Latest / Made of Stars / A Spacewalk on ISS Day

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A Spacewalk on ISS Day · Made of Stars

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  Warning. The following podcast contains an entertaining look at astronomy, physics, and
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  space news throughout the known universe. Listeners have been known to learn about astronomical
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  phenomenon the scientific method, and expanded vocabulary to include terms like quasar asterism and
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  uranus. Listen, that's your own risk. Go ahead. We're made of
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  stars. Made them stars, made sizes, were made of stars. You
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  could be from high they would New Mexicomas. We're all stars, womens,
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  we are made of stars. I'm Wes, Carol joined, I'm a good
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  friend, Doctor Sean Cruising from Columbus State University's Coca Co Space Science Center.
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  That building itself actually also made of stars. Hey Sean, you know the
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  building? What I had for lunch yesterday, my dog? It's stars.
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  Coincidentally, though, the cast of Dancing with the Stars is usually not actual
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  stars, so that's also just occasionally they might have one or two maybe former
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  stars of the Gridiron. But they also are made of stars, even if
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  they're not technically stars. So Hi, We've got a day where we're going
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  to look back in history. We're using the old time machine today for a
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  couple of stories, and we've and I had a conversation with someone the other
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  day about gravitational lensing, and you and I've talked about the way as we're
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  exploring deep space and getting opportunities to see things through gravitational lensing, we're really
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  looking into the far, far past and being able to explore things and observe
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  science taking place in the past, which is fascinating. This is not quite
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  that far into the past. We're only looking. But for some maybe if
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  you're graduating college next year, this is your lifetime, you know, maybe
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  right? And this is an important day in our history of space because it's
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  International Space Station Day, isn't it International Space Station Day? What does that
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  mean? Well, I'll tell you what it means. Friends, that means
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  this on November second, the day that we're recording this podcast. By the
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  way, on November second of the year two thousand, which is not the
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  day we're recording this podcast. It's twenty three years earlier. On this day,
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  twenty three years ago, Expedition one, the first ever long term crew
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  to the International Space Station, arrived in a soy used capsule, the first
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  time a crew had ever gone there in a soyuse capsule. That's a Russian
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  capsule they dot with the International Space Station. They brought their camping gear with
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  them. They brought some extra twinkies and you know, s'mores and things that
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  they need to stay for a while, because they hung out up there for
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  about four and a half months. And friends, this was the very first
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  time that a long duration crew ever arrived at the International Space Station. But
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  from that day forward, it's all been long duration crews and there has never
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  been a day where the space station was unoccupied. So what that means,
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  friends, and why we call this International Space Station Day, is that the
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  International Space Station has been continuously occupied since this day for the past twenty three
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  years, which means, if you are twenty three years old today or younger,
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  there has never been a day in your lifetime where astronauts or cosmonauts have
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  not been orbiting above your head continuously. That, friends, is a permanent
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  space presence. Humanity has had a permanent space presence since November two of the
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  year two thousand. That's why that's important, and that's why we are making
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  note of it today on Made of Stars. It's worth acknowledging and just to
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  point out the fact that and you say, you know, obviously if you're
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  twenty three or younger, then obviously your entire lifetime. For me, who
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  is quite a bit older than that, it still feels like they've been up
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  there my whole life, right, I mean, it's far as it just
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  you take for granted that there's just kind of always been someone up there,
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  even though we know better. But that's it's certainly a huge milestone for you
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  know, humankind to be there in orbit around the planet for that long.
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  So they were there, you said, for four and a half months,
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  and then they op off or more joined, you know, before the four
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  and a half months, what was the next crew that got there, So
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  so it's it's important to say who these folks were first. And so these
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  new explorers, the very first crew aboard the International Space Station were They were
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  led by NASA astronaut William Shepherd or Bill Shepherd, and two Russian cosmonauts Yuri
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  Gidzenko and Sergei Krikoliv and so Gidzenko and Krikoleev, two cosmonauts. The commander
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  of the mission was Bill Shepherd, NASA astronaut. Those were the first inhabitants.
