SpaceX's Historical Achievement // A Star with Insane Resolution // Iron Winds on a Planet

Polaris Dawn launches and completes the first private spacewalk. The surface of a giant star is resolved with incredible detail. Starliner comes home empty and amazing new images of Mercury from BepiColombo. All this and more in this week's Space Bytes. So Polaris Dawn finally launched on Tuesday, carrying four private astronauts to orbit. This is exciting and historic for a bunch of reasons. They launched on a Falcon 9 carrying a Crew Dragon and they went into a fairly unusual orbit. So they started at a fairly extreme elliptical orbit going at 190 kilometers at the lowest point, the perigee, and then up to 1400 kilometers at the apogee. And this is the highest that human beings have gone from Earth since the Apollo era. And then they changed the orbit to be a little bit lower. And so they were about 700 kilometers above the Earth and they went on the first private spacewalk. Now, this spacewalk is very different from the kinds of spacewalks that they do with the space shuttle, with the International Space Station, because there's no airlock in Crew Dragon. They had to depressurize the entire spacecraft. And so all four of the astronauts had to get into their spacesuits and then they depressurize the cabin of Crew Dragon. And then two of them, Jarek Isaacman and Sarah Gillis, went out of the hatch on the nose and out into space. Now, they didn't float free from the capsule. They hung on to a ladder outside the capsule. But still, this is the first private spacewalk that anyone has ever done. And it's interesting when you compare the design of the SpaceX spacesuits that were designed for this spacewalk to the NASA suits that are designed for their EVAs. And with the NASA ones, they're gigantic, bulky. They've got big backpacks. Now, these give them autonomy so they don't have to be attached with an umbilical to the spacecraft the way that the SpaceX ones were. But still, I mean, the SpaceX ones look pretty sleek and it was interesting to sort of hear the mobility that they were getting. I know a bunch of astronauts were quite interested to see how the mobility was on the SpaceX version of the spacesuits. The whole process was about 30 minutes, but they only just got a couple of minutes outside the spacecraft before they had to come back inside. But still, that's been checked off the list. Now there's just a couple more days left. They're going to perform some more experiments, enjoy their time in orbit, and then they'll be returning back to Earth in a couple of days. A star seen in amazing resolution. Stars are big, and yet they're very far. And even our most powerful telescopes really can't resolve any features on the surfaces of stars, except for the Sun. They can't resolve anything other than about a single pixel. The only star that we've ever been able to see any features on its surface is Betelgeuse, and that is an enormous star that is relatively close to us, with some of the biggest telescopes on Earth being able to do that. But now astronomers have looked at the surface of another star called R Doradus. It is also a monster. It is 350 times bigger than the Sun. And the scans were made with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, the ALMA telescope. And what's really interesting is they were able to do continuous scans of the surface of R Doradus for 30 days. That was enough time for them to watch convective bubbles appear on the surface of the star and disappear. I mean, we see these on the Sun, but they are these tiny granules, these convective cells where hotter material is escaping from the interior of the Sun. It bubbles up to the surface, releases its energy, and then this material sinks back down into the Sun. But in the case of R Doradus, these things are massive. Each one of these bubbles is 75 times bigger than the Sun. And so we've got another star that we're able to image the surface of directly. NASA recreates Mars spiders in the lab. One really interesting feature that has been found on the surface of Mars has been dubbed Mars spiders. And when you look at them, they kind of look like spiders on the surface of Mars. Now, of course, they're they're not. They're a natural formation. But this was a puzzle to planetary science to figure out how this thing could probably form. And over the years, scientists have come to the conclusion that what's probably happening is that you've got this region near the poles of Mars. And during the wintertime, carbon dioxide freezes out of the atmosphere and forms a thin, relatively transparent layer on the surface of the regolith on Mars. And then as the seasons switch in and things start to warm up, the Sun is able to go through this transparent ice, heat up the regolith underneath, and then that sort of heaves it up, causes gas and cracks open this carbon dioxide ice. Then you get this release of trapped carbon dioxide underneath the ice, as well as dust and this sort of plumes up into the air and then it falls back down onto the surface of Mars. And then as summer approaches, all of the carbon dioxide sublimates away and you're left with these these strange deposits where this ice had formed and then cracked and you got the regolith depositing back down. And so this is the conclusion that scientists have been getting to. But it's even better to be able to recreate it in the lab to make Mars spiders on Earth. And so scientists used an instrument called the Dirty Under Vacuum Simulation Testbed for icy environments or dusty. And this is a small vacuum chamber that's been used for various Mars missions to be able to test