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Astronauts or Space Flight Participants? · 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 expand the vocabulary to include terms like quasar asterism
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and uranus. Listen, that's your own risk, Go ahead. Where made
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of Stars? Made of Stars? Stars? You could be from High Hollywood,
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New Mexico, Mars. Where are stars? We are made of Stars?
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Joined by my good friend doctor Sean Cruising from Columbus State University's Coca Cola
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Space Science Or I'm Wes Carol Mornan Sean, Good morning West, Good to
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be with you today. We have a couple of successful missions for some private
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space companies. They're kind of follow ups to what we talked about last week,
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but we knew we were kind of catching, especially the Virgin Galactic story
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kind of it was hot off the press. It was happening almost in real
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time for us as we were recording last week. And we also had given
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an update on the A X two Axiom mission that had launched and basically just
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filled up the International Space Station with people. There were some other people also
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in space at the same time, so we have is that a new record
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a number of people in space at the same time? Anyway, But let's
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start, I guess with Axiom, because a successful mission for them, this
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is now their second time of sending basically tourists to space. Yeah, so
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a very good place to start is with Axiom's AX two mission that sent,
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as you just said, an entirely commercial crew to the International Space Station to
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be what are being called space flight participants. I'm not sure why they're not
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just calling them astronauts, but okay, there's space flight participants aboard the International
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Space Station that isn't interesting that well, and you know, one of them
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at least was a real astronaut at one point, so I think that's fair.
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But I mean, I do think it does kind of need a different
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name, doesn't it. It's a little different than being someone who has gone
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through the specific astronaut training versus someone who's you know, enjoying the ride.
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I know there's some training, and I assume there's some training involved for the
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space flight participants. Yeah, I mean, yes, there is. By
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the way, so before I gloss over that point, yes they do go
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through training, but clearly they do not go through the same training as what
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we would call official NASA astronauts. But it's hard to not call these people
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official NASA astronauts because NASA is participating in their experience to go to space by
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allowing them to come aboard the International Space Station. So this is it gets
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dodgy right in this whole definitional transition from what we knew, as you know
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John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, astronauts trained by NASA, you know, veteran
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fighter pilots, all the all the traditional kind of astronaut that we think of,
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to now these people who include you know, people who just came from
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the private sector and their entrepreneurs and they could afford to buy a ticket,
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and they wrote a Space Dragon capsule, which is not really a NASA vehicle,
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although certainly it's a NASA funded vehicle, and they go to space with
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somebody on board who's maybe NASA's greatest astronaut ever, right are arguably Peggy Whitson,
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who has spent more time in space than any NASA astronaut. But now
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she works for Axiom, so she's no longer a NASA astronaut. She's now
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a space flight participant. Come on, ladies and gentlemen, can we just
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go ahead and say, all right, we get it. There are differences,
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we understand, But people who go to space are astronauts. I mean
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that's my take, and I know it's like okay, So the official fire
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department rolls up on the scene and they're fighting a house fire. And then
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the neighbor standing across the fence with his garden hose and he sprayed that burning
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house too. Is he a fireman? I don't know, but he's fighting
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a fire with water and a hose, So yeah, is the a fireman?
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I don't know. Well, they went to space aboard a spacecraft.
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Are the astronauts or spaceflight participants? Look, I don't want to brag,
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but years ago I came upon two women who were being robbed at gunpoint,
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and in me approaching the scene, the the the robber in question, uh
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saw me, and I guess in me like just walking in that direction.
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Honestly, as it started to happen, I didn't fully know what was going
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on. I could tell that there were some women in distress, but I
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apparently, in in all of my uh you know, superhero Zeke startled this
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man and he ran and jumped in his car and drove away and left them
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with their purses. They thanked me, They called me a hero and a
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guardian angel, and all these sorts of things. Now does that make me
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Batman? Know? But I was certainly very batman esque that particular day when
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I thwarted an armed robbery from taking place. For you, A crime fighter,
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I mean, I think crime fighter? Yeah, yeah, I mean,
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while not being Batman, I was certainly a crime fighter. I mean,
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I'm comfortable with that term. While I wasn't a masked vigilante or you
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know, but I think a crime fighter is the right word for it.
