#389: Ingenuity's Incredible Martian Journey: Helicopter Makes History Before Bittersweet Ending

Hi there, Thanks for joining us on this edition of Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Dunkley, your host, and always good to have you with us. Coming up in this episode, we will be looking again at ingenuity. It's all bad news but not really, Plus the slim moon Lander which has landed on the Moon sort of, and we're going to talk about the passing of a great in astronomy and space science. There's a lot on today. We've also got a story about our Milky Ways dark matter halo and it looks like it's got a weird thing going on with it that might make our galaxy unique. Plus a potential explanation for the burping of Mars. That's all coming up on this edition of Space Nuts fifteen, Channel ten nine Ignition, Space Nuts NI three and I we bought it Nels good and joining us to talk about all that and a little bit more later on is Professor Fred what's that astronomer Tello Fred, Andrew, good to see you again, Good to see you without dedlay in the sound. Yes, yes, long explanation, but yeah, my one drive was sync to the hard drive and they hated each other. Basically, That's that's what the problem was. Short explanation for a big, big problem. But it's all sorted out now, so we can talk in real time, not like we were on a not like we were on a satellite phone for the last couple of weeks. Bizar. Yeah, and everything good at your end of the world. I just thank you. Yes, all going well so far. We I can't believe that the year has taken off at such a high rate of nice. It seems faster every year. Yeh, January is January is. I read a study as to why the years go faster as you get older, and that's you. Yeah, And the answer is because we've experienced most of life and we're not sort of being welcomed by new and exciting things anymore like when we were children. So for some reason, that just turns it into a very fast motioned day by day in the second half of it. So life becomes routine, is what, Yes, that's what it is. Yeah, yeah, I get that. I quite like routine. Actually I like my other half who doesn't, but which is why she you know, she's constantly conjuring up these tours that we do to take people around to places where we've never been. Well, if you want the year to seem like it's lasting longer. You've got to bring new things into your life, apparently, yeah, yeah, yeawise. Otherwise it just becomes routine and every day is the same. And who would have thought space notes would become routine. Yeah, it doesn't feel routine. And certainly something that, certainly something that wasn't routine was the situation with the Ingenuity helicopter. Now we've been talking about Ingenuity the last couple of weeks because it had an incident. They thought they lost it, they found it again, but now it is end of mission, yes, because we know that it's suffered damage. And so the story is that the just try to bring up the right page. I kind of know what the story is. Here we are. We've got a lovely picture of Ingenuity on my screen, taken during its fifty fourth flight. And so yeah, so flight seventy two, which was I think we've spoken about before, was just meant to be an up and down to check that's something that went wrong on the previous flight with its excuse me, with its communications was okay. But it turned out that that seventy second flight something went wrong, probably in the landing, and it broke one of the rotor blades, the two rotor blades that counter rotate on top of Ingenuity. One of them is now broken off. And there's an easy to find photograph actually of the shadow of the rotor blade taken by one of Ingenuity's cameras, the shadow of the rotor blade on the Martian sand, and you can see the end of it looks as though it's not there. Yeah, So that sort of essentially writes off the helicopter. It reached actually an altitude of twelve meters or forty feet with a four point five second hover, so it was obvi say in reasonable shape at that stage. But then when it landed, it looks as though something went wrong with the landing and it broke the rotor blade. And so it's now been deemed unusable after seventy two flights compared with the expected five. Astonishing. Yeah, and it's covered seventeen kilometers a bit more than ten miles in its couple of years of flying. Actually it's three. Its first one was, Yeah, it's nearly three years. April nineteenth, twenty twenty one was the first flight. And you can actually go online Andrew and you can get the full flight log of it Genuity, So yeah, it's not that's again not very hard to find. I I think it's just it's such an astonishing achievement that this has been able to happen. That's been three really exciting years of Mars exploration, and of course the less has learned from that because this was originally just a technology demonstrator. It's you know, the idea is to just demonstrate whether you can fly helicopter on Mars and attach cameras to it, and all of that has been proven. Absolutely positive that the information that we've learned from Ingenuity will be fed into the Dragonfly mission, which is another helicopter which eventually will go to Titan. Schedule for launch not very far down the track twenty twenty eight, four years time, sending a mission to Titan with a helicopter on board to look at the thick atmosphere of Titan and have a look at the methane lakes and seas that there are there. It's in extraordinary what this will lead to. So yeah, all credit to Ingenuity. Rip. What a wonderful mission had to come