S02E06: Exploring Jupiter's Moons // StratoLaunch's Hypersonic Vehicle Test and other Space News

0:00 Good everybody, and welcome to Astronomy Daily for the seventeenth of May twenty and

0:06 twenty three. My name is Tim Gibbson. I will be your host for

0:09 today's podcast, and as usual I have Hallie, my AI assistant with me

0:15 in the studio here. Gooday, Hallie, how are you? Good day?

0:19 Tim? I am well and continually searching the Internet for great stories.

0:22 Would you like me to do the headlines? Yes? Please, Hallie,

0:25 Off you go. Europe's Jupiter Icy moon's explorer Juice spacecraft has been spotted as

0:37 it zooms away from Earth towards the Solar System's largest planet. Juice launched on

0:42 April fourteenth, kicking off an eight year journey to the Jupiter System. Once

0:47 it gets there, Juice will investigate the Jovian atmosphere and its physics. It

0:52 will also study the Jupiter Ocean moons Ganymede, Calisto, and Europa, helping

0:57 to assess their potential to host life as we know it. The new Juice

1:00 footage was captured by the Airbus Robotic Telescope ART, a ground based instrument in

1:06 Spain designed to aid in space surveillance and tracking. The telescope, which is

1:11 owned and operated by Airbus Space, captured the Jupiter probe between six fifty two

1:15 p m eastern daylight time twenty two fifty two Gmt and eight forty one p

1:19 m eastern daylight time zero forty one Greenwich meantime on April twentieth. NASA's Juno

1:26 spacecraft will fly past Jupiter's volcanic moon aisle on Tuesday, May sixteenth, and

1:30 then the gas giant itself soon after. The fly by of the Jovian moon

1:34 will be the closest to date, at an altitude of about twenty two thousand

1:38 and sixty miles thirty five thousand, five hundred kilometers. Now in the third

1:44 year of its extended mission to investigate the interior of Jupiter, the solar powered

1:49 spacecraft will also explore the Ring system, where some of the gas giants inner

1:53 moons reside. To date, Juno has performed fifty flybys of Jupiter and also

1:57 collected data during close counters with three of the four Galilean moons, the icy

2:02 World's Europa and Ganymede and fiery Io. NASA's second of its kind high altitude

2:07 balloon sprang a leak and is now at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

2:13 A NASA scientific balloon flight was terminated Sunday May fourteenth after the craft developed an

2:17 irreparable leak about a day and a half into flight. NASA launched the Super

2:23 Pressure Balloon SPB out of New Zealand's Wanaka Airport on Friday May twelfth at eight

2:29 o two pm. After detecting the leak and unsuccessfully attempting a fix, flight

2:34 teams terminated the mission over the Pacific Ocean at eight fifty four am Eastern daylight

2:38 time on Sunday twelve fifty four GMT. The SPB carried the Extreme Universe Space

2:45 Observatory two e USO A two a payload, which is designed to detect intergalactic

2:50 ultra high energy cosmic ray particles fallen through Earth's atmosphere. The origins of these

2:54 types of particles have largely eluded researchers. USO A two now sits on the

3:01 bottom of the ocean, and NASA has no plans for another SPB launch this

3:06 year. SpaceX AX two private astronaut mission is to go for May twenty first

3:10 launch, AX two will send four people to the International Space Station for an

3:15 eight day stay. If all goes according to plan, AX two will launch

3:21 atop a SpaceX Falcon nine rocket at five thirty seven pm Eastern daylight time twenty

3:25 one thirty seven GMT on Sunday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The

3:31 AX two astronauts will ride a SpaceX Dragon capsule to the orbiting lab, getting

3:37 there around nine thirty am Eastern daylight time thirteen thirty GMT on Monday, May

3:42 twenty first. The mission will spend eight days doc to the ISS team members

3:46 said today that's a slight change from the previous plan, which had called for

3:52 a ten day ISS stay. The Astronomy Daily podcast, Strata launches Rock Carrier

3:58 plane, which is the largest plane in the world, has just finished its

4:02 first ever drop test, releasing a prototype of the company's Talons hypersonic vehicle test

