Mars' Carbon Cycle Unveiled, SKA Project Progress, and ISS Rush Hour

[00:00:00] This is Space Time Series 28 Episode 53, for broadcast on the 2nd of May 2025. Coming up on Space Time, large carbon deposits discovered on the red planet Mars, an update on the billion dollar square kilometre array project, and it's like Rush Hour at Grand Central aboard the International Space Station. All that and more coming up on Space Time. Welcome to Space Time with Stuart Gary.

[00:00:44] NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has discovered evidence of a carbon cycle on the red planet. The new observations from three of Curiosity's drill sites found evidence of siderite and iron carbonate material within sulphate rich layers. The discovery reported in the journal Science brings researchers closer to answering that age-old question of whether the red planet was ever capable of supporting life.

[00:01:08] The KSI 6-wheeled rover has been climbing Mount Sharp, the central peak of Gale Crater, as part of an effort to understand the red planet's climatic transitions and habitability. Mount Sharp is like a geologic history book with different layers representing different parts of the red planet's past. The study's lead author Ben Tuttolo from the University of Calgary says the discovery of large carbon deposits in Gale Crater represents a surprising and important breakthrough in science's

[00:01:36] understanding of the geologic and atmospheric evolution of Mars. He says reaching this strata was a long-term goal of the mission. The abundance of highly soluble salts in these rocks and similar deposits mapped all over much of Mars has been used as evidence of the great drying of the red planet, all part of its dramatic shift from a warm, wet world capable of supporting life early in its history to the uninhabitable freeze-dried desert it's become today.

[00:02:03] Sedimentary carbonate had long been predicted to have been formed through a carbon dioxide rich ancient Martian atmosphere. But Tuttolo says identifications had previously been sparse. Curiosity landed on Mars on August 5, 2012, and has travelled more than 34 kilometres across the red planet's surface. The discovery of carbonate suggests that the red planet contained enough carbon dioxide to support liquid water existing on the planet's surface.

[00:02:29] And as this atmosphere thinned, the carbon dioxide transformed into rock. NASA says future missions and analysis of other sulfate rich areas on Mars could confirm the findings and help to better understand the red planet's early history, and how it transformed as its atmosphere was lost. Tuttolo says scientists are ultimately trying to determine whether Mars was ever capable of supporting life. And these latest findings are bringing them a step closer to an answer.

[00:02:56] He says it's telling scientists that the planet was habitable and that the models for habitability are correct. The broader implications are that the planet was habitable until that time. But then, as the carbon dioxide that had been warming the planet started to precipitate into siderite, it likely impacted Mars' ability to stay warm. The question looking forward is how much of this carbon dioxide from the atmosphere was actually sequestered. And was that a potential reason for Mars losing habitability?

[00:03:26] This is Space Time. Space Time. Still to come, an update on the billion dollar square kilometer array project. Extractions now well underway. How are they going? And it's like rush hour at Grand Central aboard the International Space Station as times get busy. All that and more still to come on Space Time. This episode of Space Time is brought to you by Incogni. Because while we spend a lot of time uncovering the hidden wonders of the universe, there are

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[00:04:23] And it follows up to make sure they actually do what they're asked to do. You don't have to make a single call or send a single email. The Incogni process is easy, fast and it puts you back in control of your personal information. And right now, Space Time listeners can get 60% off their subscription with a 30-day money-back guarantee. That's more than half off just by visiting incogni.com slash space time. That's I-N-C-O-G-N-I dot com slash space time.

[00:04:53] Take back your information and take back your privacy with Incogni. Construction works now well advanced on what will be the world's largest radio telescope, the massive Square Kilometre Array project in outback Western Australia and Southern Africa.

