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NASA's New Horizons to Investigate Rear of Uranus · 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 their vocabulary to include terms like quasar asterism and
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uranus. Listen, that's your own risk. Go ahead. Where made of
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Stars? Made of Stars? Made? Where? Made Stars? You could
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be from High Hollywood, New Mexico, Mars, Where Stars? When we
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are made of Stars? I'm West Carroll, joined by my good friend doctor
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Sean and cruising from Columbus State University's Coca Cola Space Science Center. Hey Sean,
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good morning West. It's great to be here. You know, we
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have a lot of interesting conversations today about things tied to solar systems. It's
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our solar system, but maybe some other solar systems too, So it's a
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kind of a venture into the Solar system today on Made of Stars. Well,
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let's start following up on a story we talked about last week, and
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actually we talked about prior to that, Because we talked about there was a
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lot of big launches that were scheduled to happen before the end of the year.
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One of those big launches happened last week and there's you know, so
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far so good. I guess for Russia's Luna twenty five moonlander. It's now
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reached lunar orbit. Yeah, so the launch occurred on August tenth, which
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was last week, and so they announced yesterday. Ross Cosmos did on August
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sixteen that the spaceship has arrived around the orbit of the Moon. It arrived
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in good shape as far as they can tell. And this is Russia's first
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moon mission since nineteen seventy six. This mission is called Luna twenty five.
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The previous one was called, of course Luna twenty four, but Luna twenty
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four launched in nineteen seventy six. So things, you know, in terms
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of technology, engineering, coding, all those kinds of things, things have
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advanced to tad you know, in that interim time and so of nearly fifty
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years, by the way, so it's still to be seen whether or not
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this orbiter, and it's probe this sitting down to the service will actually be
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able to land because Russia just hasn't landed anything, particularly on the Moon in
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a very long time. So so yes, they they're good at spacecraft and
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you know, we see the Russian space program and having a lot of success
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in orbit around our own planet, but we haven't seen them. I have
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a ton of success landing vehicles on other worlds. So as we move now
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into the next phase of the Lunar twenty five mission, we are going to
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be watching very carefully to see how the landing system works. Right. So,
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ross Cosmos put out a statement today It says all Lunar twenty five systems
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are functioning normally, communication with it is stable, and sessions are being taken
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to measure the current navigational parameters. So they're just they know it's there,
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they know it's in safe orbit. They're just kind of maneuvering the vehicle and
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making sure that everything's working right now. So so yes, it looks like
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Russia has now put something into orbit around the Moon and they will now move
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into the face where they're going to be dropping that lander. And you know,
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I mean russ Cosmos, Russia, I know there. I know that
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they're affiliated their kin organizations. Ross Cosmos is the Russian space agency, but
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I like to kind of think of ross Cosmos as a bit separate from Russia,
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the nation that's playing some shenanigans around the world right now. The rose
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Cosmos Space Agency has been a close partner with NASA, and it's had lots
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of common investigations both in lower orbit and in the Solar System. So maybe
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I guess I'm rooting for, you know, a safe landing. I'd like
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to see more data and more science about the Moon come out. The vehicle
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is going to be particularly hunting for water ice in the neighborhood of the Moon's
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south pole, so this is as kind of you know, main mission as
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it goes down in the lands in the lunar south pole region. So yeah,
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I guess I want to know more about what water rice is down there
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around the south pole of the Moon, and if it's the Russians that are
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providing it, all the better. So you talked about their lack of success
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with landing things on the Moon and being able to consistently do that or be
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able to I mean that would be ultimately why they never put human beings on
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the Moon becau as they weren't able to ever really master that, right,
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Yeah, and more pointedly their lunar rocket, which was you have to have
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a really big rocket that has a lot of payload capacity to be able to
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blast off both humans and all the camping equipment that they need to go to
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another world. Right, So there's you know, lots of tents and you
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know, walking sticks and Bunsen burners and whatever camp camp stoves, whatever you
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take to the Moon, twinkies. There's a lot of stuff you need when
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you go up there. So you have to have a very large heavy lift
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rocket. Now, Russia was building one called the N one at about the
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same time that we were building the Saturn five here in America that took our
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Apollo missions to the Moon. The N one rocket that the Russians were working
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on never worked. It exploded on the launch pad and killed many of the
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technicians and engineers who were working on it, including mister Karlov who was ahead
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of their space program at the time. So so yes, they didn't have
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a lot of success with that takeoff with human They have also not had a
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lot of success landing vehicles on other worlds like Mars. They have they have,
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well, my friends got Norman here at the Space Science Center. He
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likes the term augur in. They have augured in many spacecraft into the surface
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of the planet Mars, trying to land at Temple landings there, and they've
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argued in quite frankly, a couple into the lunar surface as well. So
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so whether it can there's no question it took off, there's no question that
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it got into orbit. Whether that vehicle can land safely on the Moon's surface
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and actually begin to send back some of the data that it was designed to
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take remains to be seen. All right, let's this is my favorite story
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of the week by far. So NASA's New Horizons is going to go around
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to the dark side of the planet Uranus. Dare I say to the rear
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of Uranus and investigate? I was pretty sure you would, dare So.
