Japan’s Phobos Mission & Martian Quakes: Exploring Mars’ Moons, Canyons, and the Search for ET |...

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_01] Hi there, thanks for joining us again on Space Nuts, where we talk astronomy and space science. My name is Andrew Dunkley. Good to have your company. On this episode, we will be looking at Mars a couple of times from a couple of different angles. And the first story will be Japan's mission to Mars, but they're not landing on the planet. They're going to drop a bomb. Well, actually it won't be. They're going to drop something onto Phobos.

[00:00:30] [SPEAKER_01] Why? We'll tell you. And in the past, we've talked about these mysterious Mars quakes. Well, they think they might have figured out part of the reason. The largest canyon on Mars, or we should probably say in Mars, seems to still be having an effect on the red planet all these years later. And who's started looking for ET? Saudi Arabia.

[00:00:59] [SPEAKER_01] We'll tell you all about it on this episode of Space Nuts.

[00:01:03] [SPEAKER_03] 15 seconds. Guidance is internal. 10, 9. Ignition sequence start. Space Nuts. 5, 4, 3, 2. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Space Nuts. Astronauts report. It feels good.

[00:01:19] [SPEAKER_01] And joining us as always is Professor Fred Watson, astronomer at large. Hello, Fred. Hello, Andrew. It seems like only yesterday, but it wasn't. No, it's been about four weeks or something like that. Three or four weeks because Judy and I have been gallivanting again.

[00:01:37] [SPEAKER_01] We visited the former Yugoslavia, now known as the Balkans, but they're all independent nations now post the, I don't know what you call it, the communist regime. I hate that word, but anyway.

[00:01:54] [SPEAKER_01] So we visited Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Albania and Bulgaria. Hey, I got them all. Seven countries. And it's obviously formally a communist state when you look at the real estate. Yeah.

[00:02:23] [SPEAKER_01] Those big blocky eastern communist apartments in some parts of the world, but just beautiful countryside, beautiful lakes and river systems. Saw one of the most famous bridges in the world, which Red Bull uses for part of its world championship diving competitions.

[00:02:46] [SPEAKER_01] That was in a little town in Montenegro, I think. Or was it Bosnia? I can't remember. And but we also saw abject poverty, beggars on the streets, filth everywhere. Albania's got a lot of catching up to do with the rest of the world, very sadly. But I'm glad we went. I don't know if I'd go back. Did you go up to Bled?

[00:03:15] [SPEAKER_00] Yes. Yes, I did. So that's very different from the scenario you've described down in the south.

[00:03:24] [SPEAKER_01] Oh, absolutely. And that's the thing. It's like a few countries we've been to in recent years. In the north, it's completely different to the south.

[00:03:32] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah.

[00:03:33] [SPEAKER_01] Although in the former Yugoslavia, it's the other way up. The good stuff's up the north.

[00:03:37] [SPEAKER_00] It is. That's right. With Ljana and Slovenia. So one of my claims to fame is that I bled in Bled. And it's because on the shoreline of Lake Bled is the former residence of President Tito when he was the head of the Yugoslav consortium, I suppose, collaboration.

[00:04:04] [SPEAKER_00] And my colleague in Ljubljana, a really good friend, Thomas Vitter, dropped me off at the top of the property that Tito used to have and said, you can walk down through the property. I think it's a sort of museum now. And he said, there'll be a gate at the bottom and that'll bring you out onto the lake and I'll be parked nearby. So me and a colleague walked down this long, long hill through a forest. It was beautiful place. It is stunning.

[00:04:33] [SPEAKER_00] No sign of a gate at the bottom, but there was this fence, an iron fence. And I forgot that I was then probably 30 years older than my colleague. And I said, oh, yeah, I can shin over that. That's fine. Yes, I did. But my foot slipped and I basically impaled myself on the spikes at the top of this thing. It was only a flesh wound, I have to say.

[00:04:59] [SPEAKER_00] But I had blood all over my shirt and Thomas was mortified when he picked us up. We did get over the fence and got picked up. But I was getting on the plane to Sydney that night and I thought, I can't really fly back to Sydney with looking as though somebody just shot me. So I had to try and find somewhere to change, which I did. But then the flight was cancelled. I don't think I went. There were French traffic controllers were on strike. Anyway, it was. Yeah.

[00:05:26] [SPEAKER_00] So every time I think of Blade, I think of Bleeding there. But as you will have seen, it's straight out of a Disney cartoon. Oh, isn't it? With that astonishing castle on the lakeside and island in the middle and beautiful place.

