Video from Titan, Watching Artemis 2, Moons with Moons with Moons | Q&A 408

What kind of media can we expect from Titan Dragonfly? Could you track Artemis too with an amateur telescope? Can moons have moons that have moons? And in Q&A Plus, should journalists use more storytelling? All this and more in this question show. It's time for the question show, your questions, my answers, as always, wherever you are across my channel. If a question pops into your brain, just write it down, I'll gather them up and I will answer them here. All right, let's get into the questions. To Yohundo, what media content can we expect from the Dragonfly mission on Titan? Hopefully video. It won't be video because just the data transmission rates from Titan are so low. So it'll be pictures, but they will be amazing pictures. I mean, we have one set of pictures from the surface of Titan, which was taken by the Huygens probe when the Cassini mission arrived at Saturn. Dropped the Huygens probe. You got these images of it sort of descending down through the atmosphere, and then this image from the surface. And then that's it. That's all we got. And so now we're going to have just day after day after day of pictures of this thing flying around. It's kind of the same way you have pictures of Mars from Curiosity and Perseverance. So imagine that, and then people will absolutely be able to stitch them together into videos, but they won't be like 4K, high def streaming video. It'll be more like stitched together images like a slideshow. Domingo Flav, do you think we'll be able to catch a picture of Artemis 2 around the moon or 2024 YR4 with our smart telescopes? So the Artemis around the moon, no. You know, the biggest telescopes on Earth, the 8.5 meter, the 10 meter telescopes can resolve objects around the moon at about 150 meters across. You cannot see things that are small. The Orion capsule is too small for us to be able to see with the biggest telescopes on Earth. So of course, we can't see it with tiny smart scopes. You will be able to detect when the Artemis 2 mission has launched and is still close enough to the Earth and on its way for a translunar injection. If you're on the right part of the Earth, you would be able to detect it. And when Artemis 3 does this docking maneuver in orbit around the Earth, then you will, it will be very bright, and you will be able to watch it going overhead and you would even be able to see like the two spacecraft that are following each other, like two stars following each other in the sky. And then as the stars got closer and closer together, eventually they would dock, that would be pretty cool. YR4, it's not going to be very big, it's going to be like maybe 50 meters across. And so it could theoretically come within, you know, a few hundred thousand kilometers of the Earth, but it would be really tricky for you to see. Now the one you want to be able to see is Apophis, which is what, 2029, you'll be able to see that with your eyes. Like you won't even need a telescope. There will be this star that moves across the sky, and that was the asteroid that almost hit the Earth. Testing, testing, do you think that we should establish Aldrin cyclers between the Earth and the Moon before we make a base in a factory on the Moon? Between the Earth and the Moon? I'm not sure. So the idea of an Aldrin cycler, you know, proposed by Buzz Aldrin, is that you would have a spacecraft that is traveling between the Earth and Mars. And so it would be on this regular trip, going from the Earth to Mars and back again. And it would be a fairly big spacecraft, it would be kitted out with all of the luxuries that you would require to make this long journey. And so then if you wanted to make this journey, you know, this spacecraft would never need to slow down, it would have to make slight course adjustments with its fuel, but in general, it would just keep making the cycle from Earth to Mars and Earth to Mars and back again. And so you can sort of leave all this mass just going, and then you can resupply it, you can send astronauts to it. When the cycler gets close to Mars, then the astronauts get off and they land on Mars, and then other astronauts get off of Mars and land on the cycler, and then they come home to Earth. And it's a great idea, you know, it's a big chunk of infrastructure. But it would allow you to have more luxury and comfort and protection and safety and supplies for the mission. And so you're proposing, you know, should we build a cycler that goes from Earth to the Moon? Theoretically, sure, you could build a spacecraft that is doing this big, long orbit between the Earth and the Moon. And so you would launch astronauts up, they would dock with the cycler, and then they would be carried up to the Moon, and then they get off there, and then you refuel it and so on. And you know, I'm sure something like that was thought of when people were considering the Deep Space Gateway, the Lunar Gateway, you know, now the Lunar Gateway is going to be in this rectilinear halo orbit, it's going to essentially be doing this figure eight around the Earth-Moon L1 Lagrange point, but you could have something that's just in orbit around the Earth and the Moon, and you can use it to jump on and jump off, and it would be like a half space station, half a ferry boat taking you to and from the Moon. But there's like a lot of moving parts, like that's overly simplified, like you have to reboost it, you have to maintain it, you have