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I hate to be so predictable, but you give me a story that says
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they're going to be looking at the dark side of your rainus and I can't
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help, but you know, run with it. So I feel like i'd
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like to set your I like to set your volleyball spikes. Yeah, that
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was a nice job, and I was gonna say, I can't take full
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responsibility for it when you're just feeding me like this, So you know,
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I gotta I gotta deliver the spike. There's the spike. So New Horizons
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is going to be investigating Uranus on the dark side of it, on the
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dark side, so to speak. Yeah, this story is in space dot
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Com by the way, if you want to go out and read it.
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And they didn't. They didn't turn away from that joke either, so they
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kind of use that joke in their story. So I figured it's it's fair
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game for us too. So what's really happening is the New Horizons spacecraft was
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designed to go out to the now dwarf planet Pluto. It's interesting that the
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planet was still a planet when at launched, but by the time it got
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there it had been downgraded to a dwarf planet anyway. So so New Horizons
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did a great job photographing Pluto and gave us a really good idea of all
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the magnificent surface features on that world. But now it is far beyond the
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orbit of Pluto. It's heading out of our Solar System, and what it's
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doing is it's turning back toward the direction of its origin, towards the Earth
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or towards the Sun, and it's going to take those photographs, as you
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said, of both both of what we call the ice giant planets, both
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Urinus and Neptune, and we would kind of consider that from behind because it's
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going to be the non Sun facing side. Okay, so that's the setup.
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Now, remember that the planet's Urinus and Neptune have only been photographed from
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space vehicles. In other words, they've only been visited twice, and that
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was by the same space vehicle. That was by Voyage or two, which
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by the way, we talked about this last time. But they have re
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established contact with Voyager two. They lost contact with Voyager two for a bit
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over the last couple of weeks, but now they have re established it.
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Anyway, So Voyager Voyager two back in nineteen eighty six and then again in
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nineteen eighty nine did flybys of the planets Uranus and Neptune and got images of
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those worlds that we now use. It's kind of the fiduciary images, so
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to speak. There's sort of the standard images of those planets that you might
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see out there. So now we have new horizons out far beyond the orbit
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of Uranus and Neptune. But in September they'll be turning that spacecraft again back
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towards the Sun facing side or back toward the interior of the Solar System,
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and they're going to use a device called the Multi Spectral Visible Imaging Camera or
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the m VIC to point back at the planets and get some data on those
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two worlds, which we just haven't had a lot of visits too. We
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don't know. There's still lots of mysteries out there. So the spacecraft is
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actually kind of far from those worlds. It's about five billion miles from Earth
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anyway. It's also kind of far from those other planets as well, but
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those sensitive cameras aboard will be able to take the data necessary to help us
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further our understanding of what are now known as the Ice Giant worlds. The
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m VIC. The m VIC not named after Michael Vick. It not that
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I know of, Okay, so I wasn't there that day, so I
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can't really tell you better. So they didn't. They can't use the nickname
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Ron Mexico. Like. That's not an option either as an alias. It's
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not so long. I don't know that it could be could be an option.
