#417: Solar Flares & Speedy Spacecraft: Revolutionizing Our Cosmic Commute

Hi there, Thanks for joining us on this the latest episode of Space Nuts. My name is Andrew Dunkley. It's great to have your company. Coming up. On this episode, we're going to be talking massive solar flares. We're going to be talking one thousand days on Mars. For perseverance, NASA's got a fabulous idea to move around faster in space. It's called a plasma rocket and the biggest ever proto planetary disc pile of junk stuff that makes planets ever seen. We'll talk about all of that and more on this episode of Space Nuts. Fifteen seconds in Channal ten nine ignition Space Nuts NI or three two Space Nuts as when I re bought it Bills Goods and he's here again because he's got nothing better to do. Fred, what's an astronomer of large? Hello? Fred? Yes, that might be true. Soon you never do taking dogs to and cleaning up dogs. That's right. And I'm being reviewed, of course by the Prime Minister. Now maybe not that high. He's not quite put his ore into it yet, but you never know. He's been too busy with the budget. I think the budget. Just tell me why you're being reviewed? There might be Yes, that's why it might be everything else. Okay with that friend, I saw budgets and reviews and stuff dog stuff. Yes, that's the dog is suffering from a gastric episode that let he wound up at the vets very very early this morning at the emergency VAT. But he seems to be okay, so hopefully it's not anything that's life threatening. We were a bit worried for a little while though, after say, yeah, that's the thing with pets. They tend to rack up VET bills that are raided knots sometimes. Yeah, that wasn't why we were worried. We're worried in case we didn't, I know, I know. Yeah, it's through costly. My son had to take one of his cats to the couple of weeks ago, twelve hundred dollars worth of dental work. Yeah, very very scary. We don't have any pets anymore. We're just early money. Well that's probably the reason. But yeah, I think we've had our fair share of cats and dogs and fish and everything else. That's not what we're here to talk about. I did want to start off Fred by having a chat about this latest activity from the sun, which has resulted in some massive activity. It's sort of reaching the peak of its eleven year cycle as far as I understand it. According to Noah anyway, but the biggest solar flare in nearly a decade has just passed over the Earth, and some of the photographs of the aurora north and south have been extraordinary. It's really having quite a spectacular thing, notwithstanding, obviously, the potential side effects of such an event. Yes, that's right, I think it was. I think it was actually a coronal mass ejection. Okay, rather flair. Yeah, but I might be using the the using the description soul of flair in some media outlets, but that might be a bit of a fative license. My the stuff I read, and it's a few days ago now, it was a G four G four coronal mass ejection. G five is the biggest, and so yeah, I mean, whatever it was, it a whole lot of plasma and subatomic particles and magnetic fields at the Earth from the direction of the Sun and we bathed in the aurora. That's absolutely right. My friends and relatives all over the world have been sending marvelous pictures of auroral displays, even as far as the south of England. Friends, there sent pictures and I think probably even further south than that. Here in Australia, there was a report of Rory being seen. This was I think Friday night or maybe early Saturday morning, the weekend that's just passed at Siding Spring Observatory, where the Australian telescope is. That's one hundred odd kilometers further north than you are, which means it's a long long way from the polar region. But there have been reports that people have seen them from Dubbo, which is in central New South Wales, which is usually way too far north to see anything like that, but the weather was so bad here last weekend I didn't even bother to try. Same in Sydney. Sydney has been under cloud and rain for about two weeks. It's sort of cleared away now, but not before it blocked any views at all of the biggest solar event for twenty years, the best of Rory for twenty years, so we missed out on them, which is a shame. I think the ones twenty years ago two thousand and three was the last big display of this kind, and I am pretty sure that's one that I saw from the central of Adibra City center. I could see the Amaura was quite extraordinary. Of course. The big worry is the impact these things have on electronics, and that's constantly being monitored and warnings are issued whenever there are potential blackout zones, and there have been some have been many in recent years. It just depends on what part of the planet the thing here. So direct hit though, could be catastrophic in some circumstances. Was I haven't heard of anything too negative happening. Yeah, the Carrington event when the telegraph was Yeah, it was eighteen fifty nine. I think eighteen fifty nine. I think the current to