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  That was Expedition one crew. They went up there on a soy Use,
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  a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, first time a Russian Soyuz that ever docked to
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  the International Space Station. But the second crew, as you just mentioned,
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  was called Expedition two. That crew went up aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery,
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  so then they they had so they had a soy Used docked to the space
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  station. Then they brought up up the Space Shuttle with an abbreviated crew,
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  and some of that crew stayed aboard the space station, and the three astronauts
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  aboard Expedition one jumped a ride on Discovery and came back home. They left
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  their spacecraft up there docked. I think they lost their keys so they couldn't
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  drive it away. No, that's not why they docked it there to be
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  a lifeboat. So when people were up aboard the International Space Station, they
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  would have an extra spacecraft up there in case they needed to have an emergency
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  egress. And so that's why crew's expedition crews who stayed aboard the International Space
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  Station were in rotations of three people. And that's because that's how many could
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  fit into a soil use spacecraft. So those are all the reasonings behind that,
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  and so that that was a very eventful day when the expedition crew first
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  docked to the right to the International Space Station back in the year two thousand
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  and I'm sure Frank Rubio was probably like, Hey, where's my safety boat
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  to get home? So in this time in twenty three years, has there
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  consistently always been an American there? Because I know sometimes they rotate who's there
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  and who's not? Is it all there always been a yank on board?
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  As my Australian family would say, I will tell you this. I will
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  tell you that it's not a piece of trivia I have at the top of
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  my head. And so there's certainly people out there who know more than me.
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  If there was a time whether we're not Americans aboard, it would have
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  been in those early days, right, because of the way the crew.
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  There was a more sparse crew rotation taking place back in the early days.
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  And let me also say along with that, I'm not aware of a time
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  where there were only Americans, I'm sorry, where there were only Russians aboard.
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  Right, I'm only aware of times where there were Americans on board.
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  But again, I don't always win at space trivia, so there could be
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  a window of time where there was a crew and maybe before we come back
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  at the break, we'll look this up real quick and let folks know.
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  But this show's the shows that we don't have always had a major role in
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  occupying the International Space Station, right, and this shows that we don't do
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  rehearsals. You know. I'm just don't we go raw, man, it's
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  raw off the cuff, that's right. And listen, I'm supposed to be
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  the smart guy on the show, and that's my role. I get it.
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  But I will just tell you right now, if you listen to the
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  show, for you probably already know this. I don't know everything, so
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  so there's just moments where it's like, yeah, that's a great question,
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  let's find that out for our listeners. And you know, and that's kind
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  of I feel like my my role is to, uh, you know,
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  ask those kinds of questions. So, you know, but we can we
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  can dig into that when we get to our break coming up. Just to
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  confirm, someone's probably shouting. I bet Scott Norman is shouting at us right
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  now. When Scott hears this, you know, on the on the delay.
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  Hopefully he's teaching children right now, So we can't hear it's basically live.
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  But Scott Norman, our space is story here at Space Science Center will
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  be just shaking his head at his boss right now, going, really,
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  you don't know that that's a soft toss question. Come on, now,
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  well, I was just curious and I assumed, like you said, it
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  seems like there would have probably been someone there the whole time. Do we
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  want to stick with our historical story? Do we want to stay on the
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  space station? We can do either one of those. We have another space
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  station story and then we have another. Let's chat about what's going on in
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  the space station now, because it's kind of interesting and somewhat related. So
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  after this twenty three year history of continuous occupation aboard the space station, it's
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  not been that long since there's been the first all female EVA crew. What
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  does that mean? An EVA is an extra vehicular activity, it's a spacewalk
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  outside the International Space Station. The first time that that was done with an
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  all female crew was just back in the year twenty twenty, so just three
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  years ago. And now today, as we're recording, we have just had
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  the fourth ever all email spacewalk. But the interesting part is maybe not that
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  it's the fourth all female space walk because the first crew did three. So
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  maybe a more interesting way to couch this is this is only the second time
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  there's been an all female crew outside the International Space Station doing repairs and carrying
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  that out. So it's showing the progression from the early days when there were
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  no females aboard the International Space Station to now where we have an all female
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  crew replacing broken bearings on some important machinery up there, the rotation mechanisms of
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  the solar panels, which is really important, and so that was done just
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  yesterday as we're recording the show would have been in November one, twenty twenty
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  three. The astronauts were Jasmine mog Belly and Laurel O'Hara, NASA astronauts,
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  both of them outside working on the International Space Stations shall we say, outer
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  workings for six hours in forty two minutes, that's a really long spacewalk.
