Artemis II: A Historic Journey to the Moon and Back

This is Space Time Series twenty nine, Episode forty four, for broadcast on the thirtieth of April twenty twenty six. Coming up on space Time, NASA's Artemis two returns safely back to Earth following its historic mission to the Moon, discovery of the most primitive star ever seen, and there's been yet another fireball spotted, the fifth in as many weeks, this one over the Australian state of Victoria. All that and more coming up on space Time. Welcome to space Time with Stuart Gary. NASA's Artamis two mission has returned safely back to Earth following its historic journey around the Moon. The four person crew splashed down in the North Pacific Ocean off the San Diego Coat, ending their ten day record setting flight which saw them travel further from Earth than humans have ever traveled before. Flashdown confirmed at seven oh seven pm Central Time five oh seven pm Pacific Time. From the pages of Jules vern To a modern day mission to the Moon, a new chapter of the exploration of our celestial neighboroos complete. The historic Artemis two mission had blasted off from Pad thirty nine B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with a ninety eight meter tall Space Launch System SLS rocket powering the Orion spacecraft integrity on the first leg of its one million, one hundred and eighteen thousand, six hundred and twenty four kilometer journey to the Moon and back. The mission has marked the first time the SOLS rocket and the Orion spacecraft have carried a human payload on the way to the Moon. Ittemis two deployed four small CubeSat research satellites. The crew tested the spacecraft systems and manual handling characteristics before getting the green light with a crucial six minute TLI or trams lunar injection burn, which took a Ryan out of Earth a little bit and on a four day journey to the Moon. Ten seconds until translunar injection burns start, integrity, good engine, good control. Be sure the same post great up here. At met mission lapse time of one day, one hour and fourteen minutes into the Artemis two mission, as Orion was flying one hundred and fifteen statute miles above Earth and two hundred and forty seven thousand, six hundred miles away from the Moon, we have the start of the translunar injection burn that will send the crew around the Moon, the first humans to do so in over fifty years. Integrity looks like a good burn. We're confirming in. Tigerty confirmation from teams here on the ground to the Artemis two crew aboard Orion. We have translunar injection burn cut off and early reports that it was a very good burn. Orion now five hundred and twenty miles away from Earth. Just five minutes ago we were only one hundred and fifteen miles above Earth's surface. That distance will continue to increase as we are now on a church factory to fly around the Moon for the first time in over fifty years. The world watched as Integrity sped towards its target, with a public cheering on every milester along the journey, which was paving the way for future man missions to the lunar surface. You see, the Itemis two mission was very much a man test round to the Moon and back. It followed the path of the unmanned Artemis one mission back in November twenty twenty two, and it journeyed a record setting four hundred and six thousand, seven hundred and seventy seven point eight kilometers from Earth as Orion swung around the far side of the Moon, six four hundred kilometers above the alien world's gray crater strewn surface. Integrity, Houston, you are six minutes from your forty minutes lunar flyby los. From all of us. It's a privilege to witness you carrying the fire past our farthest reach. Thank you, God speed. Thank you for that, Jenny, and thank you too, all of you for allowing us the immense privilege to be on this journey together. Quite amazing. And as we get close to the nearest point to the Moon and farthest point from Earth, as we continue to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos, I would like to remind you of one of the most important mysteries there on Earth, and that's love. And so as we prepare to go out of radio communication, we're still fulfill your love from Earth and to all of you down there on Earth and around Earth, we. Love you From the Moon, Houston. Copies will see on the other side. During their voyage around the Luna fire side, the crew studied the desolate landscape, identifying many never before seen landmarks. One name It's sent back showed the Moon's Orenthal Basin, a massive crater which had previously only ever been imaged by unmanned spacecraft, and they also suggested names for two other craters, the first named Integrity and honor of their spacecraft, and the second named Carol, which honors the late wife of Mission commander Reid Wiseman, who died of cancer. The creator named proposals will now be formally submitted to the International Astronomical Union, the organization that covers the naming of celestial bodies and their surface features. As well as being the first humans to see the lunar far side in more than half a century, they also witnessed their own private solar eclipse as the Moon passed in front of the Sun seen from their vantage point in space. As they traveled around the lunar farside, communications with mission control in Houston was lost for around forty minutes. That loss of signal