Latest / Made of Stars / Erin Go to Space!
Transcript
- 0:00Warning. The following podcast contains an entertaining look at astronomy, physics, and
- 0:04space news throughout the known universe. Listeners have been known to learn about astronomical
- 0:08phenomenon the scientific method and expanded vocabulary to include terms like quasar asterism and uranus.
- 0:15Listen, that's your own risk. Go ahead. We're made of stars,
- 0:24made them stars, madsizes. When made of stars, you could be
- 0:34from high they would new Mexicomas where stars When we are made of stars.
- 0:55Joined by my good friend doctor Sean Cruising from Columbus State University's Coca Cola Space
- 1:00Center. I'm Wes Carroll more than Shan. Good morning West, good to
- 1:03be here today. We realized as we wrapped the show last week we had
- 1:07a bit of a hang in Chad, just one of the you know,
- 1:10for people that remember that particular election twenty something years ago. We just we
- 1:15had one little thing we were gonna circle back to, and then we never
- 1:19did on the show. So while we don't have a definitive answer yet,
- 1:26but we were discussing last week about the amount of time that we have had
- 1:32astronauts orbiting the Earth consecutively, and I asked the question, can we find
- 1:38out for certain if there's always been an American on board. We believe that
- 1:42to be the case, although the old Google machine doesn't give us a definitive
- 1:48answer, does it. You know what's funny is now we all have different
- 1:53sources of truth. Yeah, in twenty twenty three compared to when, as
- 1:57you said, you know, twenty years ago. Go and Google's one of
- 2:02those, right, Like, if I can't Google it and find it,
- 2:05I'm just lost. What do I do next? There used to be these
- 2:08things called books. We used to look things up in books, encyclopedias.
- 2:14Those are hard to find now. So so yeah, so I deferred the
- 2:17question to our space historian, mister Scott Norman here at Space Science Center,
- 2:21and Scott gave me his definitive answer of I can't ever remember a time,
- 2:27which is far from definitive. So if I was going to publish a research
- 2:30paper on this, I would say, yeah, we still maybe need to
- 2:34do some more research. You know, we're a podcast, so we can
- 2:36get away with saying all manner of things. Right, We're gonna say this,
- 2:39we are not aware of a time that we left the Russians up there
- 2:46like a bunch of frat boys to run the space station by themselves. Yes,
- 2:49I just can't ever remember a time, and neither could Scott, and
- 2:53so I believe that there was never a time where we didn't have Americans on
- 2:59board the ISA, with the Russians just doing kind of like you know,
- 3:04like dorm room supervision, you know, kind of like that whole business.
- 3:07So so anyway, we're gonna go with that answer. Now, listeners,
- 3:13this is where you get to participate. It's fun. Go ahead, send
- 3:16less an email. Sure, go ahead, say that cruising guy is a
- 3:22nut. He's wrong. He didn't look in a book. I blew the
- 3:25dust off this book on my bookshelf and it said the one time when Russians
- 3:29were solely in charge of the ISS. I don't think that happened. But
- 3:32go ahead, if you find that, you know, let us know.
- 3:35But I'm gonna go ahead and say until I hear that there's never been a
- 3:38time where we didn't have Americans on board ISS. So you say, we're
- 3:42a podcast, and therefore we can say, you know, certain things.
- 3:46We do try to keep things as accurate as possible, although on the occasion
- 3:51that we misspeak, on the occasion that we might leave out a word.
- 3:55God knows I've done that before. That certainly helps to to clarify the statement
- 4:01I was trying to make. Sometimes you need that one word before the second
- 4:04word to make the word mean what you want it to mean, which I
- 4:10can think of a very specific incident. I did that once, sadly,
- 4:14and I'll never forget it. It's that you always remember I played sports,
- 4:17you know, high school. As an adult, I remember every goal I
- 4:21missed. I can just tell you that I don't remember all the I don't
- 4:26remember all the goals I scored. I remember every single one I missed,
- 4:30however, which was a lot. Sadly, it would be easier to remember
- 4:33the ones I made, but we try to keep it accurate. We try
- 4:38to do that and what we can just say and I feel very comfortable because
- 4:41this was the other qualifier that we had last week after we realized we forgot
- 4:45to recircle back, was that we don't remember a time when there wasn't an
- 4:50American on board, and if it did happen, it probably happened very early
- 4:56in the process. It would have probably been in the first few years.