the event. We've not seen anything as strong as that since then, but something like that could happen. There's no guarantee that the Sun will send out a gigantic burp, and at the time when that's likely to happen, of course, is when we have sol the maximum where the maximum of the Sun's activity, which is kind of where we are now at the moment. Yeah. Yeah, it's reaching into eleven year peak, and then it will start declining and then it'll go to sleep for a while, and then it'll all happen over again. Yeah, I think it's fascinating. I know they study the Sun and they've got observatories sort of taking long, hard looks at it all the time to learn as much as we can. But these kinds of events are well, they're spectacular to the observer, but they could be catastrophic for satellites. I do believe they actually did have to shut down some satellites to try and preserve them because of this event. Okay, let's move on, Fred. And this is to do with Mars, which is the subject of much study as well. And Perseverance is now passed one thousand days on the Red planet. Now, I just need to clarify it. Is it a thousand earth days or a thousand solts? Yeah, it's a thousand days. And you're right. One soul, which is a Martian day, is twenty four hours and forty minutes just about. It's much the same. It's quite extraordinary, a bit of a coincidence that the Martian day and our days should be so similar. Likewise, another coincidence in that the axial tilt of the two planets is very similar as well. We're at twenty three and a half degrees tilted over Mars is about twenty five degrees and that's quite I think remarkable that it is. This should be so similar, Yes, amazing. Anyway, So it was July twenty twenty when the Perseverance vehicle was launched from Earth launch from Cape Canaveral. That would have been something to watch. I'm sorry I wasn't there to see that. And then landed at Jesuo Crater in February twenty twenty one after seven month journey. And that area was chosen because it believed that it is a crater, but that it was once an ancient lake bed, and the evidence for that is a delta. There's evidence of the river that flowed into the crater and another one that flowed out actually, and where the entry point was there is a large amount of debris covering a wide area, which is a delta, is where the river has brought down sediment from further upstream and dumped it on the bed of the lake. It's a bit like the Nile Delta, the Lune delta in France. So a place that was well chosen to be representative of where you might find remnants of living organisms, and by that I mean fossilized remnants because there may have been microbes in that debris that was washed down and then dumped on the floor of Chesura Crater. So sorry, I thought you were going to ask a question, but I'll wait for that. Who are these two? They're not very professional, are they? So? As you know, because we've discussed it many times before, of course, that that mission has been characterized in a stunningly effective way by the fact that Perseverance also had a little friend called Ingenuity, the helicopter, which did marvelous things in terms of imagery and detecting where you could go and where you can't go with a rover Broker rota on its seventy third mission, after an expected lifetime of five flights, I think it got to it's either seventy two or seventy three. I think it was seventy three. And the evidence is there. There's an image that's been well circulated that shows poor little Perseverance with its sorry Ingenuity, with its broken Rota and the bit that's broken off is you know, fifteen meters away or something like that. So yeah, but so effective and such a stunning success in terms of aerodynamic design for aerial vehicles on Mars and the other thing it's done is because its mission is to look for signs of past life. Now there's a limit as to how much you can do of that with a robotic laboratory on six wheels, which is what Perseverance is. But in order to make better sense of it all, as you know, there have been little caches of material, basically in small metal canisters, basically rock samples, soil samples have been put into I think it's twenty three so far of these canisters and then deposited on the surface for later collection by a robotic machine that is currently still in planning, if not necessarily in development. I don't think it's going to be before the end of the decade that that mission takes place, but it will be fantastic what it does to bring those samples back and analyze them in earthly laboratories and maybe find evidence of fossilized microbes. Yes, that would be siting. I think one of the most interesting samples they collected was one they believe contains silica fine grained silica YEP, which is known on Earth to have preserved fossils in it. So that's one sample that'll probably be very very keen to get their hands on indeed, that's right, and another of them has phosphates in it, and again phosphates on Earth are associated with biology, basically with biological processes, so those