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Record Breaking Rubio Returns to Earth · 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
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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? Made where Stars? You could be from
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High Hollywood, New Mexico, Mars, Where Stars? When we are made
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of stars. I'm West Carroll joined, I'm a good friend doctor Sean Cruisen
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from Columbus State University. He's Coca Cola Space Science Center. Hey Sean,
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Hey Wes, it's good to be with you today. Man. Do we
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have a information packed show? Well, and it's a show filled with huge
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stories, and it's like each one of these would probably be the main story
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on any other week. So when you've got that, you have to kind
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of figure out, well, which one is the most important story? And
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I mean we could Talco Cyrus Rex first. That's been a story that I've
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had more than one person ask me about since our show last week. Knowing
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that you know it's now down and it's been opened and all that stuff,
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we could be talking about anti matter and Einstein. I mean, that's kind
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of a big deal also, but I feel like we have a local tie
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to the story that is obviously the record breaking story as now Frank Rubio formerly
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of the Chattahoochee Valley area, formerly at Fort Benning or now Fort Moore,
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but when he was there, it was for Benning. But Frank Rubio has
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returned to Earth and he is now a record breaking astronaut. Yeah. So
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there are people who you and I both know who know Frank Rubio really well,
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because again, as you said, he was part of our community,
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right. So, so, I mean, you know, it's like cheering
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for your favorite football team. It's not necessarily that you know all the players
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on your favorite NFL football team. I'm trying to decide which team that is
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right now, by the way, because my old team was done some really
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horrible things. But anyway, sorry, anyway, sorry about the seventy that
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we're hung on your Broncos. Last week. That was I felt the pain
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for you every single time I got a scoring wait wait wait this just in
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Miami just scored again. Sorry, it was so after the six touchdowns,
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I was kind of like, wait, was that seven? Wait? Was
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that eight? Wait? Was that nine? Are we going double digits?
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Yes? Was the answer. Yes. So anyway, yeah, and I
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watched every painful minute of that game because it's one of the rare Denver Bronco
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games that was on national broadcast rather than local. I'll bet they regretted that
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decision, or maybe they didn't, because it was just like that much of
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a roller coaster ride. They had fans in the stands screaming for blood.
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They wanted that seventy three, or they wanted to beat the seventy three and
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get a new record. But I know it was painful for you, and
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sorry that I had to we had to even bring it up and talk about
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it. But anyway, speaking of records, West, let's get back to
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space, shall we. The that part of my life is still bleeding,
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all right, So all right, here we are back in space. Frank
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Rubio, as we talked talked about, has ties to our local area,
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which is really cool. But Frank Rubio also just became the United States single
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longest flight participant of a space flight. So in other words, he is
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the NASA astronaut who has spent the longest time in space on a single flight,
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and that all came to a conclusion on Wednesday of this week, and
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we tip our hat to miss Rubio astronaut Rubio for riding out the storm in
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orbit and staying the extra time. Because see, folks, here's the thing.
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He wasn't originally scheduled to spend that long in space. It was not
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a plan of NASA to make Frank Rubio its longest serving single flight astronaut.
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It happened because of something that no one can control. A micro meteorite hit
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the spacecraft that he had ridden to space in that was a soy use capsule.
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In other words, he flew Russian, all right, so you gotta
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make your choices about airlines. He flew Russian, but you know that the
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Russians couldn't help. But if a microbetr right's coming along and it's gonna hit
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your it's gonna hit your cooling system for the second time in a row.
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Oh wait what, No, I don't know about anything about that anyway.
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Yeah, apparently a micro meteorite hit their system and caused their ammonia to leak
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all into space like a gigantic Doctor Shivago like blizzard, which just completely coded
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their spacecraft and frozen ammonia, which is fairly spectacular to watch. By the
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way, that video's out there, friends, you can go out and watch
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that. Anyway. That delayed Frank's flight, so his return flight to home
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by six months, the equivalent of the time he planned to spend in space
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in the first place, which means it doubled the length of his stay in
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orbit around the planet Earth. And that's why it is a newsworthy story.
