How to Break Away from The Solar System? | Q&A 432

How will future historians see space exploration? Did NASA handle the 3i Atlas story well? How quickly do you really need to go to break free from the Solar System? And in Q&A+, what are some sci-fi book recommendations? 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, write it down, I'll gather them up and I'll answer them here. Alright, let's get into the questions. Madmillion, what is your opinion of how NASA handled 3i Atlas? I don't really understand the premise of the question. Because NASA is an agency that funds the development of telescopes and does some science, but they actually sort of help the funding of other science. But in general, the kinds of science that was applicable for the interstellar object 3i Atlas was telescopes and observatories around the world. So we were reporting on what was happening with 3i Atlas. We were talking about what was coming out of the Subaru Telescope from Japan, although it's located in Hawaii. We were talking about the Keck Observatory, the Gemini North and South. We were talking about various space based telescopes, James Webb, Hubble Space Telescope. And then if you go and look at one of the papers, say analysis of 3i Atlas from the James Webb Space Telescope, it is going to be some team of astronomers located around the world that has like no affiliation with NASA, it might have an affiliation with NASA, they might have NASA astronomers on the team. But mostly, it's going to be this person works at the University of Texas, this person works at the University of Shanghai, this person works at the University of Bonn, and that they are collaborating together through the internet through their working relationships because they're experts in different parts of this to produce a paper on interstellar object 3i Atlas. And during the height of the observations, we were seeing a couple of papers a week, sometimes a couple of papers a day coming out from different astronomers around the world who had either gotten access and were able to take images of 3i Atlas with their telescope, or were performing some kind of simulation based on their knowledge of comets in general. And so NASA had very little role in what happened with 3i Atlas, right? It was discovered by Atlas, which is a international collaboration. It's an all sky survey telescope has nothing to do with NASA. Then the following observations were done with the Vero Rubin telescope with James Webb, Subaru, none of these have anything to do with NASA. Now they are, they can be partners and collaborators in various things, but NASA doesn't run them. So I think NASA did what it always did, which was that it 20 years ago, funded and led the development of a telescope like James Webb, or the Hubble Space Telescope, that was one of the cast of characters that were used in the analysis of something that was interesting that was happening out there in the cosmos. And like the tell the easiest way to know that people they've got this kind of shortened version and and a distorted idea, really, of what NASA's role is, you know, like, you know, you look at the flat Earth, never a straight answer, right? NASA, like, it is like blaming your high school principal, because you feel like there's things on the television that aren't correct. Right? Some news thing is happening on the television. You're like, I don't think that's real. Because Mr. Gibson in grade eight was my principal. Right? There is no connection. He has no relation. And he is not responsible for the news that you think is not real. And it's possible that the news is real. So, so why I'm kind of going to this diatribe is that, is that it's like, it's really important to understand that NASA is NASA is is an infrastructure organization, they provide the tools that the astronomers use to analyze the things that they're seeing. And they're very hands off about this. They, we built the telescope, go ahead and use it. Tell us what you find. But it's, yeah. So blaming the car manufacturer, I don't know how to come up with a good analogy. I'm sure somebody is going to can do this as well. So yeah, noon, noon, how fast would you need to be going by the asteroid belt to leave the solar system? The escape, what you're talking about is the escape velocity of the solar system, that there is a speed that you can go, where if you exceed that speed, then you are leaving the solar system and you're never coming back. And we have since five spacecraft on escape trajectories from the solar system, pioneers, the Voyagers and New Horizons. And what that meant is that they are going so fast, that they are not able to then fall back in to the solar system. And the escape velocity of the solar system depends on your distance from the sun. Now the escape velocity from the sun is ludicrous. Like if you were sitting on the surface of the sun, it is hundreds of kilometers per second, like you are not able to get that kind of velocity. But here at the Earth's orbit, it is only 42 kilometers per second. And the Earth is already orbiting the sun at 30 kilometers per second. So you only need to put an additional 12 kilometers per second on top of the speed of the Earth for you to be able to launch on a trajectory that's going to carry you out of the solar system. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it is a lot. And it requires some tricks. Usually, they'll use gravitational slingshots and assists. So they'll fly their spacecraft down into the gravity well of Jupiter, steal some of Jupiter's orbital momentum and use that to slingshot them out into space. And the Voyagers were able to use Jupiter and Saturn and Voyager 2 was able to use Uranus and Neptune to be able to complete its gravitational assist. So the velocity is about, you know, from Earth, it's an additional 12 kilometers per second. And as you're flying away from the sun, you are going to be slowing down. That you're sort of imagining that you're flying away from the sun. And as long as you don't hit zero at an infinite distance, then you will escape the sun's gravity. And if you go a little bit faster than that, then you're off to escape. If you're like a little less than that, like you're only going 11 kilometers per second when you leave the Earth, then you fly really far away, then you will fall back down into the sun. And so as you are moving through the asteroid belt, which is farther away from the Earth than the sun, you will be going some fraction of that 12 kilometers per second. And as long as it is fast enough, like I think it's like 27 kilometers per second. So at Earth, you need to be going 42 kilometers per second. And at the asteroid belt, you need to be going 27 kilometers per second. And I think like once you're out to Neptune, it's less for you to be able to pass through. And you're just going to be constantly slowing down. You just need to make sure that you don't hit zero at infinity. Oh, and you asked, how do you stop? That's a totally separate question. And this is sort of, this comes down to the flight paths that scientists consider, engineers consider when they're developing missions. You know, we think about New Horizons, which NASA was able to send to Pluto took 10 years that they launched it did a flyby of Jupiter and picked up more velocity, it was able to make a flyby of Pluto, but it was not a slow flyby, you came in fast, took a bunch of pictures a couple of days before took a bunch of pictures, a couple of up to a couple of days after and then it was back out in deep space again. That's because they went fast. If you actually want to go into orbit, if you want to stop, then you've got to go in a totally different orbit that takes longer. You know, if you just want to do a flyby of Mars, you can get there faster. If you actually want to go into orbit around Mars, you have to take a trajectory that gets you to Mars so that then you can fire your rocket engines, you can go into orbit around Mars. And that actually requires a longer journey because you're going slower, you're just going just fast enough to get to Mars, but not so fast that you fly right past. It's time to shout out our new patrons at the $5 level and above! Anthony Papineau Rupert Millard Gareth Malkowski Mika Rogers Scotty Douglas DeJong Lee Cummings John W. in 1978 Meaningless Theories and Jerry Join our community at patreon.com slash universe today! Paige Potter, what do you think future historians will misunderstand most about the people who first expanded humanity into space? I mean, when we think about history, the misunderstandings come fast and furious, you know? Look at the arguments about Christopher Columbus, about the early explorers into the Americas, the early interactions between the West and the East when the first ships reached Japan and China and so on. When you think about the personalities of Rome or the Peloponnesian War, the kinds of things that we know, like history has very bad memory. And it really takes archaeologists and historians a lot of very careful effort to put it all back together again. And so it may very well be that the documents and the records that we have today will stand the test of time for future generations, and they'll be able to go and watch exactly all of the events unfold as they actually happened, which is what I think our default expectation is going to be. But the reality, of course, is that there are machines, you're living in this right now, where there are people that are attempting to shape the narrative on the things that are happening right now, that there are people who disagree about COVID, about vaccines, about climate change, about just so many things right now. And that's just happening in real time. Imagine, if you could look back at those controversies 100 years from now, it's going to be a mess. So I think that the future, just history in general, people looking back to the early days of space exploration, that they will probably think that it, that it went very easy. Right? That they'll look, it was 1954. And we saw Sputnik, then 61, we saw Gagarin, then 69, we saw the first people on the moon, boom, boom, boom, then we saw the space shuttle, then we saw the space launch system, then people returned to the moon. And here we are now on our way out to Alpha Centauri, it all just happened in a blink of an eye. And I think from our perspective, as the people that are going through this, living through the time, it feels agonizingly slow, it just feels like it's taking forever for us to get on with the exploration of space. And I think that's pretty funny. And so when you think back, then you sort of