A Landing Site Chosen for NASA’s New VIPER Lunar Rover

SpaceTime S24E110 AI Transcript

This is space time series 24 episode, 110 for broadcasts on the 29th of September, 2021. Coming up on space time, a landing site chosen for NASA's new Viper lunar Rover, and you study suggest Mars was simply too small to ever retain lots of water and discovery of a new binary white dwarf system or that a more coming up on space time.

Welcome to space time with Stuart Gary

NASA is selected the Western edge of Nobel crater at the moon south pole, as the preferred landing site for its volatiles investigating polar exploration Rover or Viper mission slated for launch in 2023. Viber is part of the optimist program and is designed to confirm the presence of water ice just below the surface on the permanently shadowed floors of polar craters, where sunlight never reaches.

This water could be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen for use as rocket fuel for future missions to Mars and beyond Nobel crater was chosen because it's one of the coldest places in the solar system that spacecraft has ever landed there before. And it's only ever been explored from orbit using remote sensing instrument.

The Viper mission will explore the impact crater. They discover how frozen water reached the moon in the first place, how it's remained preserved for billions of years, how it escapes and where it goes. Unlike the rovers used on Mars, which is somewhat autonomous, the 430 kilogram Viper will be powered at in near real time.

That's because the 385,000 kilometer distance between the earth and the moon is a lot shorter than the distance to Mars. And so commands only take 1.3 lights seconds to reach it. The golf cart size for wall Viper will also be faster than its smashing counterparts. With a top speed of 0.8 kilometers per hour.

It will be solar powered and come with at least 50 hours of battery life. And it will be built to withstand the extreme temperatures. It'll have to endure on the moon. Another neat feature is its ability to crab walk sideways. So its solar panels can always keep pointing towards the sun. In order to maintain charge, Viber will launch on a space X Falcon, heavy rocket for delivery to the moon by Astrobotics Griffin Lander.

Once on the lunar surface, Viper will provide GroundTruth measurements for the presence of water and other resources at the moon south pole. The landing site will allow Vibra to visit only six locations of scientific interest. During the 100 day mission duration covering an area of some 93 square kilometers.

As Viber reaches each place of interest it'll analyze drill core samples, taken from different depths and temperatures in order to help scientists better predict where water ice may be present on the moon. Similar terrain. All this will allow scientists that rope a global resource map of the moon for use by feature manmade.

This report from that TV,

the future of human space exploration is being driven by what we can discover and accomplish on the moon. And with NASA is confirmation of ice existing at the lunar south pole, the critical task of finding and mapping where water exists, what form it is in and where it came from can now begin leading us on that journey.

It was first mobile robotic mission on the moon known as Viper, the volatiles investigating polar exploration Rover. It will be delivered to the Nabila region of the south pole as part of NASA's commercial lunar payload services initiative as the first ever resource mapping mission on the surface of another celestial.

Viper will roam the surface equipped with three science instruments and a drill to detect and analyze various lunar soil environments at a range of depths and temperatures. The Rover will venture into permanently shadowed craters. Some of the coldest spots in the solar system where ice reserves have been preserved for billions of years.

NASA had four critical parameters when choosing a landing site for Viper available sunlight earth visibility for communications from the moon to the earth data, showing the potential presence of water and other resources and terrain that is well suited for Viper to navigate. Once on the surface Viper's mission will last 100.

And cover between 10 to 15 miles. And while at baseline traverse through the Nabila region has been identified for the Rover. The scientific discoveries Viper makes along the way will actually influence where the mission team sends it next. So it's planned route will most likely change during its travels.

Viper will visit at least six locations where data suggests ice could be found.

By helping determine the locations of where water and other resources exist. Viper's findings will help pave the way for future landing sites under NASA's Artemis program, the prospects of achieving a long-term human presence on our moon never looked so bright.

This is space time, still the county. Your research suggests a fundamental reason. Mars has no water is that it's too small to hold onto large amounts of water and discovery of a new binary, white dwarf system, all that, and more still to come on space time.

So it has to found ample evidence for the past existence of liquid water on Mars. But of course there's no significant liquid water on the red planet today. Now new research suggests a fundamental reason is that Mars may simply be too small to hold onto large amounts of liquid water scientists have proposed many possible explanations.

Why a once warm wet world has become the freeze dried desert. The red planet is today. The most popular of these is the weakening of the marsh and magnetic field. As the planet cooled down on its core solidified without a protective magnetic field, the sole wind as steadily eroded the one's thick mash and atmosphere.

Eventually the atmosphere was so thin. It allowed the water to sublimate directly to a gas and evaporate away into space. However, and you study reported in P and a S the proceedings of the national academy of sciences suggests a more fundamental reason why today's Mars looks so drastically different from a planet like earth.