was expected as the Moon's body blocks the signals between the spacecraft and NASAs deep space network communications dishes back on Earth. In fact, the agency's Tidbin Biller tracking station just south of Canberra was in charge during the lead up to the loss of signal event and for signal reacquisition as Orion re emerged from behind the limb of the moon. Canberra DICENT spokesperson Rheianna llions from the CSIRO. This was the first human mission of the moon Sisapolo seventeenth back in nineteen seventy two, and all the operators, technicians, engineers and support teams that Tidbinbilla had been preparing for. This for years, so everyone here was pretty cool, calm and collected during the blackout period as they passed around the far side of the Moon. We've prepared for this. It was a planned outage, so we all knew it was coming, and our team had been doing lots of training and preparations to lead up to this moment and what to expect when we lost that signal and we lost those communications as they went around the moon, and then what to expect again when they came back on the other side, and so everyone here was very very very cool, calm and collected, very excited, and just sort of a little bit of tension as we waited to make sure everything was all good on the other side. And sure enough, everything went just as we planned and there was no hiccups at all along that way, so everyone here was doing a fantastic job. How long was the blackout It. Was around forty minutes. When we have a blackout during entry to its atmosphere, when the plasma built up the spacecraft overwhelms the radio contact, there's a constant chatter going on Houston Starship or Houston's Apollo as it would have been in the old days, and they just repeat that over and over again until they get a response. Is that the sort of thing that happened. It could be similar, So I think upon re entry it'll be a similar thing to what they would have done during Apollo. But during that forty minutes, because it's such a long period of time, we knew that we weren't going to be able to contact them until they came back around the other side. So our attention sort of shifted to maintaining communications, making sure that everything was running smoothly so that when they came back around it was going to be an easy pickup and we were able to get back in contact with them as soon as we were able to. Which is the primary receiving station for the blackout period. Because the moon was visible in the sky in over Australia, Canberra was the primary and receiver during that black app period, so we were the ones that were tracking and then regaining that communication connection back. But it varies so throughout the whole mission, the station in Madrid has been doing communications as well the station in Goldstone, California. So as the Moon goes around the Earth and as the Earth rotates, it varies on which station is the one receiving, depending on which one is able to get the best view of the mission. You've got a number of dishes there, including a big seventy meter one which dish was doing most of the work or do they swap depending on what's available at the time. So there were two antennas that were both doing tracking of artomists and now both doing different communications between the two of them, but ultimately they were doing the overall communications together. We had our seventy meter as one of those antennas, and we also have one of our thirty four meter antennas as well. Looking back at the Apollo days and the Apollo eleven mission, and of course the movie The Dish, which was really big here in Australia, it basically covered how the Parks Radio telescope was employed by NASA to help track and provide data for the Apollo eleven Moon mission. That's a sixty four meter dish. The seventy meter dish you guys were using is even bigger, Yes. It is even bigger. So our seventy meter antenna it actually used to be a sixty four meter antenna, and then as the Voyager missions got further and further away from the Earth, they actually upgraded our size to be a seventy meter antenna. And now that's the largest antennas that we have across the whole network. But yes, we've got the bigger antenna, the biggest antenna in the Southern Hemisphere to be exact. So very very exciting that we're able to support these missions to the Moon and also missions that are out beyond, well beyond the Moon as well. Any missions are you tracking at the. Moment, it's over forty active missions active in deep space, so that includes missions at Mars, missions that are looking at the Sun, missions doing flybys with other planets, and the Voyager missions, which are now the furthest missions away from the Earth. And I take it you have to do constant exercises to maintain the ability to track those spacecraft and also in case something goes wrong for some reason, you lose lock. These spacecraft maneuvers itself in such your way that it loves a signal. You have to work to try and regain that signal. There must be a lot of testing you do to do that. Yeah, So we have around ninety people who are work here at our station, and only a small handful some of them are the operators. Everyone else mechanics, engineers, technicians, people who are working on the antennas to make sure that they are in tiptop condition to maintain their tracking abilities so that we're not going to have an antenna