[00:05:19] Once fully operational, the SKA will explore the universe in unprecedented detail, doing so hundreds of times faster than any current facility. In fact, its size and wide range of operating frequencies will make this observatory at least 50 times more sensitive than any other radio telescope instrument in the world. The project includes the SKA low-frequency phased arrays of dipole antennas, which will cover the 50 to 350 megahertz range and which will be grouped in 100-metre diameter stations,

[00:05:49] each containing about 90 elements. The SKA mid-frequency array will include several thousand 12-metre diameter dish antennas. They'll cover the 350 megahertz to 14 gigahertz frequency range. And then there's the SKA survey array, which will use a compact array of 12 to 15-metre diameter parabolic medium-frequency dishes, each equipped with a multi-beam phased array covering the 350 megahertz to 4 gigahertz range.

[00:06:16] Now in order to gather and compute all this data that will be coming in, two of the world's biggest and fastest supercomputers have been built. The Australian facility for the SKA will be based at the Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory in outback Western Australia. And it already has two operational main instruments. There's the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder or ASCAP, which uses 36 12-metre parabolic dishes. And there's the Murchison Wide-Field Array of low-frequency antennas,

[00:06:46] arranged on 128-phase tiles, each comprising 16 dipoles. A third separate instrument, the experiment to detect the global epoch of reorganization signature or edges, is also located at the observatory. Across on the other side of the Indian Ocean, the SKA South African facility already includes the MiniCat array of 64 13.5-metre dishes covering the 580 megahertz to 14 gigahertz frequency range,

[00:07:12] as well as the 7-Dish Cat 7 engineering and science testbed instrument, another precursor for the SKA. This report on the billion dollar project from the SKA consortium. Was Einstein right about gravity? What makes magnetic fields in space? And how have galaxies evolved over time? To answer these questions and more, a dozen countries are building the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope,

[00:07:40] the Square Kilometre Array or SKA in Australia and South Africa. It's taking 500 engineers and scientists from 20 countries to design the SKA, a truly global mega-science project. Building the telescope will involve installing up to 132,000 antennas spread over 2,000 square kilometres of Australian outback.

[00:08:05] They'll be linked by hundreds of kilometres of fibre optic and power cables to a purpose-built data processing facility. The telescope's own equipment, including custom supercomputing and electrical infrastructure, has the potential to interfere with the unique radio-quiet environment. So CSIRO and Oricon develop innovative shielding techniques, reducing the level of radio emissions by factors of billions.

[00:08:35] CSIRO and Oricon also work closely with the SKA infrastructure team in South Africa and develop joint solutions where they face similar challenges, both designing the key infrastructure for this world-class radio telescope. What are gravitational waves? How does magnetism work throughout the universe? What did the universe look like when the first galaxies formed? How many gravitational waves are passing through me right now? What is dark matter?

[00:09:03] What is the impact of magnetic fields on the formation of galaxies? And for me, the most important, is there life out there? We ask ourselves, what is the most useful thing that a radio telescope can contribute to the answer to these big questions? We are building a time machine. We're looking at what our surroundings were like almost at their inception. We're building what will be the largest science facility ever built by mankind.

[00:09:31] To be able to achieve the scientific goals that we wanted to be able to achieve, we need to create a machine which is less a telescope. It's almost more an IT machine. We're pushing technology to its limits. What we're talking about now is two telescopes. Our site is in the middle of the Western Australian desert. Far away from towns, radio interference, anything that could impact on the science that we're trying to do. We've already started. We've got antennas at the site. We'll have hundreds of thousands more. It'll stretch out beyond the horizon.

[00:10:01] We're building hundreds of dishes in a remote location in the middle of South Africa. And it's really tough. It's a hot environment. It's a dry environment. These dishes are going to spread out over literally hundreds of kilometers. We've got to get 500 engineers to work together over 20 countries in all the time zones in the world. It's not building a jigsaw puzzle, but the pieces keep changing.

[00:10:26] Part A being designed in one place fits to part B being designed literally on the other side of the world. Every new telescope, there are always new discoveries and they are never new discoveries you build a telescope for. We're almost bound to discover something new, something that will disrupt our current everyday life. That generates new knowledge now. Huge amounts of data. Imagine the amount of data that's flowing through the internet at any one moment. We're talking about that kind of level coming out steadily. The SKA can do for interplanetary exploration what broadband did for the internet.

