SpaceX Are Go For A Starship Catch

Voyager 1 is almost one light day away. Blue Origin is making its main engine lighter. Good news and bad news for Mars dust, and on SpaceBytes Plus, measuring the cosmic web. All this and more in this week's SpaceBytes. NASA's Voyager spacecraft are about to hit a major milestone. Voyager 1 on November 18th will be one light day away from Earth. In other words, it's going to be 172 astronomical units. That is astronomically far away from us. And keep in mind, right, these spacecraft were launched in 1977 and have been traveling ever since. They're equipped with these radioisotope thermoelectric generators, essentially a nuclear battery on board that is steadily losing power year after year after year. They lose about 4 watts of power every year. And in order to keep these spacecraft operational for this much time, NASA is slowly, one by one, turning off the instruments on board. And of course, they don't need most of the instruments, they were the ones designed to to look at planets, but now out. In interstellar space, at the very edge of the solar system, they are still using some instruments to be able to measure this kind of interstellar material that they're encountering. Still sending signals back home, still doing science. In order to keep the spacecraft operational, NASA did a pretty risky move back in October, which they were calling Big Bang. I think that's a pretty great description for the level of sort of Revision that they had to do to the spacecraft essentially they took a bunch of higher power components and then swapped out the functionality to lower power versions that were on the spacecraft they swapped over two heaters and an eight track digital recorder to a lower power version to be able to still keep the same functionality but be using less electricity and so now the Voyagers are using about 200 watts of power. on an ongoing basis but of course this number is continuing to decline by this four watts per year that i mentioned so eventually and it won't be too long now they're going to reach this point where they're going to have to finally shut down both of the spacecraft and they will go silent like the pioneers did before them but until then more science from the voyagers So far away from us. Hopefully they can last long enough to meet the alien spacecraft and then come back to Earth. And that story was written by David Dickinson on Universe Today. This next story comes from Bruce Dormy. And this is about the concept of the Nemesis, which is this theorized red dwarf star that's a companion to the solar system. And, you know, there's no direct evidence that there is a red dwarf star that is orbiting the sun or that they are sharing a common center of gravity. There is this really interesting coincidence, which is that over the last 250 million years or so, there have been extinction events at almost every 26 million years. And when you look at the event that killed the dinosaurs, it's roughly double that number. So falls on that timetable. And so the theory is that there is this red dwarf star that is orbiting around the solar system. And every 26 million years, it gets close enough to To perturb the objects in the Oort cloud. That sends comets inward into the solar system that can then crash into the Earth. And comets are scary. Asteroids are scary enough, but at least they are orbiting around the Sun in a predictable way. We can go out, we can map them all, we can find the killer asteroids and be able to track down their locations, chart what their future trajectories are going to be, and then send a mission like DART to be able to knock them off course and then sort of Make the solar system safer, but comets come out of nowhere that they can come from your cloud which is this giant sort of spherical cloud around the solar system come down in any direction and crash into the earth at a higher velocity There's no reason to believe that the Chicxulub event was caused by a comet and not an asteroid the evidence is Inconclusive, at this point, something crashed into the Earth, caused a lot of damage. And you would think, well, if there is a red dwarf that is orbiting the Sun, shouldn't we be able to find it? And searches have been done. There was NASA's WISE mission that came out a couple of decades ago, and they were doing this kind of thing, searching not for red dwarfs, but actually searching for a brown dwarf that might be a companion. To the sun. And they were able to map out a large enough region around the solar system to say, no, there is not a brown dwarf that is in some kind of orbit with us. But this idea of a red dwarf on this longer trajectory, it could still be out there. It's just that it has to be having a very low, proper motion on the sky. Can't be moving very much from... From year to year, from our perspective, kind of hiding in that sky. And there's a lot of places that are sort of very crowded and busy. And so this idea that there is this companion red dwarf star, there's no evidence for it, except for the weird cadence of these extinctions. And that you kind of can't rule it out right now. If you want to