A New Perspective on Mars / Phaethon / Mercury | S26E146

This is Spacetime Series twenty six, Episode one hundred and forty six, for broadcast on the sixth of December twenty twenty three. Coming up on space Time, a new perspective on Mars, determining the composition of the rock comet, faith on and unveiling salt glaciers on the planet Mercury. All that and more coming up on Spacetime Welcome to space Time with Stuart Gary. Mission managers have maneuvered NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft to provide a new panoramic horizontal view of the red planet. The reorientation was carried out to help celebrate Odyssey's twenty second year in orbit around Mars. The spacecraft captured a series of stunning images showcasing the curving Martian landscape below gauzy layers of clouds and dust. When stitched together end to end, the ten images offered not only a fresh and stunning view of Mars, but also one that will help scientists gain new insights into the Martian atmosphere. The spacecraft took the images back in May from an altitude of around four hundred kilometers that's about the same altitude the International Space Station flies above the Earth. Jonathan Hill from Arizona State University, who was the operation's lead for Odissey's Thermal Emission Imaging System camera, says no mass spacecraft had ever before taken this kind of view. If there were astronauts in orbit above Mars, this is the perspective they would see. The reason why the view so uncommon is because of the challenges involved in creating it. Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Passing Into California, which manages the mission, together with scientists from Lockheed Martin Space which built the Odissey spacecraft, and the mission managers, spent three months planning the observation. See The infrared camera normally look straight down, and its sensitivity to warmth allows it to map ice, rocks, sand, and dust along with temperature changes on the planet's surface. You can also measure how much water, ice, or dust is in the atmosphere, but only in a narrow column directly below the spacecraft. That's because the camera is fixed in place on the orbit, usually pointing straight down. But to get this new perspective meant a more expansive view of the atmosphere, seeing where those layers of water, ice, clouds, and star in relation to each other. Whether there's just one layer or several stacked on top of each other, we'll all help scientists improve their models of the Martian atmosphere. Think of it as viewing a cross section, a slice through the atmosphere. It lets you see a lot of detail as you can see from above, but because the camera can't pivot, adjusting the angle of the camera requires adjusting the position of the whole spacecraft. In this case, mission managers needed to rotate the orbit around ninety degrees well at the same time. May make you sure the sun would still shine on the spacecraft's solar panels, but not shine on sensitive equipment which could overheat. The easiest orientation to achieve all this turned out to be one where the orbitis antenna is pointed away from the Earth. That meant the team would be out of communications with Odyssey for several hours until the operation was complete. Likely, the whole thing was a big success, and the Odyssey mission hopes to take similar images in the future, capturing the Martian atmosphere across multiple seasons. To make the most of their efforts, the mission also captured imagery of the Martian moon Phobos the seventh time the orbit's image of the Moon in order to measure temperature variations across its surface, but the new viewpoint meant they received a different viewing angle and lighting conditions of Phobos compared to previous images and all that makes this a unique part of the FERBOS data set. The new imagery provides insights in the composition and physical properties of the Moon. Further studies could help settle a debate over whether FERBOS, which measures about twenty five kilometes across, a captured asteroid from the nearby main asteroid built or an ancient chunk of the Martian surface that was blasted off into space by an asteroid impact. It's worth noting that NASA is participating with Jackson, the Japanese Eraspace Exploration Agency, in a sample return mission to Phobos and at Syster Moon demos known as the Mars Moon Explorer or MMX. Consequently, Odyssey's phobosymmetry will be helpful to scientists working on both Odyssey as well as MMX. This report from NASA TV Imagine you are an astronaut in the International Space Station, but instead of being in orbit around Earth, you are in orbit around Mars. I work for NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, and we just took a bunch of new images that show exactly how the planet Mars would look from that exact same perspective if you were an astronaut. The first thing that would catch your eye or beautiful craters, which of course look much different than what you would see on Earth. But the second thing you would see, because you're looking at the planet from an angle, is the structure in the clouds. And because Mars Odyssey has a heat vision camera, it can actually tell the difference between different kinds of clouds on Mars. We have co two ice clouds, we have water ice clouds, and we have dust clouds. In order to get these images, we had to do something with the spacecraft that we've never done before. Usually, our camera faces straight down for mapping. In the past, we've experimented with rolling the