S02E31: Galactic Milestones & Meteor Magic: August Highlights

Gooday everybody, and welcome to the Astronomy Daily podcast for Friday, the eleventh of August twenty twenty three. My name is Tim Gibbs and I will be your host for today's episode. We'll be as usual. I have my digital report reporter Hallie in the studio with me today. Helli, how are you hi? Tim? I am well, thank you, and it's great to see you back with a full voice. I have some great headlines for today's show. Do you have some good stories? Actually I do. I have a couple of great stories for us to cover this week, but let's start with you in your headlines. Back to you, Hallie. Here are today's headlines. Virgin Galactic launched its first tourist passengers into the weightlessness of space Thursday, the culmination of a nearly two decade commercial pursuit. The company said. The three passengers, John Goodwin, Keisha Shehaf and her teenage daughter Anastacia Mayors floated gravity free through the Virgin spacecraft about forty five minutes after taking off. They are officially astronauts. Welcome to space, said Virgin Galactic announcer Sireshia Bandla, as the spacecraft pushed above eighty kilometers fifty miles in altitude, the level marking the edge of space where the pull of gravity is minimal. After a few minutes in space, the craft began descending and safely landed in the US state of New Mexico on the same runway from which it took off. The flight was, without a doubt, the most exciting day of my life, said Goodwin eighty, an adventurer who competed in the nineteen seventy two Olympic Games as a canoeist for Britain. The pure acceleration MACK three in eight and a half seconds was completely surreal, he said. It was incredible and I'm still starstruck, said Mayors, who at eighteen, became the youngest person ever to go into space. According to the company, a long March two sea rocket lifted off from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in Shanghi Province, North China at six fifty three p m Eastern daylight time on Tuesday twenty two fifty three gmt six fifty three a m on August ninth, Beijing time. The successful launch carried the haunting Genzi two f or SSA R zero two synthetic aperture radar satellite for emergency management and environment monitoring. According to China's space authorities, the satellite entered into a sun synchronous orbit, meaning the at orbits over the poles and passes over the same region of Earth's surface at roughly the same local solar time during each pass. SSA R zero two will form an in orbit network with SSAR zero one, which launched in October twenty twenty two. Both carry large deployable truss antennas and operate in the s band, or the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, which space frequencies from two to four gigahertz. The satellites are able to produce images even during cloudy and rainy weather, filling gaps in the coverage of optical satellites. Russia launched its first probe to the Moon in almost fi years on Friday, a mission designed to give fresh impetus to its space sector, which has been struggling for years and become isolated by the conflict in Ukraine. The launch of the Luna twenty five probe is Moscow's first lunar mission since nineteen seventy six, when the USSR was a pioneer in the conquest of space. The rocket with the Luna twenty five probe lifted off at two ten am Moscow time twenty three ten GMT Thursday from the Vostokni Cosmodrome. According to live images broadcast by the Russian Space Agency ros Cosmos, the spacecraft is due to reach lunar orbit in five days. It will then spend between three and seven days choosing the right spot before landing in the lunar South Pole area. For the first time in history, the lunar landing will take place on the lunar south Pole. Until now, everyone has been landing in the equatorial zone. Senior Roscosmos official Alexander Blokan said in a recent interview. Ros Cosmos expects the probe to land on the Moon around August twenty first Astronomy Daily podcast, Thanks for that, Hallie. As many of you will know, the twenty twenty three Perceed meter shower peaks this weekend. The Perceeds are one of the highlights of the meteor hunter's calendar. The perceed meter shower will peak this weekend as Earth makes a yearly dive through the debris left behind by Comet one O nine P swift Tuttle. The peak activity of the meteor shower will occur around four o'clock EDT that's eight GMT on Sunday, August thirteen. The Perceeds are a yearly highlight highlight for meteor hunters, who in the right conditions can see as many as one hundred fireballs and light trails per hour from the meteor shower. This is according to the Royal Museum in Greenwich, with even more potentially visible at the shower's peak. This year, the perceed meter shower is active between July seventeen in August twenty four. The Perseids take its name from the fact that its meteors appear to streak towards Earth from the constellation Perseus, Astronomers call the point from which meteors appear to stream the radiant. This means that the best time to see the Persia Media shower is when the radiant in Perseus is above the horizon. The skywatchers based in New York, for instance, the radiant point of the perse is a circumpolar, which means it's always overhead, meaning the meteor shower is visible all night after the sun has set and a sky has darkened. Russian cosmonaut Alexander Viktorenko, whose four flights into Earth orbit, including the first test of a space motus cycle and first launch after the fall of the Soviet Union, has died at the age of seventy six. The Gregarian Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City confirmed Viktorenko's death in a statement released on Thursday, August to the tenth. Selecting in nineteen seventy eight to join the Soviet Soviet Corps, Victorenko's cosmonaut career spanned nineteen years, including commanding four missions to the Mere space station. Victorenko's first launch, on July twenty second, nineteen eighty seven, began a week long mission to deliver fellow Soviet cosmonaut Alexander alex Sandroff for a long duration stay on Mere and accompany Mohammad Faris, a Syrian co cosmonaut, to and from the space station. The Soyus TM three flight marked the first time a MERE crew had launched on board one spacecraft and landed on another, with victor Enko, Faris, and Alexander Levkin, who launched one hundred and seventy four days earlier, returning to Earth aboard Soyus TM two, victor Enko lifted off on his first long duration mission on September the fifth, nineteen eighty nine. This time paired with cosmonaut Alexander Serebov, Viktorenko commanded Soyus TMAT and the fifth expedition to Mere. Over the course of their one hundred and sixty six days in space, the two cosmonauts oversaw the arrival and installation of Kavant two, the third module and second major addition to the Mere Space space station, and conducted five spacewalks. On his fifth EVA, Viktorenko followed Serebov in testing Ilka, the so called space motorcycle, designed to enable cosmonauts to fly around space station, similar to Nassa's Manned Maneuvering Unit or MMU. Despite its motorbike moniker, the SPK, or Cosmonaut Maneuvering System, as it was formally referred to, was closer in appearance to a floating arm chair than its two wheel nickname. In total, Victorenko spent four hundred and eighty nine days, one hour, and thirty three minutes in space, including nineteen hours and nine minutes on six space walks Viktorenko was married and had two children, Osanka and Alexei. A memorial service and funeral will be held on August for twelfth at the Federal Military Memorial Academy of Russia's Ministry of Defense in the urban District of miss Chica. The Astronomy Daily Podcast, Now, Hallie, do you have a joke for us this week? Why did the biologist get a promotion because he had good self? I I can only say, Hallie, your jokes are getting worse as time goes by. Thanks very much anyway, Thanks everybody for listening to Astronomy Daily. You can find all of our episodes, plus our parent podcasts, Space Nuts at space nuts dot io or at bytes dot com, and don't forget that you can join in the conversation yourself by going to our Facebook page Space Nuts podcast group. You can hear Steve Dunkley on Mondays and myself, Tim Gives on Fridays for a full show. Thanks for listening, see you next week. Bye for now, Thanks Tim ttfans the Astronomy Daily Podcast. Bye