Game Over for Gaia // Why Ingenuity Crashed // Humanity's First Quasar

we finally learn why Ingenuity crashed Gaia is nearing the end of its life NASA is planning cargo deliveries to the moon and a twin of the Milky Way seen in infancy by web all this and more in this week's space bites on January 18th 2024 NASA's Mars Ingenuity helicopter took its 72nd flight in jezero crater on Mars but little did people realize this would be the final flight of in uity the helicopter Rose to an altitude of 12 M hovered captured a bunch of images of its surroundings at 19 seconds it started to descend and then at the 32 second mark it lost all communication with Earth Engineers tried to figure out what happened then they were able to get pictures from Ingenuity and they could see that it's rotors were broken follow-on images from perseverance showed that it was in a very bad state the helicopter had crashed now I always expected that Ingenuity would crash into a tree which is the end of all of my drones but apparently it crashed into the sand and so the question was what happened why did Ingenuity crash and so for most of this year NASA Engineers have been trying to figure out what were the series of events that led to its crash now one of the big hints came with the fact that Ingenuity was flying in a region of jezero crater that was very Sandy and there weren't a lot of visual features on the surface around it that's how the helicopter did its navigation it was looking for rocks and other features on the surface of Mars that could use to then visually navigate itself around but the area of jezo crater that was in was very smooth just sand and there were a lot of Fairly steep sand dunes all around it wasn't able to figure out exactly where it was it wasn't able to figure out how far away it was from the surface and so it crashed and it looks like it happened around the 202nd mark it was trying to find features to determine its altitude and it wasn't able to find them and so what they think happened was that when it landed on the sand it landed on an incline and it wasn't designed to handle that excessive load on the rotors which caused them to snap off and so that's it for Ingenuity I mean it was only supposed to fly a handful of times and ended up flying 72 times it showed us that sending a helicopter to the surface of Mars is a great idea mandatory for future missions if they don't send a hel opter on any future Mission to Mars I think they're going to be missing something so there will be some lessons learned for future missions hopefully they'll have much better navigation systems on board to avoid this mistake and instead they'll be looking for the trees to finally crash into also an interesting fact it's not dead it's still functioning it just can't fly anymore and occasionally it sends messages back to perseverance the Rover and the helicopter are still communicating with each other as perseverance gets farther and farther away the end of Gaia now I won't shut up on this channel about how much I love the Gaia spacecraft this is the mission from the European Space Agency that's measuring the velocity the distance and the composition of countless stars in the Milky Way and so many really interesting science papers have come out of this looking at the Motions of white dwarfs seeing how various galaxies merged into the Milky Way and are still being digested but Gaia like mini spacecraft has a limited amount of propellant on board and it is running out out and so we now know that we've reached pretty much the end of the life for Gaia the mission is going to complete its science operations at the end of January 2025 it's going to send all of its final remaining data home and then in March or April of 2025 Issa is going to passivate the spacecraft now what that means is they're going to push it into a new orbit that keeps it out of potentially colliding with any other spacecraft in the area remember it's at the Earth Sun L2 lrange point which is a fairly large area without propellant it's going to drift away from this point and hea wants to make sure that it's not going to crash into something else down the road and so that'll be the end of an era and right now there are no follow-on missions to Gaia planned which you know I keep asking people about this the idea that has the most traction is a version of Gaia that has infrared and so it'll be able to look at objects that are cooler and dimmer than all of the stars that Gaia saw and that would be really useful that would tell us where the brown dwarfs are where the red dwarfs are maybe rogue planets things like that so hopefully we'll see another version of Gaia coming up now is Gaia Beyond rescue probably uh nobody has any plans to go out to the L2 Point try and dock with Gaia and try to service that mission but it is theoretically possible and so people at the University of Illinois did a research study where they to figure out what would be the best way to service a spacecraft that is out at L2 when you think about it it's very tricky business because as your spacecraft is attempting to dock with a telescope out at L2 it's going to be firing a propellant that propellant could impact the telescope and cause damage to it in the paper the researchers proposed that you could attach to Gaia a sort of spider-like additional module that have its own power more propellent and would give the spacecraft a new lease on life but this is just like a theoretical idea not anything practical that anybody is planning and I know like why don't they send Starship out to go and rescue well Starship doesn't fly that far yet couldn't they send space launch system I mean it would cost more to launch space launch system than to launch multiple gu Gaia is going away and we all have to be okay with that so thanks guia more cargo deliveries for the moon now we're all very focused on the upcoming human missions to the Moon as part of the art emis project Artemis 2 where team of four astronauts are going to do a flyby of the Moon Artemis 3 where humans are going to set foot on the moon again for the first time in 50 years but this is just the beginning and NASA is planning several additional Artemis projects after that they've already booked a lot of the equipment they've already ordered the rockets and now we're getting a much better sense of what some of NASA's future plans are for the moon and one of their big requirements is to be able to deliver large amounts of cargo to the surface of the Moon and they've been writing technical papers about their requirements for several months we've been reporting on this quite a bit on Universe today and this week we got a more formal designation from NASA on what they're looking for they want two cargo deliveries one they're probably going to be