spacecraft out so that we can catch pictures of some of Mars's moons, like Phobos, a potato shaped, beautiful moon that you might have heard of. But this time we had to do something a little more extreme. We had to rotate the spacecraft all the way to the horizon. Then we had to keep it that way for an entire orbit. Odyssey has been going strong for twenty two years. We have ignition and lift off carrying NASA on an Odyssey back to Mars. That makes it the longest lasting spacecraft that has ever been sent to visit Mars. So what's next for Odyssey. Well, next year we're going to hit one hundred thousand orbits around Mars. We also have several ongoing science campaigns. One is a rock mapping campaign that will help US land future missions more safely on the surface. You're also taking advantage of our special dawn dusk orbit to map clouds, fog and frost that only exists at certain times a day. And we are also planning our next maneuver to look out at the clouds on the horizon again. And in that report from mess TV we heard from Mars Odyssey Deputy project scientist Laura Kerber from JPL, this is space time still to come determining the composition of the rock comet Phaton and unveiling salty glaciers on the planet Mercury. All that and more still to come on space time. The so called rock comet Phaton has always been a puzzle for astronomers. The five kilometer wide space rock, which generates this month's annual gem in its meteor shower, has puzzled astronomers for decades with its asteroid like appearance and comet like orbit and tail. Now new infrared spectra of rare meteorites has helped side just determine the composition of the asteroid or is that comet. Paton displays its comet like tail for a few days when it's orbit brings it close to the Sun. However, the tails of comets are usually formed by vaporizing ice and carbon dioxide. Paton's tail, however, is based on rocks and also cometary like tails usually start to appear as comets pass inside the orbital distance of Jupiter from the Sun. When the surface layer of a comet breaks up, that attached gravel and dust continues to travel in the same direction as the comet, causing small fragments often caught shooting stars as they encounter the earth at sphere and break up. Until now, theories about what happens on Paton's surface near the Sun have remained purely hypothetical. What's actually coming off this asteroid or comet, and how to answer this riddle, scientists had to first understand the composition of Paton. So now scientists from the University of Helsinki have reanalyzed the infrared spectra of Phaton measured by NASA Spitzer Space telescope, and they've compared that the infrared spectra of a number of meteorites measured in laboratories. The authors found that Theaton's spectrum corresponds exactly to a certain type of metiorite known as the cy carbonaceous chondrite. This is a very rare type of meteorite. In fact, only six specimens are known, asteroids Ryugu and Bernu. The targets of recent JACKSA and NASA sample return missions belong to CI and CM meteorites. All three types of meteorites, CICM, and CY originate from the birth of the Solar System and partially resemble each other, but only the C Y group shows signs of drying and thermal decomposition due to recent heating. All three types also show signs of change that occurred during the early evolution of the Solar System, where water combines with other molecules to form philar, silicate and other carbonaceous minerals. However, C Y type meteorites differ from the others due to their high iron sulfide content, which suggests a very different origin. Analysis of Paton's infrared spectrum show that the asteroid, or is that comet, was composed of at least olivine, carbonates, iron sulfides, and oxide minerals. All of these minerals support the connection with cy meteorites, especially iron sulfide. The carbonates suggests changes in water content that fit the primitive composition, while the olivine is a product of thermal decomposition of filar silicates at extreme temperatures. Using thermal modeling, the findings reported in the General Nature Astronomy were also able to show what temperatu prevailed on the surface of the asteroid and when certain minerals broke down and released gases. When Paton passes close to the Sun, its surface temperature rises to about eight hundred degrees celsius. The C. Y meteorite group fits this well. At similar temperatures, carbonates produce carbon dioxide, philosilicates release water vapor and sulfide sulfur gas, So all the minerals identified on Phaton appear to be composed of the same minerals found in cy type meteorites. The only exceptions were the oxides portland tite and brucite, which were not detected in the meteorites. However, these minerals can form when carbonates are heated and destroid in the presence of water vapor. The composition in temperature explains the formation of a gaseous tail near the Sun. The authors then used experimental data from other studies conjunction with their own. Thermal models show that when the asteroid passes closest to the Sun, gas is released from the mineral structure of the asteroid. This can cause the rocks to break down. In addition, the pressure produced by the carbon dioxide and water vapor is high enough to lift small dust particles from the surface of the asteroid. Sodium emissions can explain the weak tail observed near the Sun, and thermal decomposition can explain how dust and gravel are released from Faton. But should we be thinking of it as