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Just a Drop of Water In an Endless Sea · Made of Stars

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Warning. The following podcast contains an entertaining look at astronomy, physics, and
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space news throughout the known universe. Listeners have been known to learn about astronomical
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phenomenon the scientific method, and expanded vocabulary to include terms like quasar asterism and
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uranus. Listen, that's your own risk. Go ahead. When made of
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stars, made them stars, madies. When made of stars, you could
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be from high they would New Mexicomus, where all stars? When we are
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made of stars. I'm West Carrol, joined by my good friend doctor Sean
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Cruising from Columbus Universities Coca Cola Space sign Center. Hey Sean, Hey Wes,
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Wes, it's good to be here. Wes. I'm excited to be
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here today. We've got some stuff to talk about. I don't know that
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I've ever been so excited in my life to have multiple stories about dust.
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Well, once you once you get the dust story, it's hard to go
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back. It really, it really is. And we've got a couple of
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dust related stories today and we'll talk about why. I mean, it's it's
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one of those things that maybe when you start thinking about all the glamour and
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glitz of space travel and maybe visiting other worlds. It's probably not the first
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thing that most people think, they Oh, man, when we get there,
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we're gonna have to deal with dust. However, thankfully, thanks to
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some successful Moon missions in the past, we know the importance and even some
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successful missions on Mars, we know the importance of being prepared for dust.
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But let's in a little all tie into dust because it's related to this story.
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But let's talk Artemis first and foremost, because Artemis is making big plans
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for not necessarily the we've got, you know, the first Artemis missions to
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happen, but then down the line a little bit they're thinking ahead for longer
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type missions on the Moon. So I guess we should start with that.
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And then we've got a dust related story that pertains to that as well.
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Yes, I mean, the universe is just a dusty place. That is,
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people don't think about it that way, but you know, space is
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dusty. They're very true. The story we're going to talk about right now
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is on NASA dot gov and it's basically this. There are two commercial space
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companies that NASA is contracted with to build human landing systems, and one of
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those is SpaceX and it's starship vehicle. The other company is Blue Origin,
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and actually Blue Origin file a lawsuit to be able to rebid to build a
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lander, and I think they all think it's healthy to have competition, and
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so NASA themselves also wanted some kind of a second company building a lander that
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can put humans on the surface of the Moon, take them from orbit around
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the Moon down to the Moon's surface, let them walk around and do some
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camping, then bring them back to orbit again. So that's basically what the
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human landing systems are supposed to do. Well. The latest story is that
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NASA has also asked these same two vendors, SpaceX and Blue Origin, as
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part of the Artemis mission, to build cargo versions of their human landers,
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because they need to take their camping equipment down They need to take their sleeping
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bags, you know, their backpacks, their bedrolls, whatever they're going to
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be using down there. You know those little sticks you mix somemores with all
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the things that you need on the Moon to do some camping. They got
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to take some stuff down there, right, And so maybe not for the
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first mission, maybe not the very first time that human beings land on the
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surface of the Moon. Again, since the nineteen seventies, that's the Artemis
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three mission. But from the Artemis four mission and going forward, there's lots
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of cargo expectations, let's say, for large pieces of equipment that need to
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be transported to the lunar surface that will enable long term scientific exploration of the
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Moon. Remember the Artemis motto from NASA is back to the Moon to stay.
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And so the idea is we want to develop a long term habitation of
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the lunar surface. So when you think about it, took a lot of
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cargo and payload trips to Low Earth orbit in order to deliver all the pieces
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of the International Space Station up there. If we're going to do some kind
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of similar endeavor on the surface of the Moon, they're going to have to
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be lots of trips up there. So you need something that is capable of
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delivering that cargo down to the surface where the people will be hanging out and
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doing their camping and their scientific exploration. And so the NASA variants that have
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been suggested for both SpaceX and Blue Origin need to be able to carry a
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lot of equipment. And so the proposal right now is for them to carry
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somewhere between thirteen and seventeen tons of payload down to the lunar surface. Now,
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and this may be getting really deep into it, and you may not
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know the answer to this question right away, but I'm just kind of thinking
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ahead as far as when they do a mission like this, and if they're
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saying we want to be here long term, so when they look at these
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large cargo landers, I'm assuming that they would also potentially be used for habitation
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at some point. I mean, if they're sending something down there to contain
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all of these things and whatever is in there that will be taken out and
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used over time, that eventually, maybe if they get enough of these things,
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that could end up being part of actually settling there. And again,
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I may be asking questions you don't know the answer to, but I'm just
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kind of thinking ahead maybe, and I assume that they're thinking ahead as well.