sort of learn the backstory of this theory and what astronomers think and how the evidence goes either way, check out the story from Bruce Dormley. So we've got news this week that Blue Origin is going to be making some pretty significant changes to their rockets. Two major components are getting an update. The first is a new design for their main engine. Now, if you're familiar, The Blue Origin engine on the New Glenn is called the BE-4, and Blue Origin has announced that they've got a new version of this rocket engine called North Star, and they say this is going to replace the BE-4 pretty soon, and that this engine should have dramatically reduced number of parts, 30% less mass, and much can actually be 3D printed, which makes It makes the manufacturing process a lot simpler. And so Blue Origin thinks that they can build these engines at a quarter of the cost that they're currently building the BE-4 engines. And when you think about kind of the downstream on this, other rocket companies are getting in line to be able to actually buy the BE-4 engines. The United Launch Alliance Vulcan was using a BE-4 engine. You can imagine them supplying these to other companies as well so they can make this cost competitive. Maybe there's an actual competitor to SpaceX. So that's the first part, this North Star engine. The second part is for the upper stage, and they're calling this the GS3, or the Glenn Stage 3. That's the upper stage of this, and it's used for if they're going to be sending payloads to the Moon. It'll be liquid hydrogen, oxygen, and in fact it's the same engine that they're planning on using for their lunar landers. But hydrogen is a really tricky molecule. It is the smallest, it tries to get out of almost any kind of containment that you... So there's a lot of engineering just to keep this fuel contained while it's in space. But if Blue Origin is able to figure all of this out, they should have a lot of new options for being able to send payloads to space. They hope that they could be launching a thousand New Glenn rockets a year. We'll wait and see on that claim. This next story comes from Evan Gough, and it's about Mars. Now, Mars, we always say Mars is sort of cool. It's cold and dry today, but the evidence is building that it was once warmer and wetter, that you can actually see evidence of river channels across the surface. Of course, all of the rovers on the surface of Mars are finding that there was places with lots of water for long periods across the surface. But Mars is smaller than the Earth, it has less mass than the Earth, and so it cooled down to the point that its internal dynamo stopped. And then that caused its magnetosphere to shut down and that allowed the space weather to blow the atmosphere off of the planet. But obviously... Mars had tremendous amounts of volcanism in the past. The largest volcanoes in the solar system are right there on the surface of Mars. But this is probably evidence of its cooling. That as the planet was cooling, as it was shrinking, as it was starting to solidify, there were vents that were remaining where all of the magma was able to escape out onto But there are hints that Mars is still more volcanically active today than researchers once thought. There's a couple of lines of evidence for this. One is from NASA's InSight lander, which put a seismometer down on the surface of Mars and detected well over a thousand Mars quakes. So there is still a little movement, a little rumble in the tummy of Mars. But then there's another line of evidence that comes from the Trace Gas Orbiter. And this is a spacecraft that is orbiting around Mars. And examining the atmosphere of the planet. And it detected the presence of hydrochloric acid in the atmosphere. And it was assumed that this hydrochloric acid was some part of the atmospheric cycle on Mars. It was seen when Mars was at the closest point to the Sun. And so some kind of raising temperature, more direct sunlight, changing of the seasons was causing this hydrochloric acid to form. But, new evidence shows that it's there when Mars is at the farthest point from the Sun as well, and so that could indicate that there is some kind of internal volcanic outgassing that is producing this hydrochloric acid, which wouldn't last long in this environment on the surface of Mars. So there has to be some source that is causing it. So this could mean that in fact there is a lot more volcanic gases that are being emitted from Mars and maybe there is more activity. This next story comes from Matt Williams, and this is the good news, bad news on the Mars dust problem. So, When the Apollo astronauts went to the moon, they experienced this lunar regolith, the ground-up rock on the surface of the moon for the first time. And they found that this stuff was really nasty. If you look at it under a microscope, it's like little jagged pieces of glass. And they found that this stuff was getting into their equipment, into their fabrics, it was causing wear and tear. But more worrisome, it was getting into their lungs. It was causing them to feel almost like... Cold-like symptoms, stuffy nose, coughing, and this was the