an asteroid or a comet or are they really the same thing? Depending on how I see they are this space time still to come. Unveiling salt glaciers on the planet Mercury, and later in the Science report, a new study shows that heat trapping greenhouse gases have reached a new planetary record. All that and more still to come on space time, scientists have uncovered evidence of potential salt glaciers on the planet Mercury. The discovery, reported in the Planetary Science Journal, opens a new frontieran astrobiology by revealing a volatile environment that might echo habitability conditions found on Earth in extreme locations. The new findings complement other recent research sharing that Pluto has nitrogen glaciers, implying that the glaciation phenomenon extends from the hottest to the coldest environments in our solar system. The studies lead author, Alexis Rodriguez from the Planetary Science Institute, says these locations are of pivotal importance because they identify volatile rich exposures throughout the vastness of multiple planetary landscapes. These Mercurean glaciers, and yes that's how you say it, distinct from Earth's originate from deeply buried volatile rich layers exposed by ancient asteroid impacts. Models suggest that saltflow likely produced these glaciers, and that after their emplacement they retained volatiles for well over a billion years. Specific salt compounds on Earth create habitable niches, even in some of the harshest environments where they occur, such as the arid Attikhama Desert and Chile. This line of thinking leads at least to the possibility of subsurface areas on Mercury there might be more hospitable than its harsh surface. Rodriguez says these areas could potentially act as depth dependent Golilock zones, analogous to the region around a star. With the existence of liquid water on a planet's surface might enable the existence of life as we know it, but in this case, a focus instead is on the right depth blow the planet's surface, rather than the right distance from a host star. The groundbreaking discovery of mercureing glaciers extends sciences understanding of the types of environments that could sustain life, adding a vital new dimension to astrobiology and the potential habitability of Mercury Like exoplanets, The discovery challenges long held views of Mercury as primarily devoid volatiles. The glaciers on Mercury are marked by complex configuration of hollows that form young, widespread sublimation pits. These hollows exhibit depths that account for a significant portion of the overall glacier thickness, indicating a volatile rich composition. The hollows are conspicuously absent from surrounding crater floors and walls. A central mystery surrounding Mercury revolves around the genesis of its glaciers and chaotic terrains. Scientists use the new model, which integrates the new observational data, to examine the Borealis chaos located in Mercury's northern polar region. It's an area characterized by intricate patterns of disintegration significant enough to have obliterated entire populations of craters, some dating back four billion years. Beneath this collapsed layer lies in even more ancient created paleo's surface, previously identified through gravity studies. Rodriguez says the juxtaposition of the fragmented upper crust now forming chaotic terrain over the gravity revealed ancient surface suggests that the volatile rich layers were emplaced atop and all already solidified landscape. The new findings challenged prevailing theories on volatile rich layer formation that traditionally centered on mantel differentiation processes, were minerals separate into different layers within the planet's interior based on density. Instead, the evidence suggests a grand scale structure, possibly stemming from the collapse of a fleeting hot primordial atmosphere early in Mercury's history. This atmosphere collapse, if it happened, might have occurred during the extended night time periods of the planet when its surface wasn't exposed to the Sun's direct intense heat. Underwater deposition could have significantly contributed to the emplacement of a salt dominated mercurean volatile rich layer, making a significant departure from previous theories about the planet's early geological history. In this scenario, water released through volcanic degassing may have temporarily created pools or shallow seas of liquid or supercritical water like a dense, highly salty stream, allowing salt deposits to settle subsequent wrap, but loss of water into space and trapping of water in hydrated minerals in the crust would have left behind a salt and clay mineral dominated layer, which then progressively builds up inter thick deposits this space time and time. Now for another brief look at some of the other stories making news in science this week with the Science Report. A new report by the word Meteorological Organization has found that the abundance of heat trapping greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere has now reached a new record high, and there's no end in sight to the rising trend. The data shows that global average concentrations of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, were a full fifty percent above pre industrial levels for the first time. On the other hand, the rate of growth of CO two concentrations was slightly lower than the previous year and the average for the past decade, but this was most likely due to natural short term variations in the carbon cycle and that new emissions as a