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Yeah, and absolutely if you have some kind of large, shall we
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say, shell of a spacecraft that you know can be can compress, can
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be able to hold compressed air, and we know these can because they are
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variants of the human landers, right, and so one of those being Starship.
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So in other words, if it can hold people in a different form
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it could probably hold people just to simply live in that or occupy that structure
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or somehow on the Moon as well. Now I have to admit that the
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that the SpaceX starship looks a bit like the rockets that you know, Daffy
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Duck flew to the Moon and the bugs Bunny cartoons, long vertical towers,
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which I don't know how comfortable that would necessarily be for habitation, but but
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you could imagine that if you needed to occupy that structure or something that could
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be done. So so yeah, as to whether it's part of NASA's long
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term plan to use the vehicles themselves as part of the structure, I'm not
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sure. They're probably carrying some some very specialized habitat structures down there. But
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if push came to shove, and you know, we've seen we've seen the
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movie The Martian, right, so there's there's some there's some thinking on the
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fly that happens uh in those kinds of emergency situations, and one could imagine
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some kind of scenario where yes, you could potentially be living in or occupying
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for some period of time one of these cargo vehicles that happened to be down
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on the lunar surface. All right, well, let's talk about dust.
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I know we were going to get there eventually. Oh, by the way,
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you may not be able to make it out just but over my shoulder
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back here, I've got a three Amigos poster and there's dusty bottoms. Chevy
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Chase is dusty bottoms anyway, So it's just some more dust to go with
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it. But moon guard Moon dust guards for some upcoming missions. And dust
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is a problem. We've talked about how it's a problem on Mars, and
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we obviously haven't been necessarily as active with things on the Moon here lately,
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so we haven't really been talking about Moon dust. But obviously it's a problem
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in both locations. Therefore there needs to be a plan for both locations.
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Yeah, and here's the real problem with particularly dust on the Moon, and
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it's because the Moon neither has an atmosphere, nor does it have water on
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the surface. Because those two things are missing, you don't have those two
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forces of nature which cause erosion or a destructive process for dust grains. So
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the grains of dust on the Moon are much closer to shattered pieces of glass
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than they would be to dust grains on the Earth where dust grains on the
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Earth have been affected both by rain, potential of being in some kind of
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a creek or lake where water erosion could occur, or just by being blown
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around by the winds of the Earth. The sharp edges tend to be knocked
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off a bit. They tend to be rounded grains. And again on the
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dust. Since there are none of those destructive erosive forces, you have very
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sharp dust grains. Again, the best analogy is like little tiny fragments of
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broken glass, which means that dust is very sticky. And we saw this
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during the Apollo missions. And there's a very famous set of odd from Charlie
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Duke from Apollo sixteen where he falls down, he gets back up and he's
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just covered with moon dust. He's trying to wipe it off and it's not
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coming off, and he says, with his very North Carolina accent, well,
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how am I gonna get it off? It was a computer down here
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at Space Science Center that our one of our friendly prankster fellow employees put an
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audio byte on somebody else's computer where every time they move the mouse, they
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played the Charlie Duke quote, well, how am I going to get it
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off? Well, how am I going to get it off? Well,
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so you get the idea. Anyway, So the dust grains are actually hard
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to get off, let's say, right, and so is there some kind
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of device that can be used to get these dust grains both off the lunar
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suits but also off all the equipment because you see the sharper those dust grains
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are the more destructive. They can be both too fabric but also just to
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machinery and pieces of the spacesuits and thermal radiators and cameras and all the kinds
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of things that astronauts need to use and work with on the surface of the
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Moon. So NASA has been working to develop a different and kind of creative
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way to remove dust from various surfaces, something called the electro dynamic dust shield.