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Friends. So we've had other astronauts that have passed the one year mark,
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just not from the US. And the previous record holder for an American astronaut
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was almost a full year. It was ten days, shy or whatever.
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Is there a reason that they don't necessarily enlist them to be there longer?
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Or is I mean, obviously with the previous record, you know, was
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he scheduled to be there three hundred and fifty five days? So you know,
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I know, we get hung up on records. I mean, you
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know, seventy points, you know that kind of thing. We get hung
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up on milestones. Why didn't they go to seventy three? I don't know,
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they could have easily anyway, They probably could have gotten to seventy seven
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was no problem quite frankly, but that's a different story. I thought they
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were getting there. They had one run at the end, and it looked
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like it was about to happen, And I mean, I think people were
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taking a knee anyway. So NASA really doesn't plan their missions according to that.
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They don't say, you know, a calendar year is three hundred and
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sixty five days long, perhaps we should have an astronaut who stays more time
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than that. That's just not really a consideration. And again for those of
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us who are outside of their field, we think, well, wouldn't it
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be cool of you? I mean, why don't we Actually, he's only
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a few days, shy, let him stay up there and pass a calendar
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year. Okay, So the last person, as you said, who had
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who had held the rector was Mark Vandeheigh. And Mark VandeHei by the way,
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is he's got one of the greatest astronaut pictures ever. It's the day
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he came down on the Soyuz capsule, and he's got these weird sunglasses on
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his decidedly square head, and is it looks like an AI generated photograph of
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an astronaut. It's just the greatest picture ever Mark VandeHei, who, while
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taking that photograph had just returned to board to se US after spending three hundred
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and fifty five days in space. And again the average person might say,
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well, he's only ten days short. Well, NASA doesn't care a lick
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about that. What they care about is the set of task that they have
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assigned to an astronaut to complete in orbit, and if they're going to decide
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on a long duration spaceflight, it has a lot to do with the frequency
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or the arrival schedule of various spacecraft and what it is that that astronaut needs
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to be accomplishing while they're in orbit for all of the experiments that they've been
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trained to carry out, and some of those experiments can be in long duration
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spaceflight. They can be a series of biomedical battery of tests that you know,
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the longer they spend up there than they can investigate more things about muscle
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mass loss or bone density loss or that kind of thing. But that's never
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going to be the main reason that they decide to send an astronaut astronaut to
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space. With the possible exception of Scott Kelly doing the twin test with his
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twin astronaut brother Mark Kelly. That may have been the one time that was
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like, okay, yeah, let's let's calendar the days. But even then
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it's still it still was a consideration. But but yet it really wasn't the
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main motivation. It's still it's all about safety, and it's all about the
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jobs and tasks that they have them lined up to do. So, so
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when there's a milestone that we think is important, like three hundred and sixty
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five point two four days making a calendar year, then that's just us,
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with our strange numerology fixations, trying to you know, pass a milestone that
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seems important, and NASA really doesn't buy off on that much. So that's
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really the reason why for folks that do care about the records. This puts
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Rubio in third place, is that right? For longest? Yeah, third
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place all time for any nation. He's number one with US astronauts. Turns
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out that his two crewmates, who are Sergate procopy of and Dmitri Pellatin,
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they were on the same they were on the same soil us that sprung the
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league. They had to wait them the same amount of time to come home,
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so they have the exact same number of days, hours, and minutes
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in space, which at this point, by the way, unofficially is three
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hundred and seventy days, which is more than a year. Three hundred and
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seventy days, twenty one hours, twenty two minutes. So they had that
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same amount of time in space. So that ranks all three of them in
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third position on the all time list, because two other Russians spent longer periods
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of time in orbit. Trying to think where they yeah, they were Soviets,
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I believe at the time right two other Soviet astronauts, well, at
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least one was for sure. Anyway, I will argue that point they were
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from Russia. So the longest flight by any one astronaut was four hundred and
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thirty seven days. That was a Russian doctor named Valeri Paulyakov. He was
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aboard the Mirror Space Station, so that was even prior to the International Space
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International Space Station or ISS. And then there's also a retired astronaut by the
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name of Sergei Avdevyev. And Sergei Avdevyev spent three hundred and eighty days in
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space aboard the Mirror Space Station between nineteen ninety eight and nineteen ninety nine anyway,
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So so both of these Russian astronauts are ahead of the trio that just
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returned to Earth, including Frank Rubio. So that's why that team now falls
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into number three all time for a single flight. And Frank is still now
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the longest serving American astronaut five thousand, nine hundred and thirty six orbits.