- 5:00So I feel like if someone does come back and say hey, hey,
- 5:01hey, this is when it happened, it would probably be somewhere. I
- 5:05mean, I feel like if we say in the first five years, that's
- 5:09probably when it might have happened, if it happened at all. Do you
- 5:13think that's a fair way to put it. I think it's a very fair
- 5:15way to put it. And I think the statement that we made is highly
- 5:18accurate, which is I don't remember a time. Yes, that's one hundred
- 5:21percent. I do not remember a time either, Yes, so I can
- 5:27either confirm nor deny, but I don't remember. I personally do not remember
- 5:30time. And you know my memory, I mean, my memory shouldn't be
- 5:34really trusted that much anyway. So I try to just defer to facts and
- 5:39other sources as many times as I can on this show, because, like
- 5:42you, I have a high ethical standard and want to keep this baby accurate.
- 5:45Yep. But I did go check with our space historian as well,
- 5:48who came up with the same answer as me, which is he can never
- 5:51remember a time. So there's two of us or you know, employed in
- 5:56this industry that can neither one of us remember a time. And I'm going
- 5:59to go I'm gonna stick with that. That sounds very good until we're proven
- 6:02otherwise exactly. Yeah, Well, they can't prove. They can't prove that
- 6:06I can't remember it. I mean, I'm gonna go ahead just say I
- 6:10pretty much can't remember. Yeah. Times, that's a verifiable fact. I
- 6:14can't. I don't trust my memory either. I don't even remember what we're
- 6:16talking about. Let's jump into this James Web story. We have a nuther
- 6:23and and it seems this is pretty rare. I do remember the fact that
- 6:25we've had a number of wins for James Webb since this thing was launched.
- 6:30I think since they dropped it and it wasn't broken, it's had a bunch
- 6:33of wins since then. I think that's the best way to view it.
- 6:35Even the drop turned it wasn't really a loss there because nothing really happened to
- 6:40it other than delayed the launch. But since it's been in place and working,
- 6:46when after when after when? And this is a pretty cool story we
- 6:50have this morning about the origins of how the Earth was formed. Yeah,
- 6:55and before we get into that, I would just say, you know,
- 6:57I did compare the Russians to a bunch of frat boys. But don't even
- 6:59get started on the James Webspace Telescope scientists, because those people. Have you
- 7:05seen them at the American Astronomical Society conferences. Oh man, that's one rowdy
- 7:11group. Anyways, I have shade on their head. And all right,
- 7:14I mean if they can find one at the organic coffee shop, if they
- 7:17can find one there, they're gonna put it on their head. So anyway,
- 7:20Jwst ladies and gentlemen, James Webspace Telescope has made another really important discovery
- 7:28that supports a long standing theory about the way that we think planets are created
- 7:33around not only other stars, but in the past they were created around our
- 7:38own Sun as well. Let me give you a rundown on that. So
- 7:44there's something called solar nebula theory that basically describes an evolutionary process by which the
- 7:50Sun itself formed by pulling in hot gas and dust out of a hot gas
- 7:56and dust cloud and hats a relative So it's hot on the inside where where
- 8:01the where that proto Sun was forming. But then in the outer reaches of
- 8:05the same disk of material, little dust grains were bumping into each other,
- 8:11and if they were far enough away from that proto Sun, they likely were
- 8:16coated with the ices of various volatile compounds such as water, yes, but
- 8:22also things like methane, ammonia, and other substances. There are volatile compounds
- 8:28that we find throughout our solar system. So these if you've ever been out
- 8:35where it's really snowed, a kind of a wet snow, not really a
- 8:37dry snow, but kind of a wet snow, you'll know that wet snows
- 8:41are better for making snowmen and snowballs because the wet snow sticks together. So
- 8:48imagine within this disk of material, little dust particles coated with ice bumping into
- 8:54one another, kind of like one wet snowball bumping into another wet snowball,
- 9:00and they stick together. That process is labeled with a word that we call
- 9:03accretion. So accretion is the process of these little frozen particles bumping together and
- 9:11sticking together to make a bigger particle. And then those bigger particles bump together
- 9:16and stick to stick together to make even bigger particles than that. So after