[00:10:57] We're doing this now. There's equipment on the ground in South Africa and Australia. Radio waves gives us a unique way of probing the deep universe. We can do all of this by picking up incredible faint signals. Radio waves coming from the dawn of the universe. What we will discover is the unknown. And we're going to build the real thing. This is space time. Still to come.

[00:11:23] A busy time aboard the International Space Station and later in the science report. Claims social skills may not be the most useful indicator of autism. All that and more still to come on space time.

[00:11:50] Three crew members from the International Space Station have successfully returned to Earth, landing on the Kazakhstan steppe 27 and a half hours after undocking from the orbiting outpost. The crew and their Soyuz M26 capsule had spent 220 days in orbit as part of the Expedition 71 and 72 mission. During their time on station, they studied advanced life support systems, genetic sequencing in microgravity, pharmaceutical manufacturing in space and other scientific research.

[00:12:19] Meanwhile, the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship has successfully docked to the International Space Station following its launch aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex No. 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at the Cape Canaveral Space Force space in Florida. The CRS-32 Commercial Resupply Services mission latched onto the zenith space-facing port of the orbiting outpost's Harmony module. On board were some 3,021 kilograms of fresh supplies and equipment.

[00:12:44] The new cargo will be used to study how time passes in space in comparison to on the Earth, the taking of more precise measurements of Earth's shape and gravitational field, research to see how living cells sense gravity, and a test to see if plant DNA molecules are differently resistant to damage in space. For the time experiment, the mission carried the European Space Agency's new ACES Ultra Precise Atomic Clock Ensemble. It will help redefine how time is measured.

[00:13:12] ACES uses two cutting-edge atomic clocks and an advanced time transfer system to transmit the most accurate time signals ever sent from space. It will connect to the world's best atomic clocks on Earth, testing fundamental physics from orbit, including yet another test of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Together, these ultra-precise atomic clocks will generate time signals so precise that ACES will only lose a second every 300 million years.

[00:13:38] The device will be attached to the external payload facility of ACES Columbus module in the Earth-facing Nadir position. The experiment aims to conduct at least 10 extended measurement sessions, each lasting 25 days as it orbits the Earth 16 times daily. Dragon's arrival comes just a month after a Cygnus cargo ship carrying some four tons of supplies also arrived on station. Meanwhile, Beijing's latest crew have just arrived safely aboard China's Tiangong Space Station.

[00:14:06] The three Shenzhou-20 Taikonauts were flown up aboard a Long March 2F rocket from the Zhukuan Satellite Loan Centre in northwestern China. They'll spend six months on their orbiting outpost, replacing the Shenzhou-19 crew who will return to Earth later this week. Shenzhou-20 is the ninth manned mission to the three-module Tiangong Space Station, which is already around a third the size of the ISS, and we'll see even more modules added to it in coming years as China intensifies its manned space program.

[00:14:36] This is Space Time. And time now to take another brief look at some of the other stories making news insights this week with a science report. Previous studies have already suggested that the deadly H5N1 bird flu in cows

[00:15:05] can spread to people relatively easily. The virus does so by binding to sialic acids found in human airways. And that suggested that the virus could soon start to spread between different mammals, including humans, potentially leading to a new global pandemic. However, a report in the journal Nature claims a pair of new studies has cast doubt on those findings. The first found that H5N1 in cows binds poorly to human sialic acids,

[00:15:31] suggesting the virus can't spread as easily from cows to people as previously thought. And the second looked at whether the virus binds more easily to receptors in birds than mammals, even after infecting cows, and found that was the case. Finally, the authors of the original study, which suggested the virus could spread between mammals, and the other ones responded to the new work claiming differences in the method used may explain the contrasting findings. And they warned that people shouldn't become complacent about the potential for H5N1 to become the next global pandemic.