going with SpaceX one they're going to be going with blue origin and for cargo one is going to be the japanese-built pressurized Rover that the astronauts will be able to drive around on the surface of the Moon for probably weeks and not have to be in a space suit and then the other big cargo that NASA wants is called the lunar surface habitat and so this is going to be a more permanent habitat on the surface of the Moon now we probably won't see these cargo deliveries until some of the higher numbers of the Artemis missions and of course you know with the upcoming change in administration and with the influence of people like SpaceX we don't know what the future holds for emis but if this continues on we could see these large payloads making their way to the surface of the Moon fine-tuning the mass of the Milky Way a standing question is what is the mass of the Milky Way and it's pretty tricky because you are inside the Milky Way right now how do you measure the mass of your house when you're inside you don't know how much house is outside your house if you're inside your house same problem we have with the Milky Way now researchers have come up with more than a dozen ways to measure the mass of the Milky Way and a lot of it is about the movements of things passing around in the Milky Ways you measure the movements of stars it tells you the mass of the thing that they are orbiting the Milky Way but how do you distinguish between how much is bionic matter stuff like atoms you me stars and how much is the Dark Matter portion of the Milky Way and these are still unknown questions but in general astronomers estimate that the Milky Way weighs about a trillion solar masses and you know the eror bars are give or take a few hundred billion times the mass of the Sun and so back to that question of how much is bionic matter how much is dark matter and so one component of the bionic matter is these high velocity clouds that are orbiting around the Milky Way and astronomers have estimated that they could be up to 10% of the mass of the Milky Way well a new study just came out that measured the movements of these high velocity clouds in the Milky Way and watched how they interact with other features in the Milky Way and they've set that estimate way down and so now they think that in fact these clouds probably only account for less than a tenth of a percent of the bionic mass of the Milky Way so just continuing to Chip Away bit by bit figuring out what is the total mass of the Milky Way 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 the announcement of NASA's new administrator Jared isaacman so thank you everybody who voted this week now we will post the new poll onto our YouTube channel in the community tab within about a day of when we post this news but of course if you're just scrolling on YouTube you should see the poll show up go ahead take a second interact with that train the algorithm subscribe to the channel comment on all our videos send them to your friends uh that's how more people will find out what we're doing super flares once a century we are in solar maximum now which means that we are seeing the most activity on the surface of the Sun and this is going to decline as the sun continues its regular 11-year cycle to get towards solar minimum and then we're going to see the least amount of activity on the sun then it's going to rise and one of the things that you see during solar maximum is more solar flares more coronal mass ejections and more auroras it is the best time to be looking at the sun but we know that the sun has a dark side I mean can the Sun have a dark sun has no dark side but the sun has a dark side and that is that it can fire off more catastro atrophic flares and of course the classic example is the Carrington event which happened in the 1800s where a solar flare hit the earth and it was so powerful that people saw auroras around the equator that Telegraph poles lit on fire that this was a very serious demonstration of what the sun is capable of unleashing and astronomers have seen other flares off the surface of the Sun that are the same magnitude as the carington event they just weren't pointed at the Earth they were just headed off into space and hit some other planet or star system far away and there are some events that are so powerful that the record of them is measured in the tree rings that have been found over the last few thousand years and the Carrington event isn't one of them they are more powerful than the Carrington event and so how often do stars like our sun produce these kinds of solar flares well researchers have an incredible data archive and that is all of the observations made by NASA's Kepler mission astronomers recently went through Kepler data they looked at 56,3 stars observed by Kepler because Kepler was looking at a large field of stars and saw many of them for long periods of time they were able to count up 220,000 years of Stellar activity across all the stars across all of that catalog and then they were able to figure out how often stars like our sun tend to give off killer solar flares and the answer is about once a century so about every hundred years a star like our sun gives off a very powerful kind of deadly flare like the Carrington event and so that roughly matches the kind of observations that we have made and so we should expect to see something that powerful not necessarily in our Direction like this is the key they can go in you know the sun is a ball can go in any direction very few of those directions are pointed directly at the Earth but those super flares can happen on a regular basis even with a star like our another clue about ultra high energy cosmic rays now I talk a lot about cosmic rays on this channel but mostly with their impact pardon the pun on space exploration these are some of the highest energy particles in the universe you've got particles you know mostly they're just protons accelerated to nearly the speed of light but they can be heavier all the way up to iron and when these pass through our bodies they deliver an enormous ener punch that can break apart our DNA and then that can lead to cancer down the road we are mostly protected here on Earth by the magnetosphere but once you go out into space you have no protection and you experience much higher levels of this Cosmic radiation and this is going to be like one of the thorniest problems that we face in space exploration but for scientists the question is how can these be possible also this is kind of a good reason why things like say the large hron colleter can't destroy the Earth because it can't produce particles that are as high energy as the cosmic rays that are striking the Earth all the time you know once we cross that line and get to above 10 million