- 9:22enough time, you have stuck enough particles together that then their gravitational influence begins
- 9:30to be important and they start to pull in other dust and gases via their
- 9:35gravity so the formation of planets in early solar systems is kind of a two
- 9:41step process, first accretion and then later gravitation. Okay, that's kind of
- 9:46a just a cartoon level view. So here's what JWST found. JWST,
- 9:52the J's Webspace telescope, was looking at a several discs of material forming a
- 10:00on other very young stars, and in particular the two more compact discs of
- 10:05the four that they examined, which are the two more evolutionarily mature, they've
- 10:11been collapsing longer. Those two discs had a distinct ring of steam. Now
- 10:18it's cold steam, but it's vaporous water h two ozer coming up out of
- 10:26a place that they referred to in a forming solar system as the snow line.
- 10:31Okay, what's the snow line. Imagine traveling outward from the star in
- 10:37the center of the disc, and of course it's hot near the star or
- 10:41the protostar, but the farther you get away from that campfire, the colder
- 10:43it gets. Well, eventually it gets so cold that things begin to freeze.
- 10:48That's what the snow line is in a galaxy, or I'm sorry,
- 10:54in a solar system, a forming solar system. So therefore, in this
- 10:56forming solar system, you have the snow line. Well, when JWST astronomers
- 11:03were examining their data, they found in the discs of a couple of compact
- 11:07starforming regions or solar systems in formation, they found inside the snow line a
- 11:16ring of steam. All right, how does that either confirm or deny the
- 11:22idea of how planets form. Well, here's how it does. Because there's
- 11:26thought to be a process called pebble infall, where these frozen pebbles that have
- 11:33stuck together via accretion tend to migrate towards the inner part of the parent solar
- 11:39system. And if that's true, it's necessarily true to form planets on the
- 11:43inside. So if that's true, there would be a point where they crossed
- 11:48the snow line and things got too warm for them to hold onto their watery
- 11:54or otherwise volatile sticky materials, and suddenly you had have a ring of steam.
- 12:00Well that's a theoretical idea, but friends, the JWST, the James
- 12:05Webspace Telescope team, actually was able to identify that very feature in two real
- 12:13solar systems in the process of forming. So when you have a whole theoretical
- 12:18construct and you come up with con consequences that should exist if your idea is
- 12:24correct, and then you go out and actually find those things in reality.
- 12:31It's like a giant green light saying, yes, you were right. Here
- 12:35is the result of your correct ideas, and you can see it on display
- 12:41in an actual physical system out there in the Milky Way. It's pretty darn
- 12:46cool. And so that's what they found. Andrea Benzatti of Texas State University,
- 12:50was one of the lead authors on the study, had this quote,
- 12:54the web results finally revealed the connection between water vapor in the inner disc of
- 12:58the solar sece system and the drift of icy pebbles from the outer disc.
- 13:03So there's finally now this physical connection. Hopefully I explained it well enough that
- 13:07you can kind of follow along. But this is a giant high five,
- 13:13not only for these observational astronomers, but for all the theoretical astronomers that work
- 13:16to say, hey, one of the things we should look for if we're
- 13:20correct, is this ring of cold water steam just inside the snow line of
- 13:26the forming solar systems. And lo and behold there It was fantastic example of
- 13:33how science works. Amazing when for the folks working with the James Webbs Face
- 13:37Telescope, this seems like an appropriate spot. Even though they're not paying us
- 13:41in any way, shape or form, it just seems like a good spot
- 13:43from a pop culture standpoint. To mention Ghostbusters Frozen Empire, the new trailer
- 13:48has dropped, coming to theaters March twenty ninth. I mean, they're not
- 13:52paying us, we're not showing any I'm just pointing out from a pop culture
- 13:56standpoint, the trailer is out and some of these very things seem to be
- 14:01taking place in the trailer. It's it's a pretty looks pretty good. I
- 14:05mean it's probably happening just outside the snow line. Yeah, exactly, yes,
- 14:09I mean that would be it. I mean, no, you take
- 14:13it, look it. No, No, that's good. Let's talk about
- 14:16the Starship, because we've been following this saga. That is the Starship.
