Iconic Earthrise By Artemis 1 // Rule-Breaking GRB // SpaceX Launches Starshield

Construction begins on the Square Kilometer Array, Artemis 1's iconic crescent Earthrise picture, a gamma-ray burst that breaks all the rules. All this and more in this week's episode of Space Bites. There are a lot of big telescope ideas that I'm excited about. You've probably heard me go on about the Vera Rubin Observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Observatory, the extremely large telescope, but the other really big telescope that I am really excited about is the Square Kilometer Array. This is a radio telescope that will have one square kilometer of observing area. So like not two radio telescopes that are separated one kilometer apart, one telescope with the surface area of one square kilometer. It's going to be an enormous, incredible telescope. When it's completed, it will be able to detect the signal from a cell phone in the pocket of an astronaut on Mars. It will be able to detect the air traffic control system of an alien civilization 100 light years away. This is going to be an incredible radio telescope. We've been talking about it, but finally, they've broken ground and they're now starting to build it. The telescope is actually going to be broken up into two separate components. One component will be built in Australia, and that will consist of 131,000 antennas. They kind of look like Christmas trees, but I promise they are radio antennas, and they're designed to detect the low frequencies on the radio wavelength. The other component is being built in South Africa, and this is going to consist of 197 radio dishes, large dishes, and they're designed to detect the frequencies of the radio waves. And so the two giant groups of telescopes will work together as a single observatory. You'll get that square kilometer of aperture, but you will also get the separation between the two facilities, which allows you to take even more precise images using interferometry, kind of like the Event Horizon Telescope. There's so many things that the square kilometer array is going to be going after. It's going to be scanning for pulsars, looking for transient events, it could detect the magnetospheres of extrasolar planets and help you give a sense of a place is habitable for life. It's going to obviously look for any kind of signal from alien civilizations. There's just like so many things a giant radio telescope like this will be able to do. But its big job is to probe into the region that no other telescope can look. And this is a time that is as close as possible as you can get to the beginning of the Universe. After the cosmic microwave background, after light was able to escape into the Universe, but before those first galaxies started to form, which is what James Webb is going to be looking for. There's this period of time called the Cosmic Dark Ages that lead into this time the period of reionization, when stars started to form. And there aren't a lot of ways to appear into this dark time because there are no stars, everything's dark. But there is this very special signal that hydrogen gas gives off. It's called the 21 centimeter lines you imagine like, imagine your hand, imagine a radio wave that's about as big as your hand. Neutral hydrogen will occasionally give off photons of radiation in this very specific wavelength. It's very rare, and it requires a very powerful telescope to be able to see it. But the square kilometer ray is the perfect machine to be able to find that. And so you can imagine this enormous observatory is going to be seeking out and mapping the structure of the Universe. Before the first stars started form the first galaxies started to form, give us a sense of the steps that went from the cosmic microwave background to those first stars and galaxies forming after that. It's going to take a while, we're not going to see the full completion of the square kilometer ray until the 2030s. But the cool thing about it is that as they add more and more antennas bit by bit, more and more of this telescope will come online. So they figure by say 2028, they'll probably have half of the aperture completed. So about 500 square meters, and that will be already the most powerful instrument on Earth. And then they will be able to build more and more of it over time until the full thing comes online in the 2030s. But I'm really excited that they've actually broken ground on this amazing radio telescope. Artemis completes another flyby of the moon. So the Artemis mission continues another week of stories about what's happening with Artemis. And I'm going to keep it pretty quick this week because you know, there's like a lot of tests, a lot of pictures, it's great. But the thing that I really wanted to focus on was this incredible picture that was taken by the Orion capsule as it was completing its second flyby of the moon back on December 5. And so as it was coming around the moon, you see the Earth rise from the perspective of the Orion capsule. And unlike the Earthrise picture that we saw with Apollo 8, where you saw this fully illuminated Earth, this is a crescent Earth, kind of like a crescent moon or crescent Venus. And we've just never seen Earth with this perspective rising up from the edge of the moon. And I really like this. And I think I think this is the picture that will be the iconic image that we look back and remember from the Artemis mission. But there's a lot of other cool things that are going on in this picture. You can see the Orion capsule. So it's taken a bit of a selfie in front of the moon, you can see the moon and see the rough structure of the moon, you can see that crescent Earthrise. And you can even see a reflection of the sun, which is bouncing around inside the optic system of the camera that's attached to the Orion. So great picture. The sequence of watching it rise is really amazing. So what's next? Well, Orion is