are going to be really interesting samples to bring back. There is an instrument on board which is called pixel PixL. It is the Planetary Instrument for X ray lithochemistry, and that is a way of well using X rays to see if there is any kind of you know, fossil remnants, anything that looks like a fossil, any chemical changes that might have been the result of microbial activity. So there is an equipment on board that can detect that. But so far nothing has been seen that could could be attributed to signs of life. So far, no Martians, but it's still a good future for those, certainly for those samples that have been left behind on Mars, which we were one day to be able to talk about on space notes when they come back to an earthly laboratory. Yeah. The one day thing is I think the most frustrating element of this because that they didn't have a retrieval plan proper. They just said we'll get to it one day. Yeah, it was worse than that, really because they did have one, but NASA's decided it's too expensive because the estimate was seven to I think it was seven to thirteen billion dollars. So no, eight to thirteen billion dollars was the estimate, and they're being told to revamp everything so it doesn't cost any more than seven billion dollars, which is still pretty expensive for something like that. You should just donate the annual interest from your bank account. That'll cover it. Oh, that will cover it. Yeah, I guess I could do that, couldn't I? Yeah, from all your book from all your book royalties, the royalties. Yeah, now you're talking. I once I once installed central eating in our attic on the strength of a book royalty. That's the kind of level that you get. Yes, yeah. I think my first book, which was an audiobook, the royalties there covered a holiday. I think, well it's pretty good, but in the central eating sorry conditioning, not central eating. Well that let me qualify it. It was a really crap holiday. Now it was crap conditioning as well. No, that's quite a while ago. That's a decade ago now that that that book was published. That was the one about my grandfather in World War On. Yes, I remember it. Yeah, I have since discovered which I didn't know, and this I attribute to Taylor Swift. But the way that deal was set up, the ABC owns the rights to the distribution, et cetera of the book. But if I do what Taylor Swift did and release Andrew's version, I can re release the audio again under my distribution right as you go. Sure Australian law would let you do that. Well, I'm still checking. I know, yeah, because there's a similar I'm not betraying any confidences here, but I work with a very well known composer. He's a good friend. He writes music, I write the words. This is classical music and it's very Manilow, very Manilow. But there was a similar issue with getting back copyright from some of his earlier works because he wasn't happy with the publishing company and it was a legal nightmare to do it. Absolutely, it absolutely is. And I did approach the ABC to buy back my rights and they said, well, how many going to sell and then we'll work out the price. And I went, yeah, how do I forecast that? Yeah? So I just said, look, don't worry about it. It really doesn't matter that much. Have we finished with perseverance. There will be a book about that one day. I'm sorry we have we have wandered off the topic here, but yeah, I think we've finished with perseverance. It will be marvelous when that sample return mission does come back to Earth with its samples, and there will be great excitement, especially if something you know, pointing towards the possibility of ancient life on Mars is discovered. That will be the discovery of the century. Probably, Yes, absolutely totally agree. And let's hope so. And you can chase up that story about Perseverance at Universe today dot com. This is Space Nuts Andrew Dunkley here with Professor Fred Watson. Now let's take a little break from the show to tell you about our sponsor, nord VPN. Now, not so long ago, I did a bit of a speed test just add hop speed test. Didn't plan it, just went ahead and did it on the spot, to prove that you do not lose very much speed using NordVPN on your desktop computer or your laptop for that matter. I thought i'd tested on my mobile device, which I haven't done in recent times. So I've got my phone here, I've got the speed test icon going, so I'll do a speed test without using NordVPN. So here we go and it is connecting and doing what it does. Boom, Okay, there's a well, it peaked at one hundred and thirty five, but it's hanging around the one point fifteen one sixteen mark. Well, now it's jumped up to one hundred and forty. That's well above what I pay for, but that's okay. The download, yeah, is one hundred and forty megabits per second and is uploading it around four megabits per second, which is not really great, but that's the mobile network that's available to me, so I can't do much about it. By the way, I've only got two bars on a five gen network, so I'm going to close that they are I'm going to