apply that framework to the sorts of events that unfolded. As people were living through World War Two, as people were living through the hundred, 30 Years War, right? Just the grinding day after day after day of these momentous events. That's what I think is the misunderstanding, is that people in the future will look back and go, wow, people must have just been shocked about how quickly that all happened. And yet, if you actually talked to us, we would be like, oh, it was so slow, and so frustrating, and so boring. I think that that would be a pretty big part. Jeff Hantz, do you think future people look back on us with pity for only having natural vision and hearing for our entire lives? When you read Neuromancer, when you think about Cyberpunk 2077, you look at people are enhanced in all these different ways. You know, part of me is like, yuck, like keep that bone saw away from me. But part of me was like, man, if I could swap out my eyes with something that would allow me to see farther across the electromagnetic spectrum, that would be super cool. And so will we have this future where these things are are provided inexpensively, so that you can see across the electromagnetic spectrum, hear distances, see with microscopic vision, telescopic vision, that would be pretty tempting. Yeah. 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, or some sci fi book recommendations. I'll put a link in the show notes. All right, those were all the questions that we had this episode. Thank you everyone who asked your questions into the YouTube comments, everybody who joined me for the live show, just a couple of live shows left before I go on hiatus over the summer. So we'll have the events here on the channel. But you know, get them all there while they last. All right, I'm going to talk about some upcoming sky events that you should be keeping track of. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingsman, Andrea Pedretti, Brian Bowden, Kevin, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Baylock, Darkfinger, David Gilton, David Matz, Thraller Reading and Math for Toddlers, Eric Lindstrom, Evan Dot Pro, James Clark, Terry Madden, Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Marcel Smith, Michael Purcell, Nordspace, onesurfanimals.org. Please follow my nephew at vbrick6994, Rankiddy, Richard Williams, Sean Sargent, Stephen Foundland-Money, Team 49, Teleslips Canada, Vlad Sheplin, Wolfgang Klotz, and Zeldaboard 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 I will be going on hiatus at the end of June. And there are some events that are going to be still in June, and then even more events that are going to be happening into July and August that you should be keeping an eye on. So first, the day that you are watching this will be the 16th or the 17th. And there is going to be an occultation of Venus by the Moon. And this will be visible from people in the Northern Hemisphere in the Americas. So we've got an article on Universe Today, I'll put a link down in the show notes, you can access the information about it. And so you've got like a little bit of warning. And then you can actually watch the Moon pass in front of Venus. Now, normally, I would tell you about events that are happening right around the corner, but because I won't be around, I need to tell you now. And that is that there's going to be obviously a total solar eclipse that's going to be visible from Europe on August the 12th. And total solar eclipse is totally completely mind blowing. If you've never seen one, you absolutely should. This is going to be a tricky one because it goes through a piece of Iceland, and then a little piece of Spain. And so you're going to have all the people who want to see a total solar eclipse concentrating into this very tight area. And if you can't see the entire totality, I wouldn't bother trying to get any closer. So either get to see 100% or just stay where you live in Europe and watch the eclipse and see 60% 70% 80% of the totality. So that's on August 12. And again, we'll put a link down the show notes. So you can find out when where that's going to be happening. But it's going to be a tough one to see just because it's in a small geographic area. And then the last event that I think is going to be great is the Perseids meteor shower. And this is one of my favorites just, you know, as a person who lives in the shower, but it is pretty good upwards of 100 meters an hour. And it all depends on whether or not you're going to get a lot of moon or no moon. And for this year, on August the 12th, the night of the 12th, it's going to be pretty much close to a new moon. And so there will be no pesky moon that's going to destroy the Perseids meteor shower. And so my recommendation, like even start now plan an event around it, find a place that is as close as you can to get dark skies, plan to meet there with your friends, bring lawn chairs, stay out overnight, enjoy the incredible meteor shower, fall asleep in the warm summer night. Obviously, folks in the Southern Hemisphere, you have a better one, you have the Geminids. But for us in the north, the Perseids are the best that we've got. And the Perseids are August 12, August 13. So like at the same time that the solar eclipse is happening in Europe. All right, good luck. We'll see you next time.