- 14:22It it blew up the launch pad just with sheer force. Sheer power alone
- 14:26blew up the launch pad. And when Elon Musk said we hope we don't
- 14:31blow up the launch pad, we thought he meant the rocket explode there.
- 14:33No, no, no, no, it was just the actual propulsion that
- 14:37blew up the launch pad. It's been an ongoing saga to try to figure
- 14:39out when are we going to be able to do another test launch on this
- 14:43thing. They've been going through things with the FAA, with the environmental folks.
- 14:50Every time we seem to get like a little more information about when they
- 14:52might launch it. This is just my impression. We get told it may
- 14:58be this date, and then Elon or someone at SpaceX. I'm just gonna
- 15:01blame Elon, but someone there says no, no, no, maybe this
- 15:05date which is much closer. And then somebody comes in and says, hey,
- 15:09not so fast. That seems to have happened now a couple of times.
- 15:11Well, maybe it could happen this month, and maybe it could happen
- 15:15really in a few days according to them. Yes, So the important part
- 15:20of this story we did. You did a fantastic job explaining why there was
- 15:26a giant mess down there in Boca Chica, Texas. You know, SpaceX
- 15:30just basically made a giant mess out of a very large area by trying to
- 15:35launch way too big a rocket without a sound suppression system or acoustic suppression system,
- 15:41which is what the big water towers do at the Kennedy Space Center when
- 15:45they flood the launch pads, all right. So so because of that,
- 15:50the FAA got involved, as you said, But then also the US Fish
- 15:54and Wildlife Service got involved because apparently there were there was enough environmental damage caused
- 16:03by this event that fish and wildlife were both put at risk. And turns
- 16:08out that they're not really in any hurry to get their final report done so
- 16:15that SpaceX can launch about you know, the report is on the mitigation techniques
- 16:21that SpaceX will employ to never ever do that again. It's like, you
- 16:23know, going to the board and saying, I'm gonna write five hundred times,
- 16:26I will never blow up my launch bet again. I will never blow
- 16:30up my launch bet again. It's kind of so they had to do a
- 16:33lot of mitigation to the actual systems to try to see if they could prevent
- 16:37a similar event from taking place. And then the US Fish and Wildlife Service
- 16:41is obligated to review those modifications, but at no given pace, right,
- 16:47So they have many many days and they don't. They don't have to get
- 16:49it approved by mid November, all right. In the meantime, just a
- 16:55few days ago, and we reported that about this on the podcast. Bill
- 16:57Gerstenmeyer, who represent SpaceX but is a longtime NASA headliner, shall we say,
- 17:03testified in front of Congress that the government bureaucracies were keeping the commercial space
- 17:11companies down. They were slowing things down way too much. And the exact
- 17:14example he was using was the US Fish and Wildlife Service holding up SpaceX's Starship
- 17:21from launching. So Gersty was up there testifying on Capitol Hill. Well,
- 17:25Gersty gets back to SpaceX and guess what. SpaceX puts out a message on
- 17:30their website, maybe on a platform formerly known as Twitter that might also have
- 17:37X on the title anyway, So they put out a message there saying,
- 17:42hey, we're ready to go as soon as November thirteenth. Well, they're
- 17:47talking from an engineering standpoint, and they're talking about the modifications that they've made
- 17:52and reported to the US government, but until the US Fish and Wildlife Service
- 17:56clears them, they can't launch. However, these statements may bee meant to
- 18:03apply a little extra political pressure after the Gerstenmeyer testimonies up on Capitol Hill to
- 18:10try to get the US Fish and Wildlife Service to speed up their reporting and
- 18:15clear them for launch within as you said something less than a week now from
- 18:19when we're recording this podcast, so it's a very short time. Will it
- 18:25happen or is just just another ploy? It's a really interesting question. If
- 18:29you want to read more about this story, there's a great article on spaceflight
- 18:33now dot com. Go check it out at spaceflightnow dot com. But again,
- 18:37according to SpaceX representatives, SpaceX is ready to go with its Starship launch
- 18:42and all the modifications therein as soon as November thirteen. All right, another
- 18:48SpaceX story as and I guess for the folks in Ireland it would be aaron
- 18:52go to space as SpaceX prefares to launch Ireland's first ever satellite. This one.