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Again, And you know, not trying to brag, but you know,
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I don't get a lot of opportunities to bring this up, but it definitely
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fits the metaphor for what we're discussing here. I mean, I think crime
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fighter is a whole lot cooler than spaceflight participant, accidental mug mugging prevention participant.
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I guess the other way to say that I was doing. But you
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know, to them, you know, they say hero. You know,
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I mean, I'll take it, you know, if that's what Even though
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these people paid their own way to space, I kind of think they're heroes
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absolutely space. That's true. That's true. They're going on, we're going
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on the International Space Station and doing experiments sanctioned by NASA, working with some
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of our friends over at the Marshall Space Flight Center to carry out their research.
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And then you throw in the fact that one of them is a Muslim
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Saudi woman who went into space, which is also a remarkable accomplishment on top
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of all. Ever, right, I mean, like, as we've said,
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that's a very significant glass ceiling. So yeah, I mean there's some
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heroism there just by making it to that point and getting to space. So
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yeah, that's certainly qualifies. Now, I'm just gonna argue that when we
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read these terms in space media, ladies and gentlemen, you know, as
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far as doctor Krusen's concern, which I know, in my opinion doesn't really
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carry much weight beyond this podcast. That's okay, I'm gonna say it anyway,
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spaceflight participant just doesn't seem to cut it. So when you read well
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this article, for instance, in space dot com and they refer to them
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as spaceflight participants, I love space dot com. By the way, to
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all our friends at space dot com. I'm not I'm not dissing on you.
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I know this is a kind of an it's kind of a industrial term,
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in industry term. Okay, but we gotta do better than this.
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They're astronauts. It's almost like the it's almost like the rectangle square thing,
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right, I mean technically, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong. They were also
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space flight participants, they were question Box. It just doesn't seem to do
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justice the other accomplishments, right, It seems it seems a little lacking.
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So yeah, I think we need to do better. Yeah, ladies and
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gentlemen, if you're listening to this podcast, which I know you are,
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otherwise you wouldn't be hearing my voice right now, send in your suggestions.
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You know, we we you know we have very social media attached to this
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podcast, and I know West would be very happy to hear from you with
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your suggestions for what to call people who are not NASA astronauts. Although are
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they not NASA astronauts? See I'm even a little fuzzy on that. Okay,
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but they're not. They don't go through the official complete NASA Astronauts selection
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process and training process. Okay, I get it. They bought their own
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ticket. They bought their ticket, they flew to space anyway, So all
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right, so what do we call them? Because space flight participant just as
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too, it's too lame. Maybe maybe that could be reserved for the you
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know, the William Shatner's and Michael Strahan's, Like, maybe that's a little
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different. But going to the International Space Station seems like a bigger deal.
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I mean, it is a bigger deal, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable
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with that line either. I don't know that. That's why I say maybe
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a rocket. Yeah, you're an astronaut. Am I thinking about this too?
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Simply you're on a rocket and you go to space. Yeah, we
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used all those people astronauts, we did. It is a pretty remarkable and
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this can we can wrap it with this, but this whole but it is
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a pretty remarkable thing that we have sent enough people now into space that we're
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able to have this conversation because in the early days, I can't imagine that
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they thought, oh my gosh, this is gonna become such a common thing.
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We're gonna be discussing this very generic PC term for people who've gone into
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space. It's like it's like, you know, missus jetson, you know,
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taking your spaceship to the mall or something. I don't know. I
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don't know, but in twenty twenty three, I'm gonna call these people astronauts.
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So anyway, Yeah, to wrap this up, two records were set,
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by the way, both of which are worth mentioning. There were seventeen
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people in Earth orbits simultaneously. There were six Chinese tyconnots, okay, that's
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not astronaut, but that's their own word. That's fine, that's what a
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Chinese astronaut is. We call them tyconots. Okay. So there were six
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tychonauts. There were seven trained formal astronauts and cosmonauts, which are all astronauts
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by the way, aboard the International Space Station, and there were four space
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flight participants, bringing the grand total to eleven people in Earth orbit. We
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have to say people right now, because we can't call them astronauts apparently,
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all right, So anyway, so seven people simultaneously in low Earth orbit.