[00:05:39] [SPEAKER_01] And some amazing caves we went to as well. Yes. At one stage. And you get in by train. You get on a tiny little train to go into the... It's just... Yeah. But what I did learn about Albania was that they were under the tyrannical rule of a dictator for 50 years who banned religion and was so paranoid about the country being invaded, he was planning to build 800,000 military bunkers around its border.

[00:06:09] [SPEAKER_01] He didn't get that job done before he passed away. But they built 300,000 of them. And you can see them dotted all over the place. Just these igloo-like bunkers ready to defend the country from invisible invaders. They're strange. And they're still trying to recover from those 50 years. That's a tragedy of it all. I could talk forever and I probably will. But let's get down to business, Fred. And... What was it again? I can't remember.

[00:06:38] [SPEAKER_01] That was so long ago. Our first story takes us to the Mars system in our own solar system. But more specifically, Phobos. The Japanese have launched a massive mission to get there. It's costing them a fortune. A couple of quadrillion yen, I imagine. But this is already lifted off, as far as I can tell. This week? Was it this week? Last week. Last week. Last week.

[00:07:08] [SPEAKER_01] And, yeah, it's on its way. And they're looking specifically at the Martian moon Phobos.

[00:07:16] [SPEAKER_00] So you're absolutely right. It's called the MMX mission, the Martian moons explorer. It's the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, who are running this. A very, very capable organisation. And launched, actually, a week ago last Monday, as we speak today. And, yeah, it's going to both...

[00:07:45] [SPEAKER_00] In a sense, it's going to both Martian moons. So the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, Greek for fear and dread. Perfect. That's how they were named, because they were named in the... I think it was the 1870s when they were found. And Mars, of course, the god of war. So fear and dread were very appropriate as their moon names. But they're tiny moons. They're 23 kilometres across and 14 kilometres across, respectively.

[00:08:14] [SPEAKER_00] Phobos being the biggest. But they're both puzzles, Andrew, because we don't really know how they formed. And their formation might well give us more clues to the way the solar system evolved.

[00:08:31] [SPEAKER_01] One strong theory is that they were actually captured.

[00:08:34] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, possibly captured asteroids, given that Mars is on the inner edge of the asteroid belt, the main asteroid belt. So that's possible. But you need... You do need some special conditions to capture an asteroid. It's quite hard to do with just the gravity of the planet alone, unless it really sort of swooped in very low and was decelerated by the atmosphere or something and then, you know, captured in that way.

[00:09:03] [SPEAKER_00] Another way that you could do it is if Phobos, for example, had originally been part of a binary asteroid. So two small asteroids in orbit around one another. And we know there are plenty of examples of those. We've talked about them, asteroids with moons. And then what could happen is that one of them could get ejected and the other get sucked into the orbit of being in orbit around Mars. That would have been another way. But, yeah, some people think that they perhaps might have been formed,

[00:09:32] [SPEAKER_00] or it's not some people think. It's another suggestion as to the origin of these two worlds, that they were actually formed along with Mars. When Mars was formed, just as part of the debris, leftover debris from the formation of the planet. And I guess the third theory is that they have an origin similar to our moon, in that something big collided with Mars. And this is the debris of that coalesced into a single object. And in some ways, that's quite an attractive theory,

[00:10:01] [SPEAKER_00] because we know that these moons are very, they're not very dense. They're, you know, they're quite lightweight. Think of a piece of pumice or something like that, which suggests that they are, that they've got a lot of empty space in between rocks and things. And it might mean that they're actually rubble piles. And we know there are many examples of rubble piles in the asteroid world. Yeah. So great interest in it.

[00:10:31] [SPEAKER_00] And you and I, I'm sure, covered it back in 2011 when it was launched. And that was the original Russian mission to Phobos, which was called Phobos Grunt. Do you remember that? Yes, that's right. Grunt being the word for ground or earth or basically soil. And Phobos Grunt didn't get beyond earth orbit. It was, I think it was carried aloft on a Chinese Long March rocket, if I remember right.

[00:10:59] [SPEAKER_00] They can't remember exactly the details, but yeah, it never left earth orbit and eventually was de-orbited and basically burned up. I think there was two earlier Soviet missions as well to try and send things to Phobos. So it's been very much on people's bucket list for a long time. And maybe now we are seeing this wish of humankind to get near Phobos actually unfold in reality.

