Rocket Science Setbacks, Skynet's Secret Move & Aurora Mysteries Unveiled: #475

Hi there, thanks for joining us again. This is Space Nuts where we talk astronomy and space science. My name is Andrew Dunkley. Thanks for your company. Coming up today, we have some sad news about a company that was developing what would probably have been one of the great leapforwards leaps forward in rocket science. Unfortunately it's gone the other way. And we'll explain why the UK's oldest satellite, which was launched not long after Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, has done something weird. We don't know who did it, we don't know why. And wait till you hear the name of this thing. It'll make you laugh. And citizens scientists have proved their worth again by explaining why Magenta Aura appeared over Japan earlier this year. That's all coming up on this episode of Space Nuts. Fifteen, Channel ten Ignition Space Nuts or three two. One Space Nurse and I recorded real good and he's back again for more. Gruelmut It is shred Wat's in Astronomer at Large Professor Freid. Hello, you're on a roll today, Andrew with inventing new word. I love groulnuts gruelmout. I'm going to write that one down too. I'll write this one down to you. When we were recording the TikTok, I had a slip of the tongue and I created a word called web spite. Yes, webspites. It's when you use the World Wide Web to get back at somebody. Yeah, what did I just say? Gruelmot Yeah, yes, which is I can't read my own writing, so you'll have to tell me what that was. No, thank you, I do. It's a pleasure to be here and I you don't mind being grueled from time to time as long as it doesn't get too often. No, No, it's usually once a week with their Q and A edition. So all right, we've got a lot to talk about. And first up is some very sad news about a company that they've been operating for quite some time, and they've been trying to perfect a system that enables you to get into orbit without having to actually launch rockets, which is very expensive, and they were making incredible inroads, but all of a sudden it's ground to a halt because well, money, money. They've run out of money, that's right. And yes, the reason why I picked this story to cover today is that I've been following this for thirty years the story. This company, Reaction Engines in the United Kingdom, had division back in the nineties of building a space plane, which at that time was called hotel and hotels an acronym for horizontal takeoff and landing. And that tells you basically what you need to know about this thing. It flew like a plane, took off from a normal wrong way, no need for a spaceport, climbed with its two very highly specialized engines to the place the region of the atmosphere where you're really not getting very much oxygen into the air intakes and then clicked over to liquid oxygen, so it became a rocket motor and from then straight up into orbit. Now that. Vision of that spacecraft has got a different name now it's called Skylon, but it's the same sort of idea. It's a long, narrow spacecraft with very stubby wings and a couple of these extraordinary engines that would be powering it up into space. And when you look at a diagram excuse me, or a cutaway model of one of Reaction Engines products, and they were still under development. Sadly, what you've got is something it looks a little bit like the you know, the engine part of a modern air bus or Boeing jet with an air intake, and it's a supersonic air intake because it's got a very pointing nose at one end, but at the other instead of you know, a sort of large diameter exhaust, there are rocket motors and that's what differentiates it. In fact, I think the final in the final version that they were working on, there was just one rocket motor. And so what happens is that when it takes off, it's basically a standard gas turbine, but the air that's coming in through the air intake at the beginning is compressed. It's not liquefied, but it's compressed and then injected with liquid hydrogen, which is the fuel into one of these rocket motor nozzles. Provides a rocket thrust and as the as the space as the craft increases its speed, then the ram effect comes into play because it's you know, it's turning into a ramjet. So there's a lot of the compression is high basically taking place at the front end of the engine. But then when it reaches that height above the atmosphere and you're talking probably in the region of you know, thirty kilometers something like that. It cuts out the intake and it becomes a straightforward rocket motor because you then feed liquid oxygen into it. But it's the same motor. It's got two different modes of operating, one in the atmosphere and one not providing the thrust. Now as I understand it, I'm not an aerospace engineer, as you know. But the really interesting bit of this and what took reaction engines, I think, from just being a kind of vague really into the realm of reality, was a heat exchanger. Because when you're going at two personic speeds, I think it's designed to go up to Mach five or something. Well, it's air breathing five times a speed of sound. The incoming air is compressed very to a very high degree and has a very high temperature. And you and I, I know, I've talked about this thing