BIG Mars Sample Return Update // Three HUGE Launches // EPIC Comet Incoming

we've got two new options for NASA's Mars sample return Mission an explanation for why Mars can get planewide dust storms stealing secrets from Conan the bacterium and we could see a really bright Comet next week all this and more in this week's space bites des's perseverance Rover is currently exploring jezo crater on Mars and as it moves along it is collecting samples of the surface of Mars it actually has two ways that it's collecting these samples has these small titanium canisters and so it drills down into a rock sample or collects regali and then puts it into one of these sample containers and then it's holding them inside the Rover for a future delivery it then also drops copies of those samples onto the surface of Mars that then that's a backup so something happens to the Rover you can still collect these backup samples and so the plan for perseverance was that it would eventually meet up with a future Mars sample return Mission this would be a combination between NASA and the European Space Agency they would send this Rocket To Mars it would land on the surface meet up with perseverance perseverance would hand over the samples then this spacecraft would take off meet with an Orbiter which would then return the samples back to Earth and this was the plan and work had been underway to actually create this sample return Mission and then people started to realize that it was going over budget and that it was going to be incredibly expensive we were seeing budgets that were looking like they would go higher than1 billion too much money and so NASA went back to the drawing board they asked a bunch of their commercial Partners to come up with ideas to be able to do Mars sample return Mission cheaper more quickly and this week we heard the two options that now NASA is considering so the one option is something that would be very similar to The Landing system that deployed curiosity and perseverance to the surface of Mars they call it the sky crane now the ascent vehicle that would bring the samples off of the surface of Mars would have to be bigger and so this sky crane would be larger but imagine a beefed up version of the sky crane the other idea is that instead of funding it internally they go to an exterior commercial partner like SpaceX or origin they send a heavy lift Lander to the surface of Mars that can then meet up with perseverance collect the samples and deliver those back to Earth in terms of budget for the beefed up sky crane they're looking at probably 6.6 to 7.7 billion all in and that includes the investment by the European Space Agency to develop the return Orbiter and then if they go with a commercial heavy lift partner then they're looking at between 5.8 and 7.1 billion but still with either options we're probably not going to see them launch until 2030 2031 and see the samples come back in the mid 2030s and keep in mind that the Chinese are still planning to launch their Mars sample return Mission by 2028 with returning samples by 2031 so it just shows that bringing these samples from Mars is still an incredibly high priority it's one of the Great purposes of perseverance but trying to come up with a way to feasibly bring those samples back under budget within a reasonable amount of time is still an incredible challenge so we're going to have to keep our eyes on this and figure out which way NASA finally decides to go this is how you get Global dust storms on Mars Mars is known for its huge dust storms in the right season you can get these Regional dust storms start to build and build and if the conditions are right they will meet merge and eventually you can get the entire planet covered in this single Global dust storm and if you're actually on the surface of Mars the air pressure is incredibly low like 1% of Earth and so it's not like you would be buffeted by these howling winds like was depicted in the Martian but it would definitely obscure the light that's coming from space and make your solar panels not work very well everything would get covered in dust and in fact this is what killed the opportunity Rover a couple of years years ago was that it got caught in one of these big dust storms but scientists are trying to figure out what are the underlying conditions that cause these Regional dust storms to turn into Global dust storms and they think they figured this out so they looked at weather patterns on Mars for two kinds of dust storms which are called A and C and then looked at the kinds of conditions that are on the surface of Mars and what they found is when you get unseasonably high temperatures on Mars then you get a lot of material that is lifting up off of the surface of Mars and so that's driving a lot of this dust into the atmosphere and then that can start to move around the planet and eventually you get that Global storm and so like the takeaway from this is like when you have really nice weather on Mars Panic mimicking Conan the bacterium there are plenty of extremophile forms of life here on Earth think about the hardig grades the hearty water bears and then there are other kinds of cyanobacteria and mosses and lyans and things that can really handle the harsh conditions of space but one of the hardiest is called dioc caucus radio durans and this is a type of bacteria that is incredibly Hardy to radiation it can withstand thousands of times the amount of radiation that would kill a human being and just keep on going and now scientists think they've figured out some of the secrets to this bacteria's ability to withstand deadly radiation and think that they can actually turn this into a kind of treatment for human beings they think they can create an antioxidant that works in the same way that radio durans does so it would be bonded with other chemicals that would form this free radical Scavenging agent that would move through your body and you can imagine that astronauts are going to be spending the next couple of years away from Earth outside of our protective magnetosphere would get a vaccine that would then have this agent moving through their body that would be soaking up the free radicals and help limit the amount of radiation damage now if you got into like a direct solar storm and you got like a lethal dose of radiation right away then there's not a lot of ways to protect against that but if you've got long-term radiation damage then there's a way you can sort of decrease the downsides of that how Pluto and Sharon became a double planet Pluto and its Moon Sharon are unique in the solar system that we know of where you've got this dwarf planet and its moon and the two are tily locked to each other as they rotate around a Common Center of mass and this Common Center is outside of Pluto now compare this to the Earth and the moon the Earth and the moon orbit around a Common Center of mass but that Common Center is inside Earth itself and while the Moon is tially locked to Earth Earth is not tially locked to the moon but with Pluto Sharon the two are turning and they're always facing each other now it's believed that Sharon was formed in the same way that the moon was formed that some large object crashed into Pluto and then caused this debris but now scientists think that the actual event that created Pluto and Sharon was very different from the one that created the Earth and the moon and so you had this Pluto and this Proto Sharon object that crashed into it instead of the both completely liquefying and merging into this new object with this debris coming out the two got very close and what the scientists are calling it kiss and capture so you've got Pluto and Sharon sort of kissing mashing together and then orbiting around each other for a while similar to like a snowman think about aroth which was that object that New Horizons flew past that looked like sort of two big snowballs patched together and then as they continue to spin they sped up they set separated out again but