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The EDS the electro dynamic dust shield, and basically what happens is you
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create an electric field. And not only is this dust sharp once it gets
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in physical contact, it also has a high static electricity content. And so
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this device would actually use the tendency for moondust to be statically charged, would
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use it against the dust screens and be able to remove that dust by applying
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a strong electric feel to it. So that's the idea. Now there's going
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to be a mission that's to go to the Moon, an unpiloted mission,
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a commercial mission called the Blue Ghost Mission I from a company called Firefly Aerospace
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that is slated to launch, shall we say, later this year, sometime
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in twenty twenty four. So on board there are several technology tests and proofs
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of concept aboard that Blue Ghost Mission I from Firefly. One of those is
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this electrodynamic dust shield developed by NASA, So it's actually gonna go to the
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Moon and take on the challenge of dealing with real Moon dust. Now,
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listen, Mars also is a dusty place. As you mentioned, It's a
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little bit different because Mars does at least have wind forces, so those particles
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are not quite as sharp and jagged as on the Moon. But Mars just
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has a lot more dust than the Earth ever would, simply because there is
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no humidity or very little humidity involved in the Martian atmosphere or within the hydrated
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soils of Mars. So it's another place where Mars, I'm sorry, where
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dust could be a problem for future explorers. So this electrodynamic dust shield is
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a great test of a brilliant technology that could possibly help future explorers of both
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the lunar surface and the red planet Mars. I'm just wondering, if it's
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effective, how soon it could be used here on Earth. You know,
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maybe we could get the ads. Hi, Phil Swift here for the electro
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dynamic dust shield. Boy, do you hate getting dust all over your house?
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Let me tell you how we can shock it right out of your house.
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We'll just I don't know, it could work maybe right, And people
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love to say, hey, develop by NASA this space age technology. It's
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going to be available to you, Hey, in your own home. I
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mean it could be something like that. I mean, if we've seen Phil
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Swift put some of that tape on the side of like a space ship yet,
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I mean right on the side of a I mean, you can dunk
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it underwater. You can put the tape on a submarine. While it's underwater,
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you can paint of You're gonna build a spacecraft entirely out of this tape
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and weren't gonna fly it to the Moon. Yeah, it could work,
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I think. So I think there's a there's hope maybe that we'll see that
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happen one day. All right, let's do a follow up, because we
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talked about don't worry, we've got more dust coming up, but we'll we'll
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do that a little bit later. I want to just quickly get an update
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on Voyager one, because they had contact and they lost contact, and they
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got it back, and then they lost it and they got it back,
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and then they lost it and they got it back, and then they lost
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it and they were and I'm sure there's a few more of those in there
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along the way, but most recently they had lost contact. Uh, they
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got contact again. They did get contact again. And the fact that they
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can do some kind of a repair mission when a fundamental piece of technology has
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actually failed, like like mechanically broken down, and they can fix it with
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a software patch from Earth. The spacecraft is fifteen billion miles away. It
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is journeyed beyond the boundaries of the Solar System out into interstellar space. It's
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using a computer technology that hasn't been used on Earth in fifty years. And
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there's some guy out there at GPL that says, oh, yeah, I
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know how to fix it. Yeah, I got that. We'll just rewrite
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the code. No worries, what really they can do that? Yes,
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they can, Friends, there are smart people that work at NASA. See
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that's the thing right there. And smart people can say, oh, well,
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yeah, I know how to write the code where it won't write data
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to that part of the chip that's been damaged physically or something. We'll just
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write it to another part of the chip and they can make the code do
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that, and then the spacecraft can say, oh, well, now I
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know how to work again. Now I'll phone home again because now all my
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data that was coming out as gibberish because it was a damaged part of the
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chip sector on the on the computer, now it's not using that part of
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the chip sector anymore, and so it's it's actually communicating with Earth. Just
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fine, it lost it lost, uh well, it stopped transmitting understandable data
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back in twenty in November of twenty twenty three. So since that time,
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Voyager has just been mumbling gibberish back to Earth. But again, a software
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patch, which you know, your probably your TI calculator has more computing power
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than what's actually on Voyager one right now. But somebody knew how to write
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a software patch to that ancient computer up there, at least in computer years.
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It's definitely ancient and knew how to fix that, and NASA's Jet Propulsion
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Laboratory in southern California has now declared success because they're receiving good engineering updates from
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the Voyager spacecraft. The team is still working to restore transmission of science data,
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so it's not actually taking measurements, but they're able to speak with it,
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and it is intelligible signaling coming back from that robot in outer space.
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By the way, because of that great distance, a one way journey of
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just the radio wave, just like we send a signal to Voyager, that
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trip takes twenty two and a half hours for light to travel that distance.
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That's how far away it is. And then once once Voyager receives that message
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and decides oh, yes, I should respond, the return time is another
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twenty two and a half hours. So it's basically like, okay, well
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you send me a text message today and I'll answer your text message tomorrow.