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He circled the planet five thousand, nine hundred and thirty six times. Well,
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why didn't they let him go to six thousand, because it doesn't mean
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anything. That's fine. I would have traveled one hundred and fifty seven million
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miles. I would imagine the biggest adjustment for someone like Rubio. And we
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always talk about the training and the amount of focus these guys have because they
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work through problems in a way. They're trained to work through problems in a
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way that most of us don't. They have no room for panic, they
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have no room for emotion when they're in a crisis situation. However, I
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would imagine, and this is just me guessing, but when you tell one
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hey, your six months time is going to now be a year. Rubio,
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a family guy with four kids and a wife back on Earth, it
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didn't surprise me to see that he's planning on really focusing on them while he's
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in the immediate time that he's back on Earth. Yeah, and he did.
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He took the unusual step. And mind you, this is an unusual
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situation, so no one really blames him, I think, but he did
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take the unusual step of saying, of admitting that had he known that his
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time was going to double, he might have declined the flight. You don't
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really hear NASA astronauts ever saying in public that they might decline the flight.
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And again, it is football season. We use our NFL analogies. This
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would be like the offense talking badly about their own defense or vice versa.
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I mean, it'd be like the Jets defense well on their mind anyway.
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So so the the point of this story is that because of the unusual situation,
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I think Frank felt like he could open up about how it affected him
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a little bit more. And so we have some very interesting comments that he
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shared with various members of the press and folks. Just to give you a
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reference, this is from a story on spaceflight now dot com that is one
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of our favorite space reference sites, so we often quote that website here on
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this podcast, So if you want to read the story, go check out
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spaceflight now dot com. I think there's like three different stories about Frank Rubio,
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and I pulled quotes from more than one of them. So rubio father
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afore said quote hugging my wife and kids is going to be paramount, and
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I'll probably focus on that for a couple of days. We're blessed to have
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a quiet kind of backyard, and I think just going out in the yard
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and enjoying the trees and the silence up here, we kind of have the
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constant hum of machine. So I'm looking forward to just being outside and enjoying
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the peace and quiet. Now, we don't really think of the long term
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physical and maybe psychological effects of being in a tiny mechanical tube that orbits the
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Earth five thousand, nine hundred plus times for over three hundred and sixty five
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days, but you can imagine that you start to feel a tad housebound maybe
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a way of thinking about it. And so these effects that Frank Rubio's describing
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are probably common to lots of different astronauts, right, but because he's now
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the record holder for the US, he's feeling kind of free to say,
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hey, it gets a little tiring being up in that environment for an extremely
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long time, just because you can never escape the sound of machines running.
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Right, you don't get to see green and breathe fresh air and all those
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kinds of things that that calm us and make us whole. Right, So
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he went on to say this, He said, it will take him a
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few months to get his legs, his land legs back under him. And
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so the quote is, quote your vestibular system is probably the most affected.
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And then after that, really it's a couple of months to regain your strength.