The study's lead author couldn't Wang from Washington university in St. Louis says the fate of Mars was decided from the very beginning. He says there's likely a threshold on the size requirements of Rocky planets in order to retain enough water to enable habitability and plate tectonics, to take place with unnecessary mass, exceeding that of Mars weighing in colleagues.

If you stabilized the terms of the element potassium to estimate the presence, distribution, and abundance of volatile elements on different planetary bodies. Potassium is moderately volatile and the authors could use it as a tracer for more volatile elements and compounds such as water. This is a relatively new method that the verges from previous attempts to use potassium to thorium ratios generated by remote sensing and chemical analysis, determine the amount of volatiles Mars once.

To reach their findings. The authors measured the potassium isotope compositions of 20 previously confirm, mash and meteorites each selected to be representative of the bulk Silicon composition of the red planet. There determined that Mars lost more potassium and other volatiles in the earth during its formation, but at the same time at retain more of these volatiles than the moon or the asteroid Vesta two much smaller and drier bodies than either the earth or Mars.

The author has found a well-defined correlation between the size of a body and its potassium isotopic composition. Of course, right now, marsh and media rights are the only samples of the red planet available at the study in order to determine the chemical makeup of the bog Mars and these Martian meteorites have ages varying from several hundred million to 4 billion years, thereby providing a good record of Mazda's volatile evolution history.

By measuring the isotopes of moderately volatile elements, such as potassium weighing colleagues could infer to degree of volatile, depletion of bulk planets and make comparisons between different solar system bodies. These findings have implications in the search for life on planets beside Mars that's because liquid water is an essential for life.

As we know it being too close to a host or too far away and affect the amount of volatiles a planetary body can retain. And so to start with scientists, looking for life beyond earth are looking for planets in the so-called habitable zone. That area where the temperature is right for liquid water to form on a planet surface.

And now scientists can also factor in a size range for planets in order for there to be enough water, to develop a habitable surface environment. This is space time, still the come discovery of a binary white dwarf system and tagging notes return home after 90 days on China's new space station, or that are more sort of calm on space time.

Astronomers have discovered a double white dwarf star system located just 368 light is a way what dwarves the co-ops because of sun-like stars, stars, shine by fusing hydrogen into helium in there because when they run out of core hydrogen, they can track the eventually increasing core temperature and pressure until it's hot enough to begin fusing helium into carbon and oxygen in the core where they shell of hydrogen, then beginning to burn outside the.

Now this causes the stars out of gaseous envelope to expand. And as it's now further away from the contracted core, this outer envelope also cools down, turning the Stein to a red giant. Eventually the star runs out of core helium diffuse Hanis. It's not massive enough to fuse heavier elements. The star dies it's bloated out or envelope floats away as a spectacular cloud, caught a planetary.

Leaving behind it's white hot, still at core exposed as a white dwarf, which will slowly cool over the Aeons. It's the fate that will befall our son in about 7 billion years from now. In fact, astronomers estimate about 97% of all stars eventually become white. It's new white Wolf binary designate editors, SDSs J 13 37 25 0.26 plus 39 52 37 0.7 was detected in early data from the fifth generation Sloan digital sky survey.

The findings reported on the prepress physics website, archive.org will allow scientists to study these objects. As mergers are believed to produce new white tours of higher masses, or if they're massive enough, they could even trigger a supernova initial observations suggest the binary system has a 99 minute orbital period.

The primary wide 12 is about 600 million years old with about half the mass of the sun. And about 0.0141 solar radiation based on its cooling age. The second white tool must be far older, around 1.2 billion years. It has approximately 0.2 solar masses at around 0.02 solar radiation. Now given the secondary style has a logic cooling age.

The authors think it was originally the larger of the two stars and ascended, the giant branch first losing mass torts, companion, judo, its proximity to worth and its short period. The system is among the strongest known sources of gravitational waves in the Miller Hertz frequency regime. In fact, the author said this gravitational wave emission will most likely caused the system's orbital period to contract until eventually the two stars merge probably in about 220 million years from now because of their size, their merger, or former rapidly rotating helium star, which will ultimately end its life as a helium atmosphere.

White. This is space time still to come three Chinese tagging or to return safely to earth after completing the country's longest ever met space mission, all that are more stored of calm on space. Time.

Three tiger nodes have returned safely to earth after completing China's longest ever man space mission the crew parachuted down to the Gobi desert aboard their shinzou 12 spacecraft after spending 90 days in orbit setting up the TN HII core module of Beijing's UTN gong or heavenly pallet space.

During their stay on station, the trio unloaded a cargo ship full of supplies, which has been ducted, the space station. They reconfigured the inside of the module from its original launch to an orbital mode. They undertook two space walks to set up equipment outside the space station and even conducted several experiments.

The mission was China's first man space flight in nearly five years. It was designed to coincide with the 100 anniversary of the ruling Chinese communist party on July. The first Jan, he is expected to operate for at least 10 years, and we'll be joined by two more modules, bring the total mass of the TN gong space station to 70 tons.

