S26E83: Unveiling Secrets - From Euclid's Voyage to Martian Monoliths

AI Transcript

This is Space Time Series 26 episode 83 for broadcast on the Tawthor, July 2023.
Coming up on Space Time, lift off the Euclid Space Telescope heads for Il-2.
Ancient volcanic activity discovered on the far side of the Moon, and NASA's Mars
Ingenuity helicopter has suffered another communications blackout.
All that and more coming up on Space Time.
Welcome to Space Time with Stuart Gary.
[Music]
The European Space Agency's Euclid Space Telescope is now on its way to orbit in the Lagrangian
L2 position on the dark side of the Earth following a successful launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon
9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
[Music]
Falcon 9 has successfully lifted off from Pad 40 and throttled down to prepare for Max Q,
which is coming up at T+1 minute.
Power in telemetry nominal.
One minute and about 12 seconds.
Maximum dynamic pressure.
In great news, we have passed through Max Q. Next up, we have a few events happening back
to back that will be Miko stage separation and SCS-1.
Miko is main engine cut off and that's where we'll shut down all nine of the M-1D engines
to slow the vehicle down in preparation for its next event, which is-
M-Vecchil has started.
Stage separation.
And that's where the first stage separates from the second stage.
Right after stage separation, the first stage will begin its journey back to Earth for
landing on our drone ship a short fall of gravitas.
And during that time stage two will continue on its journey with that third event, SCS-1
or second stage engine start one.
And that is where the single Merlin vacuum engine will light up and propel the second stage
along with ECS-Euclid spacecraft to orbit.
In addition to these three major events, the fairing halves will separate less than a minute
after SCS-1.
Main engine cut off stage separation confirmed.
M-Vec ignition.
Miko stage separation and the M-Vec engine has ignited-
The vehicles are following nominal trajectories.
Grid fins on the first stage are deploying and in about 15 seconds or so we should have
fairing separation.
Fairing separation confirmed.
The fairing halves have deployed.
Both fairing halves are brand new and are now making their way back down to Earth and
will be recovered by our recovery vessel dug to it.
White puffs on that first stage that is a nitrogen gas puffs for attitude control.
Stage one FTS has saved.
The engines have reignited on the first stage.
This is the entry burn with three of nine M-1D engines reignited.
Vehicle will be landing for its second time today and just before the landing burn begins
we will also have SCS-1 on the second stage that is second engine cut off one.
That's where we'll shut down that M-Vec engine on the second stage.
This is the first of two burns for this mission and that is coming up here in just a few seconds
followed by the landing burn about 20 seconds after that.
M-Vec engine has shut down and the landing burn has begun on the first stage vehicle.
I can look at the signal.
Okay.
No, a little over the distance.
Falcon 9 touching down on a shortfall of gravitas.
This landing marks the second successful landing for this particular booster and marks our
200 and fourth overall successful recovery of an orbital class rocket including both Falcon
9 and Falcon Heavy first stages.
Following launch and separation from the rocket, ESA's European Space Operations Center
in Dumpstadt, Germany confirmed acquisition of signal from Euclid by way of the NN in West
Australia.
Once it's in position 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth, it'll join the James Webb
Space Telescope which is orbiting nearby in studying the infrared universe.
But just getting Euclid to space has been a monumental task as Andreas Rudolf, ESA's flight
operations director for Euclid explains.
The telescope is sitting upright under the faring of the rocket before it's lifting off
so any particles that fall or can fall from the faring into the telescope can immediately
lead to degradation of the sensitivity of the instruments.
And basically what you do in order to not get particular contamination is that you have
a very, very clean and new faring.
So this faring for Euclid has very special requirements.
It's a new faring, it's not one which has been reused from a previous Falcon 9 flight.
It also is very clean in order to make sure that we don't get any particulates into the
telescope that may degrade it once in a little bit.
We make sure the telescope is very, very stable and very well calibrated because what we're
looking for is really very difficult to measure because otherwise we would have measured
it already from ground.
So I think in a nutshell that's the challenge is we have here for Euclid.