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For most of my friends, they would be losing their minds with that kind
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of a text delay, like did you get my text message? Did you
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get my email? Did you get my phone call? Like that happens like
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within like I'll have people call me and say, hey, did you get
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my text message when they text me like fifteen minutes ago. Let me let
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me use this other analogy, because think about it like this, and for
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anybody there's a certain age window. And I know this is generalizing, but
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anybody who is my age down to maybe late high school age, you've started
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to become, if you aren't already established as the whether you like it or
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not, official unofficial it representative for your parents, who are, you know,
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maybe sixty plus, and so think about it like this. You're trying
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to help them do some sort of it upgrade or repair on their computer or
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their phone, and then you do something to try to fix it, and
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then you have to wait almost forty eight hours to find out if it worked
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or not, and they have to patiently sit there and wait about forty eight
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hours to know whether or not it's been fixed or not. I guess.
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I mean it's kind of like that, and how that can drive you nuts
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because again, imagine you're the person in charge of the software patch and you
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think, I think I figured it out. Let's find out, and then
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you can, you know, you get a couple of days off, I
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guess, and wait for the results of it. It's just fascinating to me
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that this is something that like, if you're an expert on a certain computer
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system, a certain operating system at one point in time, if you're working
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for NASA or you're working for one of these, you know, private space
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companies, you may be relevant in being an expert in that specific computer for
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a long time. I don't know, and I don't like to cast aspersions,
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but I'm willing to bet it was not somebody under the age of thirty
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five that figured out how to fix the Voyager spacecraft. I'm just willing to
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bet. I mean, think about it like this. If you own a
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log cabin, like a true law cabin that you have on some property,
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and then it needs some sort of repair to it and you've not had to
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repair it before, you're not going to call the general contractor that built your
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house. In civilization, you got to go find a log cabin expert to
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fix it, right, I mean, that's basically what this is. They
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have to go find a guy who knows how to pack mud in there,
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and you know, that's what you got to do, and that's what they
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had to do. They had to find the guy who knows how to pack
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the mud when when Voyager launched from Earth, Walter Mondale was vice President of
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the United States. So you've got to go find somebody that knew how to
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build computers and program them when Walter Mondale was vice president of the United States.
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Yeah, so that guy, yeah, you know, is somewhere in
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the basement with a red stapler. You got to go find that guy.
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That's the only guy that can save the Voyager. He's the only one and
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so far he's been able to keep it doing something. Now, if we
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can get the science going again, that would be great. And hopefully that's
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he's working on it. He's got to wait forty eight hours. Slide roll.
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That guy still got a slide rule and knows how to use it,
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and we'll tell you, Hey, I still know how to use the slide
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rule. Yeah, and man, that's that's slide because slide rules are important.
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They're not but okay, but glad you know how to use it.
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And that guy's still got a flip phone. Yeah, yeah, Like I
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mean, flip phone is like a modern technology to him, right, flip
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phones Like, oh, well that's some new fangled contraption. A flip phone.
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Yes, as he's that's the guy. That's the guy that has to
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fix voyager pressing a key three times so that he can type a text message.
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That's that guy. And right, scroll up, scroll down. Yep,
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exactly, I JK, yep, he's all over it. Coming up
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after a quick break, we're going to talk about the Mars Ingenuity and something
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that it can continue to do in service. And uh, we'll also talk
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Oh, get a couple of marsh stories and I guess there's some dust related
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engine wey, we'll talk about that next. All right, So we've talked
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a lot about Mars Ingenuity. We had gotten to a point where we kind
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of said it's flown its last mission. It is kind of retired from service
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sort of, but not really, because it turns out the Mars Ingenuity helicopter
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now it just basically is gonna be stuck with a desk job. That's funny.
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Yes, that's exactly right. I mean, so we have documented on
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our program here and of course, if you're listening to this podcast, you
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probably already have an inkling. You're probably a bit of a space keek.
