Fraser Cain: Hi everyone, I'm Fraser Cain, publisher of
Universe Today, I've been a space in astronomy news
journalist for over 20 years. Now, you might be familiar with
all of the Q A's and interviews that we do on this channel. But
this is a new segment where we cover all of the top breaking
news stories that are happening every week, you probably are
already subscribed to my weekly email newsletter goes up to
50,000 people every week. And this is like a subset, a news
bite version of all of the stories that I'm publishing in
the newsletter. So definitely sign up for the newsletter if
you want to read the email version. But for some of you,
you like to have the news videoed at you, we totally get
it. And that's what this is. So enjoy. For those of you who are
big fans of space and astronomy news, you know that there are
two great big, they're called the decadal surveys, there's the
astrophysics Decadal Survey and the planetary science when they
come up once every 10 years where all of the astronomers
come together, they build a wish list, a 700 Plus page book wish
list that they then send on to NASA and the other space
agencies, which is their priorities over the next coming
decades. And this week, the planetary science Decadal Survey
was released 780 Plus page book, I haven't read the whole thing
yet. But it talks about a lot of the priorities and good news.
The planetary scientists really want a mission to Uranus. And so
that's their top priority a flagship mission to go back and
we think about it, we haven't been back to Uranus, since that
first fly by by voyager 2 back in 1986. All the pictures you've
ever seen. The high resolution pictures of Uranus and its moons
were all taken during that one fly by in 86. So it's time to go
back. So the Uranus mission, they have to start pretty
quickly hoping to launch the mission in the early 2030s. So
that it can get a gravitational assist from Jupiter on its way
out to Uranus. But it's still not going to arrive until the
mid 2040. So be patient for this mission. Now they released sort
of two versions of their budget, there was like the lower budget
version that included this Uranus flagship mission. But if
there was a larger budget, they also proposed what they're
calling the Enceladus, orbiter lander. And so they want to have
an orbiter and lander that would go to Enceladus. And of course,
Enceladus is the place where you've got these tiger stripe
cracks at the bottom of the southern edge of Enceladus,
which is spraying water vapor out into space. And so in
theory, if there's like a habitable environment under the
ice on Enceladus, then an orbiter would be able to fly
through this material sense it tried to see if there's any
evidence of either the chemicals for life or actual life living
under the ice on Enceladus, and then a lander would be able to
go right to where these cracks are throwing material out into
space, examine them right there. And maybe we could try to get
some kind of evidence. If there's life anywhere else in
the Solar System. Those are just two missions, they had a whole
bunch of other recommendations. Continuing on a lot of the
existing planetary science missions, potentially a follow
on mission that comes after perseverance to continue the
search for life on Mars, the Mars sample return mission will
continue. And then possible missions to go to Venus, and a
return sample from asteroid comets. There's a lot of really
kind of cool things coming out of the Decadal Survey. And keep
in mind, all of these missions are just a wish list by the
planetary scientists, you're looking at the next 10 years of
missions are going to unfold, there's going to be a lot of
give and take, and who knows what will finally survive and
actually get a chance to launch for the last Decadal Survey. The
astronomers wanted a mission to Europa. And now we're looking
shortly we're gonna see the launch of the Europa Clipper.
They also wanted another mission that would go to Mars. And that
turned into Mars, perseverance rover, so you don't get all of
the missions. But you can see how this process goes from the
Decadal Survey wishlist to design to construction and
deployment of these missions.
NASA is having a tough time testing the Space Launch System.
So we've been covering the construction of the Space Launch
System. It kind of feels like for my entire career. But, but
really, we've been seeing all these integration tests, various
tests of the rocket system of the solid rocket boosters. As
it's all coming together, we've seen a test flight of the Orion
capsule, and now the whole rocket has been stacked up and
carried out on the transporter out to the launch pad. And NASA
was hoping to do some tests of the Space Launch System. So it's
called the wet dress rehearsal and it involves a lot of
refueling base tests of the rocket. So there were a few
glitches, but the big one was there was a leak in the tail.
Surface mass unit. And this connects the core stage on the
purge canister, and none of their plans around it, were able
to fix it, they were able to do a slow phase fill. But then when
they tried to do their fast fill phase, the leak was detected and
they had to stop the tests. And so now the plan is to roll the
Space Launch System back to the Vehicle Assembly Building, fix
the errors that they were able to detect with this test and
then have to roll it back out onto the launch pad and test it
again. Obviously, this is going to add a delay to the flight
weeks, possibly months. And so now we're really starting to
find out whether it's going to be spaceflight system or
starship that's going to be flying. First, the United States
proposes a ban of anti satellite weapons. So the presentation
this week, Vice President Kamala Harris said that the US would
stop doing anti satellite weapons testing. And many of the
nations around the world have actually done tests. America has
done it, the Chinese have done it, Russians have done it, the
Indians have done it. And the challenge is that when they do
these anti satellite tested leaves this cloud of debris in
low Earth orbit that can risk other satellites, like the 1000s
of satellite communication satellites that are being
launched, as well as the inhabited space stations, both
the International Space Station and the Chinese Space Station.