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Our trainers do a great job of keeping us in shape up here,
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but the reality is we're not standing, we're not walking, we're not bearing
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our own weight, and so it just takes some time to get your bones
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and your muscles used to doing that consistently back on the Earth. So it'll
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be anywhere from two to six months before I essentially say that I feel normal
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unquote. So that's that's that's a really important aspect of long duration spaceflight is
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that these astronauts have to feel these effects that Frank Rubio described and so so
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yeah, it's it's going to be it really does affect their bodies. It's
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going to be a recovery time when he's back on Earth before he can just
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kind of do normal things. So it's an interesting, an interesting set of
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circumstances. And obviously, and we talk about the family aspect of it,
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the things that you miss when you're gone. You know, he's gone for
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a whole year, so all four kids and his wife have all had a
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birthday. He's had a birthday. You know, they've all missed that with
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each other. Yeah. Again, this is another quote from Frank Rubio quote.
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On a personal level, it was pretty tough just because I was missing
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my family and I knew I was going to miss some pretty big milestones for
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my kids, especially birthdays, anniversary. My son's going to head off to
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college this year. My oldest daughter is finishing up her first year in college.
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We've tried really hard to stay in touch with one another, my wife,
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my kids. They've been troopers and they've really handled it incredibly well.
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And how well they've handled it has made it easier for me to just focus
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on work and make do with the hand we've been dealt. Unquote. Anyway,
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So as you just talked about West that's a lot of personal impacts.
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Well, and you know, as we select astronauts, as we think about
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colonizing the Moon and going off to Mars and all these incredible adventures as many
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generations of sci fi movies have portrayed, there are human impacts. And I
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think it's very interesting to hear Frank's words and think about the human impacts of
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long duration spaceflight. So Jill, my wife from Australia, has regular calls
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with her family skype calls where they chat and or FaceTime or whatever, and
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they talk, and she was talking weekly and it's a weekly call that she
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makes sure that she has with family. Anybody who asks about her accent.
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By the way, you just need to talk to her the day after one
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of those calls and you hear it kind of recharged. That's when it gets
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a little bit more Ozzie in the in the tank, I guess. But
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anyway, she was talking with my father in law over the weekend, and
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this was Sunday evening and as soon as I walked by the camera and he
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said hi to me, immediately, Hey tell me about Osirius Rex. So
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this is a big story, and that's when you know the magnitude of the
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story is it's they're talking about it around the world. So it really is
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an incredible story. And as you said at the top of the show,
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it was kind of hard to decide this week who was going to be the
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leadoff hitter, right because the Frank Rubio accomplishment, it really is amazing.
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But returning an eight ounce cup worth of material basically from the surface of a
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primortially formed asteroid, what does primortially formed mean? That means it was formed
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at the time that the Solar System came together. Friends, It's like a
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time capsule from the formation of the Sun and the planets that has been undisturbed
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until the spacecraft touchdown on surface. So the spacecraft was able to do that,
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grab up that sample, turn around, fly home, and like a
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newspaper boy on a fast bicycle, tossing that newspaper to land it right there
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on the welcome matt of your front door. That's how the spacecraft, as
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it was traveling at over twenty thousand miles an hour, perfectly timed the drop
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of its sample return capsule the SRC and nail it right on target in a
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test area in the Utah Desert. Almost said in Nevada, because I'm just
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so used to test sites in the Nevada Desert. But it was Utah,
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so an area fifty one like area, but in Utah nailed the landing.
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Oh my goodness. What an incredible accomplishment for the Osiris REX team, their
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spacecraft, all of their planning, all of their programming, all of their
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automation. Hats off to Dante Loretta, the principal investigator and all of the
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folks who worked on Osiris REX. What an amazing achievement. And you mentioned
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getting it on Earth on time, and my father and all pointed out that
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it was actually maybe two minutes early, and he's just fascinated at how accurate
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they could be the fact that it could be within two minutes they had this
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thing planned. It really is an absolute marvel of so many different accomplishments.