connect NordVPN to my phone. It will figure out what it wants to do. It wants me to configure everything on the phone. Done, okay. It is now connected to a server in Central Australia, probably Alice Springs. That's what it chose. So let's do another speed test and we are ready to go via NordVPN this time, and I'll hit go and we'll see what happens. So this is going via Central Australia and I'm still achieving speeds of about seventy to eighty megabits per section per second. I am losing a bit, but it's not a lot. That's still really good speeds on a mobile network. The upload speed is actually faster. My upload speed is pushing up towards ten megabits per second now it's just hitting eleven. So with NordVPN, I lose a bit on the download, but I gain almost double on the upload, which is extraordinary. Now they've been our sponsor for quite some time. I use all their products I've signed up. There's a special URL if you're interested in looking at NordVPN as a space nuts listener, which starts with a thirty day money back guarantee. They back their product one hundred percent. And if you go to the url NordVPN dot com slash space nuts that's NordVPN dot com slash space nuts and click on get the deal, you can see all the different options available to you, and the longer you sign up for them, the lower it costs a month by month basis, but you can pay for it in one head. If you prefer and with every deal and extra four months is what you get from NordVPN as a space Nuts listener and extra four months. And they backed their products not just the high speed VPN, but the malware protection, the tracker ad blocker, cross platform password manager, that's my favorite thing in the world, the data bridge scanner, and a terabyte of cloud storage. Depending on which plan you get, you can combine all those things. So NordVPN dot com slash space Nuts is where you go and check out the deal today. You won't regret signing up with nord VP. And now back to the show, Space Buds Now, Fred, this is a story that kind of tickled my fancy in the last week because we and in our next episode there's a question that sort of references a situation like this, and that is how fast you can travel through space. At the moment, we are limited by certain technologies, but NASA and other organizations are working on better faster ways of traveling through space and that is very excited by this one. It's a proposed plasma rocket which would cut the travel time to Mars from nine months to two months. This is not science fiction. This is something that they're actually putting money into it sounds very exciting. Yes, that's right. It comes from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, which is, you know, it's kind of blue sky research on things that they want day to come to fruition and actually make a difference. And certainly if you can get to Mars in two months, that's a lot better than nine months six months, is there is you know, six to nine months is what we expect it to take to get to Mars with current technology, and dropping that by a third or more would be really significant. So it is basically well, it's called a pulse plasma propulsion system pulse plasma propulsion there you go three p's, and in fact is built or developed from an older version back in twenty eighteen that was something with the delightful name of puff PUFF, which is kind of what it does at the back end, I guess puff to drive the thing along. Puff is a sort of acronym for pulsed fission fusion, and it's actually a development of something that's used in the laboratory, something that compresses plasmas in the laboratory to very high pressures for short times. So the idea behind PUFF was that you utilize that sort of technology, but you also provide an exhaust pipe, so you get this high pressure, but then you blasted out and it produces thrust. The new version is apparently smaller and simpler than that, and apparently also more affordable. But the main thing is it's it's got very very high efficiency. That's the trick, and it has a very high what's called a specific impulse, which is a term that rocket engineers used to measure the effectiveness of a rocket. And I think with conventional technology and sort of pulling things from the back of my brain now, I think the highest specific impulse conventional rocket would be hydrogen and oxygen. I think I'm right in saying that, which is what they used on the Space Shuttle main engines, and in fact we'll use also on Artemis on the on the SLS is a space launch system that's being used for Artemis. So that high efficiency is well surpassed by the idea of this propulsion system. We've got a figure here from an article that's saying on Gizmodo, actually with some quite nice details in it. One one hundred thousand newtons of force Newton being the the you know, that the international recognized unit of force. It's in pounds twenty two four hundred and eighty one pounds. That's pretty impressive. That is actually ten tons, So that's you know, that's I mean, it's it's a I guess they're