[00:16:02] A new study claims social skills may not be the most useful indicator when diagnosing autism. A report of the journal Cell says, Health care professionals need to look at more repetitive behaviours, intense special interests, and perception difficulties rather than social difficulties when making an autism diagnosis. The authors used a large language model to analyse more than 4,000 reports written by clinicians assessing patients for autism, looking for the types of phrases that came up most often in assessments

[00:16:30] that ended in an autism diagnosis for the patient. The researchers say that while current criteria focused on social skills which can often change over time, it appears that when it comes to the subjective assessments of clinicians, specific behaviours such as the intensity of a special interest could be more diagnostically relevant. A disturbing new study has found that the Australian rigid honey-eater population has shrunk from hundreds of thousands to fewer than 300 over the past century.

[00:16:58] However, amazingly so far, the birds have maintained much of their genetic diversity. The findings reported in the journal The Royal Society Bee studied the genetic makeup of honey-eaters from this century and compared them to specimens dated before 1919. The authors say despite the drastic loss in population, they found no evidence of inbreeding or a genetic divide forming and the overall loss of genetic diversity from earlier specimens to modern day ones was a modest 9%.

[00:17:27] While modelling the future trajectory for genetic diversity for the birds, the authors say that it's likely there will be a lag between the drop in population and the impact that will have on genetic diversity, meaning there may well be a hidden risk that conservationists will need to keep an eye on. Well, no matter how much science and common sense one uses, there are some paranormal myths out there which people believe that just won't die. So, Tim Minham from Australian Skeptics has decided to debunk

[00:17:56] 15 of the most popular supernatural claims. Here we go. Paranormal myths. Now, it's a particular publication and they have explanations for why it's a myth but they also throw in the occasional yes but, which is annoying. Okay, ghosts only appear at night. Why? Why do ghosts only appear at night? Are they sleeping during the day? No one knows. It's just scarier at night, right? It's darker. Can you only see ghosts in the dark? Doesn't make sense. Ghosts should be able to appear every time. They say Bigfoot has no physical evidence, which is actually true. So that's not a myth. It's true that Bigfoot itself is a bit of a myth because there is no physical evidence to actually show you.

[00:18:25] There's hair samples which have been tested and shown to be something else. There's photographs, dodgy, out-of-focus, shaky photographs that say, look, there it is. There are audios of something crying in the woods and yelling and howling, etc. But overall, there is no evidence. It's the same with the Loch Ness Monster. The evidence that is there is poor and a lot of poor evidence doesn't make good evidence. It's just a lot of poor evidence. So Bigfoot, only old buildings are haunted. Why? I've actually heard cases of a new building being haunted because it's on top of an old building and there are things which are totally new buildings, Greenfield, new buildings which are haunted.

[00:18:55] Everything can be haunted. Especially if there are old Indian graveyards, isn't that right? Well, that's the thing, yeah. How many old Indian graveyards are there? I don't know. But one of the issues is, of course, that sometimes the ghost appears in a place where the person never was. It certainly didn't die there. It's the case of a Supreme Court judge or something where the ghost haunts the court. Why? He died some miles away, but apparently he likes to come back and haunts the court. Okay, paranormal events lack scientific explanation? Yes. Basically, the scientific investigation of anyone,

[00:19:24] anyone bothers to investigate some of this stuff is pretty shonky, pretty poor. You can look up any skeptic publication and look up any paranormal event, check it out. All crop circles are made by aliens. I would say no crop circles are made by aliens. People have come forward and explained in the crop circles the fact that when the crop circle craze took off from the 70s into the 80s, etc., suddenly crop circles started getting a lot busier or a lot more artistic. In a short period of time you think, why? If it's alien, do a crop circle. Yeah, the aliens are trending and all of a sudden they're not. It's a bit weird. Yeah, well, they sort of disappeared.