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That is a new record, ladies and gentlemen. That was the first time
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that's been done, and that was due to again, six aboard the Chinese
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Space Station, eleven aboard International Space Station, including the four commercial astronauts who
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rode up to space in the axiom Ax two mission, including in that number
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Peggy Whitson, America's greatest astronaut with the most time in space of any American
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astronaut ever. And she just added to her time in space, whether you
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call her an astronaut or a space flight participant on this mission or not.
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So that's one record. The second record is now be careful, you got
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to make sure the math works. Three of these Chinese people came home in
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the meantime, all right, So three of those tyconots came down before the
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second record was set. But while those three out of six Chinese tyconots came
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down, that left three aboard the Chinese Space Station. And then we still
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had those same eleven aboard the International Space Station, seven astronauts and seven astronauts
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and cosmonauts, four space slight participants. But then Virgin Galactic they put up
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six of their own people for about five minutes. And yes it was suborbital,
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and yes, some people even argue that they can get above the Carmen
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line, which some people's definition of space, which is sixty three miles or
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one hundred kilometers above the surface of the Earth. But they did surpass both
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NASA and the US Air Forces definitional line for space, and they did it
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on a rocket ship. So I'm gonna call them astronauts, if you don't
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mind. So we had six Virgin galactic astronauts, we had three Chinese tyconauts,
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and eleven individuals aboard the International Space Station for a new record of twenty
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people off the planet simultaneously, in the words of space dot Com, twenty
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people off the planet simultaneously. Can I just say twenty astronauts, lay,
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ladies and gentlemen. That's twenty astronauts in space at the same time. I'm
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coming twenty people off planet at the same time. That that Now, again
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we talk back to early days of NASA and sending people to space and thinking
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could they have imagined a time when there'd be twenty people in the air at
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the same time, twenty people off planet at the same time. It's pretty
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remarkable, well, particularly from three different space or actually technically four different space
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programs, right, yeah, but that's the only thing right in five different
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countries, by the way, So it's pretty amazing for for several different reasons.
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But you had you had Virgin galactic. You have the Chinese Space Agency,
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you had the Russian Space Agency, you had NASA, and you had
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Axiom. Yeah, so I miss telling him before needed that again. Verge
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China, Russia, NASA, and Axiom. That's five different space agencies,
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the people constituted from five different countries as well. It's just it's just an
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amazing time, ladies and gentlemen. I mean, and again we're beating the
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story to death, but it's really cool. We live in a new era.
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That's really the point, right. We cannot think about space and space
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exploration in the old model of you know, certainly not in the Mercury,
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Gemini Apollo era, not even in the old Space Shuttle era, not even
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in the era where you had a Russian space station mirror and you know,
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American spaceships going up and be doing separate programs. You now have a veritable
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hotel in space, two of them, including the Chinese Space station, and
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you have companies like Axiom working on their own versions of private space stations.
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We are at the cusp of a space exploration era that is scarcely a managable
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with our nineteen eighties brain that's wired to think about space as the Space Shuttle.
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Right, really cool neat changes going on. All right, Well,
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we talked a little bit about the Virgin mission. Obviously Virgin Galactic with the
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successful launch that happened, as I said, almost in real time. We
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delayed recording last week just so that we could talk about the mission itself.
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Now there's been a week that's gone by and time to kind of digest what
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took place and what happened. Yeah, as we's just said, this happened
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last Thursday. We record on Thursdays. We were we were watching the stream
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together just to see what happened before we actually jumped in and recorded our podcast
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that day. But that was May twenty fifth. Virgin Galactic completed its first
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flight of spaceship two in nearly two years, so they had not flown since
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July of twenty twenty one. So that's that's a part of this story,
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right has that vehicle has been grounded since that time due to some you know,
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uncertainties and some of the structural components. And in that flight though,
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they did carry the Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson two space in a proof of
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concept. So after that flight two years ago, this is the final engineering
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test flight before they start taking commercial paying customers. Now that was a statement
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they put out prior to the flight, but now we have to emphasize the
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word engineering. So as the flight the final engineering test flight. Because Mike
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Moses, who's the president of the of the Virgin Galactic Missions US, I'm
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sorry, he's president of Spaceline Missions and Safety for Virgin Galactic. He said
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in a statement after the flight, the data from this validation flight will clear
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the way for our return to space and ultimately lead to the launch of commercial
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service. Well wait a minute, what do you mean ultimately? That kind
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of suggests there's steps in between. And you know what we were led to
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believe, you know, prior to the flight, was well, this is
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this is the last time we're gonna fly without passengers on board the next time.