So Euclid is a mission that is a cosmological mission is looking back 10 billion years into
the past and the evolution of our universe.
So in order to do this you need a very, very sensitive instrument.
So once we are in orbit one of the things that Euclid is never allowed to do is to look
with its telescope and it's very, very sensitive instruments into the sun.
To make sure that doesn't happen we have two things.
First of all we have a so-called sun shield which is protecting us from the sun as long
as the spacecraft is pointed correctly.
And the second thing is we have automatic protection mechanisms which make sure that whenever
the sun is approaching the telescope line of sight we immediately switch into a fallback
mode to make sure that it doesn't have-
While the web space telescope will find specific targets and then zoom in on them with unparalleled
clarity Euclid will undertake a large scale survey in mapping program.
It's specifically focusing on studying the dark forces of the universe, dark matter
and dark energy, two of the biggest mysteries in science and neither of which will understood
it.
Although the name "dark" matters seems to suggest that the matter is in fact dark it's
probably better called missing matter.
The darkness referring to our lack of knowledge.
When scientists observe large objects on a galactic scale they notice the behavior of these
objects doesn't fit the standard model for gravity.
For example there seems to be some additional amount of mass which provides extra gravity
needed to hold galaxies together and stop them flinging apart as they rotate.
But even more interestingly, stars in the outer edges of galaxies appear to orbit the
galactic center at the same speed as those closer in towards the center.
And that just doesn't happen in real life.
In fact if you look at our own solace system you can see that our planets don't do this,
they match our expectations.
It's as if there's a huge amount of additional mass over 80% more than what we can see that's
holding everything together and that's what scientists are calling dark matter.
And although its actions are observable, it itself is invisible we have no idea what
it is.
And it doesn't end there.
Along with the observable evidence of dark matter comes dark energy.
The accelerating expansion of the universe.
When we look at deep space almost everything in the distance seems to be moving away from
everything else and the further away you look the faster things seem to be moving.
But that rate of expansion is an even, the movement seems to be accelerating.
Unegalactic scale every object seems to exhibit a redshift similar to the Doppler effect
in picture here when say an ambulance or fire engine passes you with a sirens on.
Basically the sound waves moving towards you as the vehicle approaches are compressed
or blue shifted while the sound waves moving away from you as the vehicle disappears
in the distance are stretched or red shifted.
And it's the same thing with light waves.
The further away the object is the greater the redshift.
For very distant objects that redshift is stretched beyond the visible light into the
infrared part of the spectrum which is where telescopes like web and euclid operate.
Understanding dark energy will help scientists answer one of the ultimate questions of the
universe.
What is our ultimate fate?
Well the expansion of the universe eventually slowed down and stopped resulting in a sort
of steady state with things state pretty much the way they appear now.
All gravity then take over and gradually cause everything to start to reverse and contract.
Eventually crashing back together in a big crunch which could then trigger another big bang
then another big crunch and so on.
Is that how the universe works of eternity?
Or will the universe continue to expand forever until eventually only the stars in our own
galaxy will be visible that is until they burn out and begin to wink off one after another
eventually leaving the universe cold and dark.
What astronomers call the big freeze.
Or will dark energy cause that rate of expansion to continue to accelerate until it becomes
so strong that galaxies are flying apart star systems are torn to sunder.
Maybe dark energy becomes so strong that planets are ripped apart and ultimately even atoms
are split into the constituent quarks and electrons.
The so-called big rip.
Euclid's mission is to better understand these phenomena.
Accurate light scale observations are needed not only to map the three dimensions of space
but the four dimensions of space time.
Euclid is going to create a massive archive of data of everything you can see.
Billions of galaxies and quasars at to some 10 billion light years over time with the
idea of seeing the effect of dark matter and dark energy at a level of detail unparalleled
so far.
This high precision chart of the shape, position and movement of galaxies will reveal how
matter is distributed across immense distances in the cosmic web and how the expansion of
the universe has evolved over cosmic history, enabling astronomers to finally infer the
properties of dark energy and dark matter.
This will in turn help theorists in prove our understanding of the role of gravity, the
oldest and least understood of the forces.