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A long way to go to get to a Ron Mexico joke. That's
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all I wanted to do was just reference that. By the way, So
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something interesting about this endeavor with the Uranus and Neptune is that they are going
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to be simultaneously observing those two worlds with the Hubble space telescope, but they're
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also asking other observatories around the world, including any amateur astronomers that have sufficiently
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large telescopes, to also provide simultaneous data of those worlds. So listen.
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If you're out there listening to the podcast and you're an amateur astronomer and you
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want to know if you can contribute, check out the story on space dot
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com. There's a link in there to the New Horizons program at the Southwest
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Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and you might be able to actually contribute
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data to this continuing coverage of Urinus and Neptune by the New Horizons spacecraft.
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So they're gonna get it ready to take a picture of the exact same moment.
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Is that what they're gonna do? Everybody three, two, one,
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click, and then they could make one of those remember the Gap commercial when
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they were doing the they were dancing and they throw them in the air and
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they'd spend the camera and that's how they do that. They all take a
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picture all the way, so they could do that of these planets, that
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would be great. I mean, it could be and you know, they're
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they're basic. I don't know about the simultaneity, but they basically want,
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you know, observations that are roughly correlated with the time of the observations that
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are being made by by the vehicle out in space. So so, but
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it's just kind of a fun thing to say, Hey, we acknowledge the
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fact that there are many amateurs out there who are getting high quality images and
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we would like to invite them to contribute to our science mission. I think
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that's just a great thing. It's Alan Stern who's always been the principal investigator
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of the New Horizon spacecraft, and he is at the Southwest Research Institute in
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Boulder, Colorado. And again it's a it's just a hat tip to all
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those amateurs because they know they can get good data from all of those telescopes
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around the world. Yeah, that's fantastic. Let's talk about Io, the
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Juno probe getting a new image of this moon of Jupiter. Yeah. So
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Io is a moon that's been photographed many times by several different spacecraft, but
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it's also the most dynamic surface of any world in the Solar System, and
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really that includes the Earth. In other words, the surface of Io is
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changing more often and more violently even then Earth's surface with all of its erosion
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and water oceans and things like that. And that's because Io is just slap
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jam packed with giant volcanoes all over its surface, and so those volcanoes are
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more or less continuously erupting, and they are more or less continuously repaving or
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recovering the surface of that planet Io. So any feature on Io is likely
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to be a new feature, right, And so taking more and more images
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of Io just gives us a better look at the processes that are taking place
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around these volcanic systems on its surface. Why does Io have volcanoes, Well,
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it's not for the same reason the Earth does. Io's volcanoes are actually
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caused by the tidal heating taking place by the enormously strong gravitational field of the
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parent planet Jupiter. And Io is just close enough that it gets continuously squeezed
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and stretched like a rubber ball, which heats up its interior causes these volcanos
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all over the surface. Now, according to NASA's Planetary Science Division, imager
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aboard the Juno spacecraft. That Juno Cam caught a glimpse of a volcanic plume
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from a volcano named Prometheus in this latest set of images. And so Prometheus
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is a volcano that's been nicknamed the Old Faithful of Io and that's because it
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has very regular series of eruptions. They can count on this one volcano erupting,
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erupting at a certain time frame that is more or less known, and
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so they were able to then, point Juno added, capture an eruption of
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Prometheus, and that the analysis of that material coming out of that volcano gives
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us an insight into the interior of that moon, which then tells us more
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about how Moon's form, which then tells us more about how the Solar system
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formed. And so you see, it's a really good pathway for science to
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help us better understand our world and the Solar system which it grew up.
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Let's talk about this new comet that's making its way to us be naked eye
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visible maybe next month. Yeah, that just means you don't need a telescope
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to see it, although certainly telescopes and binoculars enhance the view, but you
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might be able to capture a glimpse of the unaided eye. And so it
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was a comet that was discovered this year, earlier this year by a Japanese
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amateur astronomer. So here's another amateur astronomer making contributions. By the way,
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his name is Hideo Nishimura. And so now it's called Comet Nishimura, or
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in the catalog parlance, it's Comet C twenty twenty three P one anyway,
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so all those all those things have meaning. But obviously it's discovered in a
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year twenty twenty three, and so it has been visible at least since August
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fifteen. That's when some photographs started rolling in again from these amateur astronomers.