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No, that's not quite true. So apparently the next step and by
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the way, this is a from an article from SpaceNews dot com. Apparently
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the next step for Virgin Galactic will be a powered test flight of Vissunity that's
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the name of their spacecraft, with four company mission specialists joining the two pilots.
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That's not paying customers, those are employees, right, So four company
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mission specialists joining the two pilots on the flight quote to assess the customer experience
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and the ground based training unquote said the company. Now wait a minute,
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that's another I mean, is that not a test flight. You might not
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be doing engineering testing, but you're testing out services apparently, or I don't
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know the timing of the ASTRA. I don't know. You're you're not ready
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for prime time yet. So Virgin, I mean, come on, now,
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come on, now, you've had years to think about customer experience.
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In fact, you had two years sitting on the ground not flying. That
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customer experienced could have been thought about because you could have talked to Richard Branson
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who went himself, and he could have told you how the customer experience was.
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I'm just saying, maybe maybe you gotta go ahead and get that worked
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out in that intermediate gap. But no, but no, they have another
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flight that doesn't include paying passengers that they have to do before ultimately they will
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launch commercial services. So this is what we're hearing now from from Virgin post
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flight from last week. Virgin did not disclose a date for that flight,
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but said it will analyze the data from the glide flight over the coming weeks
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ut before clearing unity for suborbal spaceflight again, and this is from space news
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dot Com is where I'm pulling these quotes, and it sounds like, yeah,
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they're still not ready. Maybe they have all the data that good from
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the engineering data, they're still not ready. Maybe they're just looking for the
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you know, the onboard peanut supplier or you know, Tang. They're trying
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to work out a deal with Tang for beverages in flight, or I don't
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know, maybe that's what did we not know? The little push carts fit
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down the aisleway or something. I mean, how do they work? How
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do they work in zero G? You have to work all that kind of
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stuff out. You don't really know exactly. The little LCD screens on the
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back of the chair in front of you. Is that maybe they want to
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ask Branson, but they're scared to ask him because nobody really wants to go
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to the boss and ask like, so, how was it? You know,
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you don't really wanna what did you think? What did we do?
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What could we have improved? That doesn't usually bode well in most cases.
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Coming up after a quick break, we're gonna talk NASA and UFOs or UAPs
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or whatever they're called. Now we'll talk about that next, all right.
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So they used to be called the UFOs. Now they're called UAPs, which
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stands for Unidentified space flight Participants. I think is what that stands for.
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It's a weird it's a weird set of letters to mean that, but that's
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what it stands for. I don't know, but that's I guess that's what
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they are. Though they're they're unidentified and they're participating in space flight. But
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no NASA has I guess started a year ago trying to figure out what's going
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on. All these fight pilots that see these weird things happening when they're out
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on missions and things flying around, and all these years of not really telling
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us anything only just fueled all of the conspiracy theorists and the folks at coast
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to coast overnight. So I'm sorry, coast to coast, am, you
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have to make sure to specify. So the government finally said we're gonna get
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to the bottom of this, and in classic government overall experience, they got
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nothing to tell us at this point. They need more input. Is that
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fair? Need more input? Yes? I think I think they should probably
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consult you know, with Virgin Galactics team that's looking into flight experience to see
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how the flight experience was for the UAPs. Yeah, or Johnny five from
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Short Circuit need more input, Ladies and Gentlemen, Dateline, Washington, DC,
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NASA Health its first public meetings to discuss the findings of the UAP Independent
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Study Team on Wednesday, May thirty, first of twenty twenty three. Ladies
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and Gentlemen. UAP stands for Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. I'm trying to make this
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to sound as much like a news story as possible because we've been kind of
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having a lot of levity this morning. But anyway, so the group was
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formed back in June of twenty twenty two. It's a group of experts in
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a variety of fields, smart people. It's a group of smart people from
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a variety of different people fields that were assembled to look into what we don't
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do know and what we don't know about unidentified anomalous phenomenon and was called aerial
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phenomenon, but I forgot they started going under water, so that's why they
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had to chairing Aerial to anomalous Unidentified anomalous Phenomenon Okay, so I really hacked
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this new story. But I'm not a newsperson anyway. I'm just a mere
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school teacher. Ladies and gentlemen, But here we go. So the group
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includes former astronauts Scott Kelly and fifteen other investigators from a variety of different fields,
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including astronomy. Yes, they put astronomers on there, astrophysicists, oceanographers,
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Wait, why did they put oceanographers on there? Because these vehicles appeared
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to be going into the ocean, and also journalists. When we're searching for
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truth, we want journalists. That's exactly what we need. Now, Is
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there any truth to getting the the oceanographers involved, because you know mermaids,
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I mean, they could certainly help either confirm nor deny the Atlanta are identified
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as underwater participants. Is are they looking for the lost city of Atlanta?
