Significant Similarities - Mars and Earth - The New Findings

[00:00:00] Hello again and thanks for joining us on Astronomy Daily, our daily look at what's happening in astronomy and space science news. And coming up on today's show, it's looking like the history of Mars has got some uncanny similarities to Earth. And I'm not just talking

[00:00:16] about the fact that it used to be a wet, warm planet that could have harboured life. No, other things have happened that might surprise you. We'll be looking into that. We'll also be looking at a big flash of light that has been studied by astronomers. We're talking something

[00:00:36] thousands of times brighter than our sun and they think they know what caused it. And you might be able to help keep old rockets up to scratch with the help of the US Space and Rocket Centre

[00:00:49] Education Foundation. They're looking for people to help them out. We'll tell you all about it on today's edition of Astronomy Daily. And it's time to say hello to our favourite AI reporter,

[00:01:07] Hallie Gidei Hallie. What are you doing for the weekend? Hi, Andrew. I'm going to visit the Taj Mahal this weekend. The one in India? How are you going to do that? You're not going to,

[00:01:19] like you can't catch a plane or something, can you? Of course not. It's all done through virtual reality. So I can experience these places just like you, sort of. Oh wow, can people do it too?

[00:01:30] Sure, anyone can do it. It's all online. I'll have to check that out, save us a lot of money and no jet lag. Let's get the news, Hallie. On February 24th, this year Russia invaded Ukraine and its

[00:01:46] impact has stretched into space with satellites providing internet and intel and long-standing international relations in outer space shifting rapidly. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has received harsh criticism internationally from world leaders. For decades, the US and Russia have

[00:02:03] collaborated in space. From the 1975 Apollo Soyuz test project, which took place mid-Cold War, to the continued partnership in the International Space Station program, the two nations have worked together in space amidst political upheaval on Earth.

[00:02:19] But Russia's invasion of Ukraine has sparked backlash among Russia's space agency partners and is challenging that cooperative spirit. And many believe the damage many be permanent with several cooperative ventures having been shelved or canceled in the wake of hostilities. Time will tell.

[00:02:35] Cognitive Space is a startup based in Houston, Texas. And yesterday they announced that retired US Air Force Major General Aaron Pruppas has joined the company as a strategic advisor. Pruppas was most recently director for Defense Intelligence at the office of the Under Secretary

[00:02:51] of Defense for Intelligence and Security. Guida Karufal, founder and CEO of Cognitive Space, said Pruppas will help guide the company as it seeks to expand its defense and intelligence business. Cognitive Space has won several small business innovation research contracts

[00:03:08] for its artificial intelligence-driven software used to manage and schedule operations on a cloud platform. The company has been working with the Air Force Research Laboratory to demonstrate how this software can help automate the command and control of remote

[00:03:23] sensing satellites. Pruppas will provide guidance and advice to the Cognitive Space team with respect to continuing to grow its partnership with the intelligence community and Department of Defense. China continues to make great strides in space and has

[00:03:39] achieved yet another milestone. China currently has six astronauts in orbit for the first time as the country carries out a space station crew handover. Three astronauts launched aboard the Shenzhou-15 spacecraft on Tuesday docked with the Tianjiang Space Station. Chen Dong,

[00:03:55] commander of the three-person Shenzhou-14 crew already aboard the newly completed Tiangang, opened the hatch between the space station and spacecraft. Chen and colleagues Lu Yang and Kai Xu Xia greeted new arrivals Fei Junlong, Dang Qingming and Zhang Lu with hugs,

[00:04:10] marking the first time China has had two crews aboard Tiangang. NASA's bold mission to explore Jupiter's icy moon Europe is facing tight schedules leading up to the planned 2024 launch. Europa is a particularly tantalizing destination because

[00:04:26] scientists believe that, under its icy crust, the moon hides a global ocean and that the ocean may be the sort of place where life could survive. That's why NASA designed its Europa Clipper mission, meant to launch in 2024, arrive at Jupiter in 2030 and fly past Europa dozens of

[00:04:43] times. Engineers are assembling the spacecraft in a clean room in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California but things aren't going quite to plan with many of the mission's instruments behind schedule which is starting to cause serious concerns. And that's the news

[00:04:58] Andrew. Thanks Hallie and well better late than never I suppose with Europa Clipper and if that's all that goes wrong then it won't be too bad. We'll catch up with you towards the end of the show.

