Starship’s Third Flight // Schrodinger’s Voyager // Start of Milkdromeda

Starship reaches orbit in a new test NASA regains contact with Voyager 1 sort of are the Milky Way and androma already exchanging stars and two new Incredible images to replace your desktop wallpaper all this and more in this week's space bites so we've seen two tests of SpaceX Starship and the super heavy so far one back in April last year another one in November and we've gone into great detail and you're all going to have opinions about what whether or not it was successful or whether it was a failure anyway we're on to test number three and that was on Thursday March 14th 2024 so Starship on top of super heavy launched and right away we could see all 33 of its Raptor 2 engines blasting everything was working great it passed through its Max Dynamic pressure Starship ignited its boosters and did a hot fire separation from the super heavy and then we saw super heavy flip around and we could even see the grid fins turning on super heavy as it got itself into position and then the feed cut and so we didn't know exactly what happened to super heavy and afterwards SpaceX released a statement and they said it was destroyed at about 462 M altitude so it clearly wasn't able to get itself into position and be able to do a soft Landing in the ocean instead it just tore itself apart in the air but Starship continued on and this time it made it all the way up to orbital velocity now it didn't go into orbit but it was definitely going fast enough to be almost in orbit and at a very high altitude and apparently when it was in space it did a couple of tests it opened and closed its payload Bay this is the thing that it's going to use to eject starlinks into space on future flights it also apparently tested out its internal cryogenic transfer system although we kind of don't know exactly what they were testing and what the results were yet but it apparently started it then it was supposed to test whether it could relight its engines in orbit but apparently it was rolling too quickly to be able to accomplish that but it got itself into a position to re-enter the atmosphere and I think the best parts of this entire launch and flight were at this moment where you could see the big flapper wing moving back and forth as it was shifting its position rolling itself around and then as it started to re-enter the atmosphere you could see the plasma flow heat up on the outside of the spacecraft and we knew that we were going to lose contact with it I mean spacecraft as they come through the atmosphere they create this ionized glow around them it blocks communication and this has happened with all of the capsules that come you know this sort of scary moment where the capsule is coming into the atmosphere it starts to re-enter you get this ioniz glow and then you don't hear from it for a couple of minutes until finally it is slowed down to the point that you can reestablish communication well it entered that place and apparently it lost Telemetry from spacecraft that were observing that it lost its connection with starlink which was broadcasting this incredible highdefinition feed of the spacecraft and then SpaceX officially confirmed that the spaceship was lost so it didn't survive re-entry it didn't get a chance to test out to do a sof Landing in the Indian Ocean as planned so where are we at now um I mean it can launch off the pad the two can separate the hot separation works well super heavy is able to flip itself back over and fire its engines and attempt to slow itself down but that didn't work yet and we still have really no idea how well where Starship failed as it was attempting its re-entry and this is the part of this entire vehicle concept that I have been preparing myself to be the most complicated the one that they're going to have the biggest troubles with and that is re-entry that going from orbital velocity to standstill requires shedding just an enormous amount of energy generates a ton of heat there are very few substances that can handle that kind of speed and also just be reusable on a rapid basis and SpaceX thinks they've solved this problem now we'll have to see them demonstrate it I mean already this is the biggest heaviest lift vehicle that has been launched into orbit and so even if SpaceX could never figure out how to make this a fully reusable two-stage rocket which is the point it's already kind of a replacement for the space launch system like it can do the same kind of jobs and be completely destroyed so that is enormous progress obviously we're not quite at that dream of a fully reusable two-state rocket but we could see a fourth flight pretty quick apparently there are a lot of other versions of Starship lined up ready to go more Super Heavies and I know that SpaceX wants to increase the Cadence of their tests maybe do another three or four tests this year if possible and that's because the pressure is on they have promised to deliver the human Landing system to NASA to be able to have the arabis 3 astronauts land on the surface of the Moon and there's a lot of things that still need to be figured out you've got to be able to to launch the tanker into space you got to demonstrate you can transfer cryogenic fuelent it's got to be reusable because you're not going to want to destroy every Starship that you launch to refuel the tanker you've got to be able to refuel the human Landing system you got to be able to go to the Moon you got to be able to demonstrate that you can go down to the surface of the Moon get back up into orbit and then do it again when the astronauts show up in 2026 which is just around the corner so it doesn't surprise me that SpaceX is planning to increase the C aen test test test and hopefully the development of Starship is going to