out how well they can dig into the regolith and be able to examine under Mars conditions. And so they sort of followed the recipe. They put in a bunch of Martian regolith. They cooled the temperature down. They pumped in carbon dioxide. They let it freeze. They warmed it up and they got that same process where you got the gas heating up underneath, cracking open the ice. Dust is spraying out and you get the Mars spider. So explanation for the Mars spiders. Starliner comes home empty. So last week, I said that NASA was going to quickly test how well Starliner was going to be able to return to Earth now that they had made that final decision that the astronauts are going to stay on board the International Space Station. And so once that decision had been made, they pushed off Starliner from the station. It detached from its trunk and made its reentry back into Earth. And it went perfectly. It went off without a hitch. Landed at White Sands on September 7th. So now you've got Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams on board the International Space Station. They're going to be joining the crew nine that's arriving shortly, and they will be part of that expedition until February, where they will come back down with the astronauts. And then that this part of the Starliner drama will have ended. But there is really a deeper problem here, which is what happens now? Will NASA require Boeing to go back and recertify Starliner to make sure that they've fixed all of these problems with another uncrewed test launch? Or will they be willing to do another test launch with another couple of astronauts? Maybe Wilmore and Williams again to go back up to the station to demonstrate that it doesn't have the thruster problems, doesn't have the helium leaks. And Boeing is on the hook to deliver six Starliners before the International Space Station is deorbited by 2030. And we're kind of running out of time for this. And so sort of as the time is compressing, there's less and less need for those final missions with other with SpaceX filling the gaps. And so this is going to get really tricky. And I think, you know, to see what happens next is going to be really interesting. NASA's Mars mission gets delayed on New Glenn. So last week, I told you that NASA's escapade mission was going to be launching on a new Glenn rocket from Blue Origins. And despite the issues that Blue Origin had been having recently, and despite the fact that we really haven't seen very much of this rocket, we haven't seen all of the normal tests that people do with new rocket systems. There's the hot fires. There's the wet dress rehearsals. There's like a lot of preparation that goes to make sure that this rocket is ready to launch. And yet we are now weeks away, mere weeks from when the first New Glenn rocket was expected to launch the escapade mission to Mars. And so just after we posted last week's Space Bites, we got an announcement from NASA that they and Blue Origin have decided to push the launch back to spring 2025. And that's kind of interesting because there is a launch window to Mars that comes every two years. And so there's one in 2024, there's going to be one in 2026, 2028 and so on. And they're planning on launching in 2025. And that's not optimal. There is a sort of less high quality window that you can use if you're willing to expend more fuel. It's a more costly launch. We don't know the exact trajectory that escapade will do to get to Mars. I mean, they could do a flyby of Venus. They could take a different trajectory to get to Mars. And hopefully, you know, the power of New Glenn gives them options. It's a really big rocket. But still, you know, this delay was not a surprise. And if they're not able to make this, then they are going to have to wait for 2026. And then but even with 2025, this will give them time to do the wet dress, to do the hot fire testing, to run through the big checklist in public to show that they're ready to launch. But then at the same time, Blue Origin announced that they're planning on still launching one of their own spacecraft on New Glenn in November. So now we probably should see that first test launch using Blue Origin's own spacecraft to test out the new rocket before we see it testing out a NASA mission. Updates on Starship. So I'm sure you're wondering whatever happened to the flight five of the SpaceX Starship. We saw flight four and we had been saying that flight five was ready. It was sitting on the launch pad. It's ready to go since probably the middle of August. And yet SpaceX has been waiting for the FAA to give it final approval to be able to launch. And there's a bunch of environmental concerns that SpaceX has to sort of fulfill the agency's comfort level. One is how they deal with the wastewater coming from the launch system. When they launch the rocket, they have this underground pool where they are firing enormous amounts of water that then heats up and absorbs a lot of the vibrations and the energy coming from the rocket. And we saw with the very first launch, they really needed that. And so now they've got it. We know that it works, but it uses up an enormous amount of water. And then they have to deal with that water. And the FAA isn't entirely convinced that SpaceX has got a good plan for the wastewater from the system. Also, when Super Heavy returns, it's going to be coming back to the launch site and it's going to be coming in at a very fast speed. There's going to be sonic booms. FAA is concerned about that. And then also there's the interstage system, right? You've got the Super Heavy and you've got the Starship. And then there's that ring