[00:11:26] [SPEAKER_00] With a complex suite of vehicles, I guess. There's a main spacecraft which is fitted with solar panels. That will initially go into orbit around Mars, not Phobos. Phobos has too little gravity to put anything in a stable orbit around it. It would just get sucked away by Mars. So there'll be an orbit around Mars, but one that brings them close to both Phobos and Deimos.

[00:11:56] [SPEAKER_00] So we can get lots of close-up images and things of that sort. So it's going to take about 10 months to get there. And then something like three years of this orbiting characteristic, lots of imagery looking for landing sites, things of that sort, because this thing will actually land. There are two landers. There's a little shoebox-sized French rover. I think it might be French and German, I think, space agencies who've collaborated on that.

[00:12:25] [SPEAKER_00] This is a rover that's got wheels and it'll try and rove around Phobos. But if it is really just a rubble pile, I think it's going to struggle with that. And the other thing about Phobos, of course, is it's got negligible gravity. Gravity is a thousandth of what it is here on Earth. Wow. And so the trick in getting anything onto the surface is to stop it bouncing off so it just disappears into space. Yeah. You wouldn't want to fart, would you? No, you wouldn't. That would almost do it, Andrew.

[00:12:55] [SPEAKER_00] The average escape velocity on Phobos is 40 kilometres an hour, so you could almost do it on your bike. You could. That's the fastest I ever rode a bike as a kid. Is it 40? Yeah, 40 cars. Actually, yeah, I ride mine at more than 40. There's a bit of a hill here.

[00:13:10] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, but mine was an old clunker. Ah. It wasn't a racing bike.

[00:13:16] [SPEAKER_00] Neither is mine. Anyway, never mind that. That's all right.

[00:13:18] [SPEAKER_01] That was downhill with a tailwind too.

[00:13:19] [SPEAKER_00] We could. Both of us could escape the clutches of Phobos's gravity. And then the sort of grand finale, if I can put it that way, of the mission is that the spacecraft itself will land on Phobos with two sample pickup mechanisms. One is a drill. They'll actually do a core sample if there's enough solid stuff to drill a core into

[00:13:47] [SPEAKER_00] or out of, and a thing that will blast nitrogen onto the surface. So it will raise a cloud of dust and the spacecraft will collect the dust. And then a capsule will return to Earth and it will re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and land in Australia. So we're going to be the nation that picks it up, the Australian Space Agency's liaising with JAXA on that issue.

[00:14:14] [SPEAKER_00] And of course that builds on, and in a sense the whole mission builds on experience that the Japan Space Agency has gathered with their two missions to asteroids, Hayabusa 1 and Hayabusa 2, which brought back samples. Both of them successfully returned samples of, well, was it Itokawa and Ryugu, I think were the two asteroids.

[00:14:40] [SPEAKER_00] And so we've got samples from those asteroids now in Earth laboratories, and they too landed those sample capsules in Western Australia. Sorry, I beg your pardon, South Australia.

[00:14:51] [SPEAKER_01] They love dropping their junk on our country.

[00:14:54] [SPEAKER_00] I think it's a bit more precious than junk, though. We could snaffle it and become world famous by analysing all their data.

[00:15:00] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. That's a possibility. I'm fascinated by the spacecraft itself. It's about 9,900 pounds or four and a half metric tonnes, two-thirds of which is propellant.

[00:15:11] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. That's about typical. Yeah, it's fairly typical.

[00:15:15] [SPEAKER_01] Is it really? Yeah. Gosh, I've never seen the breakdowns, really.

[00:15:21] [SPEAKER_00] Usually there's more propellant than anything. Oh, I mean, just think of the Saturn V. Oh, of course. Not much of it was not propellant. Just the nose. Yeah, that's right. Basically.

[00:15:33] [SPEAKER_01] And the command module. Yes. All right. It's going to be a fascinating journey, and we will be able to keep you up to date with what happens in about 10 months' time when they finally get there. It's a long, long trip. I think, yeah. Sorry, Andrew. I was going to say, I can't believe they're thinking of sending people there. Like I did 30 hours to Zagreb, and I couldn't stand it.

[00:16:01] [SPEAKER_01] Being put in a tinier, tinier module to travel for, you know, six months.

[00:16:08] [SPEAKER_00] Horrifying. We're a long way from that, I think, despite what some enthusiastic people think. Just to tie up the loose end, we expect the sample return to be in 2031. So in five years' time, we hopefully will still be going strong by then. You never know. I hope so.

[00:16:28] [SPEAKER_01] The other point was... It could answer some of those really interesting questions about Mars and the origin of the moons, and maybe even the planet. I don't know. It depends what they're made of.

