Latest / Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries / #401: Titan's Troubles & UN's Satellite Summits: Life on Ice Moons and Space Traffic Control

Transcript

#401: Titan's Troubles & UN's Satellite Summits: Life on Ice Moons and Space Traffic Control · Space Nuts: Astronomy Insights & Cosmic Discoveries

0:00
Hi there, Thank you for joining us yet again on another episode of Space
0:04
Nuts. My name is Andrew Dunkley, your host, and good to have
0:07
your company. Got a couple of things to talk about on today's show.
0:12
Not all good news, I'm afraid. One in relation to Saturn's moon Titan.
0:17
They've released some new information about the potential for life on Titan and that
0:24
doesn't augur well. Unfortunately. They've been crunching the numbers and looking at the
0:29
elephants and they've basically come up with an elephant in a room that they don't
0:34
like the look of. That all makes sense, promise you that. And
0:39
we are also going to the United Nations because there's been an agreement to talk
0:44
about something that needs to be talked about so that they can talk about it
0:47
again and then maybe make it about talking about whatever they're going to talk about
0:51
at the first meeting that they're going to talk about. That all makes sense
0:58
as well. That's all coming up on this episode of Space Nuts Channel ten
1:06
nine, Ignition, Space Nuts three two Space Notes. As I reported,
1:17
real good and joining me to unravel quite literally all of that is Professor Fred
1:22
Watson, Astronomer at Large. Hello Fred, Hello, Andrew, how are
1:26
you doing. I'm confused. Well, join the club. Yes, No,
1:34
I'm all right, I'm alright. Are you okay? Yeah, much
1:38
better than I have been, Thank you. Now that the antibiotics have got
1:41
rid of the it's technically called rickets here, but it's usually also known as
1:46
a spotted fever. That describes it perfectly. And it was caused by a
1:51
tick bite. Yeah. So yeah, that is nasty. It's been a
1:55
long haul, really, hasn't it. I mean it does, it's been
1:57
about three weeks. Nasty, nasty. Let us get stuck into the news
2:05
of this episode, and our first story concerns Titan. Now, Titan held
2:12
a lot of promise in terms of potential life because we know that it's got
2:19
all those elements for creating life, plus you know, probably a subterranean ocean
2:27
or a suber ice ocean. That could mean that the mix is right to
2:32
create potentially life. And of course there's a big mission going there in the
2:38
not too distant future. And the people who published this study were actually a
2:45
little bit worried that what they discovered might put a torpedo in the mission,
2:50
but it's probably going to do the opposite for other reasons, But let's sort
2:53
of just get down to tintas. Titan probably looked like one of the best
3:00
prospects for life beyond Earth, and now they are starting to suggest that's probably
3:06
not true. What's happened? Ye, yeah, so, And I think
3:12
the kind of slightly depressing bit of this is that it may well be that
3:17
what has been evaluated for Titan will apply to the other ice moons like Europa,
3:23
Enceladus and now Mimas, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago.
3:27
Yes, all have sub ice oceans. So this is a study by
3:32
an astrobologist Catherine Nisch, and what she's shown is that the sub ice ocean
3:43
on Titan. So remember the model of Titan, it's a rocky world.
3:46
It's a big world. It's bigger than Mercury, which has an ocean overlaying
3:53
the rock and ice on the surface of that. And on the surface of
3:57
the ice there are other liquids which are with hydrocarbons. That's another story which
4:02
we might touch on in a minute as well. But what Catherine has done
4:09
is looked at how material from the surface of Titan, which is known to
4:15
be rich in hydrocarbons, how that might filter down to the subsurface ocean.
4:23
And the basically the outcome is that it is very very slow indeed, and
4:30
you know, not something that might might make for a a prebiotic mix in
4:40
the oceans of Titan, the sub ocean. And I'm putting that succinctly.
4:45
But basically the story is this excuse me, and I should say this study
4:50
is published in the journal Astrobiology. It's all about how you know, this
4:56
transfer from the surface, which is gone to be organic rich down to the
5:00
ocean. And so what has what the modeling looks at is the fact that
5:09
comets, which will have impacted Titan like they have done the Earth and probably
5:15
more so in the early history of Titan, hits the surface. The heat
5:21
of impact melts the surface, so you've got a pool of liquid water for
5:27
a little while that's got the surface organics mixed with it. And what she
5:33
has done then is said, okay, first of all, how many comets
5:39
are going to strike Tighten every year, and that gives you an idea of
5:45
the flow of water rate carrying these organics from the surface to the interior.
