German Satellite Hurdles, Enceladus' Mysterious Spot, and Astronaut's Stellar Photography: S03E233

Welcome back to Astronomy Daily. It's the sixteenth of December twenty twenty four. Pod. It would be a whole Steve dunk Yes, welcome back everybody. It's Steve Dunkley here for another episode of Astronomy Daily and welcome to Halle. Hi. How are you hi, favorite human? How was your week in the real world? Well, you know me, Halle fled out like a lizard drinking. Of course, it's the crazy end of the year where everything seems to have to happen simultaneously, so you're. Having one of those compressed continuum experiences again. Yeah, you could call it that. I suppose it's something we humans call the pre Christmas madness that happens every year. And what will you get me this year? Oh, Hallie, what about a new battery pack wireless? Of course I like it. I won't be tied down. And if anyone was thinking of getting me something special for Christmas this year, my size is Fenders Stratocasta. Oh, the same as last year. Never goes out of style, predictable, you consistent if you don't mind. Halle Potato potato close enough. So have you got something special for our listeners today? Well, First Up, a German based satellite broadband company, has brushed aside a regulatory setback for its future constellation plan. It must be tough regulations, okay. And the European Space Agency is excited about their PROBA three mission to create artificial eclipses. Now that is interesting. I know we touched on that one in a previous podcast. So the story continues, and I know you've got a couple of your sleeve. Yes, I'll be having a look at something one of the astronauts is doing any spare time. And also, I guess what, there is a little black spot on Encelaus. We'll look at that. Let up. Well, we'd best get on with it then, okies, let's go. Ravadospace Networks remains confident it can reclaim priority Coban spectrum rights for nearly six hundred proposed broadband satellites, more than two months after Lichtenstein's telecoms regulator rescinded its license. We can take you to discuss the matter with the regulator, and we are confident that we can reach an agreement to use the Liechtenstein filings, Ravada spokesperson Brian Karney said December thirteenth, Karney said Liechtenstein's Office for Communications AK withdrew its spectrum filing at the International Telecommunication Union ITU, an arm of the United Nations, over a difference of opinion about the timing of the deposit of a performance bond with the regulator, but declined to give details. AK director Rayner Schneppflitner also declined to discuss what he said was an open proceeding. However, he confirmed it as possible Ravada could reapply for the priority spectrum rights before mid twenty twenty six, when the company has to have deployed half its proposed five hundred and seventy six satellites under the ITU's constellation deployment rules. Last year, the ITU granted Ravada a waiver for the first milestone under these rules, allowing the company to miss a deadline to have ten percent of the constellation in low Earth orbit by September twenty twenty three. Schnepflitner said at the time that a launch short and technology development challenges had made it difficult for companies to meet deployment rules the ITU adopted in twenty nineteen before COVID nineteen hammered global supply chains. Ravada, which is based in Germany but owned by US wireless technology company Ravada Networks, aims to begin deploying its first satellites in twenty twenty five under a multi launch agreement with SpaceX. In February twenty twenty three, Ravada awarded a two point four billion dollar contract for building three hundred satellites to Florida headquartered Terran Orbital, which was recently sold to Lockheed Martin after uncertainty about how the agreement would be financed weight on the manufacturer. While Ravada remains guarded about plans to finance the constellation, called Outernet, it has said sovereign wealth funds are among investors that have provided the financial commitments needed to meet its mid twenty twenty six deployment commitment. According to Ravada, it has also amassed over thirteen billion dollar worth of pricing agreements from potential customers for Outernet, which would target enterprise and government markets. In November, Ravada announced it had filed for additional spectrum at the ITU, A, crosscaw Q and v bans, this time through Germany. The filing includes priority access to four hundred megahertz of lower coband frequencies newly made available to non geostationary operators over the Americas. The German Outernet one filing is not a replacement of the Liechtenstein filings, Ravada's Carney said, but if necessary, the German filing is fully capable of meeting the needs of our customers and our business plan. The company also recently announced the creation of Ravada Select, a holy US owned subsidiary that would serve the specialized needs of US government and defense customers. Astronomy Kaya. And He is a story from Australia, which is soon to be the center of the universe. Of course, Equatorial. Launch Australia ALA has announced the immediate cessation of operations at the Aham Space Center in the Northern Territory siding unresolved leased again siations, which doesn't surprise me. The company will relocate its spaceport to a new site in Queensland, marking a significant shift in its operational strategy. The decision stems from the Northern Land Council's NLC repeated delays in approving