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  They had basically two large jobs that they were intending to accomplish. One of
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  those was to replace that rotation mechanism for those solar panels on the space station.
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  The other was to replace a broken communications unit, or at least to
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  clear it out of the way so a new one can be installed. So
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  here's what happened. Though sometimes in the show we call it harsh environment of
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  low Earth orbit. There's a lot of radiation damaging that can take place.
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  You don't really have rusting because you don't really have water, so it's not
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  like the bolts get rusty, but they do degrade over time because of the
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  space radiation and the micro mediaite impact events that take place up there. So
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  there's a couple of different things that can erode these pieces of equipment on the
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  outside of the space station. There was enough degradation, enough damage to this
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  bearing unit that the bolts were extraordinarily hard to get off off. So these
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  two intrepid space explorers out there doing a spacewalk were basically doing almost like an
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  auto mechanics job, and the bolts just stick. Sometimes you might harken back
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  to remember that as they were trying to remove some of the original equipment on
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  the Hubble space telescope, our friend friend of the show story Musgrave, who's
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  been here besides there are a couple of times, was having a very hard
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  time removing some of those bolts and had to use some techniques that he said
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  he learned on the farm to break loose some bolts to get that equipment to
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  come off. Later crews also had similar problems trying to remove space hardware.
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  So it's just a matter of when these things are outside in the space environment
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  for a long period of time, they're hard to remove. So because they
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  had so much time on that, they lost about two hours of time during
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  their spacewalk that was unexpected due to this bolt sticking problem. So they didn't
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  get to remove the s BN radio communications systems that they they wanted to,
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  but they were able to still prep it for removal, and so the next
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  crew will have an easier time removing that in their next space walk. So
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  all pretty interesting stuff happening up there aboard the International Space Station yesterday. So
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  what happens to a can of w D forty out in space? So we
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  see you and me think the same. You know, that's the first thing
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  I would have done was reach for the can of WD forty and sprayed the
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  heck out of that thing. Or there's you know, bol bolt looseners or
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  whatever kind of you know juice you want to spray in there. But the
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  problem is, as you point out in micro gravity, it doesn't behave the
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  same So you would simply blow a giant, big bubble of w D forty
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  held together by its own surface tension that you cannot necessarily control where it goes.
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  And therefore it's not really the kind of thing you want to do in
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  the space environment because it might get somewhere where you don't want it. And
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  so you don't want w D forty where you don't want it. Clearly,
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  if you're constrained to a space suit, if you know what I'm saying,
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  no, you want it everywhere. You want it everywhere when you're using it.
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  That's what you want. You want it to soak in there and you
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  can. I'm just thinking also about the can itself. I mean, I'm
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  thinking that the can is probably not gonna have a good ending in space.
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  You can have a new kind of pressure differential that hopefully the can would be
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  engineered to withstand, but I'm not really sure if you're off the shelf,
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  WD forty can is engineered to withstand are pressure differential of one Earth atmosphere versus
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  zero atmosphere, yet probably would cause that baby to simply pop out there and
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  sea. Yeah, even worse problem. It would be fun to see.
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  I assume, all right, well, let's let's let's jump over to the
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  Sun. We have as far as activity with the Sun for Halloween. But
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  then also again another historical story. Now, twenty years ago it was a
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  pretty big day for solar activity. So either one of those you want to
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  start with. Let's talk about the Sun. Let's talk about the crazy things
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  that happened right on Halloween Day this year, just two days ago. So
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  there was a massive what they call solar filament or a solar prominence you might
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  have heard of. It's a big giant loop of gas that's projecting up off
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  the surface of the Sun, held there suspended in a distorted portion of the
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  of the Sun's magnetic field. But then suddenly this Mount Everest sized mass of
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  solar radiation is ejected off into space because the magnetic loop itself breaks. That's
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  what happened yesterday, and it gets nicknamed a canyon of fire because it looks
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  basically like a giant smiley face on the Sun just erupts and gets very hot
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  because of the nature of the solar flare that occurs when these magnetic film it's
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  break and release all of the plasma that they're storing in there, the charged
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  gases from the surface of the Sun. So that happened yesterday, so you
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  know, no big deal. It was facing right after Earth or you know,
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  earth ish, And so the original reports came out from NASA with their
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  modeling saying, well, we don't think any of the debris from this explosion
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  is going to come into direct contact with the Earth and its magnetic field.