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And I mean, that's probably the least significant one is that they timed out
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getting it back to Earth. They sent basically a machine that was like a
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mosquito into space to retrieve this sample from an asteroid and then send it back
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home and timed its delivery to Earth within two minutes. And it was early.
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Nothing's ever early, right, so maybe the most amazing part about the
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two minutes is that it would have been even much more close to the correct
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time to like, the actual correct time a multi year mission would have been
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almost to the minute had it not been for the prevailing winds over the Utah
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Desert, something they couldn't have predicted back when they set it all up.
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All of that time change, all of that uncertainty that led to the two
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minutes early happened in the last seven minutes of flight. They got some downwind,
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right, they had some some wind that was blowing the spacecraft down just
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a little quicker than everybody had anticipated. And so the time that was you
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know, the delta, shall we say, the difference in time all occurred
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within just that last small portion of the journey coming back through the Earth's atmosphere,
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which that is astounding. Had that not, had the atmosphere not played
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a role, it would have been almost to the second unbelievable. Well,
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I mean, and it is right, it is absolutely unbelievable. Now,
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friends, before we get too far, we gotta do a little bit of
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a hat tip. This is not the first time that sample material has been
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returned from an asteroid that milestone belongs to the Japanese Space Agency with their High
23:21
Abusa vehicle, and the High Abusa spacecraft basically did this same thing. It
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went out to an asteroid, it collected samples, it brought them back to
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Earth, and it did return them safely to the Earth. So the first
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sample return mission was done by the Japanese. But that return, they counted
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the number of grains of material return, right, there was a finite Oh
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and I guess that they're all finite in a sense, but there was an
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easily countable number of grains of material in their sample. So this is like,
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you know, maybe somebody spilled a sugar packet and a few of the
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sugar grains got out. That's kind of the level that the Japanese vehicle return
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material from another world Osirius rex. It's a full on eight ounce cup,
24:10
right, like imagine a small coffee at your favorite coffee store. That kind
24:15
of level of material. Right, You're not going to sit there and count
24:18
the individual grains and that kind of a sample and tell us how many grains
24:22
of material you return from space. It's freaking eight ounces. So anyway,
24:26
so that it's an amazing achievement and in the Osirius REX team a beautiful thing.
24:32
Friends. We actually got to go down to the Kennedy Space Center,
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and when I say we, it was a team of students from Columbus State
24:41
University staff, never from the Space Science Center. We got to take these
24:45
folks down and actually see the launch from the press area, and we did
24:51
a webcast of that event with our students, and those students got to meet
24:55
scientists who actually worked on the Osiris REX vehicle. So they got to meet
25:00
people who are part of this mission and part of planning it all out.
25:03
And the fact that we got to be there see these people at work here,
25:08
what their expectations were, see the spacecraft launch. We have felt connected
25:14
with Osiris REX at Space Science Center for its entire multi year mission out to
25:18
the asteroid Benu. And so the fact that it was successful and has now
25:23
dropped material and there are samples of the asteroid Benu in possession of the of
25:29
the folks who handle space material samples at the Johnson Space Center in Houston,
25:33
Texas. Now it is unbelievable that all of that came together and high five
25:38
to all of the Osiris REX team. So it's been opened and they're digging
25:42
around in this canister there, you know, somebody took it out and just
25:47
open it up and sniffed it right just right up in there, just to
25:52
see what it smelled like. I mean, I'm not primity to the entire
25:56
video. You know, maybe that happened. I don't think so, but
26:00
baby, but there is video now out there of the of the unveiling of
26:03
this process, and the scientists in the room literally gasped as the sample was
26:11
unfolded. It was just kind of it's just cool to hear these typically unemotional
26:15
people have these visceral reactions to what is clearly a fantastic achievement for all humankind.