Meanwhile, the TN Jiu three cargo ship has now docked onto the AFT port at the Annie. The docking took place just seven hours after it's launched from the Wang Chang satellite launch center on hint, an island in the south China sea, a border Longmont seven rocket. The spacecraft is carrying over six tons of supplies, which will be unloaded by the crew of the Shenzhou 13 spacecraft.

It was slated to launch on October the 16th. This is space time,

and Tom Meditech, another brief look at some of the other stories, making news in science this week with a science report and you study suggest if you've already had COVID-19, it's still worth getting the vaccine. Uh, report of the journal nature, look, to see how well the virus was neutralized by antibodies from people who had been vaccinated, people who had been infected and people who had been birth vaccinated and infected.

And to really put these antibodies to the test, yours is the, the version of the virus, spike protein with 20 specific mutations that made it more likely to escape immune response just a minute. Isn't that gain of function research. Anyway, the authors found that people who were vaccinated or those who had had COVID-19, we're no longer able to neutralize the super spike protein, but people who had been both infected and vaccinated had antibodies that could neutralize it since it's not ideal to become infected with COVID-19 in the first place.

Researchers suggest looking at whether or not boosted jabs can be created with the same broad response. They also suggest using this highly mutated spike protein to create vaccines that may one day help to broaden the immune response. The world health organization says more than 8 million people have been killed by the COVID-19 Corona virus with almost 4.8 million confirmed fatalities.

And over 230 million people infected since the deadly disease was first spread out a word, China. And you study shows that the parents of kids with autism tend to have less symmetrical faces than average the findings by scientists with the Edith Cowan university in the university of Western Australia could provide a better understanding for the genetic factors associated with being on the autism spectrum.

Previous research had already shown that kids on the autism spectrum were more likely to have greater facial asymmetry than non-autistic children. The researchers use sophisticated machine learning techniques to analyze some 5,000 points on three dimensional facial scans of 192 parents of kids on the spectrum and 163 adults with no known history of autism.

They found the parents of children on the autism spectrum had more asymmetric faces than other adults of a similar age. The findings reported in the journal. Autism research suggests there could be a link between the genes which affect the likelihood of an individual, having a greater facial asymmetry and autism.

And you study awards that nearly a quarter of Italian Alpine plant species are now threatened by glacial retreat. Scientists from Stanford university reached their conclusions by combining historical records, current surveys and computational models. The authors say many glaciers around the water predicted to disappear within the next decade.

And the consequences for plants, animals, and society surrounding them are still uncertain for years. Kerry lovers have sworn by the antiinflammatory properties of turmeric, but its active compound curcumin as long frustrated scientists having to validate these claims with clinical studies. The failure of the human body to easily absorb curcumin has been a thorn in the side for medical researchers seeking scientific validation to show that curcumin can't treat cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's and many other chronic health conditions.

Now a study reported in the international journal. Molecular science has shown that curcumin can be delivered effectively to human cells by way of tiny nanoparticles. Apple is finally a release then your iOS 15 operating system with the details we're joined by technology editor, Alex.

Yeah, well, it's just been launched and it is available for the iPhone. iPad. OSA 15 for the iPad is what show is eight for the apple watch TV, apple TV, uh, and maca was 12 months. Or I will come in a month or two when they launched the new max, but there's extra great features for the iPhone. One for example is one we're using right now.

When you on a FaceTime call, as opposed to an ordinary phone call, you can choose the mic mode so you can have standard. Then you can have voice isolation where you can have like a head dry or blow dry or some sort of noise in the background, which has been edited out on the fly because it's voice selection is just picking up your voice.

And so it means that you can have kids in the background or dogs barking, or someone mowing the lawn. Next door and you even the fans and your laptop, you know, spinning up whilst you're on a phone call, uh, on your phone. And if you're talking to another iPhone user on FaceTime or in another voice app that supports it, you won't hear that background noise.

You're also able to do FaceTime with Android and windows users. You have to send them an invite link, but it's now a bit more like zoom to be able to do that. You can now take photographs of anything with texts, like a business card. It could be a phone number or a name in the text of a shop behind you.

Or you can have images from 10 years ago that you've taken that are in your camera roll. And I was 16 and I've had a 16 can you can now copy and paste that text as though it was actual text and it's doing live on the flight optical character recognition. Pop it into an email or notes or documents to go very hand that you can.

I mean, for example, if there's something that you can't copy and paste on Facebook, because Facebook doesn't let you, you take a photo of it, you know, you take the screenshot and then all the text is available to you in the photo app. Now you can more easily save photos from your messages, this cool new emojis, there's new focus mode.

