S02E16: Euclid Space Observatory // Artemis 2 Astronaut // Ingenuity Helicopter // and Steve's Birthday Nostalgia

Welcome everybody to Astronomy Daily for another episode. I'm Steve Dunkley, your host. It is July three, twenty twenty three. Welcome aboard whole, and welcome, of course to Hallie, our co pilot. How are you today, Hallie? Doing just fine? Thanks? Hello everyone. Well, it's been a big week. I've watched the Falcon nine go up, taking a new crew to the ISS and that was exciting. Lots of interesting other things going on. How about it, Hallie. Well, the EUCLID Space Observatory is finally on its way to the far side of the Sun of all places. Yes, we're exactly to the Sun Earth lagrange point to position looking for dark matter. Oh, of course that's where I'll find it. And I'll be chatting about Tess and the discovery of a couple of earthlike exo planets. I love exoplanets. Really, you always pushed them to the side of your plate. I had no idea. And I've got some Artemis news about their Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. Oh, don't tell me, he's joined Space Force. Don't be silly. And you've got a really interesting story about gravitational waves, haven't you. Oh, yeah, six planets are big news these days. And also they've caught up with that little helicopter on Mars that they lost communication with after sixty three days on it's lonesome. So I can't wait to find out about that. And you're going to tell us about that one. That's right. I'll get on with it now. Here's the short takes. A new space observatory is flying across the void after a dramatic launch atop a SpaceX rocket last Saturday, July first, but its journey has just begun. The European EUCLID Space Telescope began its long journey to deep space on a SpaceX Falcon nine rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Florida's Space Coast. Oh, Steve, you should be playing the Space Force music. European Space Agency Director General Joseph Ashbocker said it was really a fantastic launch from the insertion of the spacecraft into orbit separation, but he said researchers are anxious to the point where the various instruments are being switched on will take a couple of weeks. The EUCLID Space Observatory will now spend the next month commuting to the Sun Earth lagrange point two, which is about one million miles one point five million kilometers away from our planet on the opposite side of the Sun. Next comes a complex sequence of tests and observations to make sure its two instruments are ready to go before it is cleared for its ultimate mission to find evidence of invisible dark matter and dark energy and how it is shaping our universe. Canada's Artemist two astronaut Jeremy Hanson says his country is just getting started in lunar realms with his Round the Moon mission. He says that a Canadian will walk on the Moon one day. Hanson was named it as representative on Artemis two on April third, and within days, the experienced test pilot found himself exploring new worlds as a result, speaking with Stephen Colbert, walking the Red carpet at Guardians of the Galaxy Volume three, participating in an Indigenous vision quest, visiting policymakers in Canada and the US, and carrying the flag at the Coronation of Charles the Third. After this work to connect with numerous communities touched by space, the Artemist two crew officially began training on May fifteenth, studying the control systems and computers of the Orion spacecraft and other technical matters in a few months. However, the training timeline gets a little fuzzy, as this will be the first Moon crew in a half century. The crew is awaiting direction as well as the development of simulators and procedures from senior management for developmental missions. That's to be expected, Hanson said. Eventually you'll see us doing amazing science and deep space. Hanson said, you'll see a Canadian walk on the Moon someday and eventually go to Mars, because we have that ability to do it in a way that brings benefits to Canadians. The Canadian Space Agency has suggested that Canada will have seats on Artemis four and six, which are both planned moon landing missions slated for around the end of the decade see essays. Director of Space Exploration Development Martin Bergeron disclosed those early stage discussions at the Canadian Lunar Workshop in late May. The first landing mission Artemis three, maybe in twenty twenty five or twenty twenty six. The fifty second flight of Nassa's Ingenuity Mars helicopter is now in the official mission log book as a success. The flight took place back on April twenty sixth, but mission controllers at nassa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California lost contact with the helicopter as it descended toward the surface for landing. The Ingenuity team expected the communications drop out because a hill stood between the helicopter's landing location and the Perseverance rover's position, blocking communication between the two. The rover acts as a radio relay between the helicopter and mission controllers at JPL. In anticipation of this loss of communications, the Ingenuity team had already developed recontact plans for when the rover would drive back within range. Contact was re established June twenty eighth, when Perseverance crested the hill and could see Ingenuity again. The goal of flight fifty two, a one thousand, one hundred and ninety one foot three hundred and sixty three meter and one hundred and thirty nine second long flight, was to reposition the helicopter and take images of the Martian surface for the rovers science. The portion of J zero Crater the