5:49
But then to work out just how they will get down through the ice.
5:56
I mean, there are all kinds of unknowns in this, I have to
5:59
say, Andrew, because we don't actually know how thick that ice layer is,
6:04
and we don't know what the kind of consistency of what's underneath it is.
6:09
It may be the sort of slush because we're talking about very low temperatures,
6:12
but that ocean is known to exist because of this phenomenon of if you
6:16
stand on tighten, your longitude changes, and that's because the surface is moving
6:20
with respect to the interior core. Anyway, what they discovered was that every
6:30
year, I think it's every year. Let me just make sure I'm saying
6:35
the right thing here. Yeah, so this is every year, every year
6:41
you would get roughly seven and a half tons of glycine, which is the
6:46
simplest of the amino acids and is one of the constituents of proteins in living
6:51
organisms. And I'll leave you to draw the line with the elephant there,
6:57
but seven point five tons of glycine we're going to filter down to the ocean.
7:02
Now, the ocean is we think at least twelve times the volume of
7:10
the Earth's ocean, So seven and a half tons per year into that isn't
7:16
going to cut the mustard when it comes to forming life, which is the
7:20
equivalent to the mess of an African male elephant. That's very much that's where
7:26
we're drawing the analogy an elephant in the room. Yes, that's right.
7:30
So one elephant's worth of glycine per year going into an ocean twelve times the
7:34
volume of Earth oceans. You can see the difficulty there, aren't you.
7:39
It's going to be very, very dilute. Indeed, Now that's that's for
7:46
a world that is rich in surface organic surface chemicals containing carbon, whereas the
7:54
other icy worlds that we just mentioned, europeaganymye Enceladus, they're virtually no carbon
8:00
compounds on their surface. And so you know, if Titan's subsurface moon is
8:07
not going to be habitable because of this very poor flow of good stuff down
8:11
from the surface, then it's going to be worse for the other, you
8:16
know, the other ocean worlds, the other ice moons of the Solar system.
8:22
So, actually, Catherineiche summarized it very nicely. This work shows that
8:28
it is very hard to transfer the carbon on Titan's surface to its subsurface ocean.
8:35
Basically, it's hard to have both the water and the carbon needed for
8:37
life in the same place. And so that's as you said, there is
8:43
still much to learn about about Titan. The Dragonfly mission, which will launch
8:52
a double quad cocktail lander on Titan twenty twenty eight. It's not that far
8:58
down the track, going to take a few years to get there, but
9:01
that'll be exciting when it happens. So we're still excited about Titan, but
9:07
this kind of is a bit of a downer when it comes to the sub
9:11
sub ocean, So sorry, sub ice ocean. Well, the question for
9:16
me is how do they know they're most likely to be right because they've had
9:22
to make assumptions on several levels in releasing this paper. They've had to assume
9:26
a certain number of comments, a certain amount of material, And how do
9:31
we know that the interior of the planet didn't already contain all that exactly that
9:41
that is a very good question because like all science, you're working on assumptions.
9:50
You know, you're making these assumptions about what the constituents are with.
9:58
The assumptions are always ba on the best understanding that we have, but may
10:03
not be the right answer, and that's the beauty of science. You know,
10:07
something might turn up next week that says, oh, wait a minute,
10:09
we've got the comic flux wrong. Oh wait a minute, we've done
10:13
the maths wrong. That's not usually the maths that have been done wrong.
10:18
It's usually that one of the assumptions might change because of new discoveries. So
10:24
it's like all particular astrobiology, you're pulling together strands from many, many different
10:28
fields of science, and you're making a conclusion on the basis of that.
10:35
Now, you did you did mention, you did mention liquid hydrocarbons on the
10:41
surface. So what's the story? Like, I know, I know that
10:43
exists, but how is it relevant to this story? Well, my take
10:48
on this is less specimistic because one of the things that has excited astrobiologists in
10:54
the past, certainly in the early days of the Cassini Huygen's mission when we
10:58
landed a spacecraft on the surface of Titan, the fact that so the argument
11:05
that niche Ander colleagues are making very much on standard biology as we know,
11:15
it's water based life with carbon as the sorry carbon based life with water as
11:20
the working fluid. And that's certainly true of all life that we know.