[00:16:41] [SPEAKER_00] That's correct. It might also... So people have talked about the first human mission to Mars actually being to land on Phobos. And the reason for that is, of course, it's much easier to land on a small body and take off again from it than it is on a big one like Mars. Whether that's still considered a realistic possibility, I don't know. I think we're still a long way from sending people into the orbital sphere of Mars.

[00:17:09] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. But, yeah, I'd consider logic in that. Land on Phobos or Deimos and then just drop a rope. Cheaper way to get down.

[00:17:18] [SPEAKER_00] I think if you tried to... I think if you tried to land on Deimos, you'd just knock it out of the way. Yeah, you might. Even the softest touch to bring it down and you'd, oh, damn, it's gone.

[00:17:31] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, scary stuff. If you want to read about it, there's a great article on the arstechnica.com website. Yeah, that's right. This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred Watson.

[00:17:49] [SPEAKER_03] Roger, you're allowed to go here also.

[00:17:51] [SPEAKER_01] Space Nuts. To our next story, Fred, which continues our look at Mars and the geography of Mars astounds me. It's a smaller planet than Earth, but it's got bigger stuff. It's like it's saying, okay, yeah, yeah, you're bigger, but I've got bigger stuff than you. Yes. You're Grand Canyon.

[00:18:13] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[00:18:14] [SPEAKER_01] I can fit that into my little finger. And it's got the biggest mountain in the solar system, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, yeah, puffing its chest up. And I'm red and you're not. It's going to, it's made the news again now because they have, we've talked about in the past how Mars has been kind of making noise. There's been Mars quakes and they've been trying to figure out why.

[00:18:42] [SPEAKER_01] This could be a contributing factor and it all comes down to that massive canyon.

[00:18:48] [SPEAKER_00] Indeed, that's right. So you're right. We have talked about Mars quakes and the reason we know that they exist is because there was a lander. It's probably still there, but it's now defunct. A NASA lander called InSight, which basically was around in the early, sort of mid 2010s to early 2020s.

[00:19:17] [SPEAKER_00] And InSight was basically looking at the interior of Mars. So it had a very accurate seismometer. And actually, I think we covered this in detail. They had a thermometer to try and measure the amount of heat radiation coming from the interior of Mars, but they couldn't, they never managed to dig the hole and drill a hole deep enough for it to be used in. So I think that part of it was never successful, but the seismometer was very successful.

[00:19:46] [SPEAKER_00] And so what's happened now is that, so that InSight is no longer operational, but it collected all these data on temperature and the seismic records, basically recording Mars quakes. And of course, with earthquakes, the seismometry is the same on Earth. The devil is in the detail. It's the detail of these disturbances that you can use to sort of pick out

[00:20:15] [SPEAKER_00] all the fine details of where this has come from, what it's passed through on its journey through the interior of Mars, and other issues. So that's a complicated way of saying that people are still studying these seismic records from InSight. Yeah. And in fact, one in particular, one seismic event, and I love the fact that these things have names, it's called S0976A.

[00:20:44] [SPEAKER_00] That's a seismic event, which was recorded on the 25th of August, 2021. And it basically was unique in that the characteristics of the seismic wave tells you that this thing came from the other side of Mars, and it's the only one that did, the only Mars quake detected during the whole InSight mission that you could locate to the western hemisphere of the planet.

[00:21:14] [SPEAKER_00] So it now turns out that it came from, as you said, the biggest canyon in the solar system, Valles Marineris, the Valles Marineris. It's 3,900 kilometres long.

[00:21:29] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. 10 times longer than the Grand Canyon. Yeah. That's extraordinary. 20 times wider. Yeah. And just to throw salt into our wounds, twice as deep. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't it fantastic?

[00:21:46] [SPEAKER_00] It's an ordinary place. Yeah. I'd love to go there and have a look. Yes. Well, if Elon Musk has his way, you might get the opportunity to do that, but I think you might be long gone by then. Never mind. That's another story. It is the largest canyon. And so that is pinpointed onto that. And the evidence that comes from the details of this seismic wave is something called a strike-slip Mars quake.

[00:22:15] [SPEAKER_00] And so you've got blocks of the crust of Mars sliding horizontally past each other, basically along a very steep and probably very deep fault line. Now, we know, because we've talked about it before, Mars does not have plate tectonics. So you're not getting plate tectonic type Mars quakes all the time.