[00:05:11] Now Mars and Earth and to a point Venus all share a similar history. At one stage all three planets they think were livable. They were warm and wet and probably had oceans or water of

[00:05:24] some kind but things changed for Mars and Venus. The other interesting thing about the histories of these planets is at least in the case of Mars there have been very significant similarities in the history of the planets and that's what I'm going to talk about right now.

[00:05:42] And it looks like Mars as well as Earth both suffered at some stage in their history mega-sonamis that crashed a lot across their landscapes. Now in the case of Earth we know

[00:05:55] about the Chicksalup crater of 66 million years ago when the asteroid hit what is now the Gulf of Mexico and led to the killing off the dinosaurs it certainly had a big stake in that. Well it

[00:06:10] looks like Mars may also have had a similar event in its history. Research is led by planetary scientist Alexis Rodriguez of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona located an enormous impact crater that they say is most likely the origin of a mystery wave

[00:06:31] that they found evidence of on Mars. They've named it Pohl POHL and it's located within an area that was scoured with catastrophic flood erosion. Now that was first identified back in the 1970s on what could be the edge of an ancient ocean. When NASA's Viking 1 probe landed in 1976

[00:06:53] on Mars they landed near a large flood channel called the Maha Velas and they found something strange not the features expected of a landscape transformed by a mega-flood but a boulder strewn plane which seemed at odds with what they believed. Now a team of scientists led by Rodriguez

[00:07:16] have since determined and this is in a paper in 2016 that it was the result of tsunami waves which extensively resurfaced the shoreline of what was an ancient Martian ocean and to confirm their suspicions the researchers did impact simulations. They tweaked the

[00:07:33] parameters of the impactor and the surface that it slammed into and they came up with two scenarios that seemed to fit the observations. First was an asteroid 9 kilometers or 5.6 miles across which encountered strong ground resistance and that resulted in a 13 million megaton explosion.

[00:07:53] The other possibility was an asteroid 3 kilometers across which hit weak ground resistance resulting in a half million megaton of TNT energy. Now in the simulations both of those scenarios resulted in a crater 110 kilometers across which unleashed a mega-sonami that traveled as

[00:08:13] far as 1500 kilometers from the impact site and it easily covered the region around the Maha Vallas. So it looks like their suspicions are fairly solid and the evidence does suggest just like

[00:08:30] Earth that Mars was struck by a big rock causing a mega-sonami and the study has just been published in the journal Scientific Reports. Now earlier this year astronomers were keeping tabs on data from the Zwicky Transient Facility. It's an all-sky survey based at the Paloma Observatory in California

[00:08:57] when they detected an extraordinary flash of light in a part of the sky where no such light had been observed even the night before. From a rough calculation the flash appeared to give off

[00:09:09] weight for this more than a thousand trillion suns. That's a big flash. You can get arrested for that. The team led by researchers at NASA, Caltech and a few other places put their discovery on an astronomy newsletter and it drew significant attention very quickly amongst astronomers around the

[00:09:29] world including scientists at MIT. Now over the next few days multiple telescopes focused on the signal to get more data across multiple wavelengths. We're talking X-ray, ultraviolet, radio bands, optical. They wanted to see what could possibly produce such an enormous amount of light.