line up nicely with what NASA needs for Artemis 3 Voyager One Not Dead Yet back in November I reported that NASA had lost communication with the Voyager One spacecraft well I mean not exactly lost communication what it happened was they were starting to receive garble data coming from the spacecraft and they assumed that there was some kind of problem with its memory system often spacecraft when they start to misbehave you can almost be sure that it was a cosmic rate that went through the spacecraft hit the memory flip bits made it do unpredictable things and so Now Voyager is just spouting gibberish but at least they were able to receive this data and even be able to send commands back so on March 1st NASA Engineers sent back what's called a poke they tried to send a command at Voyager and within a couple of days later they got a weird signal that was different from the garble messages that they were getting but something still that they didn't recognize but then an engineer at the deep space Network looked at this garble data and realized that this was a memory dump of the flight data subsystem which is the computer on board Voyager that NASA was pretty sure was misbehaving and so it was able to dump the contents of its memory and then from that NASA is now looking carefully through the memory they're able to send more of these messages to voyage and is able to respond in unpredictable ways but the hope is that they can send more signals try and Route Around whatever damage has been done into its memory systems and hopefully get it back to a place where they can continue communicating with it so I don't know it it feels like like you know the movie arrival where you've got these aliens you're trying to communicate with them in bits and pieces and so and yet you know we built the thing and yet we're still having to try and learn how to actually be able to communicate with our own spacecraft is this how you get vur I don't know are Andromeda and the Milky Way already swapping Stars almost every single galaxy in the universe is speeding away from us except for a couple and one of those is androma which is that gigantic Galaxy that's just 2 and a half million light years away from us it's on its way and in a few billion years the Milky Way and Andromeda will collide into this much larger elliptical galaxy which is named milk dromeda you've heard a lot of other names for this lot of terms they're all wrong the correct one is milk dromeda remember that but astronomers are wondering are Andromeda and the Milky Way already starting to swap Stars between them so here's the mechanism that would be causing this we know that there are hypervelocity stars Inside the Milky Way and these are on Escape trajectories leaving the Galaxy and so it's believed that these were say a star that was part of a binary system and one star went supernova and that created sort of a slingshot effect for the other star to leave the Milky Way another possibility is that one of these Stars got too close to the super massive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way and went into a three body interaction and then got flung out of the Galaxy and some of these Stars can be going a th000 kilometers per second which is much faster than the escape velocity of the Milky Way and so then it's assumed that the same processes happening inside Andromeda and so you've got these clouds of stars on Escape trajectories in all directions until then astronomers did a simulation they took Andromeda they imagined that it is ejecting stars at a rate dependent on the mass of the Galaxy and they found that about 0.1% of the stars that are rejected from Andromeda are passing through the Milky Way right now and in fact some of those Stars could then get captured by the Milky Way they could go into some other three-body interaction with our super massive black hole or somehow get captured in some other interaction the astronomers who ran this simulation proposed that we could actually track down some of these stars with Gia which is pretty cool and so some of the stars in the Milky Way started in Andromeda and vice versa of course in just a few billion years our galaxies will merge and then all it'll all be a big mushy Oly iCal Galaxy anyway white Force might be less dead than we thought when our sun dies in a few billion years it will turn into a red giant and puff out its outer layers probably consume the inner planets maybe Earth and then it will shed these layers off into space and then all that will remain is the core of the star it no longer has fuel in the core so now it's just going to cool down slowly over billions trillions of years to reach the background temperature of the universe and so astronomers used to think okay if we look at a white door star and we measure the temperature of the star then we can know what temperature it would have started out at you know hundreds of thousands millions of degrees Kelvin and we can measure the temperature that it is today and then use that to try and figure out how old the star is but what astronomers found was that these white doors seem to pause at a certain temperature and then they sit at that temperature for a long time before finally starting to cool off again and that's really bizarre because they should just be smoothly cooling down over billions of years but they don't do that and astronomers have wondered why this is happening so finally researchers think theyve figured out what's going on and it comes down to the internal structure of white dwarfs you imagine them being this giant crystal of carbon and other atoms sort of arranging themselves and cooling down over time and solid ifying you've probably heard this term that they're like the biggest diamonds in the universe that's not exactly accurate but we'll get more