- 19:00Yes, So there's a satellite that was built. It's a great story
- 19:04because it's a student leed satellite. Uh. It's a cube sat, which
- 19:10means it's a micro satellite or a small satellite. It's it's a gamma ray
- 19:15observatory. It's a little tiny, you know the size of your laptop,
- 19:18roughly gamma ray observatory. And it was built by the Irish Educational Research Group
- 19:26at the University College at Dublin, which is great. The name of the
- 19:30satellite is the Educational Irish Research Satellite one, or as you pronounced a moment
- 19:37ago, ire SAT one IRISAT one. It could be ear SAT. I
- 19:41don't know. I think it's ir SAT, but anyway, I'm not gonna
- 19:45argue that I would go ir I think it's you know, when they spell
- 19:47Ireland in like the Olympics, I think they put the E in there,
- 19:49don't they. So that's it would be yeah, e I R Ireland.
- 19:52Yeah, I think so. I mean it seems gaylic, it seems like
- 19:55a Gaelic thing to do. So all right, So ire SAT one as
- 19:59part of the European Space Agencies Academy which is called Fly Your Satellite FYS,
- 20:07the Fly Your Satellite program sponsored by ISSA. So it's kind of a cool
- 20:11thing, right. Imagine a bunch of students in a relatively small college that
- 20:15get to be involved in a European Space Agency program where they construct and build
- 20:21their own gamma ray observatory that's a microsat, and they get to fly it
- 20:26aboard a SpaceX Falcon rocket. So that's the whole thing that's taking place.
- 20:30It's unfolding. Not only is this little cube sat built by the Irish students.
- 20:36Not only is it a gamma ray observatory. It's also got a couple
- 20:40of other really interesting tests that it's going to do. The main payload is
- 20:44gamma ray a gamma ray module, but it also has a couple of other
- 20:48important tests aboard. They're going to test to see whether a new oxide thermal
- 20:53coating can protect the satellite from the space environment, which is kind of a
- 20:59neat thing. And then they have something else called wave based control. Wave
- 21:04based control, so I had to look this term up make sure I understood
- 21:07what it was, but it's basically this. The satellite has maybe not the
- 21:15same number of retro rockets that you would have on a full sized satellite for
- 21:21being able to spin it and turn it and doing all the kind of maneuvers
- 21:25that you would want to do in space. So they figured out another way
- 21:29to move this little satellite around, which is simply this. They get the
- 21:33fuel sloshing. They slash the fuel on the inside of this cube sat at
- 21:38a certain rate, which corresponds to a resonance within the rocket itself. So
- 21:45it's kind of like this. If you've ever been on a swing and you
- 21:49know how to kick your feet to get yourself swinging without touching the ground right,
- 21:55and you kind of build a rhythm of kicking your feet out and pulling
- 21:57on the chains, but you're never really touching the earth. You're performing an
- 22:03internal resonance to get your swing moving back and forth and back and forth without
- 22:08ever touching the ground. Well, this is sort of like the internal spacecraft
- 22:15version of that. They're getting their fuel to slash in and out in and
- 22:18out with inside the vehicle, which can actually begin to cause the vehicle,
- 22:23when paired with the other thrusters, to move in certain orientations. And so
- 22:30this is a really cool new way to maneuver a satellite in space without having
- 22:36to put an extra rocket thrust aboard. You're able to do it with the
- 22:40internal mechanics of the device itself. And so this is a really cool test.