breakdown mid track and then lose a lot of data. So we have lots of regular servicing and maintenance happening on our antennas. So it's a big group effort out here at the station to make sure that everything goes well. And then our trackers are the ones making sure that those signals that we're receiving are the right signals that we want to receive, that there's nothing wrong there, and they're the ones doing all that troubleshooting in case there's anything going on in that radio signal sphere. I believe there's a lot of camaraderie between not just the dig space network of NASA, but also the European Space Agency ES owned network. Yeah, so we do a little bit with the other networks that might be out there, but our predominant role is with the other stations in the deep space network. So we work very closely with Madrid, we work very closely with Goldstern, California, and we also work very closely with the Jet Propulsion Lab over in the United States, a part of so we work quite collaboratively amongst those three point and then sometimes we might get a little bit of stuff with other stations around the world as well, depending on what is needed to. Be done for the artemier's mission. What special things have you been doing. We've been doing those primary communications. So we've sort of gone back to a similar role that we would have had during Apollo, making sure that the primary communications with the mission are all going well, going smoothly. We're able to contact them, they're able to contact us, and we're receiving back everything that we need to receive from that. So we're doing a constant role in the background. During the daytime here in Australia, our operators are the ones managing the whole network, so they're not just using the intennas here in Canberra, they're also using the ones in Madrid and California. So we've been making sure that whilst the sun is in the sky over here and the moon is in the sky in Australia, we've been able to maintain those communications and ensure that the other stations have been able to do the same. One of the great controversies about the Apollo mission was that it wasn't your fault, but the audio, so the vision was lost for quite some time. That can't happen these days. There's backups for backups for backups, aren't there. Yes, there is. They've got lots of contingencies and redundancies in place to make sure that if something doesn't work, they've got something else to do it as well. And so that's why we've got the deep Space network here, We've got lots of other places. It's a very global collaborative effort, just as Apollo was. It's the same for Artemis, but even on a larger scale now. So we've got lots and lots of things in place to make sure that we're able to keep tracking and receiving everything that we need from this mission. Now under the current Trump plan, we're going to have an Artemis launch at least once a year, so that's an incredible increasing cadence. And of course as well as that, there's going to be lots of activity on the lunar surface as well. That'll be transmitting data here and there and everywhere. That's going to make things very busy, isn't it. It is going to make things very busy, but it's going to make things very exciting as well. So we know that Artemis three, it's just changed from a lunar landing to orbit around Earth to ensure that all of their systems are working through more maneuvers and more testing of the module. But then Artemis four is going to be the big one to past your eyes to because that's when we're going to be landing back on the lunar surface, which is going to be such an incredible moment. As amazing as Artemis two is and as historic as it is, there's only more than you know, the sky, the moon is the limit, right, It's even further than that now. So Artemis two is really set the pavement for future Artemis missions to go and continue the exploration that we've started back with Apolo. You still monitor Voyager two? We do. We are always in contact with Voyager two very frequently. We're the only tracking station in the world that is able to send a signal to Voyager to end receiver signal. So we spend a lot of time with that mission as it continues traveling away from our solar system. Okay, here's the tough one for you. Can you still contact the original pioneer probes? No, we can't. I know they were used for training exercises for a while there. Once they stopped, I said, we're decommissioned. They were still used as training exercises for your guys to see if they can find them. Yeah, so back when we could still contact them, we did contact them frequently, even though they weren't doing any science at that time. But no, we and we're not in contact with them any more. The furtherest missions the way that we contacted the Voyager one, and so we spend a lot of our time tracking those missions as well as the forty other missions that are in our solar system as well. That's DSN spokesperson Ranalliance from the CSIRO during their lunar flyby. A fleet of cameras we used to capture imagery of the Moon, including features humans had never directly seen before. They also saw several flashes of light as mete or slammed into the lunar surface before their very eyes. The crew used a variety of digital handheld cameras to conduct high resolution photography of the lunar surface see The Artemus two mission is providing NASA