Mars Samples By 2031 // Starship's GO For Launch // Oumuamua NOT Interstellar?

China is planning a Mars sample return Mission web tracks water moving towards planets and the Hubble tension has gotten even more tense all this and more in this week's space bites we've got samples from a lot of places around the solar system think about the samples that came from the Moon we've got samples from asteroids but the thing that we don't have the thing we really want is a sample from Mars now this is in the works NASA and the European Space Agency are working together they're building their Mars sample return Mission and in fact this process has already started with the perseverance Rover it is crawling across the surface of Mars it's finding interesting locations it is extracting core samples it's putting them into its sample collection it's holding them deep inside and it's going to meet up with a future NASA Isa Mission give over the samples and then it will fly them back to Earth and we will finally have pieces of Mars but there is another group that is working on a Mars sample return Mission and that's the Chinese they have been building up to this capability of delivering samples from Mars when you think about the chonga 5 Mission with landed on the moon they retrieved samples from the Moon and they brought them back to Earth and then we think about the 10 wi mission where they sent a Lander and a Rover to the surface of Mars and have demonstrated they can land payloads with accuracy on Mars they can move around they can Rove all the pieces are in place to now develop a Mars sample return Mission the Chinese space agency has said this is probably going to be 10 win three and the plan is to launch this in 2028 and retrieve the samples back to Earth by 2031 and this is earlier by a couple of years than what the NASA e mission is planning to do and in fact the nasy E mission is is kind of up in the air right now there are concerns about the size of the budget concerns about the timelines and so it could be that that mission gets pushed back a little farther we kind of don't know as part of this process the Chinese have been simulating the atmospheric conditions around where their mission is going to be landing and So based on that they'll be able to figure out exactly what will be the requirements of their sample return Mission now this won't be like the NASA Isa mission where they're going to get all of these carefully chosen samples from several kilometers of journey by the perseverance Rover they're going to be collecting their samples in one spot where the Lander is and then they're going to be sending that back to Earth but still like whether NASA Isa does it whether the Chinese do it like we are really close to finally getting some fresh samples from Mars back here on Earth to study what's going to be in them the or Cloud could be more active than we thought we know of two Interstellar objects UA and borisov and om muamua was the first one it was this very strange cigar shaped object maybe it's an asteroid maybe it's a comet kind of mysterious borisov is just like straight up Comet that passed through the solar system both aumua and borov were on what are called hyperbolic trajectories which means that they are going to come through the solar system but then they're going to leave again while regular asteroids and comets they move in elliptical trajectories within the solar system and so they're trapped in the gravitational well around the Sun astronomers have seen meteors on Interstellar trajectories they able to track the actual path that a meteor took as it came into the atmosphere and they able to chart that in fact this was coming in on an Interstellar trajectory does this mean that there could be Interstellar meteorite somewhere on Earth maybe but maybe not so a new paper suggests that in fact some of the interstellar meteors might not have been Interstellar at all but actually came from the or Cloud typically objects that come from the or Cloud they're already trapped by the gravitational wave of the sun they're going to be just going in orbit around the Sun and they're not going to be coming or leaving the solar system but if one of these objects has like a three body interaction with another Earth Cloud object or a Kyper belt object or a planet that it could be kicked in into a trajectory that will then take it out of the solar system and so their Theory says that in fact you could explain some of these Interstellar meteors as not being Interstellar at all they are actually or Cloud objects that were kicked into these trajectories and if so then that maybe that means that some of the other objects maybe even Oma and borisov aren't Interstellar that they're actually came from the or Cloud but went through some kind of three-body interaction and so we're not sure how many objects are actually coming from intercellular locations but if we could get our hands on a piece of an intercellular object we could learn about another star system so I'm going to talk about this some more at the end of this episode so stick around for that a unique Supernova Remnant discovered by an amateur astronomer in 2023 amateur astronomer Dana Patrick was looking through archival data from the wide field infrared survey Explorer or wise and the wise telescope is very cool it's designed to look for objects in the infrared spectrum and one of its tasks was to scan the environment around the solar system to see if like does the Sun have a companion brown dwarf or is there like a really large like a Jupiter sized object out in the Y cloud and based on the wise data the answer is no uh the sun is alone but they were able to find lots of brown dwarfs and it also found lots of asteroids and other objects and so Dana was looking through some of this archival data and noticed a supernova Remnant a weird little nebula that was visible in the infrared but it wasn't that obvious in the visible light this was unusual