- 22:45Beyond yes measuring gamma ray bursts from space, which is great, beyond
- 22:49yes testing new protective oxide thermal coatings, they can also test this new way
- 22:56to actually move a rocket around. It's a proof of but if they show
- 23:00it to be valid, they may be able to start incorporating it on other
- 23:06small satellites, which lowers the cost of them because they don't have to add
- 23:10on new rocket engines. So way to go ir Sat one for Ireland's first
- 23:17ever satellite to space and a test of a really cool control system on board.
- 23:22We hope them, We wish them the very best and hope them for
- 23:26them the best of success. Coming up after a quick break, an update
- 23:30on Ingenuity. Yes, it's still flying and we'll talk about Supernova nineteen eighty
- 23:34seven right after this. So the lifespan for NASA's Ingenuity helicopter has a far
- 24:00past what they expected, which is great, especially considering it's preparing for something
- 24:07significant on Mars. Yeah, so they thought, hey, let's stick this
- 24:11little helicopter on the Perseverance rover. And it's small enough that it could just
- 24:15drop right out from under the rover as if the rover was giving birth on
- 24:18the Red planet. And then we'll leave it there until the rover drives off.
- 24:22But then we'll deploy these little blades and it's like a little cube sat
- 24:26itself. It's a little got a little cubic fuselage basically for lack of a
- 24:30better term, And maybe this thing, maybe we can actually fly to the
- 24:33Martian atmosphere. Maybe once you know, get a cool video of Perseverance,
- 24:38maybe we can fly two or three times, probably not gonna last beyond that.
- 24:42Oh were they wrong. So the Ingenuity Helicopter, as part of the
- 24:49Mars Perseverance Rover program, has just completed it's sixty fifth and sixty sixth flight
- 24:59on the Red planet. Sixty six times. This little helicopter has taken to
- 25:04the air, landed safely, recharged with its own little solar panels, and
- 25:11is ready to fly again. Friends. That's an amazing story. This is
- 25:17a success story, right. The most recent flights of the Ingenuity helicopter have
- 25:23been just a couple of short hops. They want this helicopter be in a
- 25:27very specific position relative to the Perseverance Rover, which is the easiest to help
- 25:33it communicate with the rover and possibly get back on track if it gets lost
- 25:38for a little while. Because it turns out that the planet Mars is about
- 25:42to go out of view from the planet Earth for about two weeks. It's
- 25:48going out of view on the backside of the Sun. This is what we
- 25:52call a conjunction, and so when Mars moves behind the Sun relative to the
- 25:56Earth, we can't send radio signs up to Mars, which means we can't
- 26:02position or control our rovers or our helicopters. If the Ingenuity helicopter was not
- 26:08in the right spot to successfully recharge itself, or if it was not in
- 26:14the right spot to successfully communicate back with the home base, which is the
- 26:18Mars Perseverance Rover, we might actually lose that helicopter on Mars. And since
- 26:22it's been so successful at surpassing its initial mission, we want to keep that
- 26:27little guy going right. So the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and those folks at NASA
- 26:33performed a couple of little flights to make sure that the helicopter was sitting in
- 26:37the goldilocks just right position that when we regain signal in a couple of weeks,
- 26:42we'll be able to communicate with the helicopter and be able to get it
- 26:45back on track for more future flights up on Mars, which is really cool.
- 26:49So the last two flights happened on November second and November three. On
- 26:56November second, Ingenuity only stayed a law for about forty eight seconds and only
- 27:00flew about twenty three feet. The flight the next day, on November third,
- 27:04was even shorter. It was only twenty three seconds and only flew about
- 27:08three feet. It almost flew perfectly vertically, very little horizontal movement. But
- 27:15between those two flights it is now sitting at the just right Goldilock spot relative
- 27:21to the rover to be able to recharge itself, to communicate with the rover
- 27:23well, and be ready to go. When Mars clears the sun as viewed
- 27:29from Earth, the conjunction ends and we can start to fly and explore the
- 27:33service of Mars again. Of all of its accomplishments, of all of the
- 27:37winds for this thing, maybe the best win, biggest win, I think,
- 27:42is just the name ingenuity for how successful this thing has been. What
- 27:48an absolute marvel this thing has been on Mars. Yep, it really has.