before. So they had this heat exchanger that reduced the temperature from a thousand degrees to sort of minus five or something in a thousand through a seconds. It's totally heably ridiculous, but they made that work, and in fact, it's had other applications, other industrial applications as well, so that's reaction engines have, you know, had contracts to do that. They've been underwritten by the British government. I think they've been underwritten by Rolls Royce and other companies. Sadly their funding has just basically run out and then is still under development. It still shows promise, Andrew, it's one of these things that it's as you said, it's a tragic story. And I should say the engine is called SABER and that's an acronym for synergetic air breathing rocket engine. It's a very nice acronym and it tells you exactly what it is. Yeah, you know, I hope it's saved. I hope someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos comes to the forum. Then they've got money to burn. If you can send a Tesla vehicle to Mars wherever, surely you can bankroll something that's probably probably going to change the game completely in terms of getting into space, getting into orbit from the planet's surface at such a low cost in comparison. I mean, I think what I read the other day was that the cost per kilo to send something into space now is about two thousand dollars. It is a take. This could make a huge, huge difference, and it's so sad that they've run into that brick wall because they were onto something. They were onto something. Definitely now the high it so we go on ahead. I was just going to say, for people who wonder what it looks like, they've never actually produced one yet, have they. They've just been developing the motor. Is that right correct? Yes, the artist's impression what it looks like is a I suppose there was a plane back in the nineteen sixties built by Lockheed. It was called the Blackbirth, and it looks it looks a lot like the Blackbird, which was quite a quite an astounding aircraft for its time. I think I've got the statistics somewhere of the Lockheed, but it could achieve multiple speeds of sound capability, as many aircraft have. But yeah, that's I think the closest that I can come to what it looks like is a Lockheed Blackbird. Quite an amazing aircraft. You're going to say something, sorry, just. That you know you're absolutely right. SpaceX HA brought the cost per kilogram down from about twenty thousand dollars to two thousand. This would have brought it down further. But more especially, I think is that it's highly environmentally friendly because the exhaust was just water. You know, you're burning, you're burning liquid, liquid, hydrogen and oxygen, so basically it's water that's coming out. Now, yes, water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but it's not anything like us. But some of the things that come out the back end of some other some other rockets that we know about. Yeah. Absolutely. Another interesting thing, Fred by the Bye I did a little bit of research on some of these high speed aircraft of the past, the X fifteen, which was a NASA creation. It came about in the nineteen sixties as well. I think the X fifteens were built between It operated between nine and fifty nine and nineteen sixty eight. There were twelve pilots, including Neil Armstrong who flew it. Flew the X fifteen and it was the first land based horizontal takeoff aircraft to achieve space wings because it could reach a height of one hundred kilometers sixty seven miles in fact, and it had a top speed of four five hundred and twenty miles an hour of mark six point seven. So it has been done in the past. In fact, in the very early days of rocket science. The North American X fifteen achieved technical spaceflight by reaching what we consider the limit between Earth and space one hundred kilometer limits. So it's been done before, and they were building on something that would have changed everything. And let's hope that they're I mean, there's been nearly two hundred jobs lost as a consequence of this situation, but he's really sad, and I can. Imagine there were very highly qualified people as well. Indeed, and hopefully hopefully someone will come to the fore and carry on this incredible work because it, Yeah, I think it's vital for the future, especially given you know, not so long ago we were talking about the pollution that's getting into the atmosphere from multiple rocket launchers to put up those satellite arrays, this would be an incredible development if they can just finish the job. Anyway, you can read all about it at universetoday dot com. This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Professor Fred what's an. Wi space nuts? Now? Fred? Speaking speaking of orbital satellites, I'm laughing because I love this story for a couple of reasons. This is a story about a satellite that the UK owns and is still responsible for. It went up in nineteen sixty nine. It's still up there, surprisingly, but something weird happened. What the heck is going on? It has the name. You're going to probably say something about this. Let's do the name first, Andrew Gone, you covered that. It's tell everybody what's this called. It's called sky Net. If you listen to our sister podcasts with