Dana marked this called it pa30 it was initially thought it might be a planetary nebula but then later on astronomers realized no this is a supernova Remnant and astronomers were able to match this Supernova Remnant to a supernova that was seen in the sky in 1181 CE so 1181 ad it was noted by Chinese astronomers in in their records and in fact you know would have been very bright people around the world would have seen this very bright star appear in the Sky last for a few weeks before it faded away and doing follow on observations astronomers realized that this is a very special kind of supernova so it's called a type 1ax now the type 1A should give you a bit of a hint a type 1A Supernova is when a white dwarf has been feeding material from a partner star when it reaches 1.4 times the mass of the Sun it detonates completely explodes and disappears and astronomers use use that as a way to measure distance in the universe a type 1 ax is thought to be a collision between two white dwarf stars and so this very rare Supernova Remnant discovered by an amateur astronomer in archival data ended up being one of the most important recent Supernova discoveries and it was also seen and tied to a historical event like it's all such a cool story all connected together there's so much value in looking through this archival data every week we put up a vote on our Channel where you tell us what you thought was the best story of the week and this week was no surprise it was the new photos from the uclid mission and I totally agree they were amazing I'm really excited about the uclid mission so if you want to vote we put up a new vote at the end of every space bites go ahead you'll see it show up in your YouTube feed you can go to the community tab to specifically go and join the vote and if you want a better chance of seeing of course subscribe to the channel click on the notification Bell and you'll get it when the next one comes out web sees water being delivered to planets one of the long-standing questions in astronomy is where did the Earth get its water and you know you would think that okay the Earth got its water when it got all its rocks and its metal and all of the various gases and dust and stuff that was in the solar system but the problem is that when the sun fully ignited and started to blast out radiation into its environment any volatiles any water would have evaporated away and when you think about the moon like the Moon is exposed we don't see water on the surface of the Moon yet there is some water in the shadowed craters where they're protected from the sunlight but any water that just sits on the surface of the Moon would be completely evaporated and so where did the Earth get its water from and so it was assumed that some mechanism delivered this water after this fact like maybe comets or asteroids crashed into the Earth and delivered all that water and carbon and other things that it needed but another theory is called the icy Pebbles Theory and that is that small Pebbles of rock coated in water ice that formed out in the outer reaches of the solar system moved Inward and eventually made their way into the inner solar system were able to transfer their water to the Earth before it all got evaporated by the Sun and so to confirm this Theory the James web Space Telescope was able to observe a protoplanetary disc that had various amounts of water on small pebble-sized grains of material in the system and they were being shifted into the inner solar system so it's like a beautiful conf conf of this one Theory so it's not case closed but I think we're getting really close to saying the Earth got its water by Icy Pebbles migrating inward after the Earth formed which is amazing so thanks web the lunar swirl mystery deepens another mystery today's episode is all about Mysteries um but there are these features on the Moon called lunar Swirls and they really look like like swirly shapes on the Moon and what they appear be is some kind of interaction between the sun's solar wind which is charge particles hitting the surface of the Moon with pockets of magnetism on the moon that are shifting the the location we think about the Earth we have this giant magnetosphere and as the solar wind tries to hit the earth it gets channeled down the poles and we see the auroras and we get protected from that radiation the moon doesn't have a global magnetosphere but it does have little pockets of magnetism and so it's thought that bits of the Moon are being protected and so when you see these swirls these lighter areas they're being hit less by the solar wind than the darker areas and the Assumption was that this was just the magnetosphere of the Moon that had nothing to do with the topology the the features the craters mountains and things on the moon well not so fast astronomers have found that in fact there are lower elevation sections of the Moon that seem to have lunar swirls associated with them and so is it that the lower features on the moon have more magnetic material and a more powerful magnetosphere is that somehow the lower elevation impacts how these lunar swirls are created no answers more questions but it's interesting to see this new insight into it and speaking of the Moon we've talked about how regolith on the moon is a big problem and not just for astronauts who are walking around on the surface of the Moon but when a spacecraft lands on the moon it kicks up a cloud of regolith now there's no atmosphere on the moon and so this regolith isn't stopped by the at atmosphere the gravity is lower on the moon and so this regli can be kicked up into much higher trajectories in fact it can go into orbit around the moon when a spacecraft lands on the moon it could kick enough reguli into orbit that it's actually like a hazard for other satellites and other Landers that are in the vicinity and so it's really important to understand like what is the Environmental effect of like what happens when a