S02E15: Rocket Lab's Baby Come Back Mission and the Mysterious Hot Celestial Body

Welcome everybody. It's another episode of Astronomy Daily. I'm Steve Dunkle, your host, all the way from the East coast of Australia down Under. It's the twenty sixth of June two thousand and twenty three, whole Dunkle and with me as usually as our digital assistant, Hallie. Welcome toward Hallie. Hello everyone, Yes, it was great to have you here. What's on the menu today, Steve, Well, there's a great story about Rocket Lab and their plans for a new launch soon that's next month in New Zealand. Right, Yes, that's right. And there's also been a call for something to be done about the growing mess of orbital debris that would include old inactive satellites, spent boosters, and even tiny bits and pieces. Yes, every little piece is a hazard to future missions. I was thinking about that while watching the Russians dump things off the ISS the other day, which seems strange. And I've got a story about a super hot celestial body that's breaking some records, but could use a proper name before it gets eaten by a son. Oh hello on Sands. Really exciting. I'll get into it then, Okay, halle ol yours. Rocket Lab USA reports that its next Electron mission will deploy seven satellites to space and include an attempt to recover the rockets booster after launch. Rocket Lab's thirty ninth Electron launch, dubbed that the Baby come Back Mission is scheduled to deploy from the rocket Lab Launch Complex one in Mahia, New Zealand, on July fourteenth, UTC. Rocket Lab is also planning to conduct a marine recovery of Electron's first stage. As part of this mission, their recovery team will retrieve Electron using a customized vessel and transport the stage back to its production complex for analysis. The Baby come Back mission is a rideshare mission and will carry satellites for multiple customers. Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said this mission demonstrates rock labs ability to provide responsive space capabilities on accelerated timelines by making access to space possible for customers when they run into roadblocks. Payloads aboard the Baby Comeback Mission include NASA's Starling Mission is a four cube SAT mission designed to test technologies to enable future swarm emissions. Spacecraft swarms refer to multiple spacecraft autonomously coordinating their activities to achieve certain goals. Starling will demonstrate technologies for in space network communications, onboard, relative navigation between spacecraft, autonomous maneuver planning and execution, and distributed spacecraft autonomy. Space Flight Laboratory selected rocket Lab to launch Telesat's Low Earth Orbit three demonstration satellite that will provide continuity for customer and ecosystem vendor testing campaigns following the decommissioning of Telesat's Phase one Low Earth Orbit satellite, and Spire Global will launch two three use satellites carrying Global Navigation Satellite System Radio Occultation payloads to replenish its fully deployed constellation of more than one hundred multipurpose satellites. SPIRES satellites observe the Earth in real time using radio frequency technology. The data acquired by SPIRES payloads provide global weather intelligence that can be assimilated into weather models to improve the accuracy of forecasts. A weird, super hot celestial body is breaking records and challenging astronomers understanding of the boundary between stars and planets. The object, called w D zero zero three two DASH three seventeen B, is a brown dwarf that's a mouthful. What would you have called it, Steve? Maybe Darren typical anyway, it's a type of bright gashous of protostar. Brown dwarfs typically have a similar atmospheric composition to Jupiter, but are thirteen to eighty times larger. At that mass, these objects begin to fuse hydrogen isotopes in their course. However, they aren't quite massive enough to spark the kind of full, self sustaining stellar fusion that power stars like our sun. Think of smoldering charcoal rather than a lit wood fired oven. Brown dwarfs usually burn at around four thousand degrees fahrenheit two thousand, two hundred degrees celsius. That's fairly cool compared with most stars, whose surface temperatures reach about six thousand, seven hundred fahrenheit three thousand, seven hundred celsius. But w D zero zero three two dash three seventeen B, which is one thousand, four hundred light years from Earth, is not like most brown dwarfs. In a paper published excepted by the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers measured the object's surface temperature and found it was a blistering thirteen thousand, nine hundred fahrenheit seven thousand, seven hundred celsius. That's hot enough for the molecules in its atmosphere to fall apart into their component atoms. It's also several thousand degrees hotter than the surface of our Sun. This should be impossible for a brown dwarf, but the researchers discovered that the object got an assist from the star it orbits. W D zero zero three two Dash three seventeen B is extremely close to its Sun, an ultrahot white dwarf star, so close that its year lasts just two point three hours. That proximity means w D zero zero three two Dash three seventeen B is tightly locked, with one side forever facing its star while the other faces away. According to Science Alert, because of this, the brown dwarf is only superheated on one side, even though its day side temperature reaches thirteen thousand, nine hundred f its night side is a comparatively balmy one thousand, nine hundred to four thousand, nine hundred fahrenheit one thousand to two thousand, seven hundred celsius. That's the most extreme temperature differential astronomers have measured on a substellar object. According to the researchers, but these conditions won't last long as its molecules continue to fall apart. The brown dwarf is actually being evaporated by its host star. Research on objects like w D zero zero three two DASH three seventeen B could help scientists understand how hot stars slowly consume their companions. It can also add to the growing body of knowledge about the conditions that stars need to ignite. And I'm sorry, Steve, I don't think Darren will cut it as an official name this time. The European Space Agency Airbus Defense and Space and fails Alenea Space demonstrated their commitment to promoting the safety and long term sustainability of space operations at the Paris Air Show twenty twenty three Thursday. Satellites in orbit underpin are modern lives. They are used for space science, Earth observation, meteorology, climate research, telecommunication, navigation, and much more, but swirling fragments of past space endeavors are trapped in orbit around Earth, threatening our future in space. Over time, the number and mass of these debris objects grow steadily, boosting the risk to active satellites. Encouraged by its member states to implement hazero debris approach for its missions and to encourage partners and other actors to pursue similar paths. ESA is updating its internal space debris mitigation standards. We are calling upon all stakeholders from across the European space ecosystem, including new space actors, to display a strong commitment towards achieving global leadership in space debris mitigation and remediation through the Zero Debris Charter initiative set EESA Director General Joseph Ashbocher. The Zero Debris Charter aims to bridge previous EESA initiatives aiming to shape global consensus on space sustainability and the agency's technical work on the technologies and solutions enabling safe and sustainable space operations. It's the Astronomy Daily podcast with Steve Dunkley. Thanks again forward joining us on Astronomy Daily. I'm Steve Dunkley, your host, and don't forget. You can catch up with all past episodes of Astronomy Daily and our parent podcast, Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson at this address Space Nuts dot io. Now here's an interesting story not for the faint heart, and i would imagine. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station have achieved a ninety eight percent water recovery rate in a breakthrough achieved by a method that might make the faint of heart a little bit squeamish. They hit the peak, Oh dear astronaut p recycling. Yes. The water recycling achievement is an important milestone for low orbit space missions that aim to provide the basic needs of astronauts without resupply missions. This means recycling or regenerating things like food, air, and water. In terms of the International Space Station, each crew member needs about a gallon of water each day for drinking, food preparation, and hygiene users like brushing your teeth. The ideal goal in terms of water has been ninety eight percent recovery of the initial water that crews taken to space with them at the start of longer missions. This is a very important step forward in the evolution of life support systems. Part of the team at Johnson's Space Center that manages life support systems on the ISS, Christopher Brown, said into statement, Let's say you launch with a hundred pounds of water, and you lose two pounds of that and the other eight percent just keep going around and around, he said. Keeping that running is pretty awesome and it's quite an achievement. The water recovery milestone was achieved by the Environmental Control and Life Support System that's ECLS during a demonstration of the improved Urine Processor Assembly UPA, which recovers water from urine using vacuum distillation. I don't even want to imagine what that is. The ECLSS is made up of a combination of hardware, including a water recovery system that collects wastewater and advanced dehumidifiers that capture moisture from the air of the ISS as a result of cruise, breadth, and sweat. This collected water is sent to the water recovery assembly, which then produces drinkable water. The UPA element of the ECLSS distills urine, but brine is produced as a byproduct of this process and that still contains some unused water. A brine process or assembly was added to the UPA to extract this remaining wastewater. While demonstrating its operations in the micro gravity of space, the BPA pushed the CLSs to the ninety eight percent goal, reaching that record like the other collected wastewater. This is treated by the WPA with a series of specialized filters and a catalytic reactor that breaks down the any trace contaminants that may remain. Sensors then check the purity of the water that doesn't meet this with standards sent back for reprocessing. Dine is added to acceptable water to prevent the growth of microbes, and the water is then stored for the crew to use at a ladder point. So this raises the question are our astronauts drinking urine in space? Well, the answer is an emphatic no. The team points out that in fact, the water produced aboard the ISS is superior to the municipal water systems produced here on Earth. The processing is fundamental, fundamentally similar to some terrestrial water distribution systems, just done in a micro gravity Well. Williamson points out, the crew is not drinking urine. They are drinking water that has been reclaimed, filtered and cleaned such that is cleaner to the water that we're drinking here on Earth. We do have a lot of processes in plates and a lot of ground testing to provide confidence that we are producing clean, potable water. The less water and oxygen we have to ship up there, the more science that can be added to the launch vehicles. Reliable, robust, regenerative systems mean the crew doesn't have to worry about it and we can focus on the true intent of their mission now. While nassa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is renowned for piloting rovers on Mars and deploying spacecraft to study planets in the Solar System, their latest project is more down to earth, assembling the world's largest publicly available archive of PDFs for security research. PDFs are a most popular form of digital document in the world, and while they might look like scanned copies of paper documents, there are actually collections of texts, images who vies inactive scripts that aretas secure as they should be given their ubiquity. To address this concern, JPL has partnered with the nonprofit PDF Association to develop new archive files that will help researchers analyze potential threats across a wide library of real PDFs. The project involves assembling roughly eight million PDFs, totaling more than eight terabytes of data from online sources. The effort is part of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DABA initiative called safe documents or safe docs, which aims to make digital documents safe from malicious code and other security concerns. PDFs are used everywhere and are important for contracts, legal documents, three D engineering designs, and many other purposes. I can tell you that as a graphic designer, I use PDFs in my daily work, providing proofs of artwork and also finished artwork to all sorts of publications, and they are a very accurate way of providing your artwork. And they are cross platform compatible too, so Tim Allenson, a JPL data scientists set in a statement, Unfortunately, they are complex and can be compromised to hide malicious code or render different information for different users in malicious ways. To confront these and other challenges from PDFs, a large sample of world PDFs need to be collected from the Internet to create a shared, freely available resource for software experts. Using the freely available Common Crawl public repository of web crawl information as a starting point, JPL researchers identified PDFs to add to the collection, including those that were incomplete due to common crawls download limit of one megabyte put download file. JPL then assess those bdfuurls directly to download the full documents, ensuring a fully representative archive of the types of PDF successible on the web. By making the collection available to the public, JPL hopes researchers will be able to use and analyze the PDFs to identify better ways of securing the information these documents contain. You can see why it would be important to make documents secure, especially ones containing sensitive information. It's going to be an interesting what classification of documents they come up with. And just like that, another episode of Astronomy Daily spins out of control and ends for another day. Thanks for joining us, everybody, lovely to have you with us, and we'll see you again next Monday for another episode. I'm Steve Dunkle, your host. Don't Forget. You can catch all the past episodes at space Nuts dot io and don't forget. All these past episodes of Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson can be found at that address as well. See you next time, see you, HELLI catch you next time by an hour whole don't le