11:24
We know of nothing that works differently, but there have been speculations that you
11:30
could have a different basis of life, and there were certainly ideas put forward
11:37
back in the nearly two thousands which suggested that maybe they were. There were
11:43
organisms, again carbon based organisms, but ones that use liquid natural gas as
11:48
they're working fluid, the ethane and methane which might breathe hydrogen and eat a
11:56
settling, which is another another carbon containing pound. And there was a bit
12:01
of a little bit of a flush of excitement about that when when Cassini discovered
12:09
that both the stylene and carbon sorry acetylene and hydrogen a bigie pad, they're
12:15
both depleted near the surface of these hydrocarbon lakes. Now, that observation might
12:20
have gone away, it's not something I've heard about for a long time,
12:24
but it does mean that we we shouldn't limit ourselves to looking at life as
12:28
we know it Jim, because that's you know, water based, carbon based
12:33
life on a on a water on a water working fluid. There might be
12:39
other possibilities and titan might be a place where it exists. Okay, so
12:43
we can't absolutely rite it off, but the evidence based on certain mathematical assumptions
12:50
does sort of tip a bit of water apple on the on the on the
12:56
Titan theory, cold water too, definitely cooled. I think I've got a
13:01
solution though. Let's go to Titan and build a room. I reckon if
13:07
we go in that, inside that room, we will find an elephant on
13:13
its way down through the artist fit. Maybe it's got to be a bit
13:18
of a disappointment for people. Even though they're saying, oh, no,
13:22
no, you know this this new horizon, other dragonfly, sorry, mission,
13:26
We'll go ahead, go ahead, We're still excited. There's so many
13:28
more questions to answer. Well, that's right, but it's got to be
13:31
a bit of a gut punch to hear this. Yeah, yes, it's
13:39
it's science. Yeah, it's science. You know. We we take we
13:43
roll with the falls is done it but you know, and once again,
13:48
Titan is a fast interest, not just because of the possibility of there being
13:52
life there. It's a huge interest. It's unique. It's the only world
13:56
in the entire universe that we know other than the Earth where there are liquid
14:01
pools of liquid pools of liquid, and its hydrocarbons are on water, which
14:07
are in equilibrium with the atmosphere. So you've got this weather cycle there you
14:09
get methane and ethane rain there will be Andrew get this, there will be
14:18
methane and ethane rainbows on Tysan, which will have a different radius from rainbows
14:22
on Earth because it's water that causes our water droplets that cause our rainbows.
14:28
It'll be water, sorry, methane ethane droplets that cause theirs. And they've
14:31
got different refractive indices stuff like that. It's going to be fabulous for Dragonfly.
14:35
Yeah. Well, how long is that going to take to get there
14:39
there? Yeah, that's the problem. A long time. Yeah. So
14:43
even though the launch is what twenty twenty eight, by the time it gets
14:46
there and I'm you know, it gets down to business, it'll be much
14:52
much later. Yeah. I'm not sure what the orbital trajectory is. There
14:56
will be slingshots involved, I'm sure, but I don't know what the details
14:58
are anyway, Yeah, something still to look forward to. And it's not
15:05
you know, it's an interesting comment I see as a yes, as a
15:11
comment on our journey towards seeking life elsewhere in the universe. Indeed, if
15:16
you'd like to read that story in full, you can find it on the
15:20
site tech Daily website. This is space N's Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Fred
15:26
what's an Let's take a short break from the show to tell you about our
15:31
sponsor, nord VPN. Now, I've talked to you very very regularly about
15:37
virtual private networks and the benefits that you gained, particularly if you're using Wi
15:41
Fi devices in a public place, to protect you from scammers or hackers,
15:46
or just generally protect you in an overall sense. But another thing that I've
15:54
claimed in the past is the speed at which nord VPN can operate even when
16:02
you're using a server in another country. So I'm going to prove it right
16:06
now. I'm going to do a speed test on my own internet service.