that is in between. When it launches, the two vehicles are going to detach and the ring is going to splash down into the Gulf of Mexico. And again, the FAA is worried about exactly what's going to happen, where that ring is going to land to make sure that it's not going to cause any damage. At this point, it looks like FAA won't be giving SpaceX clearance to launch Starship Flight five until November. So it's still quite a ways away and a long time for the rocket to be sitting there on the pad waiting to launch. Now, SpaceX is clearly not pleased with this outcome. And there were a pretty long, detailed article on their website about why this is frustrating, why they think they're ready to fly, why rockets are supposed to fly. But, you know, the FAA has the rules. It's going to define what it requires to give them permission to launch. And they're going to have to jump through those hoops and get there. But then Elon Musk posted on Twitter that the first Starship launches to Mars will begin in 2026. I mentioned those launch windows and 2026 is sort of the next big window if you're not ready to launch in a couple of months. And OK, they're going to send us I don't know, like, what are they going to send to Mars? What kind of spacecraft are they going to send to Mars? And then he said that humans are going to go to Mars four years after that. And like, again, like, what's the plan? You're going to bring people back. Where are they going to live? What kind of cargo? I have questions. All right. I am skeptical. And then he said they will probably begin the establishment of a permanent self-sustaining city within about 20 years from now. So I am skeptical and I can't wait to be wrong. BepiColombo's amazing Mercury flyby. The European Space Agency's BepiColombo is a mission that's going to Mercury. And before it can go to Mercury, it has to go to Mercury six times. And these are flybys designed to give a gravitational assist that will change its orbit, slow it down and be able to make it go into orbit around Mercury. And so it just completed the fourth of these flybys. And it came incredibly close to Mercury within 165 kilometers of the surface of the planet. And that is one of the closest flybys that's ever been done of Mercury. We got some of the best pictures that have ever been taken of Mercury. And so, you know, you just gaze slack jawed at these amazing images of Mercury. For example, this is this crater called Vivaldi that has the outer crater and then it has an inner peak ring. So when a giant asteroid crashed into Mercury, it caused this splash in the middle of where the crater was. And then as that material fell back down, it formed this ring. Just amazing. And there's a bunch of these incredible craters. I highly recommend go gaze at all of the different pictures and look forward to when BepiColombo arrives at Mercury for its long duration mission. Every week we do a vote on our channel where you tell us what you thought was the best space news of the week. And the winner this week was China's plans for sending a Mars sample return mission in 2028. So thank you, everybody who voted last week. Now, we post the vote here on our channel into the community tab. And so if you're just scrolling on your phone or if you want to go specifically within about 24 hours of when we post this video and so you could just be scrolling, you will see the vote show up. Give us a second. Let us know what you thought. But if you want the best chance, if you've never seen this vote, then make sure that you're subscribed to the channel that you have clicked on the notifications bell and then watch a bunch of our videos that will train the algorithm that you want to be able to see more from us and less from the nameless faceless AI robot channels. Beep boop. The formation of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole. The Event Horizon Telescope is this worldwide collection of radio telescopes that work together to deliver the highest resolution images of a supermassive black hole ever taken that the resolution was so good they were able to see the event horizon around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. And they did follow on work where they're able to measure the magnetic field environment around the supermassive black hole. They've been able to puzzle out the rotation axis of the supermassive black hole. And what's really interesting is that it doesn't line up with the rotation of the larger Milky Way, that it is off kilter. And so based on that, researchers ran a bunch of simulations and they were able to work out what they think was the most likely chain of events that got the supermassive black hole into the axis of rotation that we see today. And so they theorized that about 9 billion years ago, there was the last great merger of the Milky Way, where you've got the Gaia Enceladus galaxy crashing into the Milky Way, adding a lot of its stars. And this has been, you know, these stars have been seen moving around the Milky Way. And that also brought another supermassive black hole. And then the two black holes merged with a ratio of about four to one. So I guess maybe the Milky Way was four times bigger than the one that the Gaia Enceladus galaxy brought with it. And from that, you've got the current black hole configuration that we see today. So our current supermassive black hole formed about 9 billion years ago. I think it's really interesting how we are learning about the history of the Milky Way that we're seeing the individual streams of stars from other galaxies that have merged into the Milky Way. And now we're learning about the history