into this in a second and so what the researchers did they simulated the interior of white doors and they realized that if instead of it being this Crystal it's actually a liquid plasma and you've got these carbon crystals forming near the core of the white dwarf they will then float up away from the core of the white dwarf closer to the surface kind of similar to the way ice crystals form inside water and then they float up because they're less dense than the water and what you then get is this insulation around the core of the white dwarf by these crystals that are forming inside the star and then that traps the heat inside and prevents it from cooling down as quickly as you would expect and so it tells us about the interior of these white doors now I did an interview with Dr Simon Blan from the University of Victoria and he's one of the researchers who worked on that paper and we spent a while talking about this idea of white dwarfs as being gigantic diamonds and so if you're sort of fascinated by that idea and want to have it ruined for you uh definitely check out this interview every week we do a vote on our Channel where you tell us what you thought was the coolest story of the week and the winner this week was the upcoming now past launch of SpaceX Starship but like a really slim margin with the news about Bal juice could be boiling not rotating as the second most popular story so thank you everybody who voted now we post this vote within 24 hours to the community tab on our Channel or if you're just scrolling on YouTube just scrolling scrolling you'll see the vote come up quickly give it a vote and then just move on as you were now if you want the best chance of seeing this vote you definitely want to be subscribed to our Channel and you want to click on the notifications Bell and ALS Ultra black coating for telescopes telescopes need to be built very carefully and it's all about making sure that you get as much light as possible from the thing you're pointing the telescope at and minimizing any other light that could make its way into the telescope and so while the actual primary mirror is a beautiful piece of glass or the shiniest mirror you've ever seen the rest of the telescope wants to be painted black to absorb light and make sure that it doesn't bounce into the telescope Optics but the problem is the telescopes are used in Fairly demanding environments they can be in the Antarctic High Plateau they can be at the top of a mountain in Chile they can be in space and so you want to have some way of painting it that is rugged and durable traditionally if you want to make really black paint there's weird techniques like you can use carbon Nano tubes that are oriented in a way that they absorb the light and there's other methods of of painting as well but the problem is they're very fragile but now Engineers have figured out a technique to be able to paint something dark black something that absorbs 99.3% of the light that falls on it but also extremely durable the technique is called Atomic layer deposition what they do is they put the part that they want to paint black into a vacuum chamber and then they spray different gases into the chamber that then adheres to the outside of the part and and coats it with a layer of paint that is incredibly thin just a few atoms thick and there's like different chemicals you can use aluminum mixed with titanium carbide or silicon nitride and these absorb almost all the light and then you put on a different gas with more of the paint and it puts another layer and then a different gas with more paint puts on another layer and so you're building up this paint and it get this even coating across every part of it and it's also incredibly lightweight where if you're if you are going to send things to space you want it to be super lightweight now I'm sure a bunch of people are asking like could we use this to darken satellites like starlink and sure absolutely and SpaceX has actually done some tests where they painted some of their starlinks black and it definitely makes the spacecraft darker from a visible perspective but it has other problems like it can cause the spacecraft to heat up in the infrared spectrum and actually be more of a problem than the problems that was causing causing in the visible spectrum and the other problem is that really the source of the greatest reflectivity from satellites is the solar panels and you're getting this glint of the sun off the solar panels and solar panels don't work so great when you paint the black so it's painting your satellites black is not an easy solution to solve the problem of light pollution time to update your desktop wallpaper all right I have got two incredible images that you're going to want to take a look at and then use to update your desktop wallpaper the first is a new picture that came from James web this is an image of the star forming region NGC 604 and this is probably one of the largest star forming regions that is in our vicinity it is about 1300 light years across it's a monster and inside it are hundreds of stars that are vastly more massive than the Sun a bunch of them are more than a hundred times more massive than the Sun and also there are a lot of red super Giants and so these are more massive than the Sun but they are hundreds of times larger than the Sun and you've got a mix of both these really Ultra massive blue stars as well as these Ultra large red stars and together all of the Stellar winds in this area are blowing these gigantic bubbles in space in this nebula this is in another galaxy this galaxy is farther away than Andromeda and yet the resolution of James web makes the picture look this good incredible and I think the second picture is even better and actually this didn't come from James web this is a picture