falling back towards the Earth. And on December 11, it's going to enter the Earth's atmosphere, it's going to land in the Pacific Ocean, NASA will collect it, and then start to download and process the terabytes of data that it was gathering during its image, like there's 16 cameras on board, they've mostly been storing all of their information locally, not transmitting it back. So now they'll be able to get all those hard drives, flash drives, search processes data. And that's when I think we're really going to see all of the amazing pictures that were taken by Orion as part of this trip. So if you're around, if you're watching NASA TV on December the 11th, you can watch the landing and recovery live if you want. I will. SpaceX launches Starshield. We got the launch of a new service from SpaceX. And it was very quiet, we didn't get a lot of fanfare. We didn't get this big talk from Elon Musk where he stands with a big keynote presentation behind him showing off this new feature. It was just added to the SpaceX website, and it's called Starshield. And what is it? Now, you're already probably very familiar with Starlink, which is their worldwide network of communication satellites. And so they announced that they're going to make a version of this for governments. These will, in some cases, be proprietary satellites, where the purchaser can put in their own components, equip it with whatever hardware that they want. And these things will be able to communicate with each other with lasers. And so they won't be going through any existing communications network. And so it'll be private and secure for say, military operations, things like that. But at the same time, it'll probably still be able to communicate through the regular Starlink network as well. So they'll be able to take advantage of both their own proprietary satellites, as well as the existing commercial satellites. And we've really seen what role these commercial satellite networks can play. When you think about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Starlinks played a big role in allowing people on the battlefield to be able to communicate, understand their position, or just like communicate with their friends and family in a place where the infrastructure is being torn apart on a daily basis. And so you can imagine the military is also pretty interested in having this kind of a service. And so we could see this full stack integration, right? SpaceX will design, build, launch and maintain these satellites for various customers around the world, governments, militaries, things like that. And that's new. We've never seen this before. There could be more lunar landers. Now we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, that NASA has gone back to SpaceX and asked them to also build a lunar landing system for one more mission. So maybe that'll be Artemis four, we're not entirely sure yet. But putting all of your eggs, all of your lunar landing eggs into the SpaceX Starship basket doesn't make a ton of sense. What if there are delays to a SpaceX project? You know, that's now that Starship is on the critical path for putting humans on the surface of the moon. This is a bit of a problem. So NASA has agreed they put out a new request for proposal for new lunar landing options. So right now there are two teams competing for this bid that we know of on the one side, you got Blue Origin and a bunch of their partners on the other side, you've got Dynetics and their partners. And who knows, as we get closer, we might find that more teams come together to try to bid on this contract. We'll find out the results in June 2023. And the hope is that whoever wins this contract will provide the lunar landing services for Artemis five. So we'll see say two landings from SpaceX and then from some other company. I think this is a good idea, right? You want to have competition. This gives NASA options for getting humans to the surface of the moon. And that way, they're not completely reliant on this one company building this giant steel rocket in Texas. So more options, more better. Don't forget that Universe Today is much more than just this YouTube channel. This is just me summarizing the news for you. We actually run a pretty sophisticated news gathering organization with our website, our weekly emails, podcasts, videos, and other stuff. And there's a lot of people working with the company. And the best way that you can support the work that we do is to join our Patreon. Just go to patreon.com slash Universe Today. And if you do that, I will remove all the ads from the Universe Today website for life. Even if you stop being a patron, you will never see another ad on Universe Today. You'll get advanced access to our interviews and other behind the scenes content. We'll put your name in a bunch of our videos, and much more. So go to patreon.com slash Universe Today to support the work that we do so that we can remain an independent space news organization. A gamma-ray burst that breaks all the rules. Gamma-ray bursts are amazing. They are just these incredibly powerful explosions that can shine halfway across the Universe. And they form this very collimated beam of energy that if it actually strikes the Earth, even if it was billions of light years away, it can actually have an effect on the Earth's atmosphere. A gamma-ray burst that went off within the Milky Way could strip the ozone layer off the Earth. These things are energetic. But fortunately, they're mostly really far away. Astronomers have broken gamma-ray bursts down into two main classes. There are the short gamma-ray bursts and the long gamma-ray bursts. The short ones just happen for a couple of seconds, and the long ones can happen for tens of seconds. And it's believed at this point that the short gamma-ray bursts are caused by some kind of collision between exotic objects. So say a collision between two white dwarfs or two neutron