[00:22:43] [SPEAKER_00] Mars' crust is more like an orange peel than something broken up into segments. It's a solid crust. And we think that's how, in fact, the biggest volcanic peak in the solar system got so big because it was above a hotspot and never moved because there's no plate tectonic. So it just kept on churning up. That's Olympus Mons, which you referred to earlier. So, yeah, so that's interesting. So what it's saying,

[00:23:13] [SPEAKER_00] and I guess this is the kind of headline that Mars is still tectonically active, even though it's not got plate tectonics. And plate tectonics, remember, are driven by convection currents in the mantle of the Earth, the sort of softish plasticky rock that's below the crust. Mars has a mantle, but it's not one that's driving plate tectonic mechanisms. Although,

[00:23:42] [SPEAKER_00] you know, maybe, maybe it is. Maybe there's, there's these convection currents in that that can sort of slip and slide the blocks of the crust itself in that horizontal fault line that we just talked about. Interesting stuff. I think it's rather, rather, you know, compelling evidence that Mars is not as dead as if we thought it was. that there's stuff going on

[00:24:12] [SPEAKER_00] and maybe some of these faults are quite geologically active.

[00:24:17] [SPEAKER_01] Yes. And I, I'm thrilled because I, as you know, I'm a big fan of the planet. I think it's probably one of the most interesting places in, in the solar system. Aside from Earth. I mean, we've got so much more going on here than anywhere else, I suppose, with all the proliferation, pro proliferation of life. Life, yeah. But Mars, Mars is, yeah, it's, it's a, it's in a category all on its own, really, as a rocky planet, I think.

[00:24:46] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah.

[00:24:47] [SPEAKER_01] And, um, deserves a lot of attention and, you know, that we just keep learning. That's the thing. Um, it's, it always seems to throw up something new every time we take a look at it. Yeah. That's what I love about it. Uh, if you want to read about that, you can go to the phys.org, P-H-Y-S, phys.org article, or you can read the entire 5,000 page, uh, study. I don't think it's that long. Um, well, it, it's two pages long,

[00:25:16] [SPEAKER_01] but if you add the authors, it's 5,000. Yes. Uh, they've published that in Nature Communications. This is Space Nuts. Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Fred Watson.

[00:25:29] [SPEAKER_03] Zero G, and I feel fine.

[00:25:31] [SPEAKER_01] Space Nuts. Now, this, um, made me do a double take, Fred, this story. Uh, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is joining in the search for E.T. Um, working with SETI by the look of it. What's, what's this about?

[00:25:49] [SPEAKER_00] Well, it's actually about, really, the stories, um, in some ways, more interesting than that, um, because, uh, the Saudis are setting up a fairly major observatory. Uh, and that's, uh, so the, the SETI, you know, the SETI facility is going to be a part of that. Um, this is, this explains why

[00:26:12] [SPEAKER_01] the live golf concept is going under. Yeah, that's right. They've got to pay for the search for extraterrestrials.

[00:26:18] [SPEAKER_00] All the money's going into SETI. Uh, yeah, so, um, it's, it's, um, basically, the Saudi government is, uh, setting up an observatory that I think will include a four-meter class telescope, uh, which is the same as our Anglo-Australian telescope here in, here in, uh, New South Wales and of course the same as the, the Kitt Peak four-meter telescope,

[00:26:48] [SPEAKER_00] uh, in Arizona. Um, so the, what they're planning is, um, an observatory. They're planning a dark sky park, uh, to make it, um, you know, a, a place where people can go and look at the stars. It's, uh, if I can try and pronounce it correctly, Alula Manara, I think, that might be giving it, giving it a Hawaiian pronunciation rather than a Saudi one, rather than an Arabic one. I mean, but, um, anyway, that's the place. It's Saudi Arabia's

[00:27:18] [SPEAKER_00] first major astronomical observatory and, um, the, there's a World Heritage site there with, and that's partly because of ancient civilizations going right back to the Neolithic. It's, you know, it makes our archaeology, even our archaeology here, uh, look a little bit, um, recent. Um, but, uh, it's also going to have a dark sky park and as I said, eventually will host large telescopes, a four metre and a pair of two metre class telescopes if, if everything

[00:27:47] [SPEAKER_00] goes according to plan. Uh, so the SETI detectors are basically just part of that and these are, they're a little bit different from the normal SETI, uh, instrumentation. so SETI, the Cirque for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, there is a SETI Institute and they operate the Allen Telescope Array, which is an array of radio telescopes, which has been dedicated to looking for alien signals for, what,

[00:28:17] [SPEAKER_00] 20 years or something like that. But Laser SETI is a network of optical detectors, in other words, ones that detect visible light. Um, it's been under development for the last couple of years and, uh, I think this site in Saudi Arabia will laser, will be Laser SETI's fifth site. The first one is actually

[00:28:37] [SPEAKER_01] looking at their website right now, laserseti.net and you can, you can look at all the data as it comes in. Excellent. Yeah. Oh, look, they found something. No, I'm kidding.