Lander touches down on the moon so NASA ran a supercomputer simulation where they took the Apollo 12 lunar Lantern and they simulated its Landing the exhaust plumes coming down hitting the regali kicking up material and then they match that to the actual results from the Apollo 12 lunar lander to see how well their simulations work to that and then they can use that to extrapolate when you've got like what's going to happen when Starship lands on the moon what's going to happen when blue Origins Lander lands on the moon and we can sort of work out what is the optimal way to land on the moon and not cause some kind of risk to other spacecraft in the area now if you like the work that we do why don't you consider joining our patreon this allows us to be a completely independent space reporting agency we have more than a dozen writers on the team we have video editors audio editors it's a big team and yet we're able to support everybody through our patrons it's not just about supporting independent space news we give you benefits if you join our patreon you get no ads on the universe today website for life you get behind the scenes information you get to see our stuff early and we do a behindth scenes Q&A just for the patrons now you don't have to donate to join our patreon there is a free tier that you can join where you still get access to a lot of the content that we produce if you want to avoid the YouTube ads the version we released to the patrons has no ads in it so there are other benefits so if you want go to patreon.com universetoday and join our patreon either donate or join for free the Hubble tension gets even more tense we've talked about the Hubble attention many times here on the channel you know the crisis in cosmology uh and this is this measurement that astronomist have done at the expansion rate of the universe they've measured our Galactic neighborhood and measured one value and then they measure the rate in the cosmic microwave background radiation and they get two different numbers and the error bars on those two numbers are so precise and they don't overlap there is a gap what's going on well we don't know but astronomers wondered is our local environment may be causing a problem with the measurement in the local environment the Milky Way is part of the local group of galaxies and that's part of the Virgo supercluster and that's part of the lanaka supercluster and our overall local group is drifting like all of the galaxies in this region towards the sort of General Center of mass and so astronomers wondered is this drift contributing to the measurements of the Hubble tension because if it was then maybe you could make that tension go away and explanation well they found that there is about a 2 to 3% % change in the Hubble tension if you take into account the drift of the local group towards the concentration of mass in the Lanaya super cluster well good news right well no because it's the opposite and so in other words the Hubble tension gets 2 to 3% worse when you account for our interaction with the Lan supercluster so no answers just another mystery deepens yeah this really is the Mystery episode isn't it all right one last story here and that is that SpaceX has gotten approved from the FAA to launch the SpaceX Starship this is the one that's going to use the newly upgraded launch platform it's got the hot fire separation it's going to disconnect the super heavy booster from the Starship and if all goes well this is going to blast off on Saturday and go into orbit and demonstrate a safe return of both the booster and Starship back to various Landing sites around the earth of course my plan is to reach out to a couple of my space friends and we'll do some kind of conversation after the successful or unsuccessful launch talk about what happened so stay tuned for that I'm going to talk about Interstellar objects tomorrow but first I'd like to thank our patrons thanks to David Richards Mark Anis Joel yansy Antonio lilara Dustin cable Vlad shiin moo George David guilan Andre gross Jeremy M Josh Schultz and Jordan Young Who support us at the master of the universe level and all of our other supporters on patreon I mentioned that we know of two Interstellar objects omua and borisov and if they do come from other star systems then we really need to study them there's been many papers that have been proposed that you could still catch up with omua mua study it it would you know every day that goes by we've got less time and we're going to need a bigger rocket to be able to make that Journey but can you imagine if we could actually gather a sample from an inell object there's a mission planned by the European Space Agency called the interstellar Interceptor and this is going to be a mission that's going to loiter out at the the Earth Sun L2 lrange point the same place that Gia and James Webb are waiting at and it's going to wait for a Target and then you've got telescopes on the ground like ver Rubin that's going to find another intercellular object and if one is coming in at the right trajectory then the Interceptor will take off and do a flyby of this object and Tak some pictures it goes by do some spectroscopic analysis and we can get a better sense of what that thing was at least figure out whether or not it's an alien spacecraft now there's an interview that I did with a researcher that is proposing that you could bolt a very powerful radioisotopic therm electric generator to an ion engine like it's just all engine and it could achieve Delta V rates in the T maybe even 100 kilometers per second that would be enough velocity to chase down an Interstellar Object Land on the surface retrieve a sample and then bring it home to Earth and again we talked about a Mars sample return can you imagine Interstellar object sample return how much could we learn about another star system so I really hope at some point we do this all right that's all for this week we'll see you next week