to time things very carefully, too, because it's a moving vehicle. So there's, it comes with headaches of its own. But you know, I'm sure people have done the math and thought about it. Kirk Wagner, when docking to an Aldrin cycler, aren't you just using as much energy fuel as you would if you just flew directly? Yes, but you can be in this sort of larger, safer, more established vehicle, right? Like there's the value of the mass, and you're essentially just resupplying this vehicle. You don't need to carry all of the mass that's going to protect you in space. So there's a very quick ship that gets you up to the cycler, and then you stay on board the cycler. Karan156, is there any plan to give the Moon its own GPS setup or a Moon positioning system? Yeah, absolutely. It's called LunaNet, and this is an international collaboration between NASA and European Space Agency and JAXA and other people. And they're working on essentially a coordinated Moon time. Time on the Moon is kind of complicated, because the Moon doesn't stay in any one time zone. The Moon moves through the time zones. And not only that, but the gravity on the Moon is different than the gravity on the Earth. Clocks tick more slowly on Earth, because we have a deeper gravity well. And so clocks on Earth and clocks on the Moon would start to go out of sync. And so you need to account for that. And then as you said, you would need to have some kind of global positioning system. You need to have satellites that are in orbit around the Moon that are able to send positioning information to rovers and stuff down on the surface of the Moon. Now it's not urgent yet, but as there's more infrastructure on the Moon, then eventually there will be missions that their only job is to help with navigation down on the surface of the Moon. And then the same thing will happen to Mars. Like eventually there will be a global positioning system on Mars to help navigate on the surface of Mars. And tell time. Because again, Mars time is going to have a different time than Moon time and Earth time. It's time to shout out our new patrons at the $5 level and above. Vlad Shiblin, Theodore Michelsky, Zimny, Bill Ratty, BDCP50, Victor Babu, Nicholas Merritt, Frank Bellotto, Andy Margulis, and Croint. Join our community at patreon.com slash universe today. Head Skeptic, is there a planet with a Moon with a Moon with a Moon system anyway? A Moon can have a Moon, theoretically, although we don't know of any examples of this. I mean, obviously, the Moon has an artificial satellite around it, you know, we have a bunch of spacecraft that are in orbit around the Moon. So that is theoretically possible. The only place in the Solar System where that would be possible would be Neptune. So Neptune could have a large Moon that is far enough away from Neptune, that then that Moon could have a Moon, and it would be stable. And the technical term for this is a Moon-Moon. So that Neptune would have Moon-Moons. Now what you're describing, a Moon with a Moon with a Moon, would be a Moon-Moon-Moon. And although it is, I guess, theoretically possible to have a Moon going around a Moon going around a Moon, going around a planet, going around a star, I haven't heard of anybody make the case that this is something that we should expect to see in the cosmos. Sid Vicious, can a Moon not be tidally locked to a planet and have a Moon with a day-night like Yavin 4? Well, actually, so if the Moon is in orbit around a gas giant, then the Moon will be tidally locked to the gas giant, but its day-night cycle will match the orbital period around the planet. So it's not about how quickly the thing is rotating. And so for example, like the Moon is in orbit around the Earth, it is tidally locked to the Earth, and its day length is 29 and a half days. So it takes 29 and a half days to orbit around the Earth once and so goes through its day-night cycle once. And so if you had a planet that was in orbit around a gas giant, and it was, you know, not orbiting, or maybe it was orbiting closely and had a magnetosphere to protect it from the trapped radiation, and was doing it every couple of days, well, then you would have days and nights that are a couple of days long, which would be totally fine. So there's plenty of ways that you could have Moons be habitable around gas giants in other star systems. And that's, you know, that's one of the reasons why people are so excited about the search for exomoons that it might be that those are going to be the places that we're going to find potential biosignatures, because the planet is easy to find. And then you can you can tease out the existence of the Moon around the planet. Cilo87 can a white dwarf collect enough material to restart fusion, or would the atoms just stack up on the edge? So there are plenty of examples of white dwarfs that are in a binary system where they are being orbited by some other main sequence star. And if the white dwarf and the star are close enough, then the white dwarf can steal material from its partner. And this material sort of builds up on the exterior of the white dwarf until it reaches some critical level. And then you get this thermonuclear flash off of the surface of the white dwarf, which clears up all of the material. And then the process starts again. And this is known as a nova. And so this is a this is an event that happens, you know, we know of many recurring novas across the Milky Way, where every few decades, they have built up enough of