And it will pin down the nature of these enigmatic entities.
Named after the great Greek mathematician Euclid, a 2160 kg spacecraft will achieve its
ambitious science goal using a 1.2 meter reflecting telescope that has two innovative scientific
instruments.
The VIS which takes very sharp images of galaxies over a large fraction of the sky and the NISP
which can analyze galaxies infrared light by wavelength to accurately establish their
distance.
The data will then be fed to some 2,000 scientists from 300 institutes around the world.
Among them is Satashi Miyazaki, the director of Japan's Subaru Telescope.
Euclid is a European space mission which has a 1.2 meter telescope combined with visible
and infrared images and spectrograph.
We have a division roles between Euclid and the ground based telescope.
Euclid takes a very sharp image, very deep, towards very faint objects.
However, they don't take a car or information.
In that sense, we provide car information.
The Subaru's features a wide field camera which we call hypersprank camp.
That is a very unique camera in terms of light correcting power because it's 8.2 meter
telescope and very wide field, like a 1.5 degree across.
Combined with the large, correcting power and a wide field image, we can survey very quickly
over the very wide field.
We have a very high sensitivity in that.
We are very good at taking the red sky in the longer wavelengths.
The CFST, the American features high sensitivity in the blue one, so the combination of the
high blue and higher red makes perfect sense.
That's the collaboration makes perfect sense.
Over the next 4 weeks, Euclid will travel towards the Earth Sun Lagrange L2 position.
An equilibrium point in the Earth Sun system located about 4 times further away from the
Earth and the Moon.
Euclid will be manoeuvred into orbit around this point and mission controllers will start
the activities to verify all the functions of the spacecraft.
Check out the telescope itself to make sure it survived the launch and finally turn on the
scientific instruments.
Scientists and engineers will then be engaged in an intense two month long phase of testing
and calibrating Euclid's instruments and preparing the spacecraft for routine operations.
Over the next 6 years, Euclid will survey a full third of the sky with unprecedented accuracy
providing a degree of sensitivity never before seen.
This report from ECTV, Euclid's 6 year mission will explore the so-called "dark side" of
the universe.
Scientists have discovered that 95% of the cosmos is made up of unknown forms of matter
and energy called "dark matter" and "dark energy".
Euclid will map approximately 1.5 to 2 billion galaxies to look for the subtle effects that
dark matter and dark energy have on the structure and expansion of the cosmos.
Once the analysis is complete, vital clues about the behaviour and characteristics of dark
matter and dark energy will be revealed.
It's space time.
Still to come.
Ancient volcanic activity discovered on the far side of the moon and NASA's Mars ingenuity
helicopter finally phones home after losing contact for 2 months.
All that and more still to come.
On space time.
Astronomers have discovered a large granite formation below the lunar surface far side.
The massive slab reported in the journal Nature was likely formed by cooling of molten lava
that fed of volcano or chained of volcanoes that must have erupted early in the moon's
history, possibly as far back as 3.5 billion years ago.
Scientists made the discovery while examining microwave frequency data to measure heat below
the surface of a suspected volcanic feature on the moon known as Compton-Belkovic.
The authors used this data to determine that the heat being generated below the surface
was coming from a concentration of radioactive elements which can only exist on the moon as
granite.
Granites are the igneous rock remnants of the plumbing systems below extinct volcanoes.
Granite formations lived in the wake of lava that's cooled without erupting and known as
batholists.
The study's lead author Matthew Seagalab from the Planetary Science Institute says any
big body of granite found on Earth used to feed a big bunch of volcanoes, much like
the large system feeding the cascade volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest today.
Seagalab says batholists are much bigger than the volcanoes they feed on the surface.
For example, the sea or Nevada mountains in California are a batholist, left over from
a volcanic chain in the Westing United States that existed long ago.
The lunar batholist is located in the region of the moon, previously identified as a volcanic
complex.
That research is a surprise that it's size of an estimated diameter of some 50 kilometres.