talking about a specific size of pulse plasma propulsion system when they quote those figures, because not all drive systems are the same. But that is pretty impressive for something that has such high fuel efficiency. So that might be the way that we are going to Mars in a few decades, taking two months rather than nine months. Absolutely, and that could be a huge game changer. Yeah, huge game changer, that's right. I mean two months, you know, nine months with your colleagues in a space capsule, even if they're protected from the radiation and all the rest of it, you're going to be a bit sick of them after nine months. After two months, you might only still be getting on quite well with your colleagues. I don't know. When we have to drive to Queensland, you sort of get out of town and you're excited about the trip and then you know you've traveled one hundred k's and gone, oh, when is this going to end? I just I just don't see. I don't know how they're going to do two months, let alone, you know, potentially six to nine months and the body oider. Let's not go there. Who's was it was Aldrin who suggested you should be sending all married couples out to Mars because they've they've done all their bickering and they you know, they've they've arrived at a place where they're not likely to fall out with each other. In the other big advantages that they're capable of not talking to each other for long periods of time. Yeah, that's right. There's all sorts of benefits to sending a married couple to Mars. Yeah, yeah, that's right. It could also end up in the first ever divorce on Mars. So there's all sorts of things, all sorts of first achievable. Yeah. The quicker the trip, the better, I suppose. I think that's right. That's the bottom. I'm not sure they'll have this developed in time for the first human mission to Mars, but we've still got probably at least a decade, maybe more, probably more. I reckon, Yeah, I reckon, it's going to be more. That's right. Yeah, I know they were talking twenty was it twenty thirty five or something? Yeah, thirty five. It's one of the one of the windows because remember, we've got to have miles in the Earth in the right place, which happens every two years and two months. But there's a window in twenty thirty five, and that was commonly being touted as when we might go with I suspect it's likely to be later in the decade indeed, But if you want to read about this, this concept, the the plasma rocket with the what did they what did they call? It? Had a funny name, the puff puff Ya. Yeah, there's z Peters the right the process to produce the thrust off For you Americans, Z pinch just in case you didn't understand what I was talking about, but yeah, tongue in check, z pinch. Z pinch is the is the process for creating bursts of thrust on this and this particular engine that they're developing. Gizmoto is the website if you want to take a look at that. Finally, Fred, we're going to look at planet formation, and this one is exciting because they've found the biggest pile of junk yet seen in the form of a planet. Planet creating environment. That's right, haven't It's not necessarily junk. It's just the raw material planets. But I don't know if you're seen a house before they build it, that's aland junk. Yes, that's certainly true. And bits of hours are like that. Now with these renovations that are still in progress after seven months and eight months now, yeah, who I worry for the future, Fred, When when archaeologists start digging down and finding our houses and going, oh, look they built elaborate houses. And then they dig deeper and go, oh my gosh, these builders were filthy, disgusting. Look at this food, look at these Yeah, actually our building can inside my wall. Oh there you go. I'm not surprised to hear that cook comes get everywhere inside your wall. I like that. Just make doing what were you doing inside your wall? A piece fell off? It was actually a now it was a retaining wall. I should clarify a retaining wall. Yeah. Still anyway, notwithstanding all that, this has been a very digressive sort of podcast, and so we apologize to all you listeners there. If you want some astronomy of space sides, you might be have to go and look at another one. Anyway, it's like we have the head against a brick wall. Really in case you find a coked and insight. The story here is about had the Yeah, I've got the I've actually got the original paper here in front of it entitled high Resolution pan Stars and SMA Observations of Iras two three zero seven seven plus six seven zero one a giant hedge on protoplanetry disc. And that last bid is the important bit because what we're seeing is a star which has a sort of cloud of debris nebulosity around it, which basically has a dark line through it. It looks I guess it's a bit like a Burgher scene edge on, you know, with the buns being bright and the dark whenever's in the middle being dark. And what that dark stuff is is a disc of material which is swirling around a young planet basically, you know, a newborn planet, probably