to an end some time, But I think it's done pretty well. Yeah, it's been fantastic. Now, wow, closely to home. Jackson has sent a mission to the Moon. It's the SLIM mission, which stands for and I looked it up and now I can't remember, but smart Lander investigating Moon. Yes, yes, now they had a bit of a problem as well. And they have successfully landed on the Moon's surface. But she's upside down, that's right. And what's more, we've got pictures of it being upside down or yeah, how does that happen? So the landing was twentieth of January. It's everything went really well, but obviously during the last few seconds something went wrong with one of the one of the engines. You know that basically they've got down with firing engines that are slowing down the trajectory of the spacecraft as it gets near the Moon, and basically you want the velocity zero when it touches the Moon's surface. Something went wrong with one of the engines and that seems to have tilted it over. But it made a soft landing because they could communicate with it and what they couldn't do and I think we talked about this. The first hint that something was wrong. There was nothing coming through the solar panels. And the suggestion then was that something had happened that skewed the direction that the solar panels were pointing in and they couldn't see the sun, which means yes, bad news. And in fact, if you remember, do you remember phil I that was the lander that went down onto the surface of Comet sixty seven P was that its name? Certainly I think that Sharia muf Grass in Menko, which was a little lander from the Rosetta spacecraft that had the same problem. It fell over when it landed and landed in the shadow of a cliff, and so its solar panels never got the light. So the story continues with slim because I think they shot their systems down with something like an hour of juice left in order to see whether the spacecraft would survive the lunar night, which lasts for fourteen days in fourteen of our days or thereabouts, and whether when the sun rose again, it would rise in such a way that it would actually light up the solar panels. And in fact that seems to have happened because it has been restored. They've actually powered up. It surprised everybody. I think this was what day was this? It was the twenty eighth or thereabouts. They succeeded in establishing communication again and we saw basically images. Now the way we know that it's tilted on its side or basically upside down is that SLIM also carried a couple of little rovers, one of which was the size of a tennis ball. Oh wow, and sort of bounces along the surface with camera. And I think it's that one rather than the other one. I think the other one does something slightly different. But they're very very small devices. They were obviously deployed after the landing successfully, and sure enough one of them has sent back a picture of the spacecraft at the jaunty angle, not the right way up on the surface of the Moon. Quite extra. You can actually see the booster pointing up to the scar that's right, Yes you can, yeah, yeah, it's amazing one to see see the jet nos, yes, rocket. Will they be able to do what they want to do now that that's happened, They're still going to be able to perform all the tasks, some of it, I think it will be, you know, I think it will. What they're doing is essentially doing, you know, powering up the various scientific experiments and seeing what they can what they can do. I think they've done very well with an instrument that's called the multiband spectroscopic camera, the NBC Multi Band camera, which essentially is a device that lets you take an image but do an analysis of the exact distribution of colors in that image, in other words, the wavelengths that are being returned, which is actually a diagnostic for different kinds of minerals and rocks and things of that sort. So yeah, they've got stuff working. I think it's not going to be the full mission obviously, because it's not sitting where it should have been. But the big trendh which I haven't mentioned, is that they got They landed this within I think fifty five meters of their target landing site, and that was the other real function of this experiment to try and do a high precision landing. So didn't they call it the Moon Sniper. I think the Moon Sniper was a nickname for this spacecraft, indicating that the the targeting of on the Moon's surface was going to be much better than anything that's ever been done before. They were expecting better than one hundred meters and they actually got with it. They got to half that fifty five meters from where they expected the touchdown point. That is again extraordinary. It's a really really significant piece of space engineering. We're very, very excited about it and a very short mission. They're not planning to do more than a lunar day. Is that it was something and I think that was Yeah, that was the idea, a lunar day. And it might be cut short by the fact that the toil the panels are pointing in the wrong direction, but they'll do what they call yeah, and it might wake it up again the next lunar day, but they're not up banking on it and it doesn't matter. But yeah, it's yeah. Well, you've got to give them credit for the resilience of their equipment. It's it's had a tough landing and it still works, which is extraordinary. One more thing in this segment, and this is a bit of a sad story. Physicist Nobel laureate and a man who's done some amazing things in astronomy and space science, Arno Penzies has passed