now their orbits and their orientations were locked together and that's how you got Pluto and Sharon what that means is that Pluto and Sharon are compositionally different from each other they weren't mixed together in the way that say the Mars siiz object Thea that crashed into the Earth and that formed the moon that's all Blended up into this planet paste with Pluto and Sharon they are compositionally separate and different every week we do a vote on our Channel where you tell us what you thought was the tastiest space bite and the winner this week by a landslide was is dark energy and illusion so thank you everybody who voted on our Channel now we post this vote into the community tab within about 24 hours of when we release this video and so if you're just browsing on YouTube and you see the vote give it a second vote uh of course the best way to see it is to subscribe to the channel click on the notifications Bell look at a bunch of our other posts interact with them and that will teach the algorithm you want to see more of this content do we have to lose the night sky to satellites thanks to light pollution much of the world can no longer see the Milky Way now I live in a place that is dark enough that I can actually go at night and you know if it's not raining which it always is but if it is clear skies then I can see the Milky Way from my backyard but I'm sure many of you who are watching this video right now can't see the Milky Way from your backyard and some of you have never seen the Milky Way which is painful and that is because of light pollution that people have decided that instead of pointing their lights down where they are used they are pointing them up into the sky for no purpose except to destroy our ability to see the cosmos so light pollution is a huge problem but there is another problem that is starting to grow and that is the light pollution that's coming from satellites the good news is that when you go outside you don't see a lot of satellites there could be dozens above but they're too dim for you to be able to see the bad news is that all of those satellites are are reflecting a little bit of light and they are increasing the amount of light pollutions thought that so far with the 5,000 is satellites that we have already light pollution just in general has increased no matter where you go around the world you can't get away from it anymore even into like remote deserts tops of mountains things like that there is still this combined light pollution coming from all of these satellites and then the problem gets worse which is that in addition to these satellites reflecting light they're Emitt radio waves and there are a lot of radio telescopes that are attempting to scan the night sky and now you've got all these bright radio sources that are moving through their field of view even if they can't see the satellite itself the radio emissions are so strong now we're starting to see some compromises between the people who run these satellite groups and the people who are attempting to view the night sky for example there are these radio quiet Preserves on Earth where as even starlinks pass overhead they have to turn off their emitters until they passed through the area and then they can turn them back on again but even doing that you get a little bit of radiation leaking in from the side where the satellite has just come over the horizon it's still beaming its radio waves and then it turns it off and you've also got the call for information from astronomers to get more data for when these satellites are going to be passing through the field of view so maybe they time their observations to wait for the satellite to pass through before they do their exposure but now you've got astronomers coming together trying to form committees and develop regulations with governments to try and put some kind of constraints on the amount of light pollution that you can get from these Mega constellations so hopefully we'll get some compromise finally where we can both live anywhere on planet Earth receive signals from space but also astronomers can go about their work uncovering secrets about the universe a possible bright Comet next week so the universe is going to try to troll me again and this is that there could be a very bright Comet next week the comet is called c224 G3 Atlas And if the best possible predictions turn true this Comet could be as bright as Venus in the night sky it might even be possible to see during the day but if if but maybe so there's like a lot of weasel words in there now the comet makes its closest approach to the sun on January 13th and last weekend it actually had an outburst now if it was completely falling apart as it was getting close to the Sun then that would be bad news but if it's actually just getting new parts of its surface opening up cracking then it could put out a lot more material and could become a lot bigger and brighter for those of you who like to do your stargazing at night bad news this comet is coming in on the dawn side of the sun which means that you're going to have to get up early in the morning look to the east before the sunrise if you want a chance to see it but I I think you know how this is going to play out is if this does end up being a very bright Comet you're going to start to see news about it everywhere so starting January 13th I would go out in the morning while you're walking the dog uh and take a look to the east to see if you can see this Comet and if you miss it don't worry it'll be back in 160,000 years so uh nice try Universe I'm you I'm still going to go watch and finally we've got three interesting rocket launches that we are keeping our eye on here at Universe today the first one is the new Glenn launch and this should be the first orbital launch of new Glenn although it hasn't even done a suborbital launch so the first ever launch of new Glenn ng1 and we just learned that the weather conditions out at the cape are not great and so they've pushed the launch back to January 12th but at 1:00 a.m. eastern standard time so it's going to be for most people in North America it's going to be late at night for people in Europe it'll be in your morning and then shortly after that we should see the seventh launch of the super heavy and Starship stack and so that'll be on January 13th the same day when the comet makes its closest approach to the Sun so the big Improvement that we're going to see this time around is that they're going to test actually deploying dummy satellites from Starship there's going to be like this slot on Starship where they're able to deploy some of these starlinks now they're not real satellites and they're going to be following the same ballistic trajectory as Starship but it'll test whether or not can actually do this and then they have some other Technologies they're going to try and test with the re-entry portion of the mission they're going to try again to capture the super heavy back at the Launchpad so we'll see if that works this time and then finally on January 15th we should see a falcon launched two different lunar Landers the first is the blue Ghost one from Firefly Aerospace and this is the latest of the NASA commercial lunar program so it's going to have a whole bunch of uh NASA and other experiments that is going to take to the surface of the Moon and then the second one is from ipace and this is the hakuto r Lander and this is the fall on the previous Lander from ipace failed and hopefully this one will stick The Landing down to the surface of the Moon so the next couple of days are going to be really interesting and obviously we'll bring you the update next week but it should be a very spaceflight heavy episode next week while you're watching this week's episode of space bites I am writing my weekly email newsletter where I cover many many more stories about space and astronomy for example the moon is going to be covering up Mars briefly 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