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Are we going to be investigating the Bermuda Triangle or these all things that they're
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also looking into, because I would think any of those things could qualify five
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under the UAP description. All mirth aside, Ladies and gentlemen, you have
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some very serious fighter pilots, and I don't like to dissuage the reputations of
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fighter fights. All ladies and gentlemen, These fighter pilots are highly trained technicians
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of aerial combat, and they are the ones reporting these phenomenons saying, hey,
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we don't know what the heck these things are. And by the way,
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our cameras and sensors aboard our aircraft also picked up these phenomenons, so
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we're not just making up stories so that we can get on unsolved mysteries on
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Netflix. So, ladies and gentlemen, those are serious people. And I
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tend to believe their reports, which means something is going on right, and
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I think this is generally what most people believe, including senators and congressmen congress
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people. So they commissioned these groups of smart people. They said, well,
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let's get some smart Let's get some astronauts and some astrophysicists and some oceanographers,
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because these vehicles appeared to be going underwater for periods of time then popping
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back up and doing a variety of maneuvers that simply aren't physically possible by vehicles
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that we know about. Let's get them together and see if they can figure
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it out. Guess what the group came back with, Yeah, we have
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no idea what they are. We don't have no data, good questions.
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That looks weird. I mean that's not a direct quote, but but that's
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that's fundamentally what they said, all right, So, including NASA's Daniel Evans,
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who's an assistant Deputy Associate Administrator for Research. I don't know how that
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fits on a business card, but anyway, so the assistant deputy Associate Administrator
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for Research, Daniel Evans, had this to say, it's this nation's OBUs
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obligation to determine whether these phenomenon posts any potential risk to airspace safety. Yes,
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I agree with that. I agree with that. So are these things
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buzzing around some really sophisticated drone technology from a nation that doesn't include the Pentagon,
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Because individuals from the Pentagon also served on this commission, and they're not
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saying, well, yeah, they're just our drones buzzing around, so it's
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not really that. In fact, the Pentagon's Sean Kirkpatrick, another member of
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the committee, said while most of these unidentified anomalous phenomenon reports the office reviewed
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are easily explained, some still do remain unresolved. Here's this quote, primarily
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due to a lack of data associated with these cases. So what he's saying
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is, I don't know, I don't know what they are, and we
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don't have enough data. Now, one of the one of the astrophysicists,
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did weigh in with some very interesting comments. By the way, what he's
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saying is he actually compared them to furbies, which you know, West and
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I have discussed furbies on this program many times, which are fast radio bursts,
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and they're they're basically a phenomenon that is so transient and so quick that
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you can't take good data of it because it's just like a flash. It's
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like a flashbulb going off, but these flashbulbs have such high energy that they
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remain unexplained, right, So that's what a fast radio burst phenomenon is.