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  But then there are colleagues over at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration jumped in
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  and said, not so fast. We think the coronal mass ejection that was
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  released by this Halloween filament eruption could likely hit Earth's magnetic field and cause a
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  minor geomagnetic storm on November fourth. Again, as we're recording the show,
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  it's a couple of days forward from now, so that means it's taking roughly
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  four days to travel through the space environment from the Sun to the Earth going
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  to hear in a later story, that's kind of a slower, more casual
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  trip for a solar flare and a chronal mass ejection, which means it doesn't
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  have that much energy behind it and it's going to only offer a glancing blow.
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  So, you know, people in the northern latitudes, in places that
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  we talk about like Iceland and Alaska, they might be watching for some high
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  latitude auroras to take place, but probably not down here in the continental United
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  States, although certainly satellite operators they need to be aware of any time there's
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  a charged volume of gas heading this direction from a canyon of fire like event
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  that took place on the Sun. If you want to read more about this,
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  check out the story on from November twod on spaceweather dot com or space
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  dot com. They both had stories about the canyon of Fire the filament collapse
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  on the Sun on November second, twenty twenty three. Thank goodness, Saturday
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  is a great day. If there is some sort of disruption to any of
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  our communications SYSM, some satellites, there won't be any college football of any
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  significance going on on Saturday. So if only we could have scheduled this for
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  a different day, that might have been good. You know, we just
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  can't ever get these things coordinated for the right day of the week. I
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  mean, how much how much money do these television televised broadcasts have, right
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  I mean, there's a lot of money behind college football? Can't they work
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  with the sun? Hey? What really? The sun has its price,
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  right? One of these games is Alabama LSU. I'm pretty sure those schools
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  could get some money put together. I mean they could think so. I
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  mean, you know, you got to talk with the Sun. You got
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  to spend your agent and you know, maybe you have us sit down with
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  you know, the Solary fire or furnace that's about ninety three million miles from
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  here and just say, hey, can you hold off on the flares because
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  we got this big game come up this weekend. You know, Apparently nobody
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  thought to do that. Nobody coordinated that at all. They could work out
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  some kind of an nil deal or something with the Sun. I mean,
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  you would think that they could get something off of at least the name and
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  the likeness. All right, let's talk about what happened twenty years ago.
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  I mean, it is the sun. Yeah, it's not like a sun
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  or one of many sons. It's the suns. It does wreak of Ohio
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  State, doesn't it. But right, I'm saying, okay, so let
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  me give you an example of what the sun can carry out. Because I
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  happen to be a personal witness to the next story that happened a mere twenty
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  years ago, and I was a personal witness right here at Columbus State University's
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  Coca Cola Space Science Center, because I've just been hanging around that long.
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  But spaceweather dot com did a really cool article, and so they call them
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  the Halloween flares. None of them occurred actually on Halloween, but there was
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  a big flare on October twenty eighth, followed by a big flare on October
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  twenty ninth of the year two thousand and three. So the headline from spaceweather
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  dot com starts this way. They say, imagine waking up to the headline
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  quote, half of Earth's satellites are law wow, sounds that sounds not good,
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  right, I mean, half of all of our satellites are somehow lost.
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  And then they have the next word. They say impossible with a question
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  mark, and then they say it actually happened during the Great Halloween Storms of
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  two thousand and three. So we're going to get to how we lose half
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  of Earth's satellites in a moment, but let's talk about the flares themselves.
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  So on October twenty eighth, of two thousand and three, the sun unleashed
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  one of the largest strongest solar flares in recorded history. It was an X
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  seventeen. Now, there are classes of solar flares. You can go read
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  about this if you'd like to, but they are based on how much X
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  ray radiation is released during a storm like this, and it's an exponential scale,
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  which is kind of similar to the Richter scale or the modified Richter scale
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  for earthquakes, which means when you go up a class, you're actually going
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  up in order of magnitude in power, so ten times are more stronger when
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  you jump levels. So the levels are level A, level B, level
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  C, level M, and level X. You're right, that doesn't follow
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  the alphabet as we know it, but that's okay. They're solar scientists.