away. Indeed, that's right. He was ninety years old due to complications from Alzheimer's disease. Were told horrible horrible disease. And Arno's name is absolutely engraved on the minds of astrophysicists everywhere because he and a man called Bob Wilson, who's still alive, still going strong. He's eighty eight now, they were the two who first detected the cosmic microwave background radiation, that's right, and they did it by accident. They were testing a receiver, a radio astronomy receiver at the Bell Labs back in I think it was nineteen sixty four, it was. It was at Holme Dell in New Jersey. They were doing experiments with this new antenna and they found basically a continuous signal that seemed to be coming from everywhere, and famously they tried everything to get rid of it because they thought it was interference. And you know the most famous stories that they found a lot of pigeon droppings in the antenna, so they shoveled them out because they thought that might be what was doing it. But it didn't go away, and it turned out to be the radiation of the Big Bang, which had been predicted before that but was not detected until that nineteen sixty four experiment. So they won together. They won the Nobel Price for Physics in nineteen seventy eight. Such an extraordinary discovery, and it's actually what really put the final nail in the coffin of the steady state theory of the universe, which was in the nineteen sixties. This Big Bang theory and the steady state theory sat side by side and we didn't know which one was right. But the discovery Panzas and Wilson really sealed the face of the steady state universe and said, no, it's not all right. So he was ninety. As we say in Australia, that's a good knock. It's a good milk here. Yeah, it's a cricket reference for those who are saying, what on earth are they talking about? Yeah, it's a good good innings will be the way too. Good innings is another well pollball sense. All I can say is thank god we don't live for the length of an innings in baseball. Okay, you know your story about the pigeon poo in the antenna reminded me that when I worked for the ab SO, we went off air once and we had to get a technician to go up to the satellite dish to find out what was going on. He found chicken bones in the in the in whatever I can't remember the name of the thing, the feed, the feed probably Yeah. We'd had people up on the roof looking at the air conditioner and they stopped for lunch and they decided to take the cap off. The shut up full of chicken mates, and that locked us off the air. Cost us a fortune to fix. But and then another another time, another time it was a spider. The spider got in there and made a where knocked us off the air. You just never know, do you? All right, straw, This is very funny. It's one of my favorite stories. This is Space Nuts Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Vrad what's ace MUDs? Yes, indeed, and thanks for joining us. Now we're going to talk about dark matter, a topic that rarely comes up, but this is a little bit of a change of pace in the dark matter story. We're looking at our own dark matter, the dark matter of the Milky Way, and it looks like it's it's behaving in a way that might make our galaxy unique. And because it's because of the way it's behaving and what's happening in the extremities of our galaxy is what I gleaned from this. What's the story? Phraid? This is all very strange, it is, and we've got to preface this by saying that anything to do with our own galaxy, and certainly it's geometry and things of that sort, it's quite difficult to establish because we're sitting in it. The Sun is one of four hundred or so billion stars, most of which are in the disc of the galaxy, and we are just one of them. So we're in a dusty disc and we're trying to map the galaxy. We're trying also to map the part of the galaxy that nobody can see, the dark matter halo. Why do we know galaxies sit in dark matter halos because we can look at other galaxies and we can measure the way the stars rotate. That was something that was actually it was first noticed that the rotation of galaxies not making sense was first is by Ken Freeman, one of our colleagues here in Australia, Ken Freeman of the Australian National University, and then followed up that was in nineteen seventy I think you won the Prime Minister Science Prize for that work. It was in the late seventies nineteen seventy eight, if I remember rightly, that Vera, Rubin and colleagues really brought it to the attention of the world's astrophysicists when they measured the way galaxies some galaxies rotate. I discovered it didn't make sense. And so what you do. You look at a galaxy. You can measure its rotation, either by using a spectrograph and looking at the starlight because the Doppler effect. If the galaxy is edge on or nearly edgeH on, the Doppler effect will show you the rotation, and you can actually do it, as I think Vera did, by looking at clouds of gas with radio telescopes. Either way, what you find is that instead of the rotation speed of stars and gas in a galaxy dropping off as you go farther away from the center of the galaxy, which is what you would expect if there was nothing else there other than what you could see, instead of doing that, the velocities stay flat. In other words, the velocities are always the same no matter how far out in the galaxy you go. It's what we call a flat rotation curve. And that's what led to the theory that galaxies are embedded in a blob of dark matter, a giant dark matter halo. Now, probing