S02E07: SpaceX's Starship Test // Glacier Detection in China // and Unveiling the Mysteries of Magnetars

0:00 Goodday everybody, and welcome to Astronomy Daily for the nineteenth of May twenty and twenty three. My name is Tim Gibson. I will be your host for today. Hi. Tim, Let's get started with today's space news headlines. There's a lot going on out there. SpaceX is gearing up for another test of its giant Starship vehicle. The company rolled out Ship twenty five, the latest Starship upper stage prototype, to a suborbital pad at its star Base site in South Texas early Thursday morning. SpaceX will conduct a static fire test of Ship twenty five six Raptor engines on the pad.

0:45 Company representatives have said static fires are a common preflight test in which the vehicle's engines are briefly lit while it remains anchored to the ground. Starship consists of a giant first stage booster known as super Heavy and the one hundred and sixty five foot tall upper stage called Starship, both of which are designed to be fully reusable. SpaceX envisions the vehicle taking people and cargo to the Moon and Mars and taking over most, if not all, of the company's other spaceflight activities over the long haul.

1:15 A fully stacked Starship has flown just once. The highly anticipated flight, which launched on April twentieth from Starbase, involved the Booster seven heavy prototype and the Ship twenty four upper stage. The goal was to send Ship twenty four most of the way around the planet, with a return to Earth in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. Booster seven and the Ship twenty four failed to separate from each other as planned. In SpaceX commanded the vehicle's destruction high over the Gulf of Mexico a few minutes into the flight.

1:49 In other SpaceX news, the company is targeting Friday made the nineteenth for the launch of the Iridium one Web mission to low Earth orbit from the Space Launch Complex at the Van and Berg's Base Force Base in California. A backup launch opportunity is available on Saturday, May twentieth. The Falcon nine first stage booster supporting this mission previously launched Sentinel six, Start, Transporter seven, and seven Starlink missions. After stage separation, the first stage will land on the of Course I Still Love You drone ship, which will be stationed in the Pacific Ocean.

2:23 A Chinese aerial remote sensing system has obtained effective mountain glacier detection data through an ongoing combined detection experiment. The Chinese Academy of Sciences and Wuhan University are conducting a sky to ground scientific experiment to test the condition of glaciers in the High Bay tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in northwest China's Qinghai Province. The experiment has applied radars in three bands, P band, L band and VHF and undertaken eleven flights, among which seven carried out tomography and interferopherometric imaging and four conductive perspective imaging.

2:57 A total of four point six terabytes of valid data has been obtained using Integral and Swift spacecraft. European astronomers have observed an unidentified X ray source known as XTEJ one dash nine dash zero dash six plus zero nine zero. Results of the observational campaign, presented on May the eleventh on the Archive preprint server suggest that this source belongs to the small and rare group of persistent low luminosity b X ray binaries. X ray binaries are composed of a normal star or a white dwarf transferring mass onto a compact neutron star or black hole.

3:35 Based on the mass of the companion star, astronomers divide them into low mass X ray binaries and high mass X ray binaries. Of special interest are the b x ray binaries, a subclass of high X ray binaries in which the optical star is a dwarf, a subgiant or obe star. Studying X ray outbursts from b x rbs could be essential in order to improve our understanding of the nature of X ray binaries in their behavior. China launched a satellite for its Baidoo navigation system on Tuesday, May the sixteenth, the first time it has done so in three years.

4:11 The Baidu satellite lifted off atop a long March three B rocket from the Jiangzhou Satellite Launch Center in southwest China's Shinju Province on Tuesday at ten forty nine pm local time. The spacecraft is the fifty sixth Baidu satellite China has launched a date, and the first to take flight since June twenty twenty. The newly launched satellite is bound for geostationary orbit about twenty two two hundred and twenty miles above the Earth. And that's the news headlines for today. Tim the Astronomy Daily podcast.

4:42 An unexpected effects sited in supernova wreckage may be caused by highly magnetis neutron star or magnetar and quantum activity never seen before, like all neutron stars, magnetars from which massive stars in their lives in a collapse. Also triggered is a massive supernova explosion. The matter that comprises neutron stars is so dense that a sugar cube of it would weigh over a billion tons on Earth. The magnetic fields around these stars star remnants are the most powerful in the known universe, often one hundred trillion times stronger than that of our planet.

5:21 As such, neutron stars and magnetars represent the most extreme celestial objects. The investigation of them is vital to better understand the universe. A new study published on April the nineteenth in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Silence examines the remnants surrounding the supernova left leftovers of Cassiopia A. The explosion was visible to Earth three hundred and forty years ago. Astronomers have always suspected that magnetars would generate highly polarized X rays around them, meaning that the electronic fields of the magnetar's radiation vibrates in a preferred direction, but scientists were surprised in twenty and twenty two when data collected by nassa's Imaging X Ray polar Imagery Explorer satellite, which launched the year before, showed polarization may depend on energy.

6:19 I XPE information suggested that may be the case after looking at X rays in the supernova remnant of Cassiopia A surrounding them magnetar four U zero one forty two plus sixty one, located thirteen thousand light years away, as the first ever measurement of the polarization of X rays around a magnetar. The IXPE observations showed that the lower energy X rays were polarized at one hundred and eighty degrees to the high energy X rays. Both energetic rays sets were orientated at ninety degrees to the electromagnetic field of the magneta.

7:00 The Astronomy Daily podcasts, So Hallie did send me one of her dad jokes earlier on so over to you, Hallie for your dad joke. Okay, you asked for it, Please don't grown too much. Why did the astronaut bring a telescope to the party because he wanted to a planet himself right in the middle of the funky Yes, Hallie, I really do have nothing to say about your terrible jokes. That's the end of today's episode. My name is Tim Gibs. I've been your host for today. Over to you Steve on Monday for Monday's edition.

7:32 Astronomy Daily is presented by myself, Tim Gibbs, Andrew Dunkley and Steve Dunkley. You can find more about the podcast on space nuts dot io and bites dot com. Thank you very much, See you again next time.