my brother Steve Astronomy Daily, he often talks to Halle about her uncle Skynett. And yes, Skynit was the self aware evil entity that was created through online systems in the Terminator movie series and basically, you know, saw the near end of humankind because it developed self awareness. So, yes, Skynit. I didn't know there was a real one, but there is. It is, and as you said, it was launched. I think in November nineteen sixty nine was when Skynet one A. There were two apparently or two of the first series. I think Skyine actually still exists as a as a series of spacecraft, but Skynet one A was It's a geostationary satellite that means it's thirty six thousand kilometers above the Earth's surface and always hovers above a particular point on the Earth because the orbital periods, the length of time it takes to go around once he's twenty four hours or was a very neat trick to be able to do that. So when it was lawn. So what was it launched for. It was all about communications for the British Forces. Was a defense relay communications spacecraft and it. Was placed. Basically over the east coast of Africa. That was where its original location forty degrees east. And of course what that meant was that because it's on the equator and that forty forty degrees east, it can see both the RAF base in the south of England where it was being controlled from, and various British Forces deployments throughout the throughout the Asia Pacific one not the Asia Pacific, but certainly Indian Ocean and East Asia. So all of that was part of its original function. Now that spacecraft, I don't think it actually uh worked for very long. It was just a few a few years. And of course that was in the in the the the infancy of this kind of telecommunications, and so I think everybody lost interest andrew until recently when somebody said, well, where's that sky net? One a gone? It turns up actually basically somewhere else, half a planet away, as the BBC reported. And actually it was a very nice article on the BBC website for this. It's it's entitled somebody moved UK's all this satellite and no one knows who Hawaii. Oh she's the story. But they commented all the orbital mechanics and that's the you know, the way that the dynamics of orbit's work. It's what I did my master's degree on. It means it's unlikely that the half done military spacecraft simply drifted to its current location. Almost certainly, says the BBC. It was commanded to fire its thrust us in the mid nineteen seventies to take it westwards. It's now over America, that's the thing. And the question is who was that and with what authority and purpose? And the BBC comments it's intriguing that key information about a once vital national security asset can just evaporate. But fascination aside. You might reasonably also ask why it still matters, after all, we're doing about some discarded space junt from fifty years ago. And the bottom line there's a space consultant by the name of Dr Stuart Eves who comments that it's still relevant because whoever did move Skynet one A did us a few favors. It's now in what we call a gravity well at one hundred and five degrees west longitude dring backwards and forwards like a marble at the bottom of a bowl. And unfortunately this brings it closer to other satellite traffic on a regular basis. Because it's dead, the risk is it might bump into something, and because it's our satellite, was still responsible for it. That's doctor Stuart e based consultant. That's the bottom line, isn't it. It is these days the responsibility of the country that sends it aloft to deal with it, and they can't because it's a dead satellite. It's stuck in this gravity well, it's bouncing around and it's it's in a traffic zone basically, Yes, that's right. Yeah. So the normal thing with defunct gestationary satellites is they're pushed outwards into what's called a graveyard orbit, yeah, where they are well away from all the active ones and sort of well away from other graveyard of spacecraft. So they're pushed outwards, and that's the standard practice and has been for some time. But clearly sky Net one A hasn't had that. It's in this gravity well, and it probably doesn't have any means of moving it because it's probably out of fuel and you know, fifty years fifty years old, it's more than fifty years old. It's probably a little bit rusty here and there in terms of its electronics and things of that. So, ye, didn't they expect it to just plunge back down to Earth, wasn't they not? Drax segnation No, geostationary is too far away. Okay, it's thirty six thousand kilometers, And I guess when that was launched back in nineteen sixty nine, there really wasn't the concern with space debris that there is now, and there would only be so the way geostationary orbits work andrew that they're all at the same distance. They've got to be at the same height above Earth for them to go around once in twenty four hours, otherwise it doesn't work. So what you've got is the all and it's all on the equator, so it's a single orbit. It's partitioned into stations for the different spacecraft, and I don't think they're very big. I think they're only you know, one hundred kilometers or something like that. Each box that one of these spacecraft sits in. One of our friends, Many's and my