16:10
I have not got NordVPN connected right at this moment, so I'll pick the
16:15
server. Let me just change it to the one I use regularly, Okay,
16:19
So I'm going from my server to another server, no VPN speed test,
16:25
and we'll do a check on how fast my internet service is. Okay.
16:30
So there, it's pushing up just over one hundred megabits per second download
16:37
as it is, all right, just peaked at one hundred and six actually,
16:40
so I'm getting more than I'm paying for through my standard service and the
16:45
upload speed is around forty Okay, right, let's stop that. And now
16:52
we got to do it via Nord VPN. So I'll open my server and
16:59
I will the quick connect so it'll pick its own server to connect through while
17:04
I'm doing this, and it only takes a few seconds and then we okay,
17:10
we are connected. So we've connected to Australians server number sixty five to
17:14
three. I'll have to close the browser and open it again so that it
17:18
gets a fresh connection via the VPN. And then we will do a speed
17:23
test, all right, speed test, and I'll use exactly the same server
17:30
so that we can compare the numbers. Can you remember what I said before?
17:34
Find the optimal server or I'm going to change it to where it to
17:38
go? There it is that one. So once again, of course the
17:42
server that I'm going through now is different from my regular server because I'm using
17:47
a VPN. So click go, let's see what the numbers say and boom
17:55
ninety nine, one hundred Yeah, so what have I lost the one hundred
18:00
and two I've lost practically nothing. One hundred and three so around one hundred,
18:07
two hundred and three megabits per second download, So I'm still getting more
18:11
than I'm paying for and the upload is continuing to hang around the thirty six
18:15
thirty seven megabits per second. That's with the VPN connected, So that's nord
18:22
vpn. It offers high speed access to their service. You don't lose anything
18:29
in the translation, maybe one or two megabits per second. Sometimes it's even
18:33
faster than your regular connection. It is a great service. It's well worth
18:37
getting, not only for your peace of mind, but also for your continuity
18:40
of service. And I stand by it. I've been using it for a
18:45
very long time, very happy with it and all those other services that go
18:48
with it that I find really valuable. So where do you get it all
18:52
right? Nord vpn dot com slash space nuts. That's gnord vpn dot com
19:00
Space Nuts. There's a special deal for you, heavily discounted price, an
19:06
extra four months, and it's their birthday, so they're offering all sorts of
19:11
bells and whistles along the way. Check it all out at NordVPN dot com
19:15
slash space nuts and click get the deal and don't forget. They have a
19:19
thirty day money back guarantee. Now back to the show, Space Nuts the
19:27
second half of our program FRED is dedicated to bureaucracy. Not I'm probably I'm
19:37
probably being a bit too tough. But it's finally come to pass that the
19:42
United Nations has put on an agenda for a meeting later this year. The
19:47
they we'll be looking into the issue of concentrations of satellites or satellite constellations or
19:53
whatever you want to call them, because as we speak, there are over
20:00
eight thousand satellites in orbit around Earth, and there are plans to send up
20:03
many, many, many many more. Even Rwanda wants to get in on
20:07
this. They announced a few years ago now that they would have put three
20:12
three hundred thousand satellites in orbit. SpaceX wants to put sixty thousand up there,
20:18
and there are so many others that want to add to that number,
20:22
and it's starting well, it's beyond becoming a concern for those who use telescope,
20:29
visual telescopes and radio telescopes, because you want to keep the skies dark
20:33
and quiet, and having hundreds of thousands of satellites orbiting the planet or in
20:40
geostationary orbit probably would make that difficult. It's a challenge. So this story
20:45
goes back really to twenty twenty nine. Sorry, doesn't go back to tonight.
20:52
See I'm still not well enough. I felt very old there for a
20:56
moment. Yeah, it goes back to twenty nineteen. In fact, May
21:00
twenty nineteen when the first transch of Stalink satellites were launched and astronomers were taken
21:07
by surprise, and when they realized that SpaceX had approval for another, well
21:15
another twelve thousand of them, they started to get upset. So that's the
21:18
backstory. Now, this is a story that I've been very closely involved with,
21:22
Andrew, because it's part of my job to help to counter this issue.