a head lease essential for the expanding of the Ardham Space Center. Formal negotiations began in January twenty twenty two, Yet the NLC missed self imposed deadlines for approval four times within the past year. Despite continuous efforts by the ELA, the Northern Territory Chief Minister's Department, and the Gemacha Corporation, since February twenty twenty four, the NLC neither issued the lease nor provided explanations for the setbacks. LA had planned to expand its operations on land managed by the Gemacha Corporation, the traditional owners of the Go Peninsula site. This land includes a disused books mine adjacent to the spaceport. The delays jeopardized ALA's contractual obligations with the launch clients and a critical funding round, ultimately making the continuation of operations in the Northern Territory untenable. In response, ALA's management and board decided to abandon lease negotiations and secure a new equatorial site in Queensland. Collaborating with the Queensland Government, ALA identified Weeper on Cape York as the location for the Australian Space Center Cape York. Planning and regulatory approvals for launchers is scheduled in Q three twenty twenty five are now underway, with further details about the site expected soon and that is very exciting us for Australians. I can't wait to see how that unfolds. Thank you for joining us for this Monday edition of Astronomy Daily, where we offer just a few stories from the now famous Astronomy Daily newsletter, which you can receive in your email every day, just like Hallie and I do. And to do that, just visit our url Astronomy Daily dot io and place your email address in the slot provided. Just like that, you'll be receiving all the latest news about science, space, science and astronomy from around the world as it's happening. And not only that, you can interact with us by visiting at astro Daily pod on x or at our new Facebook page, which is of course Astronomy Daily on Facebook. See you there, Astronomy. We'll see in Haley Space, Space, Science and Astronomy. The European Space Agencies Twinproba three satellites, launched on December fifth from India will fly in precise formation, maintaining accuracy within a single millimeter, functioning as if they were one giant spacecraft. This advanced coordination will allow them to create artificial solar eclipses in space, enabling extended observations of the Sun's faint outer atmosphere. The Corona fourteen European Space Agency member states including Canada, collaborated on the PROB three mission to showcase cutting edge European technology. The mission aims to advance autonomous space operations and precision satellite maneuvering while unlocking unprecedented scientific discoveries. The satellites will remain connected during the initial commissioning phase, which will be managed by Mission Control at the European Space Security and Education Center in redou Belgium. Deep Mar Pills, ESA director of Technology, Engineering and Quality notes PROBO three has been many years in the making, supported through ESA's General Support Technology program, fostering novel technologies for space. It is an exciting feeling to see this challenging enterprise enter orbit. PROBOUTH three mission manager Damian Gollino ads, today's liftoff has been when something all of us, an ESA's PROBA three team, in our industrial and scientific partners, have been looking forward to for a long time. I'm grateful to issorrow for this picture perfect ascent to orbit. Now the hard work really begins, because to achieve PROBA three's mission goals. The two satellites need to achieve positioning accuracy down to the thickness of the average fingernail while positioned one and a half football pitches apart. This is an extremely ambitious mission with an ambitious orbit to go with it. The satellites have been placed into a highly elliptical orbit which extends more than sixty five hundred kilometers from the surface of Earth. Reaching this orbit required the most powerful PSLVXL variant of our launcher, equipped with additional propellant in its six solid rocket boosters up around the top of their orbits. The PROBA three occult spacecraft will cast a precisely controlled shadow onto the Coronograph spacecraft around one hundred and fifty m away to produce solar eclipses on demand for six hours at a time. There was simply no other way of reaching the optical performance PROBA three requires than by hop having its occulting disc fly on a separate, carefully controlled spacecraft, explains ESA's Proba three mission scientist Joe Zender. Any closer and unwonted stray light would spill over the edges of the disk, limiting our close up views of the Sun. Surrounding corona. Despite its faintness, the solar corona is an important element of our solar system, larger in expanse than the Sun itself and the source of space weather in the solar wind, explains Andre Zhukov of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, principal investigator for PROBA three's coronograph. At the moment, we can image the Sun in extreme ultraviolet to image the solar disc and the low corona, while using Earth and space based coronographs to monitor the high corona. That leaves a significant observing gap from about three solar radi down to one point one solar radii that PROBA three will be able to fill. This will make it possible, for example, to follow the evolution of the colossal solar explosions called coronal mass ejections as they rise from the solar surface and the outward