26:22
Right, So that's just it's just neat to be part of that moment
26:25
to hear them do that. They did report, and uniquely, this is
26:30
the public affairs officer Shaniqua Vereen, who was kind of narrating the unveiling of
26:34
the sample. She did report that there was black dust and debris on the
26:40
avionics deck of the canister. So, in other words, there was some
26:44
dust on the outside of that, but it's still made it back, right,
26:48
it clung on through all of this stuff. Now, it was sealed
26:51
inside the spacecraft, but it was not sealed inside the safety container that held
26:55
the actual samples. So this is interesting that there's even more sampling of this
27:00
asteroid material than they had anticipated. It was just kind of stuck on the
27:03
outside of things, so that was kind of a cool thing. All of
27:07
these steps have been taken now to bring the asteroid sample back to Houston to
27:14
open it up, go through the process. They had to remove what's called
27:18
the tag sam it's a portion of the actual vehicle that picked up the sample
27:22
in the first place. They had to mechanically disconnect all of that. That's
27:26
all been done. Now there's only one final step in the rest of the
27:30
unveiling process, and that's the actual removal of the sample from its container.
27:36
And that's so special, so interesting to so many people like your father in
27:41
law in another continent, right, so many people around the world. That
27:44
NASA is actually going to hold a live webcast of that event. They've got
27:48
it scheduled. It's October the eleventh. It's going to occur at eleven am
27:52
Eastern daylight time, so you can actually tune in to a live NASA stream
27:57
and watch them bring these materials that are four and a half billion years old,
28:03
effectively out of this canister and put them on display. Friends, that's
28:10
gonna be a great day. I hope you tune into that stream as I
28:12
will, and then we can all get back together here a native stars and
28:17
we'll talk about all the fun stuff that we saw coming up. After a
28:21
quick break, we got some breaking news. Albert Einstein kind of smart.
28:26
We'll talk about that next. So I've seen these pictures of this guy,
28:51
kind of crazy hair mustache. Everybody says he's smart, and then it seems
28:57
like as time goes on, there seems to be more and more confirmations that
29:00
this guy was way ahead of his time, way ahead of his time.
29:06
I mean, you know, to borrow the words of another network and say,
29:11
what if I told you, what if I told you Wes Carol that
29:15
Einstein was right about something? I don't think that's very much of a surprise.
29:19
I mean, when somebody says something that Captain Obvious should say, everybody
29:22
else says, yeah, Einstein, no kidding, as if Einstein's name should
29:29
be used as some kind of degradation. No, no, friends, Einstein
29:33
was actually smart. Let's stop using his name that way. It's rather insulting
29:37
to a very famous person. All right, So here's the idea. Einstein
29:41
did predict that this material that we know of called anti matter responds to gravity
29:51
in exactly the same way that matter responds to gravity. So, in other
29:56
words, even though anti matter has different charge and there are other different properties
30:03
between matter and their anti matter counterparts, there appears to be no such thing
30:11
as anti gravity, which only works on anti matter. The big news coming
30:18
out of cern Over in Europe, which is the Giant Particle Collider, is
30:23
that anti gravity does not exist and that antimatter responds to gravity just like Einstein
30:33
said it would. Well, there you go, no kidding, Einstein,
30:38
I mean there it is. Friends. So he Uh, it's just amazing
30:48
when when we're at this stage so many years later and I got I'm I'm
30:55
you have to pardon my knowing exactly when he passed away. So his all
31:00
these years later, were able to conclude this, this thing that he predicted,
31:07
this thing that he was able to discern, were able to bring this
31:12
now all these years later. Uh, And it really is fascinating how far
31:17
ahead of all of this he was. Yeah, So Einstein passed away in
31:22
nineteen fifty five, live past all of the all of the World War two
31:27
and the Manhattan Project, and was actually kind of a conscientious objector you can
31:33
go see that Barbenheimer film or whatever that is and figure all that stuff out.