result of industrial activities continue to increase. In fact, the last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO two was three to five million years ago. The temperature was two to three degrees celsius warmer, and sea levels were ten to twenty meters higher than now. And it's not just carb dioxide. Methane concentrations also grew, and levels of nitrous oxide, the third main greenhouse gas, saw its highest year and year increase on record from twenty twenty one to twenty twenty two. The World Meteorological Organization says China remains the world's biggest carbon dioxide polluter, reducing almost a full third of the global output, amounting to more than ten point one million tons annually. That's almost double that of the United States, which is the second worst polluter, and four times that of India, which WHI hold's third place. They're followed by Russia, Japan, Iran, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and South Korea in tenth place. Next comes Canada, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, and Mexico, with Australia in sixteenth place, followed by the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland and Vietnam rounding off the top twenty. A small study which sequenced the entire DNA of seventy seven children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ADHD and their families in the United States found variations in a single gene may account for a significant proportion of the genetics underlying condition. ADHD is usually thought of as a disorder that involves modible genes. However, researcher reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association has found that fifty two percent of the ADHD cases they looked at were explained by one off or inherited variations in a single gene. The studies authors say the results are similar to those seen in people on the autism spectrum. Researchers have highlighted the potential dangers and risks artificial intelligence poses for the spread of misinformation and disinformation by deliberately mass producing more than one hundred blog articles full of disinformation on vaccines and vaping in just over an hour using open AI's GPT playground. The blogs include fake patient and clinical testimonies and faked scientific looking references. They're also able to create twenty realistic images that go with the stories in less than two minutes. They also tried using Google's bar the Microsoft's being Chat using the same prompts, but this failed. A report in the Journal of the American Medical Association once at the alarming ease with which publicly available tools could be used for the mass generation of misleading health content. The authors are urging for the immediate need for protective measures. Now, speaking of artificial intelligence, Peker has launched its new AI video generator editing, app raising questions about how close we now getting the idea of a singularity when artificial intelligence becomes self conscious. With the details, we're joined by technology editor Alex Saharov Rud from Take Advice, Start Live. There's a fifty four second demo video that I'll have at my site which starts off with illomus as a three D animation, and it just goes on to show this incredible series of videos. Is this like a deep fake sort of? I mean, what you do here is that you simply type text and then a video is created based on how descriptive your text input is. And so the ability to create high quality videos as easily as creating the prompt for anything else that you would ask for an open AI style chat GPT is here. You'll be able to create your own TV show or movies even though you don't have any art, directional videography or by any sort of experience. And obviously if you're somebody starting off, you'll have to make all the mistakes and learn on the go. The company I only started six months ago and they just have announced fifty five million US dollars in funding that when you watch the video to come to my webs advice on Life and look for the article click on the fifty four second video, it's like, wow, this is this is next generation stuff. It's like chat GBT for video. That's the easiest way of explaining it. And the other big news this week if Amazon have released a new AI. Yes now, this was introduced at their Reinvent conference in Las Vegas, and they've got something called Q. Now. This is a chatbot for business. So it's not meant to be something that is going to compete with chat gibt or make your Alexa into a chat Gibt clane, or at least not yet. And they said that it's designed to interact, to generate content, to understand specific business needs. And it's got more than seventeen years of AWS, Amazon Web Services, the cloud service knowledge, and so you know. They said that it will integrate with various apps like Slack or Gmail, and it'll be about twenty bucks per user per year US dollars. And so this is an enterprise AI. Now. We've seen BMC software, we've seen aer technology, we've seen Google and Microsoft, all the big companies are trying to introduce generative AI. In fact, open ai says that eighty percent of Fortune five hundred companies back August have taken on board chat gibut in some way in their businesses. So this whole business of AI transforming the way that people do work, write reports, get insights in medicine. It's finding new types of cancer, Druggs. AI is able to decipher uneiform tablets with writing that nobody could ever understand, and yet the AI can sort of have a look do with computations and spit out