Granites pretty common on Earth and its formations generally driven by water and plate tectonics,
which aid in the creation of large melt bodies below the Earth's surface.
However, granites are extremely rare on the moon because it lacks these processes.
Seagalab says finding this granite body helps explain how the early lunar crust must have
formed.
He says if you don't have water in the process, it takes extreme conditions to make granite.
So he is this system with no water and no plate tectonics, but you have granite.
And that begs the question, was there once lots of water on the moon, at least at this
one spot?
Or is it just that this one spot was unusually especially hard?
This is space time.
Still to come, NASA's Mars in Gen. Helicopter phones home after losing contact for two months,
and later in the science report, researchers warn of the growing thread of low crop yields
due to worsening climate change.
All that and more still to come, on space time.
NASA's Mars in Gen. Helicopter is finally phoned home after suffering another communications
blackout, this one lasting for a record 63 days of radio silence.
But unlike the last blackout, this one was expected.
Information managers thought communications might drop out because of a hill lying between
the road to copters landing location and the position of its Perseverance Rover base station
blocking communications between the two.
You see the CarSci6Wield Rover provides a radio relay between the helicopter and NASA's
mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
So scientists had to wait until the Perseverance Rover crested the hill and was back in line
of side of the helicopter before communications could be reestablished.
Ingenuity Flight 52 was the 363 meter 139 second long journey designed to reposition the
tissue boxized helicopter and take images of the surrounding terrain for the Rover Science
team.
Perseverance in ingenuity are currently sitting on top of the Jisro Crater River Delta fan,
a rugged terrain which makes communications difficult and radio dropouts more likely.
Now the goal at this moment is to simply keep ingenuity ahead of Perseverance, which mission
managers say means occasionally pushing it beyond its communications limits.
The good news is the data downloaded from ingenuity indicate that all systems are nominal and
though 1.8kg chopper will be ready for Flight 53, which will head westwards towards a rocky
outcropped with scientists want Perseverance to explore.
Just over two months ago mission managers unexpectedly lost contact with ingenuity for 6 days.
That was caused by a combination of the challenging topography between the helicopter and the
rover and also low battery power aboard ingenuity due to increasing dust levels covering its
solar array.
A brief two day loss of signal happened about a year ago, also due to the chopper's battery
is not getting enough charge from the solar array as Jisro Crater moved into the Martian
winter.
The robotic ingenuity helicopter arrived on the red planet attached to Perseverance rover's
underbelly back in February 2021.
Of course ingenuity was only ever designed to undertake 5 or 6 demonstration flights, simply
to confirm that an aircraft could fly on another planet.
But it's now undertaken 52 flights and it's proven to be a huge help for mission managers,
scouting ahead of the rover, looking for the best route and spotting interesting geological
features.
Speaking of interesting features, Perseverance rover has captured an image of a strange
donor-shaped rock in Jisro Crater.
The rover photographed the mysterious monolith from a distance of about 100 meters using
its remote microscopic image which is part of the supercam instrument.
Of course oddly, shape rocks are uncommon, either on earth or Mars.
They're often formed over eons as wind sandblast rock faces.
This particular rock may have formed after a small rock or mottable rocks eroded near its
centre, and that left behind a cavity which was later enlarged by the wind.
The rover had captured an earlier image of the same rock two months ago, but that was
from a distance of around 400 meters using the mass cam z instrument.
This new image shows the strange donor-shaped rock with far greater clarity.
This is space time.
And time that I take another brief look at some of the other stories making news in science
this week with a science report.
A new study warns that the growing problem of climate change is increasing the likelihood
of major food producing regions such as North America and Eastern Europe simultaneously
producing low crop yields.
The findings reported in the journal Nature Communications are based on new computer modeling
and suggest that current climate models underestimate the risk global warming poses to
global food security.
The authors stress the urgency of rapid emission reductions in order to prevent climate extremes
and their complex interactions from becoming increasingly unmanageable.
The findings suggest potential high impact blind spots in current climate risk assessments
and highlights the urgent need for more research to support modeling improvements in climate
and agricultural domains.