friends, actually is a she drives these spacecraft. She's a satellite manager for octas Be, the telecommunications company here in Australia, and she talked to me. It's a long time ago now, but she talked about station keeping and it means, you know, the gravitational pull of the Moon and the Sun and the planets just tweaked the orbit slightly and you've got to keep bringing it back to where you want it to be. So there's always a fuel usage with these geostationary satellites, even though they're in what seemed like stable orbits. You've got to work to keep them there. And eventually that's why you need to get them into a graveyard orbit, because if the spacecraft runs out of fuel and you can't do any station keeping, then you do a risk it wandering out of its box, its imaginary box, and hitting another one. Yeah, you mentioned your friend who works for Optus who tweaks the satellites orbits to keep them where they need to be. This article you mentioned. The BBC article spoke to Graham Davidson, who was the original pilot, if you like, of Skynet one A in the early seventies. He worked for the RAF. He said the Americans originally controlled the satellites orbit and they tested the software, but eventually handed over control to the RAF. This fellows now in his eighties. He said, in essence, there was dual control. But when or why Skynett one A might have been handed back to the Americans, which seems likely. I'm afraid I can't remember us. Yeah, because such a long time, isn't it such a long time, and so much as happened over those decades, and here we are suddenly thinking, oh, hang on a minute, it's still there. It's doing the wrong thing. We can't do anything about it. My theory, fraid, is that somebody at Mission Control saw a pretty girl, sat down on the panel with his Kappa coffee and said, good hey, I'm Fred, and push the button. That's what I reckons happened. It could be well, we might find out, actually, because there's a PhD student at University College London by the name of Rachel Hill, soon hopefully to be doctor Rachel Hill if she does a PhD. And she's been working through the National archives. And there's a speculation from Rachel, which is a Skynet team from Okanger that's the RAF station would go to the usaf USF for satellite facility in Sunnyvale colloquially known as the Blue Cube and operate the sky net during oak out. That this is when control was temporarily transferred to the US while Oakhang was down for essential maintenance. Perhaps the move could have happened then, and maybe your series, as good as her was in that regard to. I can see a Bond film in this herself where uk Sky and its satellite and I six is thrust into action to deal with it because it's up there plotting the takeover of the world. Or I think that story has already been done. But anyway, it is amusing. It is amusing, although it does have some serious consequence cecificates in the way of satellite traffic. You can read that at BBC dot com. This is Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and Fred Watson. Space Nuts. Finally, Fred, we look at citizens science and it's come to the fore in Japan because this year has been quite an astounding year in terms of being able to observe aurora, and the sun's been so very active, and the aurora have been popping up in places where you wouldn't normally see them, including where I am, although I haven't been that lucky. But the thing with the ones that have been seen in Japan is that they have been a magenta color and people have gone, wait a minute, that doesn't look right. How is it? So citizen science has come up with the answer. That's correct. It has, and you know, it is a really nice story as to how we learned things by virtue of people just doing that thing with their cameras and pulling together all their images. So this was something that happened in May this year, in fact May the tenth, if I remember rightly, there was a very very active auroral display which was seen throughout the world except here in Sydney because the sky was cloudy, we didn't see any of it, and I was very Yeah, my daughters in the UK saw it, and you know, I think that most of Britain were treated to marblous arroy as with Japan as well, and so the photographs that come particularly from Japan, showed the aurory being magenta. It's a sort of purplish color, like a pinkish purple. And normally what we find with the aurora is the colors are quite specific Andrew because they are the colors that are generated by excited atoms in the upper atmosphere. And I'll be looking at the aurora again early next year hopefully and thinking about these things. What causes the green. The green is the most commonly seen color in the aurora, and that comes about because it's a the emission of oxygen atoms in the upper atmosphere. The oxygen atoms are clouded by the electrons and protons too, coming from the sun in a you know, a burst of silver activity. And when the atoms they get excited to a higher level of energy. When they relax, they emit specific colors. And the green light is the specific color of oxygen at a height of between about one and two hundred kilometers. When it gets higher than that, if there's a higher level of auroral activity, and atoms higher than about two hundred kilometers are excited, and