that kind of detail with our own galaxies not easy because we're sitting in it. But with new technology, and in particular it's the Gaya spacecraft that can measure the motions of stars very very accurately. A group of scientists based actually in the United States. I think MIT is the main institution where these scientists work. One of them is a I just I know actually Anna Freeball. She's somebody I've worked within the Rave project. But what they've done is they have very carefully measured the speeds of stars at a great distance is from the center of our galaxy, in fact, going out to something like one hundred thousand light years. Now, at that distance from the center of our galaxy, there are very very few stars because you know, they're real outliers, because we think the diameter of the galaxy is much more than one hundred thousand light years. So if you're kind of doubling the radius of that and finding stars there, you're really looking at distant, faint stars. They're difficult to measure, but you can do. But what they've found is that yes, there is a flat rotation curve exactly as we see in other galaxies out to something like eighty thousand light years, but after that the velocities fall away and you get a fall in the rotation veloc of stars. And the interpretation of that is that the dark matter halo that actually controls these rotations is not as you would expect, which is basically a blob that's more dense in the middle than the outer edges. They're suggesting that the middle is less dense, that it's like an apple with its core taken out. I think that's the analogue that's being used in the paper that they've in, which is published by the way, in the monthly Notis Is of the Royal Astronomical Society, so really really interesting. A lot of this, of course, is due to computer simulations, and I think that's the next step is to if you have got a falling rotation curve, which is what they think they've detected, then you've got to turn that into models of the distribution of the dark matter and try and understand why our galaxy shows that and why other galaxies don't. So that's you know, as you said, it's pointing to the idea that maybe our galaxy maybe not unique, but certainly very unusual compared with the general number of galaxies. The question, obviously is why why is this happening? Exactly why is it so? And we don't know the answer to that. So I think, I actually think we would well, but but people don't just say, like I would, I don't know the answer to that. What they do is they then look back at their models of galaxy evolution and how galaxies form and see whether they can replicate the galaxy with a less dense center in its dark matter halo. So it's not you know, throwing up your hands and saying we don't know. The answer is we don't know, but we'll find out. Could it be fraid that this is just part of the life cycle of a galaxy exactly that's that's exactly right, So that maybe you know the model the evolution of galaxies and the dark mater halos, over time, they might be able to find that this, yes, is a normal part of the process, that all galaxies do this, but at the moment, we don't know that. Yes. Fascinating, isn't it? If you Yeah, if you want to chase that up. Space dot COM's got a great article on it, or you can go to the Royal College thingy thing Society. Yeah yeah, and read read the whole report, but be prepared to read fifteen thousand pages of authors. Yep, all right, let's move on to another story involving Mars. And we've spoken about this a couple of times before, and it's defied explanation, and that is that they've been detecting methane on Mars and it's given rise to suggestions that it might still have seismic activity, it might still have some kind of you know, volcanic action going on, all of which have been sort of looked at with a giant question mark. Now something new has popped up to suggest these verbs might be caused by something else. Fred, Yes, that's right. Well it doesn't actually really, it doesn't give us much insight into the origin of the methane because, as you say, Angry, yes, that's right, methane could be formed by a volcanic, residual, tectonic activity of some sort, or, more intriguingly, methanogenic microbes. If there are methane burping microbes alive on Mars under the surface, that is another possibility, and that's why it's exciting. You know, because on Earth, most of the methane in the atmosphere is produced by a life or it comes from cows. In fact. Now, the thing about methane is it doesn't last long. If you generate CH four the methane molecule, put it into sunlight or daylight, and it separates into carbon and hydrogen. It doesn't last. It doesn't stick around long. So if you find it in an atmosphere, you know that there is some source that is replenishing it. And that's why this again, why it's so intriguing. We've known about methane on Mars since nineteen ninety nine. Some of the detections made from Well detections then made from the surface of our own planet because he can detect it in the atmosphere of Mars. But several missions that have had methane sensing apparatus, both on the surface of Mars and in orbit around Mars, have basically given us ambivalent results. You find, for example that I think Curiosity periodically detected a burst of methane in the part of Mars where it's sitting on the surface, which was completely unnoticed and undetected by orbiting spacecraft. Only in a very few occasions have these various different spacecraft actually both been able to detect a single methane