Dutch archaeologists have uncovered a 4,000 year old religious site which they've dubbed
the stone "Hange of the Netherlands" which includes a burial mound that served as a
solar calendar.
The 20-meter-wide burial mound located southeast of Utrek contained the remains of 60 people
including men, women and children and had several passages through which the sun directly
shone on the longest and shortest days of the year.
The scientists from the University of Growningen also discovered two other smaller mounds.
It sought the three mounds we used as burial sites for about 800 years.
Jeffrey Hintonley, so-called "Godfather of Artificial Intelligence" as a gainerage
governments to step in and make sure that AI machines do not control society.
Hidden made headlines back in May when he quitties job at Google after a decade of work
to speak more freely about the dangers of AI following the release of chat GPT.
The highly respected AI scientist issued his latest warning to the pact audience at the
Collusion Tech Conference in Toronto.
The conference has brought together over 30,000 start-up founders, investors and tech experts
all looking to learn how to ride the AI wave.
At Hinton's Warn for every 99 smart people trying to make AI better, there's only one very
smart person trying to figure out how to stop a taking over, and maybe society should want
there to be a bit more balance in this area.
He says it's important that people understand that this is not science fiction, it's not
just fear mongering.
Hinton's sister is a real risk that humanity needs to think about and people need to figure
out in advance how to deal with it.
He also pointed to the dangers of fake news being created by a chat GPT style botz saying
AI generated content should be marked in a way similar to how central banks watermark money.
Telstra Australia's largest telcos issued their mid-year assessment of where the company's
heading and what its future holds.
With the details we're joined by technology, editor Alex Harabroyd from TechAdvice.life.
Well, I made a series of announcements.
The first one was that they reached 85% of the population with 5G coverage as at June 30,
2023, so the mid-year point and their own track technology coverage plus during 2025.
Already 38% of their traffic is parod over its 5G network and they want 80% by financial
coverage.
They're going to be shutting down their 3G network as already disclosed in 2024 and actually
after about 3G coverage that when I'm fine myself from 3G I have practically zero bandwidth
to try to disconnect it.
It's just a voice.
They're committed to replicating all of that 3G coverage with 4G coverage which would
be a lot better because you can get a decent connection by the time they switch the 3G off.
Of course they're trying to get 5G as many places as possible.
They've also got a thing called Cloud RAM and this is where you can run out of the phones,
network, the radio software inside the cloud and this is their radio software that I guess
determines the frequencies that it's able to broadcast on.
And they've got the first commercial call was done last December on a cloud RAM network
running in the cloud and they've actually got that deployed in 7 sites in Queensland
with more to come.
So in addition they're going to be reselling Elon Musk's satellite service for rural and
regional areas, only basically in places where they can't service it with other connections
and they'll do voice and also they'll do voice and broadband.
And apparently the voice aspect is first asked me done before which is pretty cool and
they also had a second generation of their 5G home broadband Wi-Fi device with a bigger Wi-Fi
range than even their NBNs might mode them 3 and more than their 5G first generation
home broadband mode.
And this second generation is also compatible with Telstra Wi-Fi mesh extender so that you
can create an even larger Wi-Fi network under the same network name not with any strange
extender add-ons that can break the connection when you're going from one network to the
other.
And they'll also replace all the first gen with second gen free of charge because the second
generation units actually do carrier aggregation and they use different parts of the different
5G networks that Telstra has broadcast different frequencies and they can use that more efficiently
than the first gen units so it makes sense for them to upgrade you and give you these units
that can actually sell more 5G home broadband modes in different areas because each of the
three Telcos has limited the availability of those systems so they don't flood their 5G
network for everybody else.
But they're always adding more people on different sub-lives and it's an alternative to satellite
and alternative to traditional NBN and you get three to six hundred megabits of download
speed without having to worry about your garden being dug up if you get fiber quite to the
premise.
So a really good set of announcements from Telstra's bank.
What about the existing NBN satellite network?
Does that mean that's redundant even though it's less than 10 years old?
No, NBN is still using it, still offering their SkyMust service and they also have had
to come to the party with unlimited downloads.