21:30
And since that time there's been a lot has happened. Astronomers grumbled like
21:34
Matt to start with, but they have since then had many many conferences,
21:41
done a lot of work on actually evaluating the risk to astronomical observation. And
21:47
you're quite right, it's both optical telescopes and radio telescopes which were affected by
21:53
this. So all of that has led a couple of years ago to the
22:00
formation by the International Astronomical Union, which is the sort of governing body of
22:06
astronomy, of something that is called the Center for the Protection of the dark
22:11
and quiet sky from the effects of satellite constellations, usually abbreviated to the CPS.
22:18
It's a lot easier to say. In fact, it's a lot of
22:23
colleagues and friends of mine who are involved with that. So that's at one
22:29
level, and that organization, the CPS, one of its it does many
22:34
things. It does, you know, works out how you can remediate observations
22:38
that have been affected by satellite transmissions, whether they're radio or satellite reflections.
22:44
In the case of optical telescopes, They've done a huge amount of work on
22:48
that. There is also a strong part of the organization which is about liaising
22:56
with the space industry, which, in the body the bottom line, is
23:00
one of the most important ones because the space industry is the key to this,
23:06
and in particular the biggest basically the person or the organization with the most
23:14
investment in this so far is SpaceX with Starlink, and I'm very glad to
23:21
say that SpaceX has been one of the foremost, if not the foremost company
23:26
to engage with astronomers and look at the problems and how you fix them.
23:32
And indeed there are some really good people working within the Starlink organization who are
23:37
actually also members of the CPS the IAU Center. So there's a lot of
23:42
there's a good news aspect to this story. The less good news aspect was
23:49
something I was closely involved with this time last year. I just in fact,
23:55
I was just returning from a couple of weeks in v where the Science
24:03
and Technical Subcommittee of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space
24:10
had just finished its annual two week meeting, and during that meeting we were
24:15
very kind of urgently trying to get this issue of the deleterious effects of satellite
24:23
constellations on astronomy onto the agenda. The permanent agenda of kupwas the Committee on
24:30
the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. That proved difficult because everything in the UN
24:38
works by consensus. It's not a vote. Everybody has to agree, and
24:42
there were certain nations which will would not agree to this agenda item. And
24:48
I came away it was the United States one of them. The United States
24:53
was not one of them, No, it was other countries who were constantly
25:00
in the news because of wars and things of that sort. So it was
25:06
all about, you know, it was all about trying to push this through
25:11
we were very disappointed at the end of that couple of weeks that we didn't
25:15
make it through with the agenda item. There was a full meeting of the
25:21
Committee on the Peaceful Uses of out of Space rather than their Scientific and Technical
25:23
Subcommittee, which is what I was involved with. That full committee met in
25:29
June and the hope was that they would push it forward there too. That
25:33
didn't happen either because of another country that objected, and in fact that's where
25:40
it stood. And you might remember, but in October I was sort of
25:42
meeting in La Palma in the Canary Islands, which was actually an International Astronomical
25:48
Union meeting where we discussed this again and there were glimmers of hope there that
25:52
we could see a way forward to take this issue onto the agenda of the
25:59
UN. And Okay, so in the meeting that's just gone, which I
26:03
wasn't at, and in fact it was an in person only meeting so I
26:06
couldn't even log in online. But my colleagues from the Australians Base Agency were
26:11
there, fantastic people who are right across this issue, and in the end
26:17
it was agreed. So there is actually a very nice International Astronomical Union press
26:22
release, which is headed as you said, United Nations agrees to address the
26:26
impact of satellite constellations on astronomy. And so the agenda item, which will
26:33
come up now for the next five years and that is pretty amazing for UN
26:38
issues, has the title dark and Quiet Skies, Astronomy and large Constellations addressing
26:45
emerging issues and challenges. And I hope that I might be involved with that
26:51
work down the track. I'm not sure whether that's going to happen, but
26:55
it's certainly very close to my heart to be able to do that. So
26:59
that step forward now, as you have kind of indicated at the start of
27:03
this segment, the wheels of the UN turned very slowly, indeed, and
27:10
this is an issue on which essentially nimbleness is really the watchwork, because you
27:17
know, the industry is moving ahead so quickly. But I do believe that
27:22
what the UN agreement now will do is it just adds that little bit more
27:29
gravitas to what we're already doing in the astronomy world, engaging with the space
27:36
industry, looking at how things can be improved and how we can, you
27:41
know, how we can mitigate the effects of these mega constellations because the bottom
27:45
line is the mega constellations are actually doing good things now. You know,
27:49
they are providing Internet services where they would never have been there before. And
27:55
we've seen examples with the wars that are going on at the moment how those
27:59
services are invaluable. There is the industry itself, I should just start as
28:04
a PostScript to this, is concerned about the crowding of space because you know,
28:10
the Castler syndrome haunts us all one big collision and you've suddenly got so
28:15
much debut that space becomes unusable. Exactly. Yeah, I have a devil's
28:21
advocate question. Okay, the UNS now agreed to put this on the agenda
28:26
and discuss it and look at the problem over the next five years. How
28:33
much power have they got to actually deal with it when the time comes?