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Forecasters believe that Comet Nishimura will brighten to the third magnitude by the middle of
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next month, which is September. So check out spaceweather dot com. They're
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going to be following the story of Comet Nishimura. That's where this story came
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from that I'm reading you. One of the other interesting things from the spaceweather
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dot com article is that this commet may actually have what's called a hyperbolic orbit,
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or it is a hyperbolic comet, which means simply this, it's coming
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in at such an angle and at such speed toward the Sun that it basically
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has too much energy after it whips around the Sun to stay in our solar
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system. So this is a one and done commet. It's not ever going
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to pass back by. It's going to fly by the Sun and be slung
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outside of our solar system to travel maybe to other solar systems someday, right,
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but just out into the depths of space in the distances between stars.
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We called that the interstellar medium. So the commet will only be visiting us
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one time, so you better catch it in mid September or you're gonna miss
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out on your chance. That's kind of a grim outlook for it. I
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mean, you get one appearance on one shot and that's it. There's uh
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no no future for this thing to come by again. That's that's not that
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sounds so bleak. Well it does it first glimpse, But you have to
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remember that comets really like dark, cold places. Yeah, you know,
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they when they get near the Sun, they kind of feel like Frosty the
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snowman inside the greenhouse. They're not really happy in there. Yep. Pretty
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soon all it's left as a top hat and a flower, so you know
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that it's one of those things where the comet really wants to be back out
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away from the sun, so it's only gonna have one pass by the Sun
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and then it gets to go for some close to infinite time back out to
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the depths of space where it's nice and cold. And as far as this
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catalog number, I'm assuming the C stands for comet. Yes, twenty twenty
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three is obviously the year. What's the P P stand for it? So
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this is the P one is the type of comment that it is, and
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it's a it's kind of a little bit of a complicated designation. But but
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but the letters following the year tell you what type of comment it is.
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And again this is a hyperbolic comment, so it falls into that category.
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Gotcha, all right? Just trying to I mean, I'm looking at it
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as you're talking about the catalog number, and I'm like, I understand most
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of this. I was just curious about what that last part of it is.
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Uh, coming up after a quick break, a quadruple star system being
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born has been captured by astronomers. We'll talk about that right after this so
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quadruplets being born out in a deep space astronomers capturing a quadruple star system being
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born. This is pretty exciting. One baby, two babies, three babies,
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four babies. Sounds like rabbits. The interesting thing, though, is
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this is like having four little chicks inside the same egg. That would be
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weird. I don't I'm not I'm not a you know, an agrarian,
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so I don't have that kind of background. I'm not really a I didn't
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grow up on a farm or anything, so I don't know if four chicks
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can be in the same egg or not. I was glad you knew that
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I was gonna say chicken ologist because I don't. I don't know that term,
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So there you go. Well, what I would say is this that
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stars aren't chickens. They kind of do their own thing. So within the
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same clump of gas, though, of in a nebula, which is a
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space cloud. Nebulas are primarily hydrogen gas mixed with dust, and within a
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clump of that hydrogen gas mixed with dust, you could have multiple stars forming
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at the same time. In fact, multiple stars forming out of those clumps
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is actually more common than single stars forming. So our son being a single
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star and not having a binary or trinary or quadruple companion system is actually kind
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of an oddball. It's it's in the minority anyway on that end of things.
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All right, So there's the group of researchers called the Alma Survey of
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Oriyon Plunk Galactic Cold Clumps or Alma SOP for short. Good thing they did
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something short, right, And by the way, if you if you don't
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what Alma is, Alma is the is an acronym for a microwave observatory down
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in Chile in the Onacama Desert, and so so anyway that that acronym is
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for that. So Almah, the Alma Survey of Orian Plank Galactic Cold Clumps,
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or the Alma SOP team recently observed something that they found inside the clump
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of one of these hot, glowing lumps of gas in the ryan nebula.