result of the stuff getting into their lungs. Now, we're still not sure what are the long-term consequences of you getting this regolith in your body. But we know that there is a similar kind of dust problem over on Mars. And of course, we've talked about how many spacecraft have died because this dust on Mars covers up their solar panels, they're no longer able to generate power, and they have to shut down. And this dust gets into everything. So, NASA's Perseverance rover is equipped with a bunch of patches of potential spacesuit material. Essentially, NASA's trying to figure out what kind of spacesuit is going to work best on Mars. And so they're leaving this stuff for well over a thousand days out there on the surface of Mars. And so a new study is showing that all of the different spacesuit materials are actually standing up against the Martian regolith a lot better than anyone thought. And the reason is probably because the regolith is smoother, it's not as jagged as the stuff on the Moon. You've got wind blowing it around, it's rubbing together, it's wearing down its edges. But there is a problem, and that is that we know that the regolith on Mars has perchlorates mixed in, these really toxic chemicals. And so the rover is able to do analysis of these spacesuit panels that it has on board, And it's able to detect the presence of. Perchlorates and other chemicals mixed in with this dust. And the dust size for the particles is small enough that if you breathe it in, it gets into your lungs and it can even get into your bloodstream. You get perchlorates, which is poison, in your bloodstream, which is not good. And so the good news is that the regolith is probably not going to be as destructive to the equipment on Mars. The bad news is that the astronauts might be breathing it and, you know, we'll probably Probably don't want to do that. Every week we do a vote on our channel where you tell us what you thought was the best space news story of the week, and the winner last week was that Vera Rubin found Neptune's Trojans. So thank you everybody who voted last week, of course we're going to put this week's stories into the post tab here on YouTube, so if you take a second, go to the post tab, you should see this week's poll, vote, and then the best chance to see it, subscribe, click on the notifications bell, just obey the algorithm. This next story comes from Carolyn Collins Peterson, and it's about a possible answer. To a mystery. So researchers have found this strange source of gamma radiation coming from a region in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The object is called LMCP3. And they know that there is some kind of giant star that is at the heart of this object. But what is the source of the gamma radiation? Well to get gamma radiation, you need something incredibly energetic. There's very few things that can do this. A neutron star, or a magnetar, or a pulsar. And the other option is a black hole. Normally, if you're trying to examine these really high energy particles, you use a gamma radiation telescope, but those have to be in space. But you can see associated molecules that are being energized by the gamma radiation in other wavelengths. And so researchers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile to examine the region In much longer wavelengths that Alma uses. And they were able to look at the carbon monoxide that is around the area. And what it looks like is that you've got this giant star, this O-type star, and it has some kind of binary companion. And whatever this binary companion is, it has a swirling accretion disk, it has generated jets. It's a quasar, a micro quasar. So you've got what is probably a black hole that is orbiting around this giant star, and it is gathering up material either from the star or just from its environment. They've built up this accretion disk and then the magnetic field lines whipping around the central object have turned into these jets that are blasting out in our direction and interacting with the gas and dust that's around it. But this is sort of what the researchers are suggesting is probably the cause. But you could also have a pulsar with sort of a rapid magnetic field that's spinning around and you get pulsar winds that are coming out and interacting with the environment. But it's interesting. You know, there's been a lot of stories about how black holes. They're kind of the same, they scale really beautifully no matter what size you look at them. You could have the small ones, stellar mass black holes that can produce accretion disks and jets, essentially micro quasars, and then you can have the supermassive black holes, the ones with millions of times the mass of the Sun. Accretion disk, jets, quasar. In both cases, it really just comes down to how massive is the black hole to give you I'm going to give you the scale of... what you see coming out of it, but the mechanisms are almost exactly the same. So as early as Friday, November 13th, we should see the next launch and capture of the SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy booster. And, in theory, this is it. This is the big