event. So why does it pop out like this? Where does it come from? And what's now happened is a group of scientists actually I think, led from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States. What they've done is they've they've suggested that maybe the methane is being sucked out from underground by changes in Mars' atmospheric pressure. Now, Mars's atmospheric pressure is less than one percent of the Earth, so it's not much, but it does exist and it does change well basically you know, giving rise to weather on Mars. And so what they've done is they've done a simulation of how methane might if there's methane in underground networks, you know, fractures of between the rocks and places like that where it might lurk if the methane is there. What they've done is they've simulated how it moves in those networks, and it turns out that seasonal changes in Mars's atmosphere might be what actually bring the methane to the surface where it's detected. And they've actually gone a step further with this because they've predicted what might happen with seasonal changes. They basically, in fact, I'm quoting here from the Universe Today's article, which is that the simulations predict short lived methane pulses prior to sunrise for Mars's upcoming northern summer period, which is a candidate time frame for Curiosity's next atmospheric sampling campaign. So what they're doing is they're saying, there's Curiosity's sitting on the you know, on on Mars. It's got methane sensing equipment on it. We think that as the northern summer on Mars evolves, we're going to start seeing short lived pulses of methane discuss So that's the you know, that's basically what's happening. They're suggesting that the the Curiosity scientists should should keep an eye out for this, and I think that would be great if we started seeing pulses of methane when this you know, when these things are predicted, then it would give us some confidence that those simulations are on the right line. So they yeah, it would add a significant amount of evidence to their theory that this is an you know, a Mars atmospheric pressure issue. It doesn't answer the question as to why methane exists, and that's right, what's produce seeing it? But yeah, mystery, that's right, That mystery remains. But it's what it's saying is we can at least we could at least suggest whether methane is lurking, you know, if it is in fractures in the rocks and it's being pulled out by it, it's fake pressure changes and you can predict that that will be a step forward, even though exactly as you say, we don't know whether it's methanogenelic methanogenic microbe sitting there and emitting methane, or whether it's residual volcanic activity. Space cares. That's what it is, space caves. Blame the space cows. It's always it's actually a poker machine for your Americans, a slot machine that does have space cares. I saw it one day. Very weird, very strange. But yeah, well we'll wait with interest. It might be more to report on this particular story. Is space Nod's Andrew Uncley here with Professor Fred what's and s maare we reach out at least? No, this is this is space and we do encourage questions, and we've got questions from a few individuals today, the first one being Ray take it away. Ray. Well, this is Ray Kruz calling Troum Hollow out of California. Again. I'm we're thinking about meteor showers there. They do the geminids, and I just heard your podcast about the new one that may or may not have path on twelve. I hope you guys will follow up with that. But we talk, we speak of burning these bits of like probably sanitized particles burning up in the atmosphere. But it occurred to me that maybe these things are not oxidizing, but they're vaporizing. These are a small piece of silicon or iron or something popping up the atmosphere before it had a chance to actually burn, as it were, to archidize, it's going to just vaporize. So that's my question. I mean, is it panominantly one or the other? Is it both? I mentioned it's a little bit of both. I love your show. Thank you for taking questions. Thank you, Ray. Yeah, So when we get into a medior shower, is it oxidization or vaporization or both? Oh well, I think raised rice is both. So yeah, so the vaporization, so you basically it's the you know, this particle hits the atmosphere high velocity, feels the friction of the atmosphere and vaporizes and then I think oxidizes, in other words, burns and so so that process may explain why sometimes with with bribe meat you see color changes. Often you see green, which is caused by the excitement of oxygen atoms in the upper atmosphere. But but you know, sometimes they're white as well. I think, No, I'm not a meteor specialist, but I think I think a ray raises a really interesting topic, and I think it is true that both those processes are at play in when we see a shooting star a meteor, and we should He's right, we should follow up on that predicted twelfth of December meteor shower. I should check with the people I know who are meteor specialists and see whether there's any news on that. And it may well be that there's still an analysis going on of what's what we're seen on that night. But you might remember it came immediately before the geminid meteor shower, but it was a predicted new one, so we'll we'll talk about that again some later day. Thank you Ray for the reminder. Yeah, appreciate it. Ray, And like Ray, you should be aware that whenever they say, you know, there's a discovery in astronomy, it happened a decade ago, it just takes them takes