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

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

0:10 today. Hi. Tim, Let's get started with today's space news headlines.

0:22 There's a lot going on out there. SpaceX is gearing up for another test

0:27 of its giant Starship vehicle. The company rolled out Ship twenty five, the

0:32 latest Starship upper stage prototype, to a suborbital pad at its star Base site

0:36 in South Texas early Thursday morning. SpaceX will conduct a static fire test of

0:42 Ship twenty five six Raptor engines on the pad. Company representatives have said static

0:47 fires are a common preflight test in which the vehicle's engines are briefly lit while

0:52 it remains anchored to the ground. Starship consists of a giant first stage booster

0:57 known as super Heavy and the one hundred and sixty five foot tall upper stage

1:00 called Starship, both of which are designed to be fully reusable. SpaceX envisions

1:06 the vehicle taking people and cargo to the Moon and Mars and taking over most,

1:11 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,

1:21 which launched on April twentieth from Starbase, involved the Booster seven heavy prototype and

1:26 the Ship twenty four upper stage. The goal was to send Ship twenty four

1:30 most of the way around the planet, with a return to Earth in the

1:33 Pacific Ocean near Hawaii. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. Booster seven and the

1:40 Ship twenty four failed to separate from each other as planned. In SpaceX commanded

1:44 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

1:53 the launch of the Iridium one Web mission to low Earth orbit from the Space

1:57 Launch Complex at the Van and Berg's Base Force Base in California. A backup

2:02 launch opportunity is available on Saturday, May twentieth. The Falcon nine first stage

2:08 booster supporting this mission previously launched Sentinel six, Start, Transporter seven, and

2:14 seven Starlink missions. After stage separation, the first stage will land on the

2:19 of Course I Still Love You drone ship, which will be stationed in the

2:23 Pacific Ocean. A Chinese aerial remote sensing system has obtained effective mountain glacier detection

2:29 data through an ongoing combined detection experiment. The Chinese Academy of Sciences and Wuhan

2:34 University are conducting a sky to ground scientific experiment to test the condition of glaciers

2:39 in the High Bay tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in northwest China's Qinghai Province. The experiment

2:46 has applied radars in three bands, P band, L band and VHF and

2:50 undertaken eleven flights, among which seven carried out tomography and interferopherometric imaging and four

2:55 conductive perspective imaging. A total of four point six terabytes of valid data has

3:01 been obtained using Integral and Swift spacecraft. European astronomers have observed an unidentified X

3:08 ray source known as XTEJ one dash nine dash zero dash six plus zero nine

3:14 zero. Results of the observational campaign, presented on May the eleventh on the

3:20 Archive preprint server suggest that this source belongs to the small and rare group of

3:23 persistent low luminosity b X ray binaries. X ray binaries are composed of a

3:29 normal star or a white dwarf transferring mass onto a compact neutron star or black

3:34 hole. Based on the mass of the companion star, astronomers divide them into

3:38 low mass X ray binaries and high mass X ray binaries. Of special interest

3:44 are the b x ray binaries, a subclass of high X ray binaries in

3:47 which the optical star is a dwarf, a subgiant or obe star. Studying

3:53 X ray outbursts from b x rbs could be essential in order to improve our

3:58 understanding of the nature of X ray binaries in their behavior. China launched a

4:03 satellite for its Baidoo navigation system on Tuesday, May the sixteenth, the first

4:08 time it has done so in three years. The Baidu satellite lifted off atop

4:13 a long March three B rocket from the Jiangzhou Satellite Launch Center in southwest China's

4:16 Shinju Province on Tuesday at ten forty nine pm local time. The spacecraft is

4:23 the fifty sixth Baidu satellite China has launched a date, and the first to

4:27 take flight since June twenty twenty. The newly launched satellite is bound for geostationary

4:31 orbit about twenty two two hundred and twenty miles above the Earth. And that's

4:36 the news headlines for today. Tim the Astronomy Daily podcast. An unexpected effects

4:43 sited in supernova wreckage may be caused by highly magnetis neutron star or magnetar and

4:49 quantum activity never seen before, like all neutron stars, magnetars from which massive

4:56 stars in their lives in a collapse. Also triggered is a massive supernova explosion.

5:01 The matter that comprises neutron stars is so dense that a sugar cube of

5:06 it would weigh over a billion tons on Earth. The magnetic fields around these

5:12 stars star remnants are the most powerful in the known universe, often one hundred

5:17 trillion times stronger than that of our planet. As such, neutron stars and

5:24 magnetars represent the most extreme celestial objects. The investigation of them is vital to

5:30 better understand the universe. A new study published on April the nineteenth in the

5:35 journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Silence examines the remnants surrounding the supernova left

5:44 leftovers of Cassiopia A. The explosion was visible to Earth three hundred and forty

5:49 years ago. Astronomers have always suspected that magnetars would generate highly polarized X rays

5:58 around them, meaning that the electronic fields of the magnetar's radiation vibrates in a

6:02 preferred direction, but scientists were surprised in twenty and twenty two when data collected

6:08 by nassa's Imaging X Ray polar Imagery Explorer satellite, which launched the year before,

6:15 showed polarization may depend on energy. I XPE information suggested that may be

6:23 the case after looking at X rays in the supernova remnant of Cassiopia A surrounding

6:29 them magnetar four U zero one forty two plus sixty one, located thirteen thousand

6:36 light years away, as the first ever measurement of the polarization of X rays

6:42 around a magnetar. The IXPE observations showed that the lower energy X rays were

6:47 polarized at one hundred and eighty degrees to the high energy X rays. Both

6:54 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

7:05 jokes earlier on so over to you, Hallie for your dad joke. Okay,

7:10 you asked for it, Please don't grown too much. Why did the

7:14 astronaut bring a telescope to the party because he wanted to a planet himself right

7:18 in the middle of the funky Yes, Hallie, I really do have nothing

7:24 to say about your terrible jokes. That's the end of today's episode. My

7:28 name is Tim Gibs. I've been your host for today. Over to you

7:30 Steve on Monday for Monday's edition. Astronomy Daily is presented by myself, Tim

7:35 Gibbs, Andrew Dunkley and Steve Dunkley. You can find more about the podcast

7:41 on space nuts dot io and bites dot com. Thank you very much,

7:46 See you again next time.