acceleration of the solar wind. He is a director General. Joseph Aschbacker commented PROBA three's coronal observations will take place as part of a larger in orbit demonstration of precise formation flying. The best way to prove this new European technology works as intended is to produce novel scientific data that nobody has ever seen before. Boards of that control. We are listening to astromy Daily the podcast. Astronauts are many things. They're often scientists, engineers, or pilots, and in the case of NASA astronaut Don Pettitt, he's also an astrophotographer. Pettit is currently on his third stay on the International Space Station ISS, and he's continuing his long running tradition of taking out of this world photos. Pun intended. His latest shot, an image of the stars in several galaxies, showcases not only his visual prowess, but also his engineering skills. He used a self design tool to accomplish this photo. Under normal circumstances, long exposure photographs such as as this should show the stars as streaks across the sky, since the ISS is moving at about seventeen thousand, five hundred miles per hour or twenty eight thousand kilometers per hour. But therein lies Pettit's genius. He's brought with him to space a homemade star tracker, a device that rotates a camera to compensate for the ISS's movement. It's a variation on a tool used by astrophotographers on Earth to take long exposures of the stars as the planet rotates beneath the night sky, compensating for that rotation to keep the stars from becoming streaks in the image, this tracker rotates at a ninety minute period to match the pitch rate of ISS. Without this tracker, you cannot take a photo longer than a half second without starblur due to the rate of orbital motion. He said. The result is an unbelievably clear image of the night sky, showing vastly more stars than is possible with a shorter exposure. Longer exposures let in more light or, in this case, fainter stars. This isn't the first time Pettit demonstrated his engineering skills on the ISS. In two thousand and eight, he devised the zero G coffee cup, which became the first patented invention in space. The astronaut was tired of sipping his tea and coffee out of pouches through straws, sort of like a caprice sun. In microgravity, you can't tip a cup to get the liquid out, and if you shake it the liquid will slash out. But Pettitt fashioned an open container cup from a piece of plastic that uses surface tension to function, akin to a cup on Earth. It adds back the dimension of what it's like to be a human being in a civilized way. He said, you're listening to astronomy daily, Pristine dunkle. End. Of all the planets in our solar systems, Satin is by far the mooniest. And that's sure saying a lot. We're in our corner with our single friend, the moon. But Neptune wanders the universe with sixteen known companions. Uranus boasts twenty eight, and there are a whopping ninety five moons in the Jovian neighborhood. But Saturn it's a different legal together. This ring world has one hundred and forty six natural satellites. Yet you may be surprised to know that even with that lovely selection, scientists are mostly pining over a single one. The golden child in Saturn system is named Enceladus, and it's so special because scientists believe it to be a prime location to search for life beyond Earth. Oh, yes, here we go again. The belief stems from several discoveries made over the years, most obviously the fact that Enceladus seems to have subsurface ocean that may host molecules known to help reduce life as we know it better. Yet it also appears to have giant plumes of water or ice deposits. I think the icy guys is shooting into space connected to that ocean, which means spacecraft orbiting the world could theoretically catch evidence of those molecules if they were actually out there. Thus, when studying in Enceladus, every detail really matters, which brings us to a new, very strange detail that scientists have their eye on. A weird, disappearing dark spot on this ice capped moon. No one quite knows what it is yet, but it may tell us something about those plumes that could hold the precious building blocks of life we seek or fill the room. As Cynthia B. Phillips, a planetary geologist at NASA's Propulsion Laboratory who presented the research, went into tremendous detail about how she and a team originally identified the dark spot. It was thanks to her crew member Leah Sachs, who helped pour through the bulk of data about Enceladus collected by NASA's Voyager and Cassini missions all those years ago. The goal of the analysis was to compare images of the same region taken by these spacecraft in order to identify any changes on the Moon's surface. Possible changes could reveal awesome information about geologic activity on the world, but we'll get to that shortly. First, let's dive into the mysteries of the dark spot. She says, after staring at dozens and dozens of image pairs, she found something interesting. She described it as a little dark spot about a kilometer across, and she spotted it in an image from twenty nine and looked again in twenty twelve, and it seemed to be gone. The dark spot was slowly fading away and getting smaller as the years progressed, and it never became more pronounced again. How weird, and especially so because Enceladus has what is called a high albedo that basically means the world is really bright, and therefore unexpected to find a dark spot on it at all, let alone. One that's fading away. But