- 27:53I mean again, when people, I think, maybe in the media
- 27:59or maybe social media to really like to point out and make fun of failures
- 28:03within the technological communities like NASA, it's like, oh, you took all
- 28:07our tax money and slammed a spacecraft into Mars. Very often we overlook or
- 28:11don't talk enough about the ridiculously impressive successes of the Space Agency, and they're
- 28:18various scientists and engineers. This is certainly one of those. Right we are
- 28:22flying an aerial vehicle in the atmosphere of an alien planet. That is really
- 28:30cool. And so over these sixty six flights of ingenuity up on Mars,
- 28:34it's traveled more than nine miles, so I'm not really sure how many kilometers
- 28:40that is, some number of kilometers nos anyway, so no one knows it.
- 28:45But it's also stayed aloft for one hundred and nineteen minutes, so it
- 28:49means it's flown for more than an hour and a half of cumulative time,
- 28:52which is just crazy, right, it's almost two hours, so so again,
- 28:59success story. The ingenuity almost felt like an afterthought. It kind of
- 29:03got added to the mission a little bit late. It was only supposed to
- 29:07be a proof of concept. And the fact that it is now the scout
- 29:10for the rover. It flies ahead of the rover and looks at the terrain
- 29:14and make sure everything is safe, and then it comes back down for a
- 29:17safe landing, relays all that information back to JPL and they can drive the
- 29:21rover itself more safely through the Martian terrain. You just don't get better than
- 29:26that. It's really it's a it's a great success story, very cool outcome.
- 29:29So astronomers are trying to detect gravitational waves coming from supernova nineteen eighty seven
- 29:34A s N one nine eighty seven A I believe is the catalog number.
- 29:40Yes it is. And so friends, you know, I know, I've
- 29:42told a lot of stories today so far. I'm kind of in a chatty
- 29:45mood apparently on the podcast today. But I will tell you this, I
- 29:48do have a little bit of a personal story that goes in conjunction with the
- 29:52supernova supernova nineteen eighty seven A. Now, I had nothing to do with
- 29:56any of the science. However, there was a guy by the name of
- 30:00Ian Shelton who is one of the co discoverers. And Ian Shelton was basically
- 30:04at an observatory down in the Southern Hemisphere waiting for the sky to get dark
- 30:11and clouds to clear, and he was looking at some plates from and I'm
- 30:15saying plates because this was in eighty seven we didn't have digital cameras right,
- 30:19so they were looking at photographic plates. And he was looking at his photographic
- 30:23plate from the night before when he realized that he would actually see a star
- 30:30in the sky that was not on the plate from the night before, of
- 30:33the very region of the sky that he was photographing. So he stepped out
- 30:37and said, wait a minute, I need to go look at this for
- 30:40my own eye again. And yes, he stepped outside, and there it
- 30:42is a bright and shining star up there in what's called the large Magelantic Cloud,
- 30:48which is a a companion galaxy to our Milky Way. But you can
- 30:52see it naked eye. So he stepped out and looked up at the sky
- 30:55and there's that bright light. So he walked quickly over to the neighboring of
- 31:00and asked one of the technicians there, hey, did you see this thing?
- 31:03And the guy there said, you know what, I actually did.
- 31:07I saw that too. There's something really unusual going on. So they picked
- 31:11up the phone and contacted the Bureau of International Telegrams at the International Astronomical Union,
- 31:18which is a place where you report phenomenons such as this, and they
- 31:23got their names listed as the discoverers of super nova nineteen eighty seven. Eight.
- 31:27Now, none of that tells you why it's a personal connection to me.
- 31:30So here comes that punchline, which is this again. Ian Shelton,
- 31:34co discoverer, was the brother of a guy that I knew named David Shelton,
- 31:41who was the department chair at the University of Nevada Las Vegas Physics Department
- 31:45when I was a grad student, so I knew doctor David Shelton very well.