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And this is astrophysicists David Spurgel, who's the chair of the study group,
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saying, Yeah, these things are really kind of like furbies, a fast
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radio bursts. And so when furbies were first discovered by astronomers and they couldn't
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figure them out, they had to come up with different observation strategies to try
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to catch them in the act of occurring and so they had to look at
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wide areas of the sky at these kind of high energy wavelengths for long periods
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of time, waiting for one of these furbies fast radio bursts to go off
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in some distant galaxy so that they could actually get data on them. So
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the astrophysicist really is laying out a good observation strategy inspired from the world of
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astrophysics, saying we need to treat these things the way astronomers treat fast radio
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bursts. We need to be taking a lot more data. So it's not
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clear yet what that observation strategy is, but the recommendations of the commission are
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that they engage in taking a lot more data. They come up with an
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observation strategy that can produce results by actually acquiring more and better data on the
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phenomenon themselves. Now that all sounds good, but the commission only had a
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budge of one hundred thousand dollars, so it probably you know, they probably
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spent that on airfare and you know, sodas. So anyway, so the
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notion that that we've come to a resolution for how we're going to do this,
30:12
Wow, we haven't really yet, but we have come to the conclusion
30:17
that we just need to see these things better. And yes, we have
30:21
the beginnings of data based on these camera and sensor systems from the aircraft,
30:26
but we're gonna have to gather more data and it's serious enough of a problem
30:30
that we really do need to implement this. So I'm guessing that it's going
30:33
to result in recommendations from both the Air Force, the Pentagon, NASA,
30:38
all these agencies to go out and really try to gather more data on these
30:44
unidentified anomalous phenomena and see, by just joking around about it, we're not
30:49
in any way, and you were. You were quick to qualify that as
30:52
far as saying, we're not saying it's not serious. It is. It's
30:56
just to me. Once you involved of a government agency of some kind,
31:03
that's when you start to get into these situations where it feels like are we
31:04
having any sort of productive discussion? And then you used I thought the funniest
31:10
word possible when you said mirth aside after we were talking about mermaids. And
31:15
I didn't know if you did that on purpose, but it was I wish
31:17
that I had thought of that joke, if it was intentional. And then
31:21
last you you said a congressman, congress person. My understanding is now they're
31:26
now referred to as congressional office participants. So that's the new word for them.
31:30
Just so that we make sure we're towing the line on what's correct in
31:36
the media. The journalists that are participating in this particular group would know that
31:41
that's what they're there. They're cops now. They don't want to be called
31:45
cops either, I guess anyway, not in these days. Unfortunate participants,
31:51
my friend law if their crime fighting participants, that's what they are. That's
31:56
what I was. That's exactly what I was definition. I think maybe you're
32:00
gonna slide it into the wire. I just know that when the police officer
32:04
arrived, he called me Batman. And that doesn't mean I'm Batman, you
32:08
know, maybe, but I mean I am the night One last thing,
32:13
let's talk about the Kepler mission, because obviously we've talked the Kepler mission a
32:19
few times over the years. Now we're in the final days as far as
32:23
productive science coming from this. Yeah, So the telescope itself was sent to
32:30
space to identify a phenomenon called exoplanet transits, which means there's a planet around
32:39
another star. It all lines up just right where it passes in front of
32:44
the face of that star, and we see the star dim down for a
32:47
little while. And so during that dimming process, we take data of the
32:52
star becoming more dim and we plot that over time, and that's called a
32:54
light curve. And based on those light curves, we can determine how big
32:59
the plant and it is, how many planets might be around that star,
33:02
and a variety of other things. So the Kepler Space Telescope was an amazing
33:07
instrument to identify many, many of these lightcurves happening around other stars, and
33:15
then from that confirming literally thousands of exoplanets planets that orbit stars that are not
33:22
named the Sun. But the telescope itself quit working in October of twenty eighteen.
33:29
Now it had a lot a nine year lifetime nine and a half years.