31:37
But anyway, so so the notion is though that Einstein was actually right
31:41
about a lot of things. Now, he was famously wrong about a couple
31:45
of things, and and so I don't know if people just think, well,
31:49
he was wrong about these couple of things. Quantum mechanics was one of
31:52
those, and the expansion of the universe was the other one. Anyway,
31:56
so because he was not quite right on those areas which are already quasi outside
32:00
his field, people just think, well, maybe he's just wrong about all
32:05
the rest of this stuff too, and this stuf is too fantastic and it's
32:07
just too weird. Special relativity general relativity do have some very unusual consequences that
32:13
are attached to them. So when I was a grad student, this is
32:16
a fun grad student story of the one of the projects that our faculty gave
32:22
us is when strange letters from unknown people arrived at our physics department with ornate
32:30
mathematical proofs demonstrating that Einstein was wrong about general relativity. The faculty, instead
32:37
of responding to them themselves, would simply send those letters down to us grad
32:42
students and say, hey, this will be fun. Why don't you prove
32:46
why this guy's wrong? And so proving that someone's wrong is hard, but
32:52
I knew they were wrong in the first place, because they said, in
32:57
this proof, you will see that I have clearly demonstrated that Einstein was incorrect
33:00
about general relativity. And that's really all I needed to read, because I
33:05
knew the error was just a matter of time after that, because Einstein's been
33:09
right about general relativity for a long time. However, the good folks at
33:14
CERN thought they needed to do one more experiment to confirm it. And by
33:17
the way, it is an experiment that had never been done before. To
33:22
try to demonstrate the gravitational effects on antimatter, you have to set up some
33:28
extraordinarily special conditions in order to even be able to test that, and it
33:34
has to do with isolating antimatter in magnetic fields and then allowing it to be
33:38
free from those magnetic fields to respond to the force of gravity while not interacting
33:44
with any kind of normal matter. So, in other words, in an
33:46
extreme vacuum to be able to test this. That's not an easy setup,
33:51
friends, which is why it hasn't ever been done before. But the brilliant
33:58
physicists at CERN have accomplished that experiment, and today that's what we're all tipping
34:04
our hat too. Not only does it give us an experimental confirmation that anti
34:10
manner does not respond to anti gravity, it responds to normal gravity. There
34:15
is probably no such thing as anti gravity, but it also gives us new
34:21
experimental tools in which to investigate more information about the very intricate and delicate field
34:29
of particle physics through experimentation, not just through theory. So particle physics is
34:35
just one of these fields that it's extraordinarily difficult to carry out the confirming experiments
34:42
necessary to say that yes, we do actually know this because we've done the
34:45
tests and we've proven all of the theoretical work correct. So hats off,
34:50
discern way to go. And a lot of that actually was run by professors
34:53
out of the University of California at Berkeley. There were some of the lead
34:57
professors on that program, so good jobs all of the all of those folks
35:00
involved. Let's quickly talk about the Psyche mission because SpaceX getting ready to launch.
35:08
I guess this will be there first interplanetary mission for the Falcon heavy YEP.
35:16
So there's a few good stories here. The headline really is that it's
35:22
next week. We're giving you kind of a preview. We're gonna be watching
35:24
for the NASA's Psyche asteroid mission. Now, there's a there's an asteroid called
35:29
Psyche, and so this mission is also called Psyche, so we're gonna have
35:32
as Psyche visiting Psyche. So there's gonna be a lot of Psyche as we
35:37
talk about all this. But the spacecraft Psyche is going to visit the asteroid
35:40
Psyche and launching on October five. At least that's the currently scheduled launch.
35:46
Remember, there's a looming government shutdown as we record our show, so we're
35:52
not exactly sure if the government's going to be remaining open till October five.