of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. Iron winds blowing on Wasp 76b. Wasp 76b is one of the most fascinating planets. We've seen a lot about this world. I don't know if you remember, but we talked about this planet that had a rainbow on its surface, and this is the planet Wasp 76b. We've talked about a planet that has iron raining down. That's Wasp 76b. This planet orbits its star every 1.8 Earth days. It's so close that the daytime side of it is about 2000 degrees Celsius. And because it's tidally locked, the nighttime is a lot cooler. And so what you get is you get these powerful winds. They start up on the day side and they shift material around to the far side because it's so hot, hot enough to melt iron. You get this gasification of iron in the atmosphere of the planet. And then this iron is transported around to the far side of the planet. And then it rains liquid iron. And then that material goes down to lower levels, comes back around to the day side, is then heated up again, gasifies, is carried through the atmosphere. And you have this cycle of iron, of molten iron in the atmosphere of Wasp 76b. What a crazy world. There's more water inside planets than we thought. So scientists are trying to work out the history of water on planets. Now, here on Earth, we can examine it directly. We can see that we have the iron core. We have the mantle. We have the crust. We have water that sits on top of the crust. And we can't necessarily measure the amount of water that's on the surface of other planets. We can only measure their density. And from that, that can tell us how much water is present on the planet. And it was like assumed if you find a world that is terrestrial, but has a lower density, has a lot of water, it's probably an ocean world, right? It's got these really thick oceans of water, maybe hundreds of kilometers deep on the surface. Well, maybe not so fast that it might still have that water, but it might be underground. And so the new research shows that when you have a planet that's covered in magma, it's covered in a lot of iron as well as molten silica. And the iron, as it crystallizes, allows you to dissolve water into the iron at about 70 times better than you could dissolve it into silica. And so the iron is capturing the water and then drawing it down as it sinks down into the core of the planet as it starts to form that solid iron core like what we have on Earth. And so could very well be and even on Earth that there's actually a lot more water in the interior of planet Earth than we had originally thought. And so we see one of these worlds that's maybe a water world. Like maybe that's good news and maybe it's bad news, because maybe it actually doesn't have oceans that are hundreds of kilometers thick. Maybe it just has oceans like Earth does. It just has more water on the interior of the planet. So very interesting. We really need better pictures of these worlds. Now, while you're watching this episode of Space Bites, I am writing my weekly guide to space, my weekly email newsletter. And so there's a lot of stories that we're covering on Universe Today that we just don't have time to cover here in video form. For example, our claims of alien visitation causing a problem to society. Juno sees a brand new volcano on Io, and a stellar flyby jumbled up the outer Solar System. Now you can sign up to the guide to space. Just go to universetoday.com slash newsletter. It's completely free. There's no ads in it. I write every word in the newsletter and you can unsubscribe anytime. So join the 72,000 other people that enjoy this newsletter. I'm going to ask you to do me a favor. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Adam Schafer, Barry Lake Roofing, David Gilton, and David Matz, Dennis Liberty, Dustin Cable, Jeremy Matter, Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Josh Schultz, Paul Robock, Spiderswap.io, Steven Krasocki, Steven Fowler-Mundley, and Vlad Sheplin who support us at the Master of the Universe level, and all of our other supporters on Patreon. So we just posted a new video all about astroseismology. And this is the idea that you can measure slight variations in stars, essentially earthquakes on stars, and use that to determine the age of the stars with a level of precision that's never been seen before. This is a very new technique. I mean, it was first developed by watching the sun, but it's been extended by using data from Kepler and the test mission to be able to measure the ripples on other stars and use that to figure out how old these stars are. And the whole reason why I did that interview was because I mentioned it casually in an episode and a bunch of people told me that they would love to see an interview about astroseismology. And so we did that. And it was a lot of fun for me. I love, you know, a lot of the times I'm trying to follow the kinds of topics that I'm curious about. And partly, I know that there are certain topics that you're obviously all very interested in. And so I would love to know what are some topics that you would love to know more about, you know, like what are some concepts that you feel like you know a bit about, but you would love to be able to know further and I can go and find some researchers who are actually working in that field, interview them and try and get a lot of those answers out and so we can understand it directly. So go ahead. Take a second. Put some comments down below and let me know the topics as detailed as you can of what you would like to know more about. And I will do my best to find someone that I can interview about that topic. All right. We'll see you next week.