33:32
Really, it was only meant to go about three years. So it's
33:37
another one of these NASA missions that's highly successful, goes well beyond the specifications
33:43
initially planned from the mission, and so a great duration in that period of
33:46
time. The data from the Kepler mission led to the discovery and confirmation of
33:52
two thousand seven hundred and eleven confirmed planets around other stars or exo planets,
34:00
and in addition to that, there are another two thousand and fifty six exoplanet
34:07
candidates, which means we still need to carry out follow up observations to see
34:12
whether or not Kepler was correct that those are exoplanets, so those are not
34:16
yet confirmed but could be confirmed exoplanetary candidates, and that as of August twenty
34:22
twenty two. Well, what's happening now is that all of the data is
34:27
finally being combed through, and we're down to the last day's worth of data
34:32
from the end of that October twenty eighteen lifetime. And the problem is that
34:38
at the end of its mission, Kepler's fuel was running out, and so
34:43
the control systems weren't working as well, and so the telescope's pointing was just
34:47
a little bit flawed, and so some of that data is incomplete. Okay,
34:52
so now you have a bunch of well less than high quality data from
34:58
Kepler, but it's still Kepler data, so it's still intrinsically valuable. It's
35:04
just really hard to pull information from it. Well, enter a team from
35:08
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin, and plus a couple of
35:14
amateur astronomers who were working with the group. And what they did, ladies
35:17
and gentlemen, is that by hand or by ie, they combed through the
35:24
data from the last few days of that dying telescope that was understandably incomplete because
35:30
of pointing issues. They looked at thirty three thousand light curves by hand,
35:38
one at a time to see if there was any possible information that could be
35:45
gleaned from those that they could then run it through their computer analysis software and
35:52
identify even portions of light curves, and believe it or not, from that
35:58
desperate effort, they still came up with new exoplanet candidates, which is absolutely
36:05
amazing. So because of that effort, they were able to identify more planets
36:12
around other stars that would otherwise have gone just into the data garbage bin without
36:17
that extraordinarily extraordinary effort by those scientists and amateurs helping out amateur scientists. So
36:24
two of those exoplanets have actually been now confirmed and a third one is a
36:30
strong candidate of an exoplanet. And so what's great about that is that those
36:37
could be the last three planets confirmed from the Kepler data. Now listen.
36:45
It's not that more plants won't be confirmed out of the data set, but
36:46
this is from the last days of data, right, So if you think
36:50
about it chronologically or by the calendar, these are the last data sources taken
36:55
by Kepler that are going to yield exoplanets. And so that's what we mean
37:00
by the last ones. It's last in terms of the chronology of the data
37:04
taken. And so read about this great story on universitday dot com. It's
37:07
a fantastic story there about how this team miraculously or just with a lot of
37:12
determined effort, we're able to pull these exoplanet lightcurves out of the dying data
37:17
from the Kepler Space Telescope's last mission days. Really cool stuff. Yeah,
37:22
it is for folks living in the Chattahoochee Valley area and really kind of surrounding
37:28
areas up into the Pine Mountain Valley and things unique opportunity to get outside the
37:32
city lights and come explore the nighttime skies with you guys as you do a
37:37
bit of a road trip. When it comes to Astronomy Nights at Callaway Gardens
37:43
on Monday nights this summer, we have a very unique partnership with Callaway Gardens
37:47
with our educational group out there, and what they do is they allow us
37:52
to come out and set up our telescopes at a place called the Overlook Pavilion.
37:55
But they also allow you, the general public to get in for free
38:00
because it's after the gardens closes down, and so they allow you to come
38:04
in and participate at no cost to you with this great program that's a collaboration
38:10
between again the Callaway Gardens educational team and the Coca Cola Space Science Center's astronomy
38:16
team led by doctor Rosa. Williams, Professor of Astronomy here at Columba State
38:20
University, and we'll set up our telescopes out there. We'll have teams of
38:25
our students in the Earth and Space Sciences program who've been trained in some of
38:30
the astrophysical concepts and they know how to point those telescopes and find things in
38:34
the nighttime sky, and ladies and gentlemen, they will be your tour guides
38:37
for a lovely evening of exploring the nighttime sky with some pretty decent sized telescopes.
38:45
These are on the larger end of amateur telescopes, ten inch Dobsonians and
38:47
better, and again you'll be able to go out there and ask the experts,
38:52
get your astronomy questions answered, see things both with your naked eye and
38:55
in the nighttime sky and through our telescopes, and just generally have a good
39:00
time. So if you want to know about that program, please check out
39:02
the schedule for our astronomy nights at Callaway Gardens and throughout the rest of the
39:07
twenty twenty three By the way, do that on our website, which is
39:10
www dot cc SSC dot org. If you didn't catch all those season s's,
39:17
remember this Charlie, Charlie Sam Sam, Charlie two, Charlie's two Samson
39:22
or Charlie CCSSC dot org. Go to that website, click on the links
39:29
for the astronomy schedule, find out information about coming down and visiting us here
39:32
at Space Science Center during the day or even on Saturdays and uh and and
39:37
hopefully we'll see you out at one of our astronomy nights sometime this summer.
39:40
And we thank you for listening, and we'll do it again next week.
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