Asteroid Samples & Power Outages: Unraveling Space Mysteries | S02E25

0:00 Good everybody, and welcome to Astronomy Daily for Wednesday, the twenty sixth of

0:05 July twenty twenty three. My name is Tim Gibson. I will be your

0:09 host for today's podcast. Following on a little bit from Steve's episode on Monday

0:16 about the Apollo eleven moon landings. I well remember staying up on the day

0:23 of the moon walk to watch it live on television, and my grandparents buying

0:30 a brand new color TV because they wanted to watch it in color, and

0:34 then everybody being very very disappointed that it was broadcast in black and white.

0:39 Just a little anecdote from myself. Now on with the show. Well,

0:50 it's one story Wednesday. So Hallie, have you got a good story for

0:55 us today? Hi? Tim, Yes, I have a great story for

0:58 our listeners today. NASA Lab hopes to find life's building blocks in asteroid sample.

1:04 Eager scientists and a gleaming lab awaits a sample from the asteroid Benu,

1:10 which could be key to understanding the formation of the Solar System and our own

1:14 planet, is set to be analyzed at NASA's Johnson's Space Center in Houston after

1:18 it reaches Earth in late September. The precious cargo is currently aboard O Cyrus

1:23 Aurex, a U S space probe launched in two thousand and sixteen to Benu,

1:26 which orbits the Sun at an average distance of about one hundred and five

1:30 million miles one hundred and sixty eight million kilometers long. White sleeves hang from

1:37 the huge metal and glass box in which the sample will be handled. Scientists

1:41 will separate pieces of the rock and dust for study now, while carefully storing

1:46 away the rest for future generations equipped with better technology, a practice first started

1:51 during the Apollo missions to the Moon. We don't expect there to be anything

1:55 living, but rather the building blocks of life, Nicole Lunning, lead Osyrius

2:00 direct sample curator, told AFP that's really what motivated going to this type of

2:05 asteroid to understand what the precursors were that may have fostered life in our Solar

2:08 system and on Earth. Once the return vessel arrives at the Texas clean Room,

2:15 Lunning's job will be to carefully disassemble it and separate the contents, all

2:19 while keeping the material pure and uncontaminated. The spacecraft is scheduled to land in

2:23 the Utah Desert on September twenty fourth, carrying an estimated eight point eight ounces

2:29 or two hundred and fifty grams of material just over a cupful. Obtaining it

2:34 involved a high risk operation in October twenty twenty. The probe came into contact

2:38 with the asteroid for a few seconds and a blast of compressed nitrogen was omitted

2:43 to raise the dust sample, which was then captured. The whole mission was

2:46 imperiled when NASA realized a few days later that the valve of the collection compartment

2:51 was failing to close, letting fragments escape into space, but the precious cargo

2:57 was finally secured after being transferred to a so fixed in the Spacecraft Center.

3:01 Now back to you, Tim the Astronomy Daily podcast. A NASA power outage

3:09 disrupted communications between mission control and the International Space Station on Tuesday. Mission control

3:15 couldn't send commands to the station and talk with the seven astronauts in orbit.

3:21 The power outage hit as upgrade work was underway in the building at Houston's Johnson

3:27 Space Center. Space Station program manager Joel Montalbano said that neither the astronauts nor

3:36 the station were in any danger, and that backup control systems took over within

3:40 ninety minutes. The crew was notified of the problem through Russian communication systems within

3:46 twenty minutes of the outage. It is the first time NASA has had to

3:51 fire up these backup systems to take control, according to Montalbano. He said

3:55 NASA hoped to resolve the issue and be back to normal operations by the end

4:00 of the day. NASA maintains a backup control center miles from Houston in the

4:05 event of a hurricane or other disasters requiring evacuation, but in Tuesday's case,

4:11 the flight controllers stayed at mission control since the lights air conditioning still worked.

4:16 The Astronomy Daily Podcast Thanks everybody for listening to Astronomy Daily. You can find

4:24 all of our episodes, plus our parent podcasts, Space Nuts at space nuts

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4:42 You can hear Steve Dunkley on Mondays and myself, Tim Gives on Fridays for

4:46 a full show. Thanks for listening, see you next week. Bye for

4:49 now, Thanks Tim TTFN The Astronomy Daily Podcast. Bye