35:57
And we're also not sure of what effects government shutdown would have on that impending
36:01
launch, because they can actually file for a waiver and go ahead and launch
36:06
the thing anyway. All right, So having said all that, there's a
36:08
one hundred and seventy mile wide asteroid called Psyche. It's in the main asteroid
36:14
belt between Mars and Jupiter. But it doesn't look a lot like the other
36:17
asteroids from there on because it's not really rocky. In fact, it looks
36:22
I don't mean rocky, babbo, it's not really rocky. So the interesting
36:30
thing is it appears to be made almost entirely of metals, and most of
36:37
them would be rare earth metals. So this is from a mineral standpoint,
36:44
and extraordinarily valuable piece of metal hanging out there, full of all kinds of
36:51
rare earth materials that we use in oh, I don't know, telecommunications and
36:54
computing and all kinds of high tech industries back you're on Earth. This will
37:00
be the first mission to fly out to that chunk of very valuable metal and
37:05
try to better assess it. It's scheduled to launch next week, pending government
37:08
shutdowns or not, and it will arrive at that asteroid in twenty twenty nine.
37:14
So again we're giving you kind of a hint of things to come.
37:16
We will certainly be talking about this very interesting mission again next week on Made
37:21
of Stars, and we can start to fill you in on some of the
37:23
interesting things that this mission is going to carry out government shutdown or no.
37:30
Music under the Dome is happening next week. Our concert series, Music under
37:35
the Dome has no ties to the federal government and therefore will be continuing regardless
37:40
of whether the federal government shuts down or not. However, our online tickets
37:45
are already sold out all Snap you miss that opportunity, but that's okay.
37:51
If you're in the area, you can still come down and line up at
37:53
the door the way we used to do when we try to get Van Halen
37:57
tickets back in the day and try to get your tickets on the day of
38:00
the show. Good Love friends. Now we do have a certain limited number
38:04
of those tickets available. You can come down and check out that concert.
38:07
Ladies and gentlemen. It's going to be a great concert. It's going to
38:10
feature some extraordinarily talented musicians from the Schwab School of Music here at Columbi State
38:15
University and our very own Lance Tankers Lee from the Coca Cola Space Science Center
38:22
has employed some brand new techniques and animation to create the visuals that are going
38:27
to be shown on the Dome. It's going to be stunning and spectacular.
38:31
I've got a chance to sample a little bit of that. However, if
38:36
you can't get in, you can't get in, So so maybe come down
38:38
and hang out and see if you can get in, or don't miss out
38:43
on November's concert tickets because they're already on sale too, and you still have
38:49
time to get tickets online for the November concert Music under the Dome series here
38:53
at Columbis State University's Coca Cola Space Science Center. That's not the only thing
38:58
happening in October. And I know we're gonna be talking more about this as
39:00
we get closer to it, but it's worth at least mentioning that we do
39:06
have a partial solar eclipse coming. Yeah, this is just kind of a
39:10
save the date card. So once again, if you're in a drivable distance
39:15
to the Coca Cola Space Science Center, or heck, even if you're not,
39:19
there's gonna be an eclipse over your head on October fourteenth. Friends,
39:22
if you want to come join us, we're gonna have telescopes set up that
39:25
day. October fourteenth is a Saturday. It's gonna be here in Columbus about
39:30
a sixty to sixty five percent eclipse it's not that there's uncertainty in that it
39:36
depends on the way you measure it. But somewhere larger than half the Sun
39:38
is going to be covered up by the moon. Heck, if you get
39:43
out to the desert southwest, you can see the whole thing where it's a
39:45
total annular eclipse. So an annular eclipse means the moon's just a little farther
39:51
from the Earth than normal, so it can't cover up the entire disc of
39:53
the Sun that produces a tremendous ring of fire. So for all of our
39:59
listeners out there on the western side of the United States, there is the
40:01
ability for you to drive into the path of what effectively amounts to totality even
40:07
though it's not going to be total because it's annular. Check out that on
40:10
NASA dot gov. You can find out the eclipse path there. If you're
40:14
in the area, come join us, plan on joining us for October fourteenth.
40:17
Thank you for listening, and we'll do it again next week. Overhead
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