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You probably we have an understanding that the Mars Ingenuity Helicopter, the little tiny
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drone that was stuck up under the perseverance rovers almost an afterthought, has done
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okay for itself. You know it one flight would have been successful a mission,
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you know what, one fifteen second flight. And yet this helicopter had
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many, many, many flights, and was you know, leading that giant
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rover across the surface of Mars as kind of a a forward scout to look
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at locations on Mars where the rover should go and what it shouldn't drive over
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and what might be interesting anyway. So successful to the max, there's no
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doubt, there's no argument. On its last flight, it did come down
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kind of hard and it broke off one of the roaders, and everybody said,
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aw, I mean, you know, we've gotten kind of attached to
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it as like a little friend up there on Mars as it was flying around
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and showing us pictures. So that was very sad. But here's the thing,
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just because it can't fly doesn't mean that scientists and engineers back on Earth
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can't still talk to it. They can, and it's still got cameras on
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board. It still does and it's still got measurement tools on board. It
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can still tell the temperature of the air on Mars. So so here's the
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fun part. It looks like the Ingenuity helicopter, which is not really a
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helicopter anymore, is going to have an extended life as a data station on
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the Red planet. Now this story can be found out there in several places,
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but I found this particular version of the story on foxweather dot com.
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Foxweather dot com anyway. So the initial mission ended on January twenty fifth of
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this year, about a week after that hard hit. But on April sixteenth,
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the the team at JPL sent their final transmission to the helicopter through NASA's
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Deep Space Network as a helicopter. They did all the downloads of the final
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downloads of the data as a helicopter. But now NAS is preparing to use
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this as a test bed for collecting data from the location that the helicopter finally
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came down. So they now have basically a new weather monitoring station and an
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imager on the service of Mars. It's just not going to go anywhere,
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but it has a very detailed color camera and it can still take this temperature
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data. And here's the thing, it's also got enough onboard memory. Now
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that JPL the folks at JPL have downloaded all of its stored data. It
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has enough memory to record data for about another twenty years if they did daily
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collections of Mars service images and Mars A temperatures. So that's a whole new
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life for this thing that was once a little helicopter and has now become a
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scientific station located on the surface of Mars. Pretty cool stuff. So I
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assume we know it needed power to fly. It's gonna need power to do
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what it's doing. Uh, And one of the concerns anytime something needs power
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up, there is obviously dust back to dust. So it's basically gonna be
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able to function and to or does it still I guess it still has in
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place whatever it was using to get the dust off of the the solar panels
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because didn't have the wiper system in place. Yeah, so it had some
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sort of a system like that. What it also has is the rotors themselves.
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And look, I don't know this is not me talking like I know
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things, but if they can just even spin those rotors a little bit,
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it doesn't have to fly. They could spin those rotors around and probably clear
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some of the dust off the solar panels. It's just a little cube,
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right, So it's not very big. It's only a four pound robot,
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and so they don't have a lot of surface area to clear. I personally
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am wondering if they can use those rotors in very limited spins to clear dust
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off. I don't know the answer to that, but it could be that
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even though the data storage is twenty years, maybe they'll get a few more
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years out of this robot just by doing some of those kind of simple manipulations
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and trying to keep those solar panels clear again. Dust it's everywhere, man,
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it's everywhere. All right. Let's talk about another Mars story and whether
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or not Mars is seeping methane. So the crazy thing is that Mars is
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definitely seeking methane. And the additional crazy thing is that the most prolific progenitor
27:56
of methane on the Earth our life forms, right, And so when we
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see sources of methane that are below the surface on Earth, there's some kind
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of critter down there that's generating that methane by by far and away more often
28:14
than any other kind of process. Now, it's been argued that this methane
28:18
on Mars could have geological sources, and we don't really know the answer to
28:22
that. But what we do know is that in a very specific place in
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the bottom of the Gale Crater where NASA's Mars Curiosity rover is exploring, that
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methane seems to bee seeping out from the surface in kind of an asymmetric way.
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Sometimes there's very little methane seeping, but then other times they'll be like
28:48
a big burst of methane coming from underground. And so this varying rate of
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methane generation appears to be tied with whether the sun is shining on that part
29:03
of the crater or whether it's summertime versus wintertime. Turns out, in the
29:07
summertime on Mars, on this part of Mars, that methane emission seems to
29:14
be more prolific. It turns out during the daytime, it seems to be
29:18
more prolific than at night. So temperature variation, for sure has some kind
29:23
of an effect, and these spikes can be up to forty times the level
29:27
of methane output. All right, so this is an interesting mystery, right,
29:33
you have methane coming from the surface of the bottom of Gale Crater.