I started with a trial in evening periods where there was sort of unlimited things like Netflix
and that sort of usage which previously was causing problems because it only had a certain
amount of data that could download over the system.
Elon Musk came in, completely revolutionised that, you know, 150 bucks a month gives you
100 plus megabit download, you've got upload speeds and so it's, you know, welcome competitions,
competitions always welcome and it's force the NBN to think about their satellite plans too.
But at the moment, I mean, they also have 5G spectrum.
You know, they were telco competitors, even though they supply all the other telco's as
a whole set, I mean, they have to also theory what they're doing.
So Telstra is just using the fact that it can get a whole range of other services from
different players.
Telstra is working with different satellite providers and they want to be able to use some
of their back hall with Elon Musk's challenge, they're also with the one web to be able
to mitigate when they have outages so that the entire state doesn't go down and they can
allocate resources and eventually also they want things like AI to fix network problems
automatically, self-heal and they're concerned about the problems of AI being poisoned and
you know, giving false information.
I mean, they didn't mention it, but it's the old garbage in garbage out and in fact we
just had one of the US courts that in a freedom of speech should be preserved and that some
of the social networks shouldn't be censoring people and I was thinking in Australia we
have, we need a first amendment, the type of referendum in Australia where we can guarantee
freedom of speech and not being censored by government ministries of truth or companies
acting on behalf of the government and we've got to fight battles in Australia with the
censorship that is being talked about.
He was a mission information, this information which can effectively even police what people
are saying in private WhatsApp and other messages.
But we'll have the government to tell us what's right and wrong now.
Well, that's the thing, you know, of course that's the problem.
So the issue is freedom of speech is something we should replicate globally and should
say what about Jeffrey Hinton's idea that there has to be some sort of a watermark putting
anything that's created by AI.
Look, that is a great idea.
I mean, being able to tell what is AI generated contact.
We need AI to be neutral.
Now, if you want to left wing or right wing or other point of view, you should be able
to ask your AI to tell you what that point of view is.
That the information that presenstery should be neutral until you ask it for different
views to be applied.
I think that Hinton's warnings as the grandfather of AI should absolutely be heated.
Hinton says for every 99 people, very smart people working to make AI is better.
There's only one person working to make sure they're safe.
Obviously that ratio has to change.
We need to be ensuring that our AI is explainable ethical trustworthy.
When Luke Skywalker said may the force be with you, we didn't know he was talking about
Skynet.
Well, I mean, that's the eternal battle of good and evil in that particular story.
Hopefully there's more of us on the good side to fight back against bad.
And ultimately, I hope we muddle through and win.
That's Alex Aharavroid from TechAdvice Start Life.
[Music]
And that's the show for now.
Space time is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Apple podcasts, iTunes,
Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Pocketcasts, Spotify, Acast, Amazon Music, Bites.com,
SoundCloud, YouTube, your favorite podcast download provider, and from Space Time with Stuart
Gary.com.
Space Times also broadcast through the National Science Foundation on Science Zone Radio,
and on both I Heart Radio and Tune in Radio.
And you can help to support our show by visiting the Space Time Store for a range of promotional
merchandising goodies, or by becoming a Space Time patron, which gives you access to triple
episode commercial free versions of the show, as well as lots of bonus audio content which
doesn't go to air, access to our exclusive Facebook group and other rewards.
Just go to Space Time with Stuart Gary.com for full details.
And if you want more space time, please check out our blog where you'll find all the stuff
we couldn't fit in the show, as well as heaps of images, news stories, loads of videos,
and things on the web I find interesting or amusing.
Just go to Space Time with Stuart Gary.tumbler.com.
That's all one word, and that's Tumbler without the e. You can also follow us through @stuartgaryontwitter
at Space Time with Stuart Gary on Instagram, through our Space Time YouTube channel.
And on Facebook, just go to Facebook.com/spacetimewithstuartgary.
And Space Time is brought to you in collaboration with Australian Sky and Telescope magazine, your
window on the universe.
You've been listening to Space Time with Stuart Gary.
Space has been another quality podcast production from bitesz.com