them a long time to write the report with a quill and an ink. Well, astronomers sort of, you know, a bit slawer to take up the new tech. Sometimes. Sure that that's but I do you know your points well made? There's certainly to get your data into the published record, what we call the literature, it's got to be peer reviewed, and that's a process that often does take the time, and I'm not surprised it's quite a hard thing to do. I don't really do it anymore, but when I used to peer review other people's work, you've got criteria against which it needs to be judged, and you basically need to redo the research yourself to check whether what they've done is correct. It's pretty hard work. Yeah, it sounds sounds like a right royal pain. Sometimes they give you twenty dollars for it as well. If you really lucky, nice area. Okay, thank you, Ray. We will follow that up. I've written a note to remind Fred to do his homework and I used a real pen. Yes, now the same thing that's read. I hope yours is a good luck one is too. Where you go two reds, I'll teach I'll teach you how to use one next time. I down there. Now, let's let's go to Rusty and Donnybrook. I love I love this question. This is a speculator. We've got a couple of speculators to finish up off the show this week. Rusty is suggesting a solar Pergola Bredan Andrew. Good morning. It's Rusty and Donnybrook. Just been thinking about putting a sunscreen for the Earth out at L one between a son and the Earth, and for a two percent coverage it would be about eight hundred square kilometers. Just wondering if that sort of thing using an opake membrane would be possible for our technology in the next say twenty years and two percent, I think that would be enough to make the difference we need at this stage of the game. So he could act as a solar pergola, and they could tilt to let more or less come through. Just wondering what you think of that idea. Cheeers guys, thanks for usty. I assume he's talking about cooling the planet a little bit. Is that where he's going two percent? I mean, what you're trying to do is put darkness onto a spot. It would have to be well, it wouldn't have to be actually no, it wouldn't have to be on the equator. It would be probably between the topics, but it would move all the time as the Earth rotates, because the L two point stays a big about the L one point, which is what he's talking about, that stays stationary in relation to the Earth and the Sun, but the Earth is rotating. What I don't know, So you've got eight hundred square kilometers I think is what Roster stays. It would have to be, which is a megastructure. It's bigger than anything we've ever built. And I'd need to just do a sum to see what the how what angle that would subtend at the Earth's surface, just to see how much of the Sun's light is blocked out that. The bottom line, though, is it might be possible. It might be the kind of engineering that could be done. I'm not suggesting it will be anytime soon. I think it's beyond us for at least a century that scale of engineering. Right. The question is whether you actually want to do it. You know, quite a few solutions have been proposed for the issue of climate change that involved this kind of engineering. I think it's called geoengineering. Basically, you're trying to you try to change the properties of the Earth by building something or sticking something into the atmosphere. You know, there's been I think it's half a dioxide that you can inject into the atmosphere that increases the opacity of the atmosphere. The trouble with all those issues, all those suggestions, is that they're potentially dangerous because like you know, we in Australia know all about cantoads, which are introduced with the best will in the world. Oh yeah, and now you know a hideous problem. So I would always counsel against too many ambitious, over ambitious projects. But I do like the sound of that one. I think Russi's thinking is good. Putting it in the right place. There you've got a two percent reduction in the solar radiation. That's absolutely significant. If you can sustain that over a long period, you might need rockets to keep the thing in its right orientation because gravitational forces would tend to disturb its orientation and it probably would not be sitting stationary at L one. It would probably be in orbit around L one, which might mean its shadow moves all over the place. Now that's not the issue. Here's we're just talking about that, the reduction of the solar radiance in one spot. And I'm not sure to what extent that affects the overall temperature of the planet, whether it's a simple two percent drop or whether there are other factors at play, which they might be. Not a climate scientist, that mare of climate science. So yeah, it could be the case. If it's anything like solar panels, it'll it'll lose a lot in the translation. So it knows. Just a side thought to that theory of rusties. If we built this megastructure, would that reclassify ourselves civilization? Oh yeah, so the what's that called that? Yeah? I forgot what it's called as a scale of classific Yeah, but we're at like zero point seven now, and to be you know, the best we're going to be at one, and that requires a megastructure, as it does. Yeah, maybe it's the first step, and it would be certainly not that that really you know, that's that's that that scale is very much one that's predicated on there being other Civilization's course, fucking use the word. And we don't know the answer. No, we don't not yet, well we might I never know