that perseverance
brought with it to Mars
actually getting in the way of the science that it's doing.
Celebrating 10 years for Curiosity on Mars. It feels like
just yesterday that NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Mars.
But it's been 10 years, the rover landed on Mars on August 5
2012. And I remember it very fondly. We actually did a
livestream on my YouTube channel, where we cover that and
had special guests who are associated with the mission. And
we talked about it, we had a lot of fun, but 10 years. That's
amazing. Now over the course of this 10 years, Curiosity has
really accomplished its main goal of searching for water or
evidence of past water on Mars. And it's found many different
examples of that there was water acting on the surface of Mars
for long periods of time. It's sampled dozens of rocks, it's
crawled for many kilometers, it's slowly climbing up the
flanks of Mount Sharp in Gale crater on Mars. So what's next?
Well, the next big goal for curiosity is to move into this
ancient flood channel called Gediz Vallis. And of course
there it's going to continue the search for ancient water on the
surface of Mars, and it's still going strong. Now there's some
damage to some of its wheels, but nothing that it can't deal
with its power system is still delivering enough energy for it.
All of its scientific instruments are working great.
So it's likely we'll still see many more years of science
coming from Curiosity. So we've got perseverance. We've got
curiosity, of course, we got the Chinese rovers we've got like
three rovers right now working on the surface of Mars, living
in the future. South Korea's first mission to the Moon. A
couple of weeks ago, we reported on South Korea's first orbital
launch their home grown rocket system was able to carry a
satellite payload into orbit. But they're also working on
their own mission to the Moon, which launched this week. It's
called Dindori which translates into enjoy the Moon and launched
on a SpaceX Falcon nine on a trajectory that's going to take
it to the Moon now, we don't know how it's gonna turn out.
But if it is successful, then South Korea will become the
seventh country to send a spacecraft to the Moon, which is
pretty exciting. The spacecraft is going to go into orbit at
about 100 kilometers above the Moon, and it's going to be
scanning the surface of the Moon. It's going to be testing
out different scientific instruments. And it's going to
be trying to identify potential landing spots for future
missions both by South Korea and other countries. So stay tuned
for that. A remote surgery robot is going to the International
Space Station.
And one of my questions shows several months back someone
asked me like how do astronauts deal with medical emergencies
onboard the International Space Station now they have a giant
book 1000 pages that gives detailed information on how to
deal with every medical issue they could face. But for most
situations, the answer is hoping to spacecraft and returned to
earth so that doctors can deal with it. But that's not ideal. I
mean, there's a lot of issues that astronauts won't be able to
deal with onboard the station without having to abort their
entire mission. So NASA is planning to send a surgery robot
to the International Space Station by 2024. And this robot
will be able to create very small incisions do surgery
inside the body do things like resection the bowel, which
sounds like pretty big surgery, but apparently it's not. Now
this can be done remotely. So there can be doctors here on
earth that are going to be working the surgical robot on
the space station. They've done several tests, they've done the
surgical tests here on Earth, and also an astronaut has
actually done surgery here on Earth, although the surgery was
cutting through rubber bands, and moving metal rings around to
demonstrate the capability. But if all goes well, we should see
this robot go to the space station in 2024. And they
continue a bunch of those tests. And you can imagine, again, some
kind of future where if there's some kind of medical issue
onboard the station, doctors on Earth can use this robot
remotely to be able to perform the surgery and keep the
astronauts safe and healthy without them having to
completely abandon their mission. And this will get even
more important when you think about situations where say
they're going to be on the surface of Mars, and other
astronauts are going to be in orbit, maybe you have a doctor
who's in orbit around Mars that will be able to perform certain
surgery on the astronauts that are down on the station when
help is months if not years away. Dwarf galaxies found
without dark matter. Yeah, we still don't know what dark
matter is. But it is a puzzle. And the one possibility is that
dark matter is some kind of particle that doesn't interact
with regular matter except through gravity. And then the
other possibility is that we just don't understand how
gravity works at the largest scales. And often, we're finding
evidence for the dark matter as a particle. But now we've got
more evidence for the dark matter as a we don't understand
gravity situation. And so what happened was astronomers were
looking at dwarf galaxies that were located in a galaxy
cluster, there's about 62 million light years away. And
these galaxies should be protected by a halo of dark
matter, that should be protecting it and allowing it to
maintain a fairly dwarf galaxy shape. And what they found was
that these galaxies have been distorted and mangled by the
gravity in this galaxy cluster, and they're not being protected
at all, which means that they probably don't have very much of
a halo of dark matter around them at all. And yet, this is
completely opposite to other evidence where astronomers have
found galaxies that have a surprising amount of dark matter
surrounding them, they're very well protected. So which is it?
We don't know, the mystery continues. Again, as always,
stay tuned, more evidence needed. Hubble is still going
strong. Now we've been sharing tons of pictures from the James
Webb Space Telescope, but don't rule out the Hubble Space
Telescope. It's still there. It's still working hard. It's
oversubscribed. And we got just an amazing picture of one of my
favorite types of objects. A globular star cluster. This is
NGC 6638. It's a globular cluster that it's located in the
Sagittarius region of the Milky Way, sort of near the core of
the Milky Way. There's a lot of globular star clusters in that
area. And what's amazing about globular star clusters is that
they're just these relics. They seem to be as old as the galaxy
itself, almost as old as the Universe itself. And yet they
hold together in this sort of buzzing ball of stars where the
average distance between the stars is about one light year
across so it was imagine like what would it be like to stand
on the planet in one of the stars were all of the stars
around your pack that closely together, it would be quite
inspiring. Where we are in the Milky Way, stars are only about
four light years. apart or even more, and so it would just be a
totally different experience to see the night sky. But Hubble
can get us most of the way there. So enjoy this picture.
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all the stories for this week. I'll see you next week one sneak
preview. I've got a very special interview coming up on August
22. Even though I'm in hiatus. I'm coming back to do one
special interview. I'm not going to tell you who it is yet, but
these images should give you a hint. All right, we'll see you
next week.