- 31:51He's the older and somewhat more studious and detail oriented of the two brothers.
- 31:56He would occasionally describe his brother is maybe not moving through his degree program
- 32:01quite as quickly as everybody thought he should. But then the younger brother ends
- 32:06up being the discoverer of Supernova nineteen eighty seven eighty. So this was good
- 32:10fun to talk to David about that and hear his comments on how his brother
- 32:14discovered this supernova, which is pretty cool. So there's my story and I'm
- 32:17sticking to it. So, in this giant supernova cloud that was created in
- 32:22nineteen eighty seven, there's a neutron star and this neutron star. All neutron
- 32:28stars have some kind of irregularities and as they spin around really really fast,
- 32:32they should be testing they should be emitting gravitational waves. So a group of
- 32:37scientists led by Texas Tech University is actually trying to use LIGO data to find
- 32:45gravitational waves. Now you might know LIGO, that's the instrument that first detected
- 32:49gravitational waves back in twenty fifteen. So the Texas Tech scientists going back through
- 32:53the data of Ligo trying to see if they can see little ripples in the
- 32:59fabric of space time caused by the uneven rotation of a neutron star inside the
- 33:05supernova remnant from the supernova in nineteen eighty seven. So they have yet to
- 33:08find it. They haven't found it yet, but they are looking, and
- 33:12so it makes a really interesting story about that very famous supernova. The closest
- 33:16supernova to Earth since the invention of the telescope is Supernova nineteen eighty seven.
- 33:22Eight. Let's talk about Music under the Dome. You guys just had the
- 33:24final Music under the Dome of twenty twenty three. But we're just kind of
- 33:30at a mid season finale because really there's going to be more shows coming up
- 33:34next year. Yep, exactly, So Music under the Dome is going to
- 33:37return in March. And so I would tell you this, folks, if
- 33:42you have not seen one of these concerts, but you really have been wanting
- 33:45to come buy your tickets ahead of time because the tickets sell out fast.
- 33:51So that's one piece of advice. The other thing I would tell you is
- 33:53this we likely will have a new planetarium projection system in place for the concerts
- 34:00happening in the spring. So that's just a little hat tip out there to
- 34:05say, hey, be paying attention. Follow us on Facebook here at Colomba
- 34:08State University's co Colospace Science Center because we're expecting some changes and some upgrades in
- 34:14our planetarium over the next few months. So's there's a there's an advanced notice
- 34:20of a headline that's going to be coming out shortly. Also another headline.
- 34:23We just did a ribbon cutting ceremony for a brand new exhibit here at the
- 34:29Space Science Center, and that new exhibit is now open and accessible to the
- 34:32public. It's called the Guzzle Vortex. Yeah, you might be wondering what
- 34:37that's kind of an interesting name, guzzle Vortex. What is it? Well,
- 34:40it's an exhibit for the youngest kids in the family and it's a place
- 34:45where they can let aliens guzzle up some food that then after that flies through
- 34:51a vortex of wind tunnels and shoots out in the air high aloft in the
- 34:57high atrium of the Coke Coola Space Science Center, where the kids can retrieve
- 35:00these targets and put them back in the aliens again and again and again,
- 35:05and friends, I can just tell you after watching the first wave of kids
- 35:08actually using this display, they're having a great time. There's also opportunities to
- 35:14learn about exoplanets and the flight of various machines like the Ingenuity helicopter in the
- 35:20Martian atmosphere. All of that content associated with this exhibit. But come down
- 35:24and check it out. Come down and check out Guzzle Vortex, Music under
- 35:27the Dome and all the other great artifacts and programs we have here at Columbus
- 35:30State University's Coca Cola Space Science Center and the website to learn more about what
- 35:36you guys do in those upcoming showtimes for Music under the Dome. Yep,
- 35:40you can follow us at our website. The web address is www dot cc
- 35:45SSC dot org, Charlie Charlie SamSam Charlie dot org. And we thank you
- 35:52again for listening, and we'll do it again next week. Overhead Door Company
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