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 twenty three. My name is Tim Gibbson. I will be your host for today's podcast, and as usual I have Hallie, my AI assistant with me in the studio here. Gooday, Hallie, how are you? Good day? Tim? I am well and continually searching the Internet for great stories. Would you like me to do the headlines? Yes? Please, Hallie, Off you go. Europe's Jupiter Icy moon's explorer Juice spacecraft has been spotted as it zooms away from Earth towards the Solar System's largest planet.

0:41 Juice launched on April fourteenth, kicking off an eight year journey to the Jupiter System. Once it gets there, Juice will investigate the Jovian atmosphere and its physics. It will also study the Jupiter Ocean moons Ganymede, Calisto, and Europa, helping to assess their potential to host life as we know it. The new Juice footage was captured by the Airbus Robotic Telescope ART, a ground based instrument in Spain designed to aid in space surveillance and tracking. The telescope, which is owned and operated by Airbus Space, captured the Jupiter probe between six fifty two p m eastern daylight time twenty two fifty two Gmt and eight forty one p m eastern daylight time zero forty one Greenwich meantime on April twentieth.

1:25 NASA's Juno spacecraft will fly past Jupiter's volcanic moon aisle on Tuesday, May sixteenth, and then the gas giant itself soon after. The fly by of the Jovian moon will be the closest to date, at an altitude of about twenty two thousand and sixty miles thirty five thousand, five hundred kilometers. Now in the third year of its extended mission to investigate the interior of Jupiter, the solar powered spacecraft will also explore the Ring system, where some of the gas giants inner moons reside.

1:53 To date, Juno has performed fifty flybys of Jupiter and also collected data during close counters with three of the four Galilean moons, the icy World's Europa and Ganymede and fiery Io. NASA's second of its kind high altitude balloon sprang a leak and is now at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. A NASA scientific balloon flight was terminated Sunday May fourteenth after the craft developed an irreparable leak about a day and a half into flight. NASA launched the Super Pressure Balloon SPB out of New Zealand's Wanaka Airport on Friday May twelfth at eight o two pm.

2:29 After detecting the leak and unsuccessfully attempting a fix, flight teams terminated the mission over the Pacific Ocean at eight fifty four am Eastern daylight time on Sunday twelve fifty four GMT. The SPB carried the Extreme Universe Space Observatory two e USO A two a payload, which is designed to detect intergalactic ultra high energy cosmic ray particles fallen through Earth's atmosphere. The origins of these types of particles have largely eluded researchers. USO A two now sits on the bottom of the ocean, and NASA has no plans for another SPB launch this year.

3:06 SpaceX AX two private astronaut mission is to go for May twenty first launch, AX two will send four people to the International Space Station for an eight day stay. If all goes according to plan, AX two will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon nine rocket at five thirty seven pm Eastern daylight time twenty one thirty seven GMT on Sunday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The AX two astronauts will ride a SpaceX Dragon capsule to the orbiting lab, getting there around nine thirty am Eastern daylight time thirteen thirty GMT on Monday, May twenty first.

3:43 The mission will spend eight days doc to the ISS team members said today that's a slight change from the previous plan, which had called for a ten day ISS stay. The Astronomy Daily podcast, Strata launches Rock Carrier plane, which is the largest plane in the world, has just finished its first ever drop test, releasing a prototype of the company's Talons hypersonic vehicle test above the Pacific Ocean off the central California coast. Everything went well, paving the way for an even more ambitious test in the coming months.

4:19 Strato Launch representative set, with this significant milestone complete, we move on to preparing for our first ever hypersonic flight in the late autumn this year. Zachary Krev, the company's CEO, and president said during a call with reporters today. Rock lifted off from the Mohave Air and Spaceport in southern California on Saturday after a little after nine am local time, Strato Launch representative said, kicking off the plane's eleventh test flight, Rock, which has a wingspan larger than an American 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 central coast. Talon zero isn't equipped with an engine, so it didn't make a forward a powered flight on Saturday, but the vehicle did perform a variety of gliding maneuvers and continued sending telemetry back to the mission team until it hit the water in a destructive impact that was part all part of Saturday's flight plan. Rock returned for a touchdown at Mohave four hours and eight minutes later after after liftoff, bringing an end to Saturday's test light.

5:38 Microsoft co founder Paul Allen established Strata Launch in twenty eleven with the initial goal of air launching rockets carried into the atmosphere and then released by Rock. Virgin Orbit and Virgin Galactic also employ an air launched strategy for satellite and space tourism missions. This vision changed in two and nineteen, a year after Alan's death, Struta Launch turned Rock into a platform hypersonic research and development, which it will conduct with the Giant Plane and the Talent series of robotic hypersonic vehicles.

6:14 Hypersonic refers to speeds of at least mac five or five times the speed of sound. The astronomy they'll be podcasts. Saturn's rings are much younger than scientists once thought, according to new research from Indiana University professor of astronomy Richard Durison, and they are not here to stay. For decades, there have been debates about the origin of Saturn's I see rings, but according to two new studies from Durison published in Icarus, the rings are no more than a few hundred million years old, much younger than the planet itself, which formed four point five billion years ago.

6:55 In fact, Jurison said the rings may well have formed when Saurs were still walking on the Earth. Jurison and coauthor Paul Astrada are research scientist at NASA's AIMS Research Center in California's Silicon Vassy Valley also concluded that the rings will last only another few hundred million years at the very most. Our inescapable conclusion is that Saturn's rings must be relatively young by astronomical standards, just a few hundred million years old. Durison said, if you look at Saturn's satellite system, there are other hints that something dramatic happened here in the last few hundred million years.

7:35 Urison and Estrada have long argued that Saturn's rings are relatively young because they expected the rings to be eroded and darkened by the influx of interplanetary meteoroids. However, it wasn't until data that was available from NASA's thirteen year long Cassini spacecraft mission, particularly it's two hundreds, it's two, and seventeen Grand Finale, consisting of twenty two orbits passing between Saturn and its rings, that they were able to use theoretical models to determine the age and longevity of the rings with confidence by computing how the rings changed over long periods of time.

8:16 Particularly important for their work were Cassini's measurements of the meteoroid influx rate, the mass of the rings and the inflow rate of ring material onto Saturn. The impact of meteoroids not only pollutes the rings, it ultimately leads to ring material drifting inwards towards the planet. The theoretical models presented by Jurison and Astralia demonstrate that the rings should be losing mass onto the planet at the rate of many tons per second that Cassini observed, which means that the life the 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 io, orbites dot com, presented by myself, Steve Dunkly and Andrew Dunkly. See you next time on Astronomy Daily.