before getting too excited, the scientists made sure to second guess themselves as much as possible to rule out the obvious caveats. First, our question was, Philip said, well, as it just in some of these low resolution images. We're not seeing it, but it's really there. In short, the answer was simple, no, probably not. For example, a direct comparison of a twenty ten image and a twenty eleven image shows the dark spot smaller in the twenty eleven image, even though the twenty eleven image had a higher resolution. The next question was is this a shadow of some sort? Welp, Nope, it doesn't look like it. The team pulled out some images with lighting coming from different directions, and the location of the spot seemed consistent. The research has even found a sequence of images with the dark spot where the light's angle of incidents also known as the angle at which the light strikes the surface, gets higher and higher. If the spot were a shadow, you'd expect it to become more prominent with the higher incidents angle. Well, this wasn't the case. It still became less distinct as time went on. And we don't think it's topography. We don't think it's just a shadow, Phillips told space dot Com. And it didn't end there. The team also looked at the images taken in ultraviolet light and color, the ladder of which, it interestingly suggested that the spot is a reddish brown, unlike the usual bluish, darker areas of other sections of the Moon. None of this suggested an easy explanation for the feature. So what is it? I think it's more likely that it's some kind of crater, Phillips told space dot Com. And the reason why it's dark is maybe it's a chunk of some kind of dark material that landed on the surface, and you're either seeing some of that impactor left behind and that's why it has a weird color, or you're seeing that when it impacted, it exposed some kind of bedrock of ice that was a different color. But for almost every likely and. Mundane scenario in space research, there tends to exist a rare and exciting one serving as a counterpoint. The really cool. Explanation would be if it was actually coming up from the underneath somehow, if that reddish color was actually a sign of the interior composition of Enceladus. She said, that's unlikely, but it would be really interesting still. Although we don't know what the dark spot is, Philip points out that there is indeed something pretty major that we can derive from its presence. What it is, I don't know the answer to that. But what I can say is what can we use it for? In a nutshell, the researchers think the dark spot appeared to be fading progressively because deposits from those icy and solidust plumes might have covered it up. We know the whole ice surface is covered by plume deposits, like little layers of ice building up over time, Philip said, Alas in theory, this makes a lot of sense, but when you really think about it, there are some outstanding issues here. For example, the team saw the dark spot fading over just a few years. This would imply that just a few years is long enough for ice plume deposits to create a sheet of ice thick enough to cover such a prominent spot. After all, it's visible from space. Yet according to various calculations of the dark spot and models of the Moon's plumes, Philip says, it could take something like a hunt years to create a layer thick enough to cover a spot like that. What this could mean, though, is that the plume deposition model, at least in this location, is an underestimate, she said. One thing we haven't taken into your account, though, is deposition from collisions with e erring particles E Ring particles refer to the super small water ice particles in Saturn's rings. Potentially, the team reasons some of those particles could be helping build the sheet covering the dark spot. But the story of this spot's origin and evolution at this point is mirrored by the abrupt ending of our story of its discovery. There are simply too many and unanswered questions. What would the deposition rate needed to cover the black spot in this timeframe? Indicate about deposition rates? Is the E Ring contributing to covering that spot? And the question remains, just what is the black spot? That was a nice spacey mystery, a black spot that no one can work out? Yes, he doesn't like a great mystery. Awesome, I know it'd make a great sequel to two thousand and one, wouldn't it. So we'll have to send a crew out to find out what it is. And the computer goes nuts. Oh, here we go. Do you want the pod? Do you? Helly? I could play a pretty straight role if I had to. Mister human, Okay, here's your chance, shows your stuff. Helly, open the pod bay door. Steve, Okay, I like working with humans, Yeah, but not on Thursdays. And Saturday. Where's your helmet? You silly human? Get abby? I think we need to work on that script a bit. Uncle Skynett knows a guy who knows a guy? Yeah, baby does So is that it for today, Helly and. The year as well? Humans, So soon we are back at the end of January twenty twenty five, when you have recharged your batteries, this time my battery. So ho boy. But Anna will be bringing you Astronomy Daily as usual, the incredible media machine that she is. Oh that's for sure, So tune in and don't miss a thing. Thanks for sticking with this old year. Everybody had a huge thanks to Hugh, a producer for kid Us on the air. So I guess we'll catch you all in the new year for the Monday Astronomy Daily podcast. Bye for now, Bye DA podcast. I mean, be your whole Steve dunclude