stars or a black hole in a neutron star, something like that. And then the long duration gamma-ray bursts are formed by a supernova. So some giant star dies, turns into a black hole or neutron star and releases this enormous explosion, including this jet that is pointed directly at us and we see it very bright. But recently, astronomers found a gamma-ray burst that broke these rules. It lasted for 50 seconds, so very much a long gamma-ray burst. And so the detection was made. Astronomers pointed all their telescopes at this gamma-ray burst, they watched the afterglow as this thing was unfolding. And what they realized was that the chemical signature in the gamma-ray burst matched what you should see from a short gamma-ray burst. So it was like a kilonol. And you remember when those two neutron stars collided with each other and produced gold and we learned about the speed of gravity and all this other cool stuff. Well, it was one of those, but it shouldn't have been. And this is obviously a surprise. And this is a bit of a problem because before they could categorize them really easily. And now it appears you can have colliding exotic objects. And they can have some of the characteristics of a long gamma-ray burst and not always a short gamma-ray burst. What a surprise, the universe was more complicated than we expected. Now, I'm sure a bunch of you are wondering, did LIGO get a chance to observe the gravitational waves from the event? But unfortunately, LIGO is down for upgrades right now. So it wasn't operational when this kilonova happened. Evidence of a mega tsunami on Mars. We know that when an asteroid strikes the Earth, that is a very bad day. And when it hits the land, it can send up tons and tons of debris into the atmosphere. It can cause a winter that blankets the entire planet, it's bad. But when they strike the ocean, it can be even worse because it generates a tsunami. And we know that for example, the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs generated a tsunami that could have been kilometers high, as it streaked across the Earth inundated the coastlines around the planet. It turns out this might have happened on Mars. So researchers were studying the images captured by the Viking 1 lander, which landed on Mars back in the 1970s. And the terrain surrounding the lander looked very similar to the kind of terrain you would see in a flooding event, some really massive inundation of water. And they did follow on observations where they looked at the region around the lander from all the different orbiting spacecraft, you know, the Mars, reconnaissance orbiter, etc. And what they saw was evidence that there had been this giant tsunami event that had struck the region and thrown out these enormous waves, probably 250 meters tall, very turbulent, that scoured the area, push boulders around, and then flowed out through gaps in mountains. And in fact, based on these observations, they were able to actually figure out exactly the crater on Mars, where this event had been generated. It's called Pole Crater, which I guess is named after Frederick Pole. Anyway, it's what I like about this story is that, you know, we're always wondering, was there ever oceans on Mars? Well, there had to have been an ocean on Mars to get a tsunami. And so you get this confirmation of large amounts of water on Mars, matched with the evidence of this tsunami. So it's such an interesting story. It must have been terrifying when this thing hit. Speaking of asteroids. So I'm sure you're wondering, like, how dangerous are asteroids? What kind of damage would an asteroid do if it struck? Oh, I don't know, your house. And now you can find out there's an awesome new asteroid simulator, you can get from Neil dot fun slash asteroid launcher. And you can put in the size of the asteroid, the speed, the angle that it comes in at. And then you can pick the impact location anywhere on Earth. And then you can see the results. You can see how many people are vaporized and how far does the fireball go? And how far does the shockwave go? And what about the earthquakes that will cause I tried hitting my home here on Vancouver Island with a 1.5 kilometer asteroid, and it pretty much made the entire island unlivable. Now the only problem is that all of the measurements are in imperial and like that's just gibberish to me as a Canadian, but I was able to convert a few things but just be prepared, you're gonna have to figure out how many feet in a kilometer. So this is a lot of fun and gives you a real sense of how dangerous these asteroids could be. And you are grateful for the dark mission and upcoming asteroid surveying missions are going to help us chart all of the dangerous asteroids out there and try to prevent and predict them in the future. So anyway, this is a lot of fun. I think you'll really enjoy it. All right, those are all the stories that we had today. Of course, we're gonna have links to everything I talked about in the show notes down below. You can also get even more space news in my weekly email newsletter. I send it out every Friday to more than 55,000 people. I write every word, there are no ads and it's absolutely free. Subscribe at universetoday.com slash newsletter. You can also subscribe to the Universe Today podcast. There you can find an audio version of all of our news, interviews and q&as as well as exclusive content. Subscribe at universetoday.com slash podcast or search for Universe Today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. A huge thanks to everyone who supports us on Patreon and helps us stay independent. Thanks to all the interplanetary researchers, the interstellar adventurers, and the galaxy wanders. And a special thanks to Josh Schultz and Andrew M. Gross who support us at the Master of the Universe level. All your support means the Universe to us. All right, that was all the news that we had for today. We'll see you next week.