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We call them eggs in astronomy, that stands for evaporating gaseous globule. So
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that's yet another acronym. So withinside this egg is a quadruple star system,
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four stars being borne together, all orbiting around a common center of mass within
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one clump of gas. In the star forming regions inside the Orion constellation.
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That is like hitting a six bank pool shot my friend to find all that
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going on at the same time. So it's a really interesting story and it's
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a really fantastic observation from the Alma stop group. And the discovery was made
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during high resolution surveys of seventy two of these dense cores or these evaporating gaseous
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globules or these eggs that are inside the Orion giant molecular cloud. And so
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the Autacama Large Millimeter Array or the Alma telescope in Chile is the one that
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caught that particular view the Alma survey of Orion plunk galactic cold clumps. I
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just wanted to do it one time. It's a lot, it's a mouthful,
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there is a lot going on there. I've known people with last names
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like that, middle and last names, so it kind of felt like it
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was, you know, reading names at a graduation. I just wanted to
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just kind of run through it one time. So the rarity of this,
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and then obviously the fact that they were able to capture this, I guess
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is what's fascinating because obviously this could have happened before. No one happened to
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be looking in that direction. That's true. The you know, the Alma
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array itself is a relatively new instrument, and so it's giving us some ideas
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of the capability of that large milimeter array in the Atacama Desert in Chile,
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and so so it's it's opening up new doors of research by being able to
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see into places we weren't able to see before, right, And so when
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you do that, then you find these weird things like, oh my gosh,
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there's four protostars. We see them in the very very early stages of
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formation, and we see them all inside the same clump of gas. And
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again that's a that's like a very fancy pool shot to be able to have
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all of those circumstances align. And why do we care about that, Well,
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it's because when we study these stars in formation, it teaches us about
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the mechanisms by which these star systems, either binary stars or multiple star systems,
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actually form within these clouds of gas, which leads us to information about
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the study of ctell revolution, which leads us to information about the history of
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our own son and how other stars form out there in the galaxy. So
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that's why we want to know, because it's fundamental research that leads us down
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interesting roads to compared to objects that are right here in our inside our own
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solar system. Let's talk comic books and toys, shall we? We should
23:59
do that because we have a pretty cool deal going on. We actually have
24:03
a Columbus Comic book and toy show happening on the twenty seventh of this month
24:07
of August, and ladies and gentlemen, if you go online and buy your
24:12
tickets ahead of time, you can take advantage of a dual marketing circumstance with
24:19
the River Center here in town, where they have a very very cool event
24:23
taking place the night before, on the Saturday night, they have Spider Man
24:29
into the Spider Verse playing in their large Bill Hurd Theater. But wait,
24:33
there's more a cool movie already. But they actually have a live orchestra playing
24:38
all of the music in real time with the movie. So you can go
24:44
hear the soundtrack play live by an orchestra while you're watching the Spider Man movie
24:51
inside the River Center. And again, if you buy your tickets, you
24:55
get a discount to that event, and you also get a discount to our
24:59
Columbus Comic Book Toy Show, which is the very next morning leven am on
25:03
Sunday, will begin that and if you want to have an early preview,
25:07
you can also get an upgrade for that and come in and there'll be all
25:11
kinds of vendors of both comic books and toys inside the exhibit gallery of the
25:15
hollowed halls of the Coca Cola Space Science Center. There will also be all
25:18
kinds of costume characters and sci fi fund check out all the information for this
25:25
on the website, Ladies and gentlemen of Columbus State University's Coca Cola Space Science
25:30
Center. We like to call it cc SSC dot org or Charlie Charlie Sam
25:37
Sam Charlie dot org. If you type all of that in CCSSC dot org,
25:41
you can go follow to a link that will tell you all about the
25:45
information for the Columbus Comic Book and Toy Show. It should be a great
25:48
time. It always is. We thank you for listening and we'll do it
25:52
again next week. Overhead Door Company of Columbus has all of your garage door
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