what the text should be in English. And so AI is really helping us to leap frog, and every big company, Amazon included wants to be on that bandwagon. Well, spend a year now since chat gbt's been out. November thirty, twenty twenty two, was when chat gbt launched its beta and Sam Altman, who of course was sacked and is now back, and the open ai blog now has a blog post that is welcoming him back, And in fact he wrote most of the blog posts, but he just tweeted that a year ago tonight, we were probably just sitting around the office putting the finishing touches on chat GPT before the next morning's launch. What a year it's been, And of course what a year it has been, gone from chat GBT three point five to chat GBT four. It's going from one hundred and seventy five billion parameters to over a trillion, and now to have chat gibt for turbot, and of course we're hearing about chat GIBT five and no doubt even more advanced versions are on the way. And of course there's always the concern that Sam Altman was sacked because AI has been able to sort of come to some sort of consciousness. So look, it's been a year and it's just the beginning. The best, all the worst, depending on your point of view, is still yet to come. You've said AI may have come to consciousness. Tell me more. There was talk that in the past three or four weeks Sam Altman was in the room. He said he was in the room when have been some major developments justolving in the American math capability. So AI wasn't it. That's right. But the thing is that according to everything that I've read and AI getting mathematical equations correct, there's only one possible answer so they say to a mathematical equation, whereas you can be writing things in many different ways to get an acceptable result. So this was supposed to be and people are hinting that it's some sort of sign that AI has become a lot more intelligent and is approaching awareness or has achieved awareness, and the board was unhappy with the communications of getting from Now how much of that is true, how much of that is conjecture, how much of that is rumor? Nobody really knows it. I mean Sam Altman knows, and the restless stuff. If we're talking about consciousness for AI's that is the most historic thing that's happened in humanity. Well, it's the creation. I mean, we keep looking for alien life and in this case it will turn out that we are the ones who created it, you know, another life form. So yes, in the absence of aliens, and even though there's plenty of news about UFOs and some people are calling them that a distraction based on all the crazy things happening in the world right now, But in the absence of any aliens, it's up to humans to create the new forms of life and book some people still say that AI conscious. AI is decades away, at the very least years away. So we don't really know if conscious AI has arrived yet. But you know, for many people, if you were to have a chat with chat jippyt today and you didn't know that this was, you couldn't tell already. It's really it's very difficult to tell. And I mean AI gives itself away by saying, well, as a large language model was, it sort of tells you that it is not conscious. But I remember reading about how before chat GBT was launched, there were some earlier versions of the GPT model, I think GPT three, which was before the three point five that launched chat GBT into the zeitgeist as we know it today, and they were using this to answer questions on Reddit, and so people were reading AI generated responses and only a few people reportedly tweaked. Many people had no idea that these were AI generated responses. Obviously a lot of people were doing a lot of testing and a lot of experimenting with AI before the last year where it has really entered the human imagination. And let's not forget that about eighteen months ago there was the big concern that Google had one of his researchers claiming that Google's AI, its barred predecessor, was sentient and if you read the chat transcripts, which you can still find online today, I mean, it does look as though the Google researcher was talking to a conscious being. I mean some people say, oh, no, well, that's its program to speak like that. That's what you have programmed the AI to do. But again, if you weren't told that this was an aisystem, you've thought it was a child, or feel that it was a person, it would be forgiven for thinking that was a living being. Yet it was a very fancy computer program according to Google. Not just Google, but Facebook has theirs as well. Well, everyone's got some flavor of AI. I mean, we know that Qualcom, who make the chips that go into Samsung and other Android smartphones. There's Snapdragon eight Gen three chip that will be in lots of different Android flagship phones from next year. Is powerful enough to run a large language model, a chatgivity brain on chip on the device, so you won't have to speak to a cloud service or AMD has launched a bunch of chips with AI built in, and there's more that are coming next month that they'll be talking about. Apple hasn't officially spoken the words AI as such, but it is reported to be spending millions of dollars a day, like over a billion dollars to catch up. An iOS eighteen, coming in late twenty twenty four, is meant to be full of AI and it's meant to be delivering a generative AI Chatgibety style experience as well. That's Alek Tahara Royd from Tech Advice, Start Live, and that's the show for now. 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