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  They can do what they want. Are they the same people who came up
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  with scoring for tennis? Yes, love means nothing to them, nothing at
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  all, those kind of people anyway. All right, So a class B,
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  class C, class M class they all go up from one to ten,
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  so A one, A two all the way up to A ten,
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  and then after a ten you jump to the next class. Then it's a
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  B one all the way up to B ten, and then a C one
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  all the way up to C ten. I think you see the pattern.
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  Then you go one to ten, and then after that it's an X.
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  Well, X doesn't have a top end because they rarely ever needed something more
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  than an X ten. But friends, in the year two thousand and three,
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  there was an X seventeen flare on October twenty eighth. Why would they
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  let it go to seventeen because it went off the scale, that's why,
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  right, And so if they didn't have more letters to add to the scale,
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  they simply increased the number beyond ten. So this flare was orders of
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  magnitude stronger than the strongest class of flare that can occur on the Sun,
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  which is an X one through ten. That monster erupted on October twenty eighth
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  of the year two thousand and three, and then followed in less than twenty
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  four hours by a second massive flare, an X ten class October twenty ninth,
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  two thousand and three. Both of these flares hurled coronal mass ejections directly
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  of the Earth. There was all kinds of extreme effects that took place.
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  So when the CME arrived at the Earth, less than a day later.
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  And remember we just talked about a flare that that wave is not supposed to
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  arrive here for four days. These waves of radiation arrived in less than one
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  day. So they were so much more energy being generated by these very powerful
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  flares in two thousand and three that the particles were moving that much faster over
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  roughly five times faster. Okay, So then when they arrived at the Earth
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  for three nights October twenty ninth, October thirtieth, and yes, Halloween October
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  thirty first of two thousand and three, there were auroras all around the world.
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  Northern lights or southern lights in the southern hemisphere erupted in skies all around
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  the Earth. And just to give you a very United States centric view of
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  what that meant, these aurora phenomenon, these northern lights were as we're seen
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  as far south as right here in good old Georgia of the United States.
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  So when you have aurora phenomenon that are extending down as far as we live,
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  we live at latitude thirty two and a half degrees, which basically means
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  the top two thirds of the planet have to be glowing with auroral radiation due
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  to the sun particles interacting with the Earth's magnetic field first and then the atmosphere
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  second, generating these northern light phenomenon. Friends, if they're reaching down to
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  Georgia, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma, as
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  they did in two thousand and three, you have some extraordinary activity taking place
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  between the Sun and the Earth in a geomagnetic interaction. That's what occurred.
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  So as a result of that West it was chaos, right, So we
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  always say this. Children ask us, Hey, what happens aboard the International
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  Space Station when they're these big solar flares, And we always told them,
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  oh, you know, there's a safe place, and the astronauts just go
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  hide in a safe place and then ride out the storm. But when these
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  big storms started exploding back in two thousand and three, I remember us as
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  a staff having conversations like, well, where do they really go? We
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  don't know the answer to that. Where where is the actual space hardened environment
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  where they can shelter in place until this wave of radiation passes so they don't
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  just explode due to the radiation coming by. It turns out that there is
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  a place in the Zvezda module, which is the Russian side of the International
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  Space Station that has been more space hardened, and then in that area there
• 25:49
  are computer racks and things, and they basically just shelter in place, squat
• 25:55
  down in this Vezda module behind computer racks, hoping and praying that they're not
• 26:00
  being exposed to massive doses of radiation. So you're telling me there's a safe
• 26:03
  room on the International Space Station, right, That's what it is. Ultimately.
• 26:08
  I mean, it's as secure as they're going to get. And I
• 26:12
  mean, so that's basically what it is. I mean, it really is.
• 26:15
  And they really do think about these things ahead of time, and they
• 26:19
  really do train for these kinds of events. But I'm sure that when you're
• 26:23
  an astronaut actually in orbit and you get the call to say, hey,
• 26:29
  there was an X seventeen class flare that just blasted away off the surface of
• 26:36
  the Sun. It's sending one of the most powerful coronal mass ejections in history,
• 26:40
  in recorded history anyway at the Earth, and you might want to hunker
• 26:44
  down. You're going to really wonder yourself, as that astronaut aboard the space
• 26:48
  station, is this safe room safe enough? Yeah, it's kind of just
• 26:52
  a safe, safe er room. Right, So they hunker down in this
• 26:57
  safe er place and they ride out the storm, which is pretty darn impressive.