This week, the US proposed they would no longer be doing these
anti satellite weapon tests, and urge other nations to do the
same thing to essentially keep the low Earth orbit space
environment as clean as possible. And in fact, like
literally the day that I'm recording this, the astronauts
onboard the International Space Station had to deal with the
potential impact from a chunk of debris that had happened from a
anti satellite test that had happened from Russia just a
couple of years ago. And so the implications of these anti
satellite tests they go on for years as this debris slowly
cleans out of the low Earth orbit environment. So that
should be a good step. And hopefully, we will see any more
of these anti satellite tests in the future. Wow, perseverance is
a solar eclipse on Mars. Last week on The first version of
this news show, we talked about perseverance finding its own
parachute on the surface of Mars. And this time,
perseverance looked up and watched Mars moon Phobos as it
passed in front of the Sun. Now Phobos is really close to the
surface of Mars, only about 7500 kilometers altitude, and so it's
so much closer, and yet fits quite nicely in front of the Sun
as it passed in front. perseverance has a much better
set of cameras, optic system than other rovers. And so you've
seen these, these transits eclipses of Phobos in front of
the Sun in the past, but this is the best one, by far. And it
really shows you sort of the shape this sort of weird,
irregular rocky shape of Phobos as it passed, and I'm in front
of the Sun. The Eclipse took place on April 2 and lasted
about 40 seconds. And more perseverance, news. Perseverance
begins the next phase of its mission study in ancient
riverbed on Mars. So again, we've talked about this, we've
been over a year of perseverance exploring the surface of Mars,
it's located at Jezero crater on Mars, which is one of the best
places to search for some kind of evidence that the conditions
for early Mars were conducive to life. It's not searching for
life. Exactly, but it's looking for the conditions for life. And
Jezero crater is this ancient lake that had filled up and
drained out billions of years ago. And so everywhere
perseverance looks, it was probably the conditions for
life. But its goal has been this ancient riverbed. And now just
this week, perseverance arrived at this location. And this place
is perfect, because you've got this stream that was flowing
inside this ancient lake bed, and it's depositing silt layers
over a long period of time. And so perseverance is going to be
able to go and find some of these areas where these eluvial
silt is being with lay down year after year after year, and allow
it to roll back the history, the geologic history of Mars and try
to get a sense of how water was acting in this region. And it's
likely perseverance going to spend a long time exploring this
area and take a lot of samples that will then be added to the
list for the Mars sample return mission Coming on into the
2030s. If you like all of the Space News that we're creating
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kind of hovering around the 800 to 900 patron range. And so we
wanted to try and have a big push and try and get to 1000
patrons. And we figured, let's have a race.
We talked about how Space Launch System and starship who's gonna
get to space first, can we get to 1000 patrons before either of
them launch. And we've got an idea which people have been
asking me to do a book club, on our Discord and on Universe
Today and maybe on the video on YouTube. So, okay, if we get to
1000 patrons, we'll do a book club, we'll pick some science
fiction book. And we'll figure out a way to read it together.
And we'll cover it and talk about some of the ideas and
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for interviews and things like that. So I know we'll make
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1000 patrons before it's based on system or starship launch.
Pluto's orbit is surprisingly unstable. This is an exclusive
story that we had on Universe Today. And actually, we had a
lot of people reading pretty excited about it. And so I
actually booked an interview with the research behind this.
Dr. Renu Malhotra. She's going to be talking next week. And
we're going to go into the details. So I'll understand it a
lot more after I've had a chance to talk to her. But here's the
gist is that Pluto was discovered back in 1930. And it
was actually fairly hard to find because it has a very eccentric
orbit and highly inclined orbit. And it takes about 248 years to
go around the Sun. And what's interesting is it has this
really strange interaction with Neptune and some of the other
planets in the outer solar system. Pluto's orbit is so
eccentric, it actually crosses the orbit of Neptune. And for
about 20 years long, each one of its orbit, it gets closer to the
Sun than Neptune does. And so you're probably wondering, like,
why doesn't Pluto crash into Neptune at some point in his
orbit. And the fact is that Neptune and Pluto are in a
resonance. And so the gravity interaction between the two of
them, keeps them in lockstep with each other, so they never
actually crash. And it was thought that over long periods
of time, this was very, very stable, but hard to explain. And
so Dr. Malhotra and others did some long term calculations
using the gravity of not only Neptune, but also Uranus and
Jupiter and Saturn with Pluto. And what they found was although
it's very stable over long periods of time, over billions
of years, over short periods of time, it actually changes within
a fairly set range. It's quite chaotic, actually. And you can
think about the implications of this, you know, as we're
searching for Planet Nine farther out into the Solar
System, the gravity of all of these giant planets out there in
the outer solar system are interacting with all of these
Kuipter Belt objects Pluto, and the other dwarf planets and may
make their detection in some cases, easier ways to predict
them, but also may be more difficult, because they're not
in the places you'd expect them to be over long periods of time.