So you can choose to have certain apps. During work time, certain apps during home time, and you have different apps on the screen, and it's a different way of being able to change your life. So that work life and home life doesn't intrude. Although in lockdown, it doesn't Truett and the ability to translate a text with the fast translation.

So even if you've got an iPhone with an apple watch and you've got a one of those little air tags, if you have an ear tag in your backpack and you walk away from your backpack and you get the tag and natal. The last place we saw your backpack was back there, where you were. So you get the separation.

Very, very cool. If you are putting somebody on mute, when you're talking to them, you know, hear a little booklet and when you can, you unmute hear a little bit. So, you know, if you put somebody on me, because sometimes you do, if you're not paying attention, you can even turn your iPhone into a sound machine.

You have Ryan in the background, water in a stream or ocean. So it's this sort of peaceful nature says, if you want to block off the rest of the world, then you can have these sounds to sort of put you into a different mood. As it works. Now, one of the features that was promised that I haven't seen switched on yet, it's called conversation boosts.

If you have a pair of airport pros, you can then switch on the conversation boost and it will pick up the voice of whoever's in front of you like a friend in front of you. And you can use your airport pros as a form of cheap hearing aids and already airport. The transparency mode and I've heard of people using transparency.

My they're sort of sitting in a cafe, they turned transparency mode on and suddenly they realize they can hear what the people at the next table have saying. So the conversation is sort of that on steroids, but it's not designed to pick up somebody from the next table, but if you've got mild hearing loss to hear the person clearly will kill you in front of you.

And I know people who are already using their airports, both the regular ones and airport pros with the live listen mode, using the microphone. That's fine as a microphone that goes straight to your airports. So look, if you go to the apple website or already, you can see plenty of information there on Iowa, 16, iPad, 15, all the different operating systems they've been in development for a long time in use by via testers for about the last three months I've been using them for the last three months.

There was never see bugs this time around and the boss would normally every couple of weeks there was a new feed, a version. One of the big things for the iPad is the ability to multitask much more easily. This. Button at the top of the screen that you can tap to bring up a secondary app. You can have two apps side by side, and you can have a collection of those apps already five by side, open like a browser processor or a some music program.

And then garage bands know, so they can listen to how other people do music. I mean, you can have various different combinations of apps. And so the multitasking is definitely much better. Now the one last thing I want to talk about this. Copley. If you don't have CarPlay or Android auto, one of those screens that's on modern cars, then, you know, you can put your phone on the little internal legal phone holder of some sort, but a gadget called coral vision gives your car a seven.

Coplay screen that you construction cap to the windscreen and I've been testing it for the past couple of days. And I've been reading about a context of the company in Taiwan that makes them it's fantastic. When you get to seven inch screen, you can see ways or Google maps or apple maps speak to messages too.

I mean, Coplay has been the car safe interface for an iPhone that's controlled by, well, you can touch certain things, but it's meant to be controlled as much as possible by voice. The unit has a built-in FM transmitter. So, you know, you don't, if your car doesn't have Bluetooth, but it's got FM radio.

William controls on the steering wheel. So this is upgraded my car into a modern car with the complex features, and I've had great fun using this it's 350 us dollars to get it. And you can take it from car to car. So it's a lot cheaper than pulling the radio app, buying the whole new radio, getting someone to install it.

And then it's, you know, if you ever get rid of that Cabo, you'd have to pull that up and put the old radio back. I mean, this is a portable device, so there's been a lot of iOS news. That device has also Android auto compatible. I'm going to touch it with Android auto as well, but, uh, 12 was coming soon. New Google funds coming soon.

It's the most wonderful time of the year. Yeah. Now I've noticed that I have iOS 14.8 and iOS 15 available for downloads. Do I have to download iOS 14.8 or if I download iOS 15, would that include the updates in 14.8? We'll include the updates from 14.8 and apple was in fact giving you a choice the first time they're saying, Hey, maybe you want to stay on Iowa's 14 clinic.

I mean, I'm glad you asked because those can bring stuff in Africa. No 14.8 is the latest version came out a week ago and it's got the newest software security updates. And some people do not want to go to the latest iOS. Well, I've had, I was version for a month or two because I'd like to see what bugs are there.

Like other people do work the bugs that might have certain apps that don't work on the newest iOS 16. I'm going, I haven't come across any, but I'm sure there are some that are out there and apple, I think. Potentially continue keeping the, to release security updates. If need be for a while before eventually they'll say, look okay.

Well, we're not going to do highway 14 anymore. You now have to go to iOS 15. So they're giving you the choice. You do not have to update to iOS 15 right away. You can, if you still haven't updated to iOS 14.8, please do that immediately. If you wish to stay on, I was 14, but if you want to go to Iowa, it's ready.

It's been pretty well tested over the last three months. I'm sure some issue will come out and everyone will talk about it, but it'll be quickly fixed and we'll get back to no or avoid from it. y.com

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