• 27:03
  But friends, in addition to what happened up on the International Space Station,
• 27:07
  imagine this, airline pilots around the world began to frantically change the course
• 27:14
  of their aircraft. Why. It's because if you're flying a polar route,
• 27:22
  you might think, well, I never fly a polar route. Well,
• 27:25
  if you've ever traveled from New York to London, you have flown the polar
• 27:30
  route. You might not realize it. The straightest, shortest path between New
• 27:36
  York and London is not flying directly over the Atlantic. It's actually arcing up
• 27:41
  above toward Iceland and coming back down again to London, which means you're up
• 27:48
  in the polar regions of the Earth where the magnetic field is funneling in the
• 27:53
  majority of this radiation from the Sun. And if you're aboard an aircraft at
• 27:57
  that time, you can receive radiation to your body equivalent to one hundred chest
• 28:03
  X rays simultaneously and never even know it. So pilots know it though,
• 28:10
  and their ground crews know it, and so flights began to be diverted all
• 28:14
  over the place. Almost every flight over Earth's poles that day was detoured to
• 28:19
  lower latitudes to avoid the radiation. It costs the airlines a cumulative one hundred
• 28:26
  thousand dollars per flight, So you can imagine that is a huge financial loss
• 28:34
  to airlines just to try to keep their flight crews safe and out of harm's
• 28:41
  way by being exposed to this massive dose of radiation from the Sun. Did
• 28:48
  they make any of that money back on not having to use any you know,
• 28:52
  they could use a little less energy on the flights having to heat up
• 28:55
  the meals. Yeah, I mean maybe they sold mixture alcohol, you know,
• 29:00
  that day, because like, hey, we're gonna be in the air
• 29:03
  a little longer. We are selling drinks, so you know, check out
• 29:07
  those menus. Why are we taking longer? Oh, don't worry, it's
• 29:11
  just because a massive flare has exploded on the Sun and you might all get
• 29:15
  irradiated if we go the other way. But everything's fine, it's all good.
• 29:19
  Just sit back, relax and look at that alcohol menu one more time.
• 29:25
  Everything's fine, it's all fine. Everything's fine. So the last part
• 29:30
  of that story is about losing the satellites, right, and so at the
• 29:34
  time, this is two thousand and three, twenty years ago. At that
• 29:38
  time, there were still thousands of satellites over our head and pieces of space
• 29:42
  junk that were being tracked from the ground, but the tracking stations lost track
• 29:48
  of where those objects were. Well, you might think, well, they're
• 29:51
  just in free float, they're in free fall orbits, so you should be
• 29:56
  able to predict where they're gonna be. Yeah, well, here's the problem.
• 29:57
  When a solar flare like that hits the Earth, it actually causes the
• 30:02
  Earth's atmosphere to heat up a little bit and swell, which means the swelling
• 30:06
  atmosphere causes extra drag on the satellites. And if you lose sight of those
• 30:11
  satellites during that time, you don't know where they are. So there was
• 30:17
  a substantial period of time where the United States Air Force, who was tracking
• 30:21
  all these satellites in orbit. Remember not all of them are American satellites,
• 30:25
  right, these are hostile satellites potentially from other nations as well. They lost
• 30:29
  track of all of them, and so they had to re establish tracking of
• 30:34
  the satellites by working around the clock for several days trying to find where these
• 30:41
  satellites were again re establish contract contact and re establish tracking of those satellites.