[00:19:53] They ran out of puff. Amityville Horror was a genuine haunting. It wasn't. Most of the story is totally made up. It's fabricated. It sold a book and it sold a film, etc. But the stories that are in there, apart from the fact that there was a young person who killed his family in the house before anyone else moved in, that is apparently true. But basically everything from then on is not true. And that was all the fabrication of the Warrens, wasn't it? They picked up on it. They weren't the original fabricators. The original fabricators was the people who lived there, the Lutzes I think it was, and a writer who came to write about them

[00:20:22] and he said, well, we need more drama. It was a dramatic license. It was quite a lot of license. So the case, the people, the writer, and then the Warrens got involved. And that's when it became really big. And the Warrens have never found a haunted house that wasn't haunted. They will leave on everything. And normally for Mr. Warren, Mr. Warren was very keen on demon hauntings. There's nothing there. It's a very strong myth everywhere, but it's not true. There's a place called the Winchester House in California. It's a really strange house. It looks like something out of the Munsters. Very gothic looking house. Stairs that seem to go nowhere. All sorts of strange things. Picked up a lot of myths saying that it was haunted.

[00:20:52] It's full of spirits. The lady who made it. It was Sarah Winchester. It was a fairly well-off lady. I think she was widowed or never had any kids. Anyway, she built this house and kept building it. And there's steam thrown on all over the place. And sometimes they were never finished. And sometimes they were blocked off, etc. She was just eccentric. And had a lot of money. Too much money spent on this house. Not haunted. It's not weird. It's just a strange building. Poltergeist activity is caused by spirits. One, you have to ask what poltergeist activity? And two, what spirits? Poltergeist activity is when strange things happen in your house. Doors closed. Glasses full off the shelf.

[00:21:22] Teddy bear star walking around. Are they caused by spirits? I would say you have to go back to the basics and say, is poltergeist activity real? Are there explanations? And one of the best explanations is someone's pulling your leg. So you've got to go back to be skeptical totally of the actual activity and then decide what's causing it. Loch Ness Monster is a prehistory creature. Poor old Loch Ness Monster. Been there three times. Love the place. Highly recommend it as a tourist destination. Have not seen the monster. Doesn't mean it's not there. But again, no evidence at all for this stuff.

[00:21:48] I feel sorry for that dude who set up an observatory there to look for the Loch Ness Monster and he keeps missing it. It was there two minutes ago, but he was on the toilet or something. If you were here yesterday, yeah, there's a lot of people out there who spend a lot of time staring at the Loch. And when it's windy, et cetera, it gets very choppy, all sorts of things. People take it very seriously. Some of the things they take seriously have since been proved to be fake. Like the famous surgeon's photograph of what looks like a monster head and body sitting at the water. It's a fake. So unfortunately, good story. Nice location. No evidence.

[00:22:18] Seances. Communication with the dead. No. Again, go back to basics. What do you mean by the dead? Are they still around? Are they people who haven't gone on to heaven? What's heaven? Does hell exist? All those sort of things. Is a seance going to contact them? The nature of seances have changed over the years. People have proved to them, proved that they are fakes and shonky practitioners in there. Harry Houdini was a famous one for exposing fake, fake in quotes, aren't they all seances? So no, the seance is not a way to contact the dead.

[00:22:44] It's probably a way to spend your money on someone who pretends to contact the dead. Although, when you think about it, the fact that there's a stairway to heaven and a highway to hell shows exactly where traffic patterns are likely to be. Are they one way? That's the problem. Because they're talking about people coming back. But anyway, no. I don't think seances have a lot of things going for them. And certainly, when people have investigated them, apart from those who are totally committed, in the Victorian days there were some noted scientists who were totally committed. But no. When you independently, culturally analyse these things, there's nothing there.

[00:23:14] Paranormal events are always supernatural. Well, again, what's a paranormal event? You're almost saying that paranormal implies it's not normal, right? So you're saying it's supernatural, which are not natural. Most of these things you've looked into, what the sceptics have spent dozens and decades and decades and probably hundreds of years in the past looking at these things, assessing them scientifically, seeing if there's anything that's happening even before you worry about what causes it. Does it happen at all? And most of these things, whether it's like they're sponsored by UFOs or whatever, and paranormal ghosts and hauntings and psychic powers.