29:38
We know that methane could be and you know, is more likely to be,
29:44
at least on Earth, tied to life forms, and it's varying in
29:48
some kind of semi predictable way. But what is this methane and where's it
29:56
really coming from? Well, that's the setup for the mystery. A new
30:00
team of NASA scientists have added something further to this mystery by doing a little
30:07
bit of a testing and modeling of the of the bottom of that crater,
30:12
that surface down there, because it was once the bottom of a lake and
30:18
so that water on Mars was likely very briny or very salty. Well,
30:25
those salts have now settled into the what they call regolith. But it's this
30:30
dust on Mars. It's the it's the you know, dusty soil on Mars.
30:34
And what this team of scientists is suggesting is that that salt could be
30:40
acting as some kind of a seal, a seal of solidified salt underneath the
30:47
Martian regolith or dirt on the surface of Mars, and that the heating of
30:52
day or the change of temperatures due to seasonal variations maybe breaking up those seals
31:00
of salt, and that allows the methane to kind of gush out at certain
31:03
times, which is where you get some of these spikes and methane emission.
31:08
It's also it also could be why we only see these methane bursts so far
31:15
coming from Gale Crater because you have to have a region that was at one
31:19
time salty to build up these salt seals so that you have this event take
31:23
place. And you wouldn't necessarily have that on other places on the Martian surface,
31:29
but on an old lake bed, yeah, you can have these salt
31:32
seals formed because of the salt that accumulated at that time. So it's a
31:37
really interesting set of measurements and it is one more piece of the puzzle when
31:42
trying to solve the mystery of Martian methane bursts. So interesting stuff. You
31:48
can read about it on Science dot NASA dot gov and get the whole story
31:52
about Gale Crater methane. Let's talk a little bit about as we transition back
31:57
down here to Earth to the Coke Cola Space Science Center. I loved hearing
32:02
doctor john Hood speak, come back to the Cocola Space Science Center and speak.
32:07
That was a fun event that you guys hosted over the weekend, and
32:13
as much as I enjoyed hearing him speak and learning about all of his adventures.
32:19
And I said this on Monday on My Daily show that I do.
32:24
One of my favorite things ever is just watching you talk about your former students
32:32
and how proud you are of them, and then hearing them talk about you
32:36
and your influence over their careers. But it was a fun event and it
32:38
was a great turnout. Yeah. So John Hood one of the kids that
32:44
just grew up in the city here of Columbus and thought space was interesting,
32:50
but really didn't think about any kind of avenue for a future career in space.
32:54
He came and started hanging out with us here at Space Science Center.
32:58
He majored in our astrophysics major here at Columbus State University in the Department of
33:02
Earth and Space Sciences, and the next thing you know, he's going to
33:07
the South Pole to investigate the cosmic microwave background radiation. That's a signal left
33:13
over from the formation of the universe. That's what happens, right. You
33:16
go from just some kid that's standing around, we put them to work and
33:21
then we say, hey, by the way, there's a pathway for you
33:22
to have a career. John took every advantage of the pathways made for him
33:30
both here at our university and at Vanderbilt University where he got his PhD,
33:35
and at University of Chicago where he's doing his postdoctoral research now. So I
33:39
am so proud of him as a student, but I'm proud of all of
33:43
our students who are able to come from, you know, a fairly common
33:46
background and a reasonably small to mid size city and go off and have the
33:52
kinds of adventures in both space exploration and the science of space that our students
33:59
have had. And Folks, if you're out there and you're listening to this
34:01
and you're thinking, well, maybe that maybe I want to do that,
34:05
or maybe I want my kid to know how to do that, you can
34:08
check out the Department of Earth and Space Sciences here Clembstate University. Go visit
34:13
us on our website. It's Columbusstate dot edu, and then find the Department
34:20
of Earth and Space Sciences, check out our major or you can just go
34:22
to the website for the Space Science Center where I'm the executive director. I'll
34:27
tell you the address. Come visit us. It's www dot cc SSC dot
34:32
org. Charlie, Charlie SamSam Charlie dot org. And then down in the
34:37
bottom right hand corner there'll be a little clock tower, which is kind of
34:40
the iconic symbol of our university. If you click on the clock tower,
34:45
it's going to take you to a link where you can find out about all
34:47
the majors here on our campus that are associated with the Space Science Center,
34:52
So you can find out about engineering, about space exploration, and about education.
34:58
All those majors link from that icon the clocktower once again the website www
35:04
dot cc s SC dot org. Charlie Charlie SamSam Charlie dot org, Sean
35:09
and I thank you for listening, and we will do this again next week.
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