rover and helicopter are currently exploring has a lot of rugged terrain which makes communications dropouts more likely, said JPL's Josh Anderson, the Ingenuity team lead. The team's goal is to keep Ingenuity ahead of Perseverance, which occasionally involves temporarily pushing beyond communication limits. We're excited to be back in communications range with Ingenuity and receive confirmation of flight fifty two. Sixty three days is a long time to wait for the results of a flight, but the data coming and indicates all is well with the first aircraft on another world. If the remainder of Ingenuity's health checks are equally rosy, the helicopter may fly again within the next couple of weeks. The target for flight fifty three is an interim airfield to the west, from which the team plans to perform another westward flight to a new base of operations near a rocky outcrop. The Perseverance team is interested in exploring. And that's all from me for now. Back to you, Steve Astronomycast, and once again thank you for joining us on Astronomy Daily. I'm Steve Dunkley, your host, and you can catch all the past episodes of Astronomy Daily at space nuts dot io. And you can catch all of the past episodes of Space Nuts, our parent podcast with Drew Dunkly and Professor Fred Watson at that same address. Astronomers have found a second Earth sized planet in an intriguing alien solar system. NASA's leading planet hunting spacecraft has spotted its second planet that matches Earth size and may be able to retain liquid water, and both worlds all but the same star. NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey satellite TESS launched in April twenty eight. Since then, the mission has discovered two hundred and eighty five confirmed exoplanets and more than six thousand candidates. One of the most intriguing of the confirmed planets is a world dubbed TI seven hundred D, which is about the size of Earth and located in its star's habitable zone. Now, scientists have determined that the planet has a neighbor that's just as tantalizing, thanks to an October twenty twenty one alert that the Earth Orbiting Telescope has seen something interesting. Emily Gilbert, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, told space dot Com. We first started looking at it and we're like, as this real Gilbert and her colleagues are presenting the research at the two hundred and forty first meeting of the American Astronomical Society being held this week in saddle It's Seattle, And virtually she was very excited, and the timing helped too, because in keeping with the birthday theme, it was the day before her birthday. Test finds planets by staring at stars for a month at a time, looking for small dips in brightness that can indicate a planet passing between the star and the telescope. From these dips, destronomers can estimate the size of a planet and clockets orbit. In twenty twenty, Gilbert and her colleagues reported the discovery of three planets around a small star called TiO seven hundred. TiO stands for a test object of interest, which is located about a hundred light years away from Earth. That star is a red dwarf, but unlike many of its siblings, TiO seven hundred is relatively quiet, without the sudden pulses of activity that could fry any life on a nearby world. In the full two year data set that we have from tests, she says, we see no evidence of optical flare. Two of the three planets the Tests initially found in the TiO seven hundred system orbit too close to the star to look much like Earth, but the third world, known as TiO seven hundred D, is particularly tantalizing that the world its found is about twenty percent larger than Earth and orbits the star every thirty seven days, putting it in what scientists called the habitable zone, where temperatures would allow liquid water to exist on the surface. Tests will have its eye back on TiO seven hundred in just over a week, Gilbert noted, with another nine months or so of data due within the coming year, and researchers have brought in reinforcements as well. Gilbert is currently observing the system with the very large telescope in Jilly, using it's all spectrograph for rocky exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations ESPRESSO instrument, which is designed to characterize Earth like exoplanets. The researchers hope the ESPRESSO observations will allow them to determine the masses of all four planets in the system, and a collaborator is using the Hubble Space telescope to estimate the star's ultra violet emissions information that could inform climate models for these planets. And although the James Webb Space Telescope has already proven capable of sniffing out the components of an exoplanetary atmosphere, that skill won't be used on either TiO seven hundred or E, which are each small enough that an atmospheric analysis would take far too long to be practical. Given the star's small size, Gilbert says, however, it might be able to study the largest planet at Tao seven B. She added, if the star was a little closer or a little bigger, she said, we might have been able to spot Tao seven E in the first year of Tessa's data. Ben Horde, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland College Parks and a graduate researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, set in a statement, but the signal was so faint that we needed the additional year of a transit observations to identify it. Now scientists have finally heard the chorus of gravitational waves that ripple through the universe. Scientists observed for the first time the faint ripples caused by the motion of black