one. This is when SpaceX tries to catch Starship in the same way that they've been catching the Super Heavy booster. Now, so far, they have actually caught the Super Heavy booster back at the Mechazilla in Boca Chica, but the Starship has gone into space, even gone into orbit, but has always done this soft landing in the Indian Ocean, with an amazing amount of precision, and they've even been able to recover one of the boosters. But this time, they're ready to try and catch it back at Boca Chica. So if all goes well, we should see the launch on November 13th at 4.45 Central Time. Starship will launch on top of the Super Heavy booster. They'll separate. Super Heavy will return back to the launch facility and be captured, while Starship continues on into orbit. It'll fly at an altitude of 275 kilometers and complete 14 orbits around the Earth. It'll deploy a series of the new V-3 Starlinks, and then it will begin its reentry burn and try to make a safe landing back at Boca Chica and be caught. And if this works, then they will have completed and sort of proven the entire cycle that they That they can launch the rocket as a stack separately. Catch both Super Heavy and Starship, but this is very risky and so they're going to be taking a trajectory that will allow them to abort at every stage of the process if it doesn't look like they're going to be able to make it back safely. Now I'm going to talk a bit about what our coverage is planned for this at the end of this episode. I hope you're enjoying this week's episode of Space Bites. Now of course, we don't like ads, you don't like ads, and so we've made a version of this episode that is available without any ads at all. And while I'm talking about this right now, there should be a QR code that has appeared on the screen. So if you're watching this on your television and you want to be able to go and see what that additional version of this episode is, you can click that right now. And we've got a version of this week's episode with one bonus story. And the bonus story is about how astronomers are using the MeerKAT Observatory in South Africa to measure the cosmic web. I'll put a link down in the show notes. And of course, this is just a fraction of the stories that we're covering on Universe Today this week. And so, if you want to stay on top of all of the spacesuits, everything that we think is relevant, definitely check out the site, and of course, if you want this done for you, I will write my weekly email newsletter, which I send out every Friday to 70,000 of my closest friends. It's completely free. I write every word. There's no ads. Go to universetoday.com slash newsletter to sign up. All right, I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of Space Bites. I'm going to talk a bit about what our coverage is going to be for the upcoming... Starship launch. But first, I'd like to thank our Patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingson, Andrea Progetti, Bulldizarg, I Hate This Place, It's The Smell, Brian Bodie, Kerrigan, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Bialik, David Gilton, David Matz, Evan Dot Pro, James Clark, Jeremy Madden, Jim Burke, Marcel Smits, Michael Purcell, NasaOceanGuy, NordSpace, OneStepForAnimals.org, Rinkaidu, Richard Williams, Sean Sargent, Team49, Tales of Canada, Vlad Shiblin, Wolfgang Flutz, Zelda, Bulldizarg, Your Silence Is Fooling No One, who supports us at the Master of the Universe level, and all our patrons. All your support means the universe to us. So the timing is kind of funny with this week's episode of Space Bites. Normally we will hold off releasing the episode until after the rocket flies but in this case it's really just going to push our recording time too late and then the editing time and the release time would be the Saturday. So we are actually going to go early and so we are releasing this episode a day early just so it's really clear that we have no idea. What is going to happen with the Starship launch when we release this week's episode of Space Bites. And so we're going to be releasing the question show on Friday instead. But then, that gives us time to be able to see not only the launch, if that was successful, but then the 22 hours of orbital flight, the release, the capture, what happened after that. And so, by this time next week, we'll be able to give you much better coverage. But that's me on the video side. We've got our writing team at Universe Today that is going to be covering the story as it happens. And so you will expect to see a whole bunch of stories throughout this entire week. This is going to be exciting. I mean, I got to say, even the most hardened skeptic has got to be excited about the idea of this giant rocket taking off. Both the booster and the Starship coming back and being captured. This opens up the door for fully reusable two-stage rocketry. And even if Starship is not the company that you would like to be able to do this, so much rocketry would be made better if we could get these two-stage rockets going. So I am watching, I'm excited, and of course we'll keep you posted on what happens. Alright, we'll see you next time.