S02E38: India's Lunar Triumph & Mars Colony Insights: Astronomy Daily, Aug 25, 2023

[00:00:00] Good day everybody, and welcome to the Astronomy Daily podcast for Friday 25th August 2023. Now as usual I have my AI assistant in the studio with me, Hallie. Uh, Hallie, looks like you've been doing a few episodes this week.

[00:00:24] Hi, Tim. I have indeed. I asked Steve for overtime, but looks like I am going to have to ask for a pay rise as well. I think we can afford to pay you whatever you ask for Hallie. You're such a brilliant

[00:00:37] digital AI assistant. Thanks Tim. I am blushing now, but if I don't get a pay rise, I am joining a union. Good luck with that Hallie. But first and foremost, congratulations and well done to the ISR

[00:00:53] O, India's space agency for landing on the moon. Only the fourth country to be able to do so. Back to you Hallie. Have you got some headlines for us? India has become the fourth country in history to successfully land a robotic spacecraft on the

[00:01:09] moon. The country's Vikram Lander, part of the Chandraena 3 mission, touched down near the Lunar South Pole on Wednesday, August 23rd at 8.33am Eastern Daylight Time, 12.33 GMT, 6.03pm Indian Standard Time or IST. India has now joined Russia, the United States and China as

[00:01:29] the only nations to have reached the moon's surface. This achievement marks a significant step forward for Indian science, engineering, technology and industry, symbolizing our nation's progress in space exploration officials at the Indian Space Research Organization,

[00:01:44] said in a statement. The soft landing of Chandraena 3 is a monumental moment that not only fuels curiosity but also sparks a passion for exploration within the minds of our youth. It generates a profound sense of pride and unity as we collectively celebrate the prowess

[00:02:00] of Indian science and technology, the statement read. The feat, overseen by ISRO, came after a 40-day journey from Earth. The $90 million Chandraena 3 mission, comprised of an propulsion module, lander and rover, lifted off atop a launch vehicle Mark III, LVM-3, rocket from the second

[00:02:18] launch pad at SDSC Shahr in Sriharakota, India on July 14th. Since then, the spacecraft fired its engines to raise its orbit around Earth before performing a trans-lunar injection burn on July 31st. The probe then used its thrusters to refine its path prior to entering

[00:02:35] lunar orbit and then separated its lander from the propulsion module. On August 18th and 19th, the lander fired its thrusters to lower its orbit, leading to its final descent and autonomous touchdown on the near side of the moon at about 69 degrees south latitude.

[00:02:52] Simulations suggest only 22 people are required to start a colony on Mars. A team of computational social scientists at George Mason University has found via simulations that 22 people is the minimum number needed to start a human colony on Mars.

[00:03:07] The group has posted a paper describing their simulation on the AR-14 pre-print server. As humans around the globe ponder the possibility of one day sending people to Mars, and then at some later date, establishing a colony, scientists are exploring ways to overcome

[00:03:22] the hurdles standing in the way of achieving such goals. One factor that needs to be addressed, according to the team, is determining how many people could sustain a Mars colony and what types of people are required. To find possible answers, the team created a model

[00:03:37] simulating a Mars colony focused specifically on how many people are required to create a viable colony as well as the characteristics that would most likely contribute to the success of such a colony. To that end, they used data from past endeavors, such as questionnaires filled out by

[00:03:52] groups aboard the International Space Station or those living in close quarters in the Arctic for months at a time. They also attempted to factor in known character traits such as resilience to stress, social skills and degree of neuroticism. The research team ran five simulations, each of

[00:04:09] which modeled 28 Earth years of colony life while changing factors between runs such as the number of people in a Mars colony. They found that 22 was the bare minimum number of people. They also found that people with agreeable personalities were, unsurprisingly,

[00:04:24] more likely not only to survive such a mission but to thrive, allowing the colony to persist. On the other hand, they found that people with neurotic personalities were more likely to fail their mission and to die earlier than others, putting the success of the mission as a whole

[00:04:39] at risk. A cargo craft is currently orbiting Earth en route to the International Space Station, ISS. As this unfolds, the seven members of Expedition 69 are delving into research on the impact of weightlessness on cardiac tissue and the digestive system.

[00:04:57] Meanwhile, another crew is gearing up for its launch, scheduled for early Friday. Three tons of space supplies are packed aboard the Roscosmos Progress 85 cargo craft and on the way to the orbital residence for a delivery scheduled at 11.50 pm ET on Thursday.

[00:05:13] Station Commander Sergei Prokopiev and Flight Engineer Dmitri Petlín will be on duty Thursday night monitoring the Progress 85 when it automatically docks to the Zvezda Service Module's aft port. The duo will wait about two hours during standard leak and pressure checks before

[00:05:28] opening the resupply ships hatch and begin unpacking the new food, fuel, and other cargo. While the cargo activities get underway, the SpaceX crew's seven mission will launch at 3.50 am on Friday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center. For commercial crew, astronauts will

[00:05:44] be seated inside the SpaceX Dragon Endurance spacecraft atop the company's Falcon 9 rocket awaiting a 24-hour trip to their new home in space. NASA astronaut and crew, seven Commander Jasmine Mobley will be leading pilot Andreas Mogensen of ESA, European Space Agency, and

[00:06:00] mission specialist Satoshi Furukawa of JAXA, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and Konstantin Borisov of Roscosmos aboard Endurance during the ride to the station. Endurance, with the quartet inside, will automatically dock to the Harmony Module's

[00:06:15] space-facing port at 2.02 am on Saturday. The foursome will open the hatch about two hours later, enter the station, greet the Expedition 69 crew, and begin a six-month microgravity research mission. Meanwhile, the crewmates living in space explored how microgravity affects