[00:28:50] [SPEAKER_00] Well, um, I haven't, you've got further than me because I didn't have time to look up Laser SETI, but, um, yeah, good to see that they've, you know, I suppose it's a bit like, um, SETI at home with the, uh, you know, people using their own computers to do the analysis. There'll be a lot of AI presumably brought to bear on the Laser SETI analysis to see if they can pick out a, a, a, a laser communication signal from outer space amongst all the optical noise that there is,

[00:29:19] [SPEAKER_00] uh, going through our skies.

[00:29:22] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. I mean, the, the day will come where the aliens turn up and say, oh, hi, we're here, we've been trying to talk to you. Oh, yeah, well, we were, we were looking for you on the laser spectrum. Yeah, we don't use that.

[00:29:34] [SPEAKER_00] No, we don't use radio waves either. I wonder what they will use. Who knows?

[00:29:40] [SPEAKER_01] Um, it's hard to know, isn't it? And it could be something out there that we don't know about that could be that everyone that everyone else is using and we're, we're just using the old, you know, prehistoric stuff.

[00:29:52] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. Um, or alternatively we could be as good as it gets and there isn't anybody else out there. That's more likely though,

[00:30:00] [SPEAKER_01] isn't it? I think it might be, yes. Yeah, which would be pretty sad, but, um, there are a lot of people that think we are just a freak of nature and, um, everything was just right to make us develop as we are and nowhere else will be able to achieve that. And even if they do or have, chances are we'll never find each other.

[00:30:25] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. The tyranny of distance. The tyranny of distance, that's correct.

[00:30:30] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Fascinating. Uh, so, um, when are they going to start building this thing or have they started? Oh,

[00:30:37] [SPEAKER_00] I think it's already, um, the hardware is already there. Uh, and I, I'm not sure whether it's online in the, in the laser setting network yet, but it's certainly, uh, pretty well advanced. There are some nice photographs, um, on the side that I'm looking at. So,

[00:30:55] [SPEAKER_01] the Robert Ferguson Observatory in California is operational. The Haleakala Observatory in Maui, you'd know that one well. I do. Um, what else have we got? Oh, that's a busy one. Zwona in Arizona and was there another one? Uh, there is, yes. Alula Marinara Observatory in Saudi Arabia. That's where you are.

[00:31:20] [SPEAKER_00] there's one in Puerto Rico, I think, as well. Yeah,

[00:31:23] [SPEAKER_01] it's not on the list.

[00:31:25] [SPEAKER_00] Probably broken. Maybe. Fell down.

[00:31:31] [SPEAKER_01] There it is. You can check all that out at universetoday.com. They've got the article. Or you can go to laserseti.net and take a look at what they're doing and you might be the first to know that they've found ET and you can tell us.

[00:31:55] [SPEAKER_00] Well, that would be something, wouldn't it? Wouldn't it?

[00:31:57] [SPEAKER_01] Just. Mm, all right. Uh, that's just about it, Fred. Gosh, um, good to be back, even though it doesn't sound like we were ever apart, but we know the truth. website, spacenutspodcast.com or spacenuts.io and check everything out. The shop, the, uh,

[00:32:27] [SPEAKER_01] you can sign up for the daily news feed. There are videos. You can send us messages through the Ask Me Anything tab at the top and so on. And maybe become a supporter and don't forget to leave reviews wherever you listen to our podcast or watch it for that matter on YouTube. Uh, normally I'd play a terrible joke on Hugh, um, but I just wanted to say that, uh, Hugh has, um, got himself back home after a stint in hospital and recovering well. So we're very, very pleased to hear that

[00:32:57] [SPEAKER_01] news. Good on you, Hugh. Uh, I'll be back to, uh, insult you next week. And, uh, from me, Andrew Dunkley, thanks for your company. We'll catch you on the next episode of Space Nuts. Bye-bye.

[00:33:09] [SPEAKER_02] Space Nuts. You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast. Listen to media. Available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, or your favourite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bytes.com.

[00:33:23] [SPEAKER_00] This has been another quality podcast production from

[00:33:27] [SPEAKER_02] bytes.com.