only a few tens of millions of years old. It's a star that's been observed before, it was spotted in the infrared. That's why it's got an IRIS number. The Infrared Astronomy Satellite. I think it was a very venerable machine that did a lot for infrared astronomy it was spotted back in twenty sixteen. It's about a thousand light years away as the crow flies. It has. New observations though, that have been made demonstrates that this protoplanetary disc, which we only see as kind of a silhouette sideways on, is something like three thousand, three hundred times the well three thousand, three hundred astronomical unit astronomical units. An astronomical unit is the distance between the Earth and the Sun, so it's it's big is three thousand, three hundred times. The diameter is three thousand, three hundred times a distance from the Earth to the Sun. That means there's plenty of debris there from which planets will form. So you know, when things settle down in maybe fifteen ten or fifteen million years or so, we might have some of the biggest planets that have been observed, and perhaps many of them because it is so it's so prolific, so replete with planetary material. Ten fifteen billion years, not million million. No, we don't. We don't have to wait that long after Okay, I'm going to set my arm. Yeah, yeah, that's it's like that. The only joke astronomers ever tell about. I think we've just blown it though, about two astronomers talking on a bus and one saying, oh, you do know that, you know in two and a half million years, we're going to smash into the Andromeda Galaxy. No, that's that's not the answer. I've spoiled the joke. You do know that in two and a half billion years, two and a half billion years, we're going to smash into the Andromeda Galaxy. And there's a somebody sitting behind taps them on the shoulder and say, what did you say? I said in two and a half billion years we'll smash into the Andromeda Galaxy. And the person behind says, oh, thank god for that. I thought you said two and a half million years. It's still pretty good. Yeah, it's yeah, it's a rubbish joke. But anyway, so you phil, when we come back in a different universe, we might be able to talk about this thing with its planets rather than just protoplanetary disc although it has to be said, and this is a footnote to the fist dot org piece that's sold the Web about this issue, that both Hubble and Web would possibly be capable of detecting whether there are planets actually already forming in the protoplanetary disc, and that would be a sensational observation. It would be let's assume for a moment that we're going to go back there and find a planet like Earth with intelligent beings. How much far beyond the planet formation point would we have to add? I don't know what. I don't know what that question means. So all right, okay, you're saying that it's ten to fifteen billion years to form a planet. Maybe, well actually no, no, no, it's a million years, billion million, I keep doing that, Yeah, okay, million, But then how much longer before before life might be able to Okay, all right, well so our life started, we believe, on our planet about three point eight billion years ago, and that's you know, so that's nine hundred million years after the formation of the planet. Okay, so a bit longer. Yeah, it's a bit longer, that's right. I mean it's got to settle down. You know, young planets are pretty terrifying places. You've got lava worlds, and it's quite hard for microbes to breathe breeding in lover that's at temperatures, you know, more than a thousand degrees and for a while the Earth was a snowball as well, it was completely frozen. So our planet has gone through some extraordinary periods and yet there is still lunch on it. There is indeed, yes, all right, if you would like to read that story, you can get it, as Fred mentioned, on the fiz dot or website. Just search for the title Astronomers find the biggest known batch of planet ingredients swelling around the young Start. Did I say that, Slana? But that's where you'll find it. Fred. That wraps it up. Don't forget. If you would like to follow up anything, you can do that on the show notes. If you're following us on YouTube, don't forget to hit the subscribe button below, visit the shop while they're at our website space nuts podcast dot com or spacenuts dot io, and you can send us your questions via the website as well. Thank you, Fred. Has always it's been a great pleasure. It's other It's moment, hasn't it. It's always good to talk about all this stuff. An interview Andrew for keeping the company and we'll talk again soom we will, and we'll see on the next episode of Space Nuts. And thanks to Hu in the studio for sending me so many notes. I couldn't read any of them while we were recording, so I'll catch up with that in a minute. And from me Andrew Dunkley, it's good to have your company. See you on the next episode of Space Nuts by Byets. You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bites dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.