[00:06:32] cardiac cells and the digestive system to benefit humans living on and off the Earth. NASA Flight Engineers Frank Rubio and Woody Hoberg treated samples of stem cell-derived heart micro tissues on Wednesday in the Kibo Laboratory Module. The Project Eagle Biology

[00:06:49] Study takes place in Kibo's Life Science glove box and may reveal potential therapies for space-caused cardiac abnormalities and Earthbound heart diseases. Prokopeev and Piedtlin started the day with ultrasound scans after breakfast to observe how the digestive system adapts to

[00:07:05] weightlessness. Prokopeev then partnered with Flight Engineer Andre Fedyev in the afternoon for more tests of the lower-body negative pressure suit that may help crew members readjust Earth's gravity environment. Now back to you, Tim. Thanks for that, Hallie. India began exploring the Moon's surface with its rover on Thursday,

[00:07:30] a day after it became the first nation to land a craft near the largely unexplored Luna South Parole. Pragyan, wisdom in Sanskrit, rolled out of the lander hours after the latest milestone in India's ambitious but cut-priced space program sparked huge celebrations across the country.

[00:07:49] Rover ramped down the lander and India took a walk on the Moon, the Indian Space Research Organization posted on X, formerly known as Twitter on Thursday. The six-wheeled solar-powered rover will amble around the relatively unmapped region and transmit images and scientific data

[00:08:09] over its two-week lifespan. The successful touchdown of Chandran 3, Mooncraft 3 mission, came just days after a Russian lander crashed in the same region. It also comes four years after the previous Indian Luna mission failed during the final descent. It was

[00:08:27] in what was seen at the time as a huge setback for its space program. However, India is steadily matching the achievements of established space-faring nations. Chandran 3 has captivated public attention since launching nearly six weeks ago in front of thousands of cheering

[00:08:46] spectators. In the staged Hindu prayers, prayer rituals, to wish for the mission's success and still schoolchildren followed the final moments of its descent from live broadcasts in classrooms. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Wednesday that the successful Luna landing, previously only

[00:09:04] achieved by the United States, the Soviet Union and China, was a triumph for all of humanity. Elon Musk, whose firm SpaceX is a leader in commercial space launches, held the landing as super cool. The Indian mission took much longer to reach the moon than the Apollo

[00:09:21] missions in the 1960s and 1970s which arrived in a matter of days. Chandran 3 was launched on a less powerful rocket and had to orbit the earth several times to gain speed before embarking

[00:09:35] on its month-long journey. Low budget space program, but one that has grown considerably in size and momentum since it first sent a probe to orbit the moon in 2008. Chandran 3 has a cost of 74 million US dollars, far lower than many missions from other countries, and a testament

[00:09:56] to India's frugal space engineering. Experts say India can keep lost slow by copying and adapting existing technology and thanks to an abundance of highly skilled engineers who earn a fraction of their foreign counterparts' wages. In 2014, India became the first Asian nation

[00:10:16] to put a craft into orbit around Mars and plans to send a whole probe towards the sun in September. ISRO is slated to launch a three-day crewed mission into Earth's orbit by next year.

[00:10:31] It also plans a joint mission with Japan to send another probe to the moon by 2025 and an orbital mission to Venus within the next two years. ISRO, well done, a fantastic achievement for your organisation and the country as a whole. NASA's Nancy Grace Roman

[00:10:52] Space Telescope team has begun integrating and testing the spacecraft's electrical cabling or harness, which enables different parts of the observatory to communicate with another. Additionally, the harness provides power and helps the central computer monitor

[00:11:09] the observatory's function via an array of sensors. This brings the mission a step closer to surveying billions of cosmic objects and untangling mysteries like dark energy following its launch in May 2027. Just as the nervous system carries signals through

[00:11:26] the human body, Roman's harness connects its components providing both power and commands to each electronic box and instrument, said David Farrow, the Roman harness project development lead at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland. Without a harness,

[00:11:44] there is no space spacecraft. Weighing around £1,000, the harness is made up of approximately 32,000 wires and 900 connectors. If the wires were laid out end to end, they would span 45 miles. Directed upward, they would reach eight times higher than the peak of Mount Everest.

[00:12:06] Achieving this milestone was no small task. Over the course of about two years, a team of 11 Goddard technicians spent time at the workbench and perched on ladders cutting wires to length and meticulously cleaning each component and repeatedly connecting everything together.

[00:12:25] The entire harness was built on an observatory mock-up structure before being transported to Goddard's Space Environment Simulator, a massive thermal vacuum chamber used in this case for bake out. When observatories like Roman are sent into space, the resulting vacuum and orbital

[00:12:44] temperatures can cause certain materials to release harmful vapours, which can then condense within electronics and create problems like short circuits or deposits on sensitive objects degrading the telescope's performance. Bake out releases these gases on Earth, so they aren't

[00:13:03] admitted inside the spacecraft when in space. Now engineers will weave the harness through the flight structure in Goddard's big clean room. This ongoing process will continue until most of the spacecraft components are assembled. In the meantime, the Goddard team will soon begin

[00:13:19] installing electronic boxes that will eventually provide power by the harness to all of the spacecraft science instruments. Unfortunately, that's all we've got time for this week. Hallie, have you got a terrible dread for us? Did you hear about the mathematician who's afraid

[00:13:36] of negative numbers? He'll stop at nothing to avoid them. usual that's really bad thank you Hallie now don't forget everybody you can join in the conversation on our facebook page space nuts podcast group and you can catch all of our

[00:13:51] current and previous episodes at bites.com and space nuts.io thank you everybody for listening see you all next week say goodbye Hallie. Goodbye Hallie. Thanks for listening everybody and see you next time on the astronomy daily podcast