• 30:47
  Now, what can occur during something like this is if you lose track of
• 30:51
  them for too long and they're out there floating on their own and you're not
• 30:53
  doing any from ground adjustments, you can actually have an event called a cascade
• 30:59
  of collellisions take place, which is literally what it says. You lose track
• 31:04
  of these satellites, they get out of control in their orbits. They begin
• 31:08
  to run into one another, and it's a chain reaction because the debris from
• 31:12
  one collision can start other collisions, and then debris from those collisions can start
• 31:18
  more collisions, and then you have again a cascade of collisions that's occurring,
• 31:22
  and it's a scary time. So back in two thousand and three we had
• 31:27
  fewer satellites. Today we have thousands more satellites. So if this same event
• 31:33
  were to happen in twenty twenty three, it would be a much much harder
• 31:37
  task for those who track satellites to reacquire the positions of all these orbiting platforms
• 31:44
  up there, not to mention the substantial amount of extra space debris that exists
• 31:48
  in twenty twenty three down to a size of ten centimeters, which is what
• 31:53
  is tracked from the ground. So dogs and cats living together, chaos all
• 32:00
  occurring. If this thing flair happens in twenty twenty three, Wow, and
• 32:04
  you know, exponentially worse obviously because of all of it. Now, I
• 32:08
  get back to the safe room just for a second, and I just I
• 32:10
  can't help but think so knowing that we have plans for future, Like you
• 32:15
  know, Russia says they're going to get their own space station. I guess
• 32:19
  China is working on theirs. Eventually the US is gonna have to have their
• 32:22
  plan. I mean, is that the sort of thing that now moving forward
• 32:27
  that they would say, well, we're going to start with our safe room
• 32:30
  to begin with, because now they know they've learned a lot. I guess
• 32:32
  in twenty three years, right, one would hope one would hope that that's
• 32:39
  the case. Yeah. Remember also les that commercial companies like Axiom and Blue
• 32:44
  Origin and others are working on space based orbital platforms for people to go up
• 32:51
  and stay basically like a space hotel. So are those folks thinking about space
• 32:55
  radiation? You know, there's a lot of question there's more questions that I
• 32:59
  have answers there there. One would think that the lessons reminded today on spaceweather
• 33:06
  dot com that we learn from all of these crazy storms in the past are
• 33:10
  teaching us things that we need to know as we go out and colonize not
• 33:15
  just low Earth orbit, but also the surface of the Moon and the service
• 33:17
  of Mars, which are also more in danger of being affected by these large
• 33:24
  doses of radiation because they simply don't have strong magnetic fields like the Earth to
• 33:29
  shield them. So we have to think about this as we move out and
• 33:32
  occupy the Solar System. In general, the Sun is not necessarily our friend
• 33:38
  when it comes to these violent explosion events, and it is one more way
• 33:45
  that space is just kind of a hazardous, difficult environment in which to work.
• 33:49
  Coming up, after a quick break, we're going to talk about the
• 33:52
  next Moon mission leaving and we'll get into that right after this. All right,
• 34:19
  let's talk about the Peregrine headed getting ready to head to the Moon.
• 34:23
  So let's let's talk about astrobotic and what this mission is. It's not a
• 34:30
  bird, by the way, friends, it's a spacecraft. They like they
• 34:32
  like the Falcons period with the naming of the ships, I mean all the
• 34:36
  way back to George Lucas. They like the Falcon references. Kind of an
• 34:38
  air force thing too, So yeah, it goes both ways. So Humanity's
• 34:43
  next Moon mission is a mission called Peregrine, as Wes just said, developed
• 34:49
  by a company called Astrobotics. Now, Astrobotics is developing the Peregrine Lander.
• 34:54
  They're the main contractor, but they're taking up a lot of other people's stuff
• 35:00
  they go, and we'll talk about that in just a moment. But the
• 35:01
  Astrobotics Peregrine Lander has arrived in Florida. That's the important part of the story
• 35:09
  today. So it's preparing for a Christmas Eve launch. It will be Humanity's
• 35:16
  next vehicle to go to the Moon if everything launches okay on that December twenty
• 35:22
  fourth date. But the important part of that is it arrived in Florida to
• 35:28
  get processed for that on Halloween, which is weird. I don't know,
• 35:31
  it's only weird because Halloween, Christmas, I don't know whatever. Anyway,
• 35:36
  so there it is. So so this is going to be a mission though
• 35:39
  that has a couple of firsts with it, and these are important firsts.
• 35:44
  The first first is the first first is it's going to be the first ever
• 35:50
  launch of the United Launch Alliances brand new rocket called the Vulcan Rocket. No
• 35:55
  vehicle, no space mission has ever had the kind of live, long and
• 36:01
  prosper success of flying on a Vulcan rocket, because this is the first time
• 36:07
  it's ever gonna launch. So the first Vulcan rocket is going to carry this
• 36:12
  next lander up to the Moon, which is pretty cool. The other first
• 36:15
  is this is also the first in a program from NASA that has commercial landers
• 36:23
  taking deliveries of missions to space right so to particularly to the Moon, and
• 36:29
  so this is going to be the first in a series of landers built by
• 36:32
  private companies and managed all by private companies that NASA has contracted to take various
• 36:39
  payloads to the lunar surface, which is cool. There is a third first
• 36:45
  on this mission, and the first number three is this there's going to be
• 36:52
  a lunar rover aboard. Actually there's gonna be a couple of lunar rovers.