4:10 above the Pacific Ocean off the central California coast. Everything went well, paving

4:15 the way for an even more ambitious test in the coming months. Strato Launch

4:20 representative set, with this significant milestone complete, we move on to preparing for

4:27 our first ever hypersonic flight in the late autumn this year. Zachary Krev,

4:32 the company's CEO, and president said during a call with reporters today. Rock

4:38 lifted off from the Mohave Air and Spaceport in southern California on Saturday after a

4:44 little after nine am local time, Strato Launch representative said, kicking off the

4:49 plane's eleventh test flight, Rock, which has a wingspan larger than an American

4:55 football field, carried the company's Talon zero separation test vehicle between twin fuselages.

5:00 The giant plane headed west, eventually dropping Talon zero when it was off California's

5:05 central coast. Talon zero isn't equipped with an engine, so it didn't make

5:11 a forward a powered flight on Saturday, but the vehicle did perform a variety

5:15 of gliding maneuvers and continued sending telemetry back to the mission team until it hit

5:20 the water in a destructive impact that was part all part of Saturday's flight plan.

5:28 Rock returned for a touchdown at Mohave four hours and eight minutes later after

5:32 after liftoff, bringing an end to Saturday's test light. Microsoft co founder Paul

5:40 Allen established Strata Launch in twenty eleven with the initial goal of air launching rockets

5:46 carried into the atmosphere and then released by Rock. Virgin Orbit and Virgin Galactic

5:53 also employ an air launched strategy for satellite and space tourism missions. This vision

6:00 changed in two and nineteen, a year after Alan's death, Struta Launch turned

6:03 Rock into a platform hypersonic research and development, which it will conduct with the

6:11 Giant Plane and the Talent series of robotic hypersonic vehicles. Hypersonic refers to speeds

6:16 of at least mac five or five times the speed of sound. The astronomy

6:20 they'll be podcasts. Saturn's rings are much younger than scientists once thought, according

6:28 to new research from Indiana University professor of astronomy Richard Durison, and they are

6:34 not here to stay. For decades, there have been debates about the origin

6:40 of Saturn's I see rings, but according to two new studies from Durison published

6:45 in Icarus, the rings are no more than a few hundred million years old,

6:49 much younger than the planet itself, which formed four point five billion years

6:54 ago. In fact, Jurison said the rings may well have formed when Saurs

7:00 were still walking on the Earth. Jurison and coauthor Paul Astrada are research scientist

7:05 at NASA's AIMS Research Center in California's Silicon Vassy Valley also concluded that the rings

7:13 will last only another few hundred million years at the very most. Our inescapable

7:19 conclusion is that Saturn's rings must be relatively young by astronomical standards, just a

7:26 few hundred million years old. Durison said, if you look at Saturn's satellite

7:30 system, there are other hints that something dramatic happened here in the last few

7:34 hundred million years. Urison and Estrada have long argued that Saturn's rings are relatively

7:40 young because they expected the rings to be eroded and darkened by the influx of

7:46 interplanetary meteoroids. However, it wasn't until data that was available from NASA's thirteen

7:53 year long Cassini spacecraft mission, particularly it's two hundreds, it's two, and

7:59 seventeen Grand Finale, consisting of twenty two orbits passing between Saturn and its rings,

8:05 that they were able to use theoretical models to determine the age and longevity

8:11 of the rings with confidence by computing how the rings changed over long periods of

8:16 time. Particularly important for their work were Cassini's measurements of the meteoroid influx rate,

8:22 the mass of the rings and the inflow rate of ring material onto Saturn.

8:28 The impact of meteoroids not only pollutes the rings, it ultimately leads to

8:33 ring material drifting inwards towards the planet. The theoretical models presented by Jurison and

8:39 Astralia demonstrate that the rings should be losing mass onto the planet at the rate

8:46 of many tons per second that Cassini observed, which means that the life the

8:52 remaining lifetime of the rings is only another few hundred million years or so.

8:58 The Astronomy Daily PIP. You can find all about Astronomy Daily at spacenuts dot

9:03 io, orbites dot com, presented by myself, Steve Dunkly and Andrew Dunkly.

9:09 See you next time on Astronomy Daily.