[00:23:41] When you investigate them, when you have enough information to investigate them, no. They fall flat. Bermuda Triangle, totally false. Totally. You can wipe that one out. Get the one 110% no. There's not even a sense of doubt about that one. Good old sceptical. Hmm. I'm not going to commit myself. No. That one's out. The things that have supposedly happened there either didn't happen there or didn't happen half the time, or they didn't happen the way they're told they happened. There's definitely not more things happening around the Bermuda Triangle or around the

[00:24:07] Triangle near Japan, or the one up near Alaska, or the one near the Great Lakes. Everyone wants their own triangle somewhere. No. No evidence. Nothing surprising. Things that were supposed to be missing, never found, have been found. The evidence does not stick up on that one at all. Totally phony theory. All UFOs are alien spacecraft. Well, almost by definition. You go from flying saucer, which is an alien craft, to a UFO, which is an unidentified flying object. You think it's flying, so it's under control. It's an object. It's a thing. It's just unidentified.

[00:24:36] So once you identify what it is that's under control or a thing, once you wipe those out, you've just got unidentified. And that's what's left. Same with UAPs, which is the new name for it. If the name has changed, it's initially an unidentified aerial phenomenon. And then people complain, oh, it's not all aerial. Sometimes it's in the water, et cetera. Okay. So now an unidentified anomalous phenomenon. And then they're saying anomalous can include everything from ghosts and bigfoot, et cetera, to UFOs. UFOs, really popular, very popular right now. Yeah. Big conspiracy theories about it now.

[00:25:04] Again, the evidence is lacking completely. The skeptics have a mantra that every person keeps saying any day now they're going to get the definitive proof, like these recent American military videos of aircraft have been explained. In fact, they can be explained very quickly to anyone who bothers. So they're not unidentified. Wiped they went out.

[00:25:34] Haunted locations are always dangerous. Well, that's appropriate for ghost hunters, et cetera. They always go in scared and they say, I was attacked by a ghost. Why? Is that why they're always very camouflaged, Guy? Yeah, I know. At night, I don't know what they're camouflaging themselves against. I would say a ghost could see them. There's hardly a case where a ghost hunter team goes into a haunted house and doesn't find evidence that would be haunted. Now, the evidence is pretty poor, very poor, extremely poor. They're going in there with a precondition almost. They agree that this is going to be haunted, therefore I will find something in there. Are they dangerous?

[00:26:03] The variety of ghosts is quite stunning. From these little orbs that can hardly knock you off your feet, to malicious spirits that are going to throw things at you or bump you or say rude things to you. So the funny old thing is how come all these ghosts keep taking shape? Why do ghosts have clothes? All sorts of stories. Are they always dangerous? No. Do they exist? Probably not. So you're starting again the suggestion that it is a haunted house and it can be dangerous. No, it's probably not a haunted house in the first place. Paranormal investigations always yield results. Yes, they do.

[00:26:30] A lot of these haunted houses and scientific tests of psychics, et cetera, do often get results. And there might not always be positive results. No, that could be sort of negative results. No, this house is not haunted. And this psychic doesn't have psychic powers. Or it's an unknown result. We're not quite sure. Yeah, okay, do it again. But virtually every time when they find a positive result, when they're sort of saying that, yes, this is true. Yes, there is some evidence of the power here. There are questions raised. Scientific tests of psychics are often very, very poorly set up and open to abuse and open to cheating.

[00:26:58] And the scientists, poor things, do not expect things to cheat because sometimes they're very naive. Whereas the practitioner who bends spoons or whatever might be a cheat. Well, I'll say they probably are. So paranormal investigations always yield results, often negative, more times positive because they want to. And that positive result is very questionable. That's Tim Mendham from Australian Skeptics.

[00:27:18] And that's the show for now.

[00:27:35] Space Time is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Acast, Amazon Music, Bytes.com, SoundCloud, YouTube, your favorite podcast download provider and from Space Time with Stuart Gary.com. Space Time is also broadcast through the National Science Foundation on Science Zone Radio and on both iHeart Radio and TuneIn Radio.

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[00:28:29] This has been another quality podcast production from Bytes.com. Space Time is a production of the National Science Foundation on Science Foundation on Science Foundation.