Chinese astronomers record the earliest account of auroras I
live in Canada, which is fairly far north. And so when we've got
a lot of solar activity, like we're starting to get Now, we
can get auroras and I got to tell you like, if you've never
seen an aurora, it is one of the greatest events you can
experience. It's like the whole sky comes alive with shimmers of
green and purple and red. And it just can seem alive. It's
incredible. And cameras do not capture the experience of seeing
an aurora. Now, for most people on Earth who live farther away
from the poles, you can't see them there really only, you
know, you have to be close to the poles to be able to actually
see Aurora activity. But when there's really severe solar
storms, then Aurora is can appear anywhere on Earth. And so
astronomers have gone through historical records of
observations of the sky for times that Aurora is have been
seen. And they're able to use that to very date various events
in history. And so there was a fairly famous Chinese
astronomical record called the bamboo annals, and it was
written in the fourth century BCE.
So in the bamboo animals, astronomers recorded an event
they called the five color light and happened about the 10th
century BCE during the Zhao dynasty. And based on the data
that was in these records, astronomers We're able to date
almost exactly when these rollers were probably seen. And
they're able to tie it to which solar cycle was happening around
that time and better zero when, when the Zhao dynasty was
happening, and when the solar activity was happening. And it's
incredible, what seems like just in historical records, somebody
writes down something that they saw on the sky. But in fact,
people have used it to get a much better sense of when fairly
famous events happened in history. And this is just
another example. All of Hubble's images in a single photo, happy
birthday to the Hubble Space Telescope, they have been
operating for 32 years. And during this period, it's made
1.4 million observations, which is a lot. And Dr. Casey Handmer.
I've interviewed him several times in the past, he was
wondering like, how much of the sky is that. And so he wrote a
computer algorithm pulled in all of the public observation data
from the Hubble Space Telescope, crunched the numbers, and drew a
picture that essentially mapped out every single place and size
and shape of observing data that Hubble had done throughout its
time. And you would think it would be a fairly big chunk of
the sky. And it turns out, it's about point 8% of the entire sky
has been imaged by Hubble. And so, even though Hubble has been
operating for 32 years, the skies a really big place, and
most of the sky has never been seen in a high level of detail.
But here's a picture that shows you what has been seen so far.
Just to give you a couple of updates on what we've been doing
around Universe Today. We had an amazing interview with Dr. Slava
Turyshev about the solar gravitational lens concept,
where you turn the Sun into a telescope, and it is a mind
bending interview, I highly recommend you listen to it, it
will change your understanding of what's possible what we could
see on exoplanets. If we were able to get this mission
together, I also had a great interview with Celeste Keith
about primordial mass black holes. And Dr. Paul Sutter, our
resident astrophysicist has been running a long running series of
articles called astronomy one to one, it's talking about every
single concept in astronomy that you can think of. It's all
there, you should definitely check it out on Universe Today.
Alright, well, that was just a snapshot of some of the news
that we covered on Universe Today this week. And really, I
mean, the newsletter is probably 20 Plus stories, plus links to
another 20 or 30 interesting stories that I saw this week,
research journals, other videos. So we're doing a lot of space
news on Universe Today, and should definitely go and check
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Join our Patreon community at patreon.com/universe. Today,
help us get to that 1000 patrons. Can we as a community
get 1000 patrons before either Space Launch System or starship
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patreon.com/universe today. And thank you everybody who gave us
feedback. Last week, we hear you. You wanted us to change the
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send me an email however you want so that we can improve this
and make it better week after week after week. And I'd like to
make a special thanks to Anton Pozdyanakov, who has been
working behind the scenes to come up with ideas helped me
develop Universe Today been doing some of the editing, some
of the graphic work. A lot of you've been noticing that and I
couldn't do this without Anton. So thank you, Anton. And
hopefully we've got even more better ideas coming soon. All
right. We'll see you all next week.