taken by the dark energy camera what you're looking at is the veila Supernova Remnant which is located about 800 light years away from us but it is so close and so big about 100 Lighty years across that it actually takes up a big chunk of the sky if you could see it with your own eyes it would be about 20 times is bigger than the full moon in the sky it's just that it's so faint you need to be able to do these big long exposures and this is a supernova that exploded about 11,000 years ago and then has been expanding and fading away for all of that time so the dark energy camera it's doing a survey of the sky but it's also taking some really incredible pictures and it has one of the largest astronomical cameras in operation today it can take pictures that are 570 megapixels and so to make this image they took a whole bunch of pictures and they produced a larger Mosaic that is 1.3 gigapixels and if you want to download the largest version of this file it's 2.8 GB but I guarantee you do not have a monitor big enough to handle that the full resolution is 38,000 pixels across Square so I I don't even know how many 8K TV you could spread it across and still be filling up every individual pixel but it's going to look great on your phone or your computer desktop researchers create cyborg jellyfish you probably heard that we know more about the surface of the Moon or the surface of Mars than we do about the bottom of the ocean here on Earth and that's true because it's much easier to just orbit around the moon and take pictures of the surface than it is to try to explore the ocean with its incredible pressures and depths it's a very difficult environment but there are creatures that are perfectly fine with this environment they evolved for it and those are jellyfish but the problem with jellyfish is they go where they want and they don't tell you what they saw and so researchers have figured out a way to make cyborg jellyfish what they do is they give the jellyfish a little hat that makes them more aerodynamic as they move through the water and they also implant some electrodes it's kind of like a pacemaker so that they can drive the jellyfish's motion as it moves through the water they're able to make the jellyfish move for and a half times faster than they normally would because of this increased aerodynamics Water Dynamics aquad Dynamics anyway lower drag and then they were also able to attach an instrument package onto the jellyfish so that it could sense its environment and could record data about where it is you can imagine this future where they implant some technology on the jellyfish and then they turn it loose and then let it go down to the bottom of the ocean to explore its environment take pictures bring it back up remove the equipment let let the jellyfish Go free again and you've got this chance to explore the oceans for a fraction of the price of what it would cost to actually build some kind of submersible and this story caught my eye because I sort of Imagine like what are the implications could we not only explore really extreme places here on Earth places where life is around hydrothermal vents but wouldn't it be cool if we could build something like this and take it to other worlds like Europa or in celus a way to explore the uh ice planets of the solar system I hope you enjoyed all of the stories that we did today but this is just a fraction of all of the stories that we're working on at Universe today we typically write 30 to 40 stories every week about all kinds of cool astronomy discoveries technology space exploration but if you don't want to come to the website I write a weekly email newsletter that goes out to about 75,000 people it's completely free there's no ads in it I write every word and you can sign up at univers today.com newsletter and just to sort of wet your appetite for some of the other stories that we're working on at Universe today uh have astronomers found another hen World NASA announced its 2025 budget and the News isn't good and the Pentagon released a report about any potential UFO coverup and they didn't find any so those are just an example of additional stories that I cover in the newsletter so if you want that go to univers today.com newletter I'm going to rant about distance and time in the universe but first other I'd like to thank our patrons thanks to Abe Kingston Andrew M gross Antonio lilara David Gilton and douge Stewart Dustin cable Jeremy murn Jordan young Doos Schultz Mark anest Paul roorbach Steven Kaki Steven fer Munley and Vlad chiplin who support us at the master of the universe level and all of our supporters on patreon so last week we talked about Bal juice and how Bal juice was furiously boiling and there must have been a dozen comments with roughly the same thing that said B juice was boiling or since it happened billions of years ago it's already in the past and like obviously when we see things we are seeing into the past that just because light moves at the speed of light whatever you see it is the past when you were looking at the moon you were looking at the moon as it looked about a second ago when you look at the sun you were seeing the Sun as it looked about 8 minutes minutes ago when you look at Alpha centara you're seeing it as it looked over four years ago and when you look at Bal juu you seeing it as it looked about 640 years ago but Bal juu could explode as a supernova tomorrow or it could explode in a million years and there's a lot of time for there and you can add 640e slices into a million years many times so most likely what we see when we look at Bal juu is that it is doing exactly then what it's doing now and yes when it explodes it'll take about 640 years for us to find out that it happened and that's literally just how distance works in the universe