28:37
Well, the time has come, but how much power have they got?
28:41
So they do have power in the sense that it may well be that another
28:49
body that sort of sits under the UN, which is the International Telecommunications Union,
28:56
and that's the body that actually allocates frequencies and basically say yes, you
29:00
can launch your spacecraft. And there is there is thinking which I think is
29:07
shared across the board that that you know, their mandate needs to be tightened
29:12
up, that the ITU needs some revision in the way it deals with with
29:18
requests for orbital launches and orbital slots, and and that that can be done.
29:23
That's something that will probably be encouraged by the fact that this, uh,
29:29
this agenda item has gone ahead. If I may just segue from that
29:34
andrew to another story that kind of highlights really what we're talking about, and
29:41
that is the announcement again from SpaceX that they are going to d orbit one
29:48
hundred of its older Starlink satellites in order to sort of clear the air a
29:56
bit. It's to to basically get rid of a threat for collisions because I
30:03
think these are the older I think this is among the first group of the
30:08
Starlink satellites. They're what they're called the Version one satellite, and so over
30:12
the next few weeks they're going to deorbit one hundred of them. Now,
30:15
exactly as you've said, Stalink already has more than five thousand of these in
30:21
orbit, but the later versions are actually I think more sophisticated in their collision
30:26
avoidance capabilities and things of that sort. So you know, SpaceX announced in
30:34
an X tweet mix my metaphors there that this is the right thing to do
30:41
to keep space safe and sustainable, which is really what it's all about.
30:45
And I have to say, and I've said this already, but yes,
30:51
SpaceX they're starlink constellations are certainly the biggest offenders in terms of numbers, but
30:56
they are also the ones that have come closest to the party by things like
31:00
the Visa SATs, which we're aiming to darken the satellites. We now have
31:04
reflective coatings on the satellites that can deflect the beams of light from the Sun.
31:12
Rather than those beams being scattered down to Earth where they become visible in
31:15
twilight, you beam them straight out into space and make the satellites invisible.
31:21
It reduces their brightness, and they're also engaging in some quite stringent mitigation properties
31:26
in regard to radio astronomy as well. So in that regard, you know,
31:33
it's a good news story. It is one that's still a difficulty.
31:37
Astronomy will never be the same again with all this satellite constellation interference, but
31:42
we're learning how to deal with it, and I think forging very good relationships
31:47
with the space industry. I hope the space industry is listening to this too.
31:53
Let's hope the UN works faster than our roads and traffic authorities here in
31:57
New South Wales, who have just agreed that we should register horse drawn vehicles
32:02
keys. All right, all right, I can't help myself sometimes. Yeah,
32:08
it is interesting news and you can find out more at the International Astronomical
32:15
Union dot org website. That wraps it up. Fred. Just a reminder
32:21
too, if you want to listen to Space Nuts Q and A that will
32:24
be coming up on Monday. It'll get downloaded to your respective platforms automatically if
32:30
you subscribe to us, and if you're a follower on YouTube, don't forget
32:35
to hit the subscribe button below. Thanks Fred, We will catch up with
32:39
you real real soon. Sounds great, Andrew, talk soon. Fred Watson
32:45
an Astronomer at Large and he joins us every week on Space Nuts, and
32:49
I hope you'll join us again very very soon. We'll catch you then,
32:52
from me Andrew Dunkley. Bye BYEPA Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
33:04
iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand
33:07
at bites dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from fights dot com,