these are oxygen atoms that we're talking about then they emit a red light. They emit a different color because the pressure is different, and so that's why we commonly see a rory with green undersides and a red higher region up to usually up to about five hundred kilometers or so. That's that's why here in Australia we tend to see red a rory because people down in Tasmania in places like that, they're looking over the southern horizon. All they're seeing is the highest levels of a rory that are happening well below the horizon. That's why we see the red. But that doesn't explain magenta, and that involves something else that comes into play with very energetic a rory, and we've seen this actually up in far the northern Norway. If you've got lots of highly energetic electrons, they also, as well as exciting the green and the red, they penetrate lower into the atmosphere. And then the principle it's actually a molecule that comes into plays nitrogen. The nitrogen molecule is then excited to radiate in a range of colors, but they include bloom and in fact, sometimes there's so many of these colors come together that you see a white underside on the aurora. There's really high energetic, highly energetic electrons coming in, and we've seen that this sort of whiteness on the bottom layer of the aura, that's caused by several different excitations, if I can put it that way, of nitrogen molecules, but one of the main ones is blue. And so what the conjecture is here in Japan, and this is where the cities and science comes in. All these photographic observations tell you that the magenta color you can be knowing where the photographs were taken and what direction they were taking in and how high above the horizon these colors appear. They tell you that the magenta aurory are at a height of round about a thousand kilometers and that is a very high level. So this is because we've got this so much excitation and what they're suggesting, So yes, a thousand kilometers you'd get red from the oxygen. But the fact that this occurred in May brings the weather into play as well, and it means that the atmosphere was in a sort of what they call a preheated state, which means you get this molecular nitrogen which is normally emitting at a very low level in the atmosphere below about one hundred kilometers, it bubbles up into the upper atmosphere and that when the electrons hit, it gives a blue light. And so what you've got at a thousand kilometers is a mixture of molecular nitrogen, it's actually ionized, it's lost an electron and the oxygen. So molecular nitrogen is giving a blue light, the oxygen's giving a red light, and what you get is purple or this magenta and this. Basically there were seven hundred and seventy five cities and science observations which were combined with satellite observations in research done by one of the Japanese institutions. It's a very nice piece of work, and it's lovely that involves folk in the street like you and me. Yeah, and so it's as simple as being where they were, what was happening in the atmosphere and the mix of colors from that stet From that point of view. That's right, due partly to the time of year as well as the you know, the highly energetic electrons coming in. Yeah, very nice story. Yeah, Well, it's interesting because a lot of the photographs of arore that were taken from my part of the world around Dubbo in central New South Wales earlier this year had multiple colors like we had greens, we had purples, we had we had reds, and even some blues. So all of that was happening here as well. So yeah, there were a brilliant mix of colors in our part of the world, and I'm so disappointed that I missed that because it looks spectacular, truly spectacular. Yeah, maybe it's maybe maybe a similar effect for it to what they were. It could be, Yes, it's probably. It's probably right, Andrew, you were probably seeing similar phenomena. That's right. While I'm as colors, I do, I was by you, I mean you in a sort of general Yeah, that's right, although you saw them on the photograph, so that's well, that's fair enough. But yes, I think these will be related related issues. Indeed. All right, it's a great story. You can read all about it at fizz dot org. That brings us to the end of this particular program. Thanks for your company. Don't forget to visit our website if you're trailing around on the internet. It's space Nuts podcast dot com. Or space Nuts dot I owe lots to see and do. There you can sign up for the newsletter Astronomy Daily News for you can go to the shop. You can hit the supporter button if you feel so inclined. Plenty happening on our website Space Nuts dot iOS probably the easiest one to remember. We're all done, Fred, Thank you very much. It's a pleasure. Andrew always great to talk and I look forward to the next time. Yeah, it could be minutes away, you never know. Thanks for Fred, to see you soon. And I would say thanks to here in the studio, but we changed the recording time at the last minute and didn't tell him. And for me Andrew Dunkley, thanks to your company. We'll see you soon. Bye bye. You'll be listening to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also stream on demand at bides dot com. This has been another quality podcast production from nights dot com.