• 36:55
  But one of those lunar rovers is built by Mexico. And when I say
• 37:00
  by Mexico, it's the Mexican Space Agency collaborating with a major University in Mexico,
• 37:07
  and they've built a lunar rover. These are ultra compact mini rovers,
• 37:14
  and the mini rovers will investigate the lunar surface. And so it's a third
• 37:21
  first in that this is the first ever lunar mission by Mexico and so they've
• 37:28
  never sent a package of any kind of scientific equipment to the Moon's surface before,
• 37:31
  and so now they have, or they will have when this launches.
• 37:36
  So a really interesting set of mission firsts from the Peregrine mission, which again
• 37:43
  landed in Florida. Read about this on spaceflight now dot com. By the
• 37:46
  way, the Astrobotics, which is again the company that built the Paragrine.
• 37:52
  Astrobotics vice president for business Development had this to say, It's incredibly thrilling.
• 37:58
  We've been talking about this mission for six years as an organization, our first
• 38:01
  mission to the Moon, and now it's finally here. The team is exhilarated,
• 38:06
  anxious to get off to the launch pad and ready to fly. So
• 38:09
  really it's a dream come true that now we're here again. So says Dan
• 38:15
  Hendrickson, Astrobotics, vice president of business Development. Let's talk about music under
• 38:22
  the dome. You guys have the final one of twenty twenty three. But
• 38:25
  we're really kind of just like a mid season break like the TV show,
• 38:30
  because yeah, you're gonna keep going into the new year. But this is
• 38:34
  the final one of twenty twenty three, and it's coming up as we're recording
• 38:37
  this on Thursday. It's coming up on Tuesday the seventh, Yep, Tuesday,
• 38:40
  November seventh. We're gonna be doing Music under the Dome. The last
• 38:45
  one for twenty twenty three is Wes mentioned, but in the academic year,
• 38:50
  which begins in August and ends in May. It's the second of four,
• 38:53
  so there'll be two of these concerts in the fall. One's already taking place.
• 38:57
  The next one happens on November seventh, then two CONTs in the spring.
• 39:00
  And if you want to know what a Music under the Dome is,
• 39:04
  the dome is our planetarium. And there are original graphics and artwork that have
• 39:08
  been created by an artist that will be presented on the dome that is choreographed
• 39:15
  to the music being played by students and faculty from the Clumba State University Schwob
• 39:21
  School of Music. It is a fantastic experience. Come out and check it
• 39:25
  out. You can find out information on this concert and all the concerts following
• 39:29
  in the series by visiting our website. Ladies and gentlemen go to www dot
• 39:34
  CCSSC dot org Charlie Charlie SamSam Charlie dot org. And also I will tell
• 39:42
  you that on November eighth, there will be a private event taking place,
• 39:45
  but it's a ribbon cutting ceremony for a brand new exhibit in our gallery.
• 39:50
  That exhibit is sponsored by Pratt and Whitney. It is for the youngest members
• 39:53
  of our visiting audience. It's designed for kids just to have a really good
• 39:58
  time and explore some principles of flight while they also think about life that exists
• 40:04
  on other worlds, exoplanets, exobiology and the like. So that new exhibit
• 40:08
  is called the Guzzle Vortex. If that name doesn't make sense, you just
• 40:13
  have to come see it. Friends. It's aliens guzzling things and then they
• 40:16
  travel through an air vortex and then they fly through the air and it's just
• 40:20
  amazing. Come out and check out the Guzzle Vortex, our new exhibit at
• 40:24
  CSU's Coca Cola Space Science Center, Columbus State University, and we welcome you
• 40:30
  to come down and check out all of these fun things happening at our facility.
• 40:35
  And we thank you for listening, and Sean and I will do it
• 40:37
  again next week. Overhead Door Company of Columbus has all of your garage door
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