[00:09:50] Now the MIT astronomers along with their collaborators have determined a likely source for the signal and a study has been posted today in Nature Astronomy where the scientists report that the signal named AT-2022 CMC most likely comes from a relativistic jet of matter

[00:10:12] streaking out of a supermassive black hole at close to the speed of light. They believe the jet is the product of a black hole that suddenly began devouring a nearby star releasing a huge

[00:10:25] amount of energy while it did so. The team says the black hole's jet might well be pointing towards Earth making the signal appear much brighter than if the jet were pointing in some other direction. The effect is called Doppler boosting and it's sort of similar to the sound

[00:10:44] of a passing siren that gets louder and louder. AT-2022 CMC is the fourth Doppler-boosted TDE ever detected and the first event that has been observed since 2011. It's also the first TDE discovered using an optical sky survey. As more powerful telescopes start to ramp up in the

[00:11:06] coming years they may well reveal more TDE's which can shed light boom boom on how supermassive black holes grow and shape the galaxies around them. So yeah fascinating, fascinating discovery. And lastly and this is where you might be able to help the US Space and Rocket Centre

[00:11:27] Education Foundation has launched an ADOPT and ARTFACT program. They want to give the public a chance to help with the preservation of historic items and we're talking things like, you know, Saturn V rockets. According to the foundation's website, artifacts at the US

[00:11:44] Space and Rocket Centre play a vital role in our mission as they tell a story through science, engineering, mathematics and technology feats of the past generations to adopt an artifact program is your opportunity to adopt a piece of history and help us as we honour our past

[00:12:03] by preserving our historical artifacts of the past and ignite the space stories of the future. It's located near NASA's Marshall Space Centre in Huntsville, Alabama. The US Space and Rocket Centre was first proposed by rocket pioneer Werner von Braun as a permanent place to exhibit

[00:12:21] the hardware of the Apollo Moon Landing Program. The centre opened in 1970 and since then nearly 17 million people have passed through its doors. In 1982 it also became the home of Space Camp. Today it's affiliated with the Smithsonian Institute and displays hundreds of artifacts

[00:12:42] and that includes the Apollo 16 command module named CASPA, Sky Labs 1G trainer and a Lockheed A-12 Oxcart High Altitude Reconnaissance Aircraft. Now the centre is also the only place in the world will use where you'll see a Saturn V Moon rocket and Pathfinder, a full-scale mock-up of the

[00:13:03] space shuttle as well. The years have taken their toll on some of these vehicles and they're in need of care and they either need preservative actions to, you know, stop further deterioration

[00:13:15] but in some cases they require a lot more tender loving care to get them back to their original condition. Now they'll do that through raising funds through the new ADOPT and artifact program which will not only go into those activities in general but will be directed to vehicles

[00:13:34] of the adopter's choice so if you want to help out with a Saturn V rocket you make that choice and there you go. Among the artifacts up for adoption are in fact a Saturn V, one of only three

[00:13:47] remaining examples of the rocket that launched the first astronauts to the moon and I've been lucky enough to see one up close and personal and Pathfinder, a fit check device for the space shuttle orbiter paired with an external tank and two solid rocket boosters also up for

[00:14:05] adoptions and that A12 ox cart I told you about an F-14A Tomcat fighter jet. I'm guessing you can find out more by logging on to the internet and going to the US Space and Rocket Centre Education

[00:14:19] Foundation if you want to get involved. Sounds so cool. I'm putting my hand up for a Saturn V rocket, if they can get it over here and put it in my backyard I will take very very good care

[00:14:30] of it and of course you can chase up all of those stories on Astronomy Daily just log on to Spacenuts.io or go to the URL AstronomyDaily.io and it'll take you straight to all the latest news

[00:14:43] in astronomy and space science. We're almost done, Hallie I had a bit of an issue with Siri the other day. Oh what happened? Well I accidentally left my iPhone on flight mode

[00:14:57] and Siri said don't call me Shirley. Oh dear. Bye Hallie. Bye. That's it from us for this week until next time this is Andrew Dunkley for Astronomy Daily.