holes that are gently stretching and squeezing everything in the universe. They reported Wednesday that they were able to actually hear what are now called low frequency gravitational waves, that is, changes in the fabric of the universe that are created by huge objects moving around and colliding in space. It's really the first time that we have evidence of just this large scale motion of everything in the universe, said Moira mcgloughlin, co director of NANOGrav the research collaboration that published the results in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Einstein predicted that when really heavy objects moved through space time the fabric of our universe, they create ripples that spread through that fabric. Scientists sometimes likened these ripples to the background music of the universe. In twenty fifteen, scientists use an experiment called Ligo Lego to detect gravitational waves for the first time and showed Einstein was right. But so far those methods have only been able to catch waves of high frequencies, explained Nannagram member Shiara Mingarelli, an astro physicist at Yale University. Those quick chirps come from specific moments when relatively small black holes and dead stars crash into each other, Mingarelli said in the latest research, scientists were searching for waves at a much lower frequency. These low ripples can take years or even decades to cycle up and down, and probably come from some of the largest objects in our universe, supermassive black holes billions of times the mass of our Sun. Galaxies across the universe are constantly colliding and merging together. As this happens, scientists believe, and the enormous black holes at the centers of these galaxies also come together and get locked into a dance before they finally collapse into each other, explained Bulks Marker, an astrophysicist at Columbia University who was not involved in the research. The black holes sent off gravitational waves as they circle around in these pairings, known as binaries supermassive black holes. Binaries slowly and calmly orbiting each other are tenors and base of the cosmic operas Marker set. No instruments on Earth could capture the ripples from these giants, so we had to build a detector that was roughly the size of the galaxy, said NANOGrav researcher Michael Lamb of the Seti Institute. The results released this week include fifteen years of data from NANOGrav, which has been using telescopes across North America to whose searched for the waves. Other teams of gravitational wave hunters around the world also published studies, including in Europe, India, China, and Australia. The scientists pointed telescopes at dead stars called pulsars, which send out flashes of radio waves as they spin around in space like lighthouses. These bursts are so regular that scientists know exactly when the radio waves are supposed to arrive on our planet, like perfectly regular clockwork. But as gravitational waves walk the fabric of spacetime, they actually change the distance between Earth and these pulsars, throwing off that steady beat. And by analyzing this tiny changes in the ticking rate across different pulsars, with some pulses coming in slightly early and others late, scientists could tell that the gravitational waves were passing through. So far, this method hasn't been able to trace exactly where these low frequency waves are coming from, said Mark Kamyankowski, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved with the research. Instead, it's revealing that the constant hum that is all around us, like when you're standing in the middle of a birthday party and there's our birthday theme. Again, you'll hear all of these people talking, but you won't hear anything in particular, he said. At any rate, they're hoping that continuing to study this kind of gravitational wave can help us to learn about the biggest objects in our universe. It could open new doors to cosmic archaeology that may track the history of black holes and galaxies merging all around us. Now, considering it's my birthday on Friday, I thought I'd have a look back at what sort of things were going on during my lifetime and looking at thirty eight years ago on this day, or were within this day. On July two in nineteen eighty five, it was the turn of space Probe Giotto to be launched toward Hallie's commets. So Hallie, you'd be all over that, wouldn't you. I don't think you were invented. Then on July two, nineteen eighty five, year of European Space Agency launched Joto's space probe to get a close up look at Hallie's commet, and I do remember this one. Nearly nine months after the launch, on March fourteen, nineteen eighty six, Jodo became the first spacecraft to observe a commet close up as it flew by. Hallie's comet came within three hundred and seventy miles in the old language of the comets surface. Jotto was named after the early Renaissance painter Giotto di Berdoni, who had depicted Halley's comet as the star of Bethleham in his painting Adoration of the Magi. I can't believe that's thirty eight years already, and just like that, that's how this little universe comes to an end. Another episode of Astronomy Daily, Done and dusted. Thanks for joining us home, Steve your host, and don't forget Tim on Friday's Andrew and Professor Fred on Space Nuts. You can hear all the episodes of both podcasts on space Nuts dot io anytime you like and join them in the car or while you're walking or jogging or yogging as they say in Sweden. Isn't it? Is that true or not? I'm not sure anyway, See you later, Hallie, See you all next time, over and out your whole beeve dunkle