times what the LHC can produce then we might have a problem and so what causes them how can you get that much energy now it used to be thought that there was some kind of shock acceleration so you would have a supernova or colliding neutron stars or the accretion disc around a black hole and it would somehow be able to accelerate these particles to these incredibly high energy stat you know just a fraction below the speed of light but another possibility is that it has something to do with magnetic fields and now a new paper has gone into calculating the kinds of particles that should be generated by magnetic fields and finds that that tends to better match the observations and so instead of necessarily a shock wave coming off of a supernova that's striking particles accelerating them instead you've got magnetic fields that are twisting and turning in a very extreme environment like a around a black hole or a neutron star and then you get these tumbling reconfigurations of the magnetic field and that snaps away particles out into space that could then be delivered with that much energy it seems like that might be the better answer for where these ultra high energy cosmic rays are coming from but the mystery continues an early twin of the Milky Way the James Webb Space Telescope has recently observed a fascinating Galaxy seen as it was only 600 million years after after the big bang normally this would be really hard for web to examine but fortunately this galaxy was behind a much larger Galaxy cluster that acted like a natural telescope lens a gravitational lens and so astronomers were able to see this galaxy although distorted in unprecedented detail and in fact they were able to see this Galaxy and see Star clusters orbiting around this Galaxy and based on their calculations astronomers think that this galaxy is very similar to what the Milky Way probably looked like at that point in the history of the universe because of the star clusters orbiting around the Galaxy astronomers have nicknamed it the Firefly Sparkle Galaxy I don't isn't that a My Little Pony character and so when you think about the Milky Way today it's 100,000 Lighty years across well this galaxy one of its companions is only 6,500 Lighty years away the other is 42,000 Lighty years away so you could fit both of these companions within the size of the milkyway so it's much smaller and yet thanks to this gravity ational lens astronomers are able to study it and really get a sense and I like what makes me so excited is like this is what web was born to do to answer these questions what did the Milky Way look like at the beginning of the universe as the building blocks were coming together to form the large Galaxy that we see today and now astronomers have found one example of these galaxies with the building blocks coming together it's amazing Hubble revisits Humanity's first quazar in 1963 astronomers realized that what they thought was a star was actually a Galaxy 2.5 billion Lighty years away they were able to match the observations of the star with radio missions coming from around it and they were able to then use that to calculate the distance to this galaxy they called this object a quasi Stellar object a quazar but they didn't know what it was and there were many exotic explanations for what could cause a quazar and in fact if you go back and watch Cosmos there's a point where Carl Sean is talking about quazar they don't really know what they are well now we know they are super massive black holes that are actively feeding on material around them so this object that I mentioned the one that was discovered in 1963 is called 3c273 and recently it got an update from the Hubble Space Telescope and what's great about Hubble was it was able to block the bright light from the central core of the Galaxy and then reveal fainter features around that and so it was able to see a new core jet at the center of the Galaxy Core blob and then other blobs and so just like lots of other features and structures around this and of course you can see this giant jet that is blasting out of the Galaxy out into Interstellar space Intergalactic space and so it's great to see this piece of astronomy history then updated by the Hubble Space Telescope when is it going to get its web photo all right I'm going to talk about who I would love to interview but first I'd like to thank our patrons thanks to Abe Kingston Adam Schaefer andram gross barley gring David Gilton and David matz Dennis elbery Dustin cable James Clark Jeremy murn Jim Burke Jordan young Josh Schultz Paul robach science rec.org spiders swap. Steven Kaki Steven fer Munley and Vlad chiplin who support us at the master of the universe level and all of our other supporters on patreon so a question that I get asked a lot of people is who would be the my dream person to be able to interview and the reality is that I don't have a good answer for that I think people are expecting that I'm going to mention some celebrity but I don't want to interview a celebrity the people that I love to interview the most are the researchers who are doing the work right now who are in the middle of it who are well spoken able to communicate have a passion for the work that they're doing and they would love to explain to an interested lay person what it is that they're working on ideally they have a really nice audio setup as well and so I know a lot of people who are scientists early career scientists people who want to be science communicators that are watching this Channel today and like I would love to interview you if you are working on research and you think that you have an interesting story to tell and you have a good audio setup um or I can help you with that feel free to reach out and let me know who you are and what you're working on uh I I can't guarantee that'll have time to interview you but you know that'll save me the time from having to hunt you down so that we can do an interview and so if you want a great example uh we were talking about ways to clean off regolith off of astronauts and I mentioned some research into using liquid nitrogen and one of the researchers behind that work posted that they had done this work and if I wanted to interview them and I did and it was awesome so uh yeah like if you're a scientist and you're watching this reach out let me know and I would love to be able to interview you now of course we've got lots of really great interviews and one of the new things that we're doing is giving you the viewers a chance to tell me some of the questions that you have for the researchers and of course we've got that available on our patreon for free you don't have to become a member you can just access that for free and give me your recommendations all right we'll see you next week