this material that it's that it's enough for it to ignite fusion on the surface of the white dwarf, and then it flashes off and then it starts back again. So that's like one example of I think what you're talking about. And the problem is just that you get, you know, the amount of material that is required burns off in this bright flash, you don't get it restarting the fusion. Because, you know, the core of the white dwarf, the white dwarf is the leftover remnant is essentially the core of the star. So you think about, say, a star like the Sun, it has hydrogen and helium in its core. And so it's mashing the hydrogen into helium with fusion, releasing energy, and using up that hydrogen fuel at the core. And the amount that is able to do that is dependent on the entire mass of the star. And then the star runs out of hydrogen in the core. And so it switches to helium. So now it is fusing helium into other elements up the periodic table of elements. And it goes through oxygen, and then it gets to carbon. And then that's where a star like the Sun stops. But the core accounts for about 50% of the mass of the Sun. So the Sun goes through its red giant phase, sort of throws off all of its outer layers. And then eventually, all that's left is the core. And so, you know, theoretically, if you could put two more stars worth of hydrogen around the star, then you would be able to reignite the core and it would be able to start proceeding again. But the problem is, is that you're not going to get that much material, you're just going to get small amounts at a time, it's going to build up on the surface of the white dwarf, and it's going to explode. And the other thing is that there is a type of this process, which creates a type one a supernova. And so when a white dwarf has accumulated 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, it explodes as a supernova. And the sort of the fine tune of this is still a little unknown, but it has to do probably with the speed. So if the material is coming in slowly enough, then it can build up on the surface of the white dwarf, flashes off and it just kind of clears the plate for next time. But if it's coming in, like a lot of it is is accumulating on the surface of the white dwarf faster than it can can flash this stuff off, then you can theoretically get one of these type 20 supernova. In that case, thing just explodes. So no, becoming a white dwarf is a one way process for stars. Did you know that you can watch the same video with no ads and get a bonus question over on Patreon completely for free? We call it Q&A Plus. This week's bonus question. Should journalists use more storytelling? I'll put a link in the show notes. All right. Those are all the questions that we had this week. Everyone who put your questions into the YouTube comments, everybody who joined me for the live show, which we record every Monday at 5 p.m. somewhere in the world. I'm going to talk about a way that you can get your questions answered guaranteed. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Andrea Pergetti, Bailey Griffin, Brian Boddy, Kerwin, Chuck Darkfinger, David Gilton, David Matz, Evan Dot Pro, Greg Feeley, James Clark, Janice Smith, Jeremy Mattern, Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Josh Schultz, Marcel Smith, Michael Parcell, Nordspace, OneStarFunnels.org, Brent Kaidu, Richard Williams, Sean Sargent, Stephen Fathom, Team49, Telescopes Canada, Vlad Shiblin, Wolfgang Klotz, and ZeldaBorg Galactic Defender, who support us at the Master of the Universe level and all our patrons. All your support means the universe to us. So you're watching the question show, and this is the result of the live stream that I do every Monday where I will answer questions for about two hours. And then we take that, edit it down into the various question shows that we distribute across the network. And so you can watch the full live stream, which we now make public, or you can watch the two episodes that we release during the week. Each one is about 20 minutes long. And then all of the rest of that material we call overtime, and that's available over on Patreon, available to the patron members. But there is another show that we do where we answer questions, and this comes from the patrons. It's the patrons question show. And I typically put out the call for the questions around the middle of the month. And so I've just put out the call for the questions, and now the patrons are putting in all of their questions. And then my producer Anton and I will go through all of those questions and answer them all. And, you know, if you're getting to this place where you're like, oh, the questions on the show, they're starting to get... Like, I know the answers. I know what Fraser's going to say. Well, the patrons questions are much more advanced, more complicated. They require research by me and Anton, and are often questions you've never heard before. We go through them all, however long that takes. You know, they take four to five hours to go through all of the questions. And so if you want like another big, long, fall asleep to them type question show, you definitely check out the patrons question show. It's available at any level, and you can just download the entire back catalog. And then, of course, as a patron, you can contribute a question every month. And this is a reminder to you, the patrons who are watching as well, to put in your question for the patron show. All right, we'll see you next time.