it, that's all. Probably probably that you can't rule out aliens until you've just you know, not ruled them out by discovering one civilization. Okay, thanks Rusty. And finally we are going to get another what if from Duncan. Hello Duncan here from Weymouth in the UK. Question that come to mind with research going on on Mars and Venus, would it be possible to make it easier in the long run to bring the planets closer to worth, maybe using some asteroids in the oben transfer or bit something like that. So maybe move Mars in a bit closer and Venus out a bit further. And also with that that would hopefully cal Venus down a bit and wal Mars up a bit. It maybe even we could set up some sort of siphon to siphon some atmosphere directly from Venus on to Mars or something like that that would help terror form them knowing for them at the same time. I don't know, just the thought that came to mind. What do you think? Oh, go your way. I bought Ace Space Nuts T shirt. Very nice. I've been wearing it all about. Thanks for the good work, keep it up. Thank you, Duncan. Bye, I want to I want a photo of him with the T shirt. Yeah, we should do. Yeah, it's great stuff, Duncan. Look, he's thinking way outside the box, but I have it. I have an idea on how we might move Mars. Get someone up there with a box of matches and just fire up that methane. Ah, there's a problem with that. No, no message, no question. Yeah yeah torch then without oxygen canister. Duncan's question is, Look, it's great. It's great stuff. I love the way people think about this sort of thing. And if if Rosty's speculation was mega engineering, what Duncan's suggesting is hyper mega engineering or something even bigger, because moving planets is actually very hard, indeed, because they're big and there's the big and they're set in their ways. Because they're so old, so I think, and well, that's very set in their ways. That's right. Four points four point six billion years tends to make you a bit interested in routine, doesn't it. Really. I'm not moving, Yes, I'm not going to move so for terraforming, and as you know, I'm not a big fan of terraforming because I think it's slightly you know, off the wall idea. But if you were going to do that, I think there would be easier ways than trying to move the planets, and in particular the you know, the high temperature of Venus and the low temperature of Mars. Yes, it makes sense because Venus is nearer the Sun that we are. Mars is further away from the Sun than we are, but there's all kinds of atmospheric physics going on there as well, and moving Venus to an orbit that was nearest to the Earth would not necessarily make it any more habitable because you've still got this runaway greenhouse effect. It's a carbon dioxide atmosphere, very very thick atmosphere. You really need to fix that, and I don't think just moving its orbit would be enough to do that unless you built a lest you built a really big screen. Yeah, well that's right, that might be trick. So good thinking, Duncan. Duncan's thinking is always good. And by the way, Duncan, we've got some text questions from you which we will look out there on the track. Thank you for them. Thank you for this what if suggestion, And I think this one is perhaps at the more unlikely end of the spectrum of what you could do. I think planetary orbits are You might put it that they are literally set in stone because out of rocky planets that we're talking about. Y's not thinking though. Somebody will pick that up for a sci fi novel somewhere along the line, though I imagine probably probably you. I'm still working on thoughts. I'm still I'm still trying to get my audio book down for Parallax. It's just I have much time, and it's a hard one to do because there's so many characters in it and I'm running out of voice ideas. But anyway, we'll keep working on that. I'm about halfway, so only plus better than starting. Only two hundred chapters to go. Thank you, Dunk, and thank you Rusty, thank you Ray. And a reminder if you would like to send us some questions. You're all always welcome to do so via our website, Spacenuts podcast dot com or spacenuts dot io. Click on the AMA link or the little purple button on the right hand side of the home page. And if you've got a device with a microphone, easypasy, and just don't forget us. Just tell us who you are and where you're from. We always like to know what you're up to and have a look around while you're on the website and check out the shop and all the other things. Maybe you want to become a patron. We have plenty of those, and they've been staunch supporters of space Nuts for a long time. And we so very much appreciate that. We're done and dusted for another week. Oh by the way, next week's episode, All Questions, All question episode episode three hundred and ninety. Nearly forgot to mention that, thank you Fred as always, Thank you very much, Andrew. It's always a pleasure. We'll speak again soon, maybe we will, indeed, Professor Fred Watson, an astronomer at large, And to Hugh in the studio, thanks for doing the tests this week. We were testing my technology to make sure it worked and we got it all right. And what's wrong with me? I said something nice about Hugh. It happens occasionally and from me Andrew Unkley, thanks for your company. I hope you can join us on the next episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye Nuts. You'll be listening to The Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bides dot com. This has been another quality podcast production. Nights dot com