with an opportunity to gather as much data as possible on the topography and geological features of the lunar fi side under varying illumination conditions, thereby allowing shadows to add never before depth and texture to this alien landscape. The photos, videos, mission telemetry, and communications information will all be used to help determine landing sites for future atomist missions. As NASA embarks on the development of its lunar base near the Moon's south pole. After being flung around the Moon in a gravity assists maneuver, Integrity was on course to return to Earth using a free return trajectory. As it approached our home planet, crew began reconfiguring a rhine for atmospheric reentry. The European Service module was jettisoned and the capsule began the most dangerous part of the entire mission. Ten seconds till entry interface, and we have crossed the threshold. Now entering the Earth's atmosphere, we're at four hundred thousand feet traveling thirty four thousand, eight hundred feet per second. Time to splash down thirteen minutes, ten seconds, and as predicted, we've entered our communications blockout. This will be a six minute blackout period, no voice, no data from the crew. The rhine was maneuvered so the heat shield faces four forward. They re entered its atmosphere over thirty eight thousand kilometers an hour. That's fast enough to travel from Sydney to Perth, or in New York to la in just five minutes. We're thirty seconds away from the anticipated point of peak heating on the vehicle, where temperatures will rise to about four to five thousand degrees fahrenheit. This is the true test of our trajectory, the vehicle as it enters the period of peak heating in the Earth's atmosphere. The first tug of gravity being felt by Integrity's astronauts since their launched back on April first. Temperature has reached over two thousand, seven hundred degrees celsius, half as hot as the surface of the Sun. And for all this, their early protection was the spacecraft's five meter to hate shield, an improved version of the one which broke apart during the previous Items one mission. Four and a half minutes until the end of the blackout period. Time to splash down eleven minutes thirty three seconds. The Landing and Support Officer reports that the P three has acquisition on Integrity three and a half minutes left in this blackout period. The plasma build up around the spacecraft and the repelling of that heat on Integrity's heat shield. Flight Dynamics reports so that airborne assets in the vicinity of the splashdown zone do have a visual on Integrity. Still two minutes and forty seconds left in our blackout period. Time to splash down nine minutes thirty five seconds. Multiple airborne assets as part of the recovery team all have visuals on Integrity, and the WB fifty seven flying in the splashdown zone also has a visual and the Navy helos also have visuals. We're still in the blackout period, still do not have communications from the crew. We should be out of the blackout period less than a minute from now. We are now processing data from integrity landing and support officer reports. The small boats are en route to the splashdown target zone, passing through one hundred and fifty thousand feet. Our trajectory is perfect. Still waiting to establish voice communication. Integrity Houston com check post blackout. Heath Sin Integrity. We have you out and clear. Your trajectory is nominal and your recovery teams. Have visual guides. Look scared. No action for the internal camera controller fail. Big cheers from the viewing room here in mission control as voice communication re established with Commander Reid Wiseman for America and a waiting world Integrity. Is five and a half minutes away from coming home, passing one hundred thousand feet now ranged to splash down nineteen nautical miles. Integrity. Impact to the camera controller fail is no cabline views of the shoots Integrity. We're processing good data through the GPS system. We're at fifty thousand feet. The pyros are armed for forward bay covered jettisons as. The spacecraft plunge through its atmosphere. Seven drogue and main parachutes were deployed. Slow Integrity down and they. Go the first series of parachutes, and we're on Drogues and Houston. We're visional. Two droges out the window. Two good DRUGU shoots we copy. We see them. Next up the deployment of pilot parachutes that will pull the main shoots out. Time to splash down three minutes and ten seconds, perfect descent rate according to flight dynamics. Rate on two drugs. We see the say. Onmeboard passing through ten thousand feet. Still on Drgues shoot deploy. We're at five thousand feet. Surgeon recovery beacon has been activated on Integrity and we have three good main shoots, good reefing, good descent rate. Right, and we see three good looking parachutes. Integrity. Cabin pressure indicates no need for hydrogen check. Tiggerty copies this is a perfect descent for Integrity. Its crew sounding hail and hardy on board. Time to splash down one minute, fifteen seconds. Integrity about to complete a journey spanning six hundred and ninety four thousand, four hundred and eighty one miles from its launch from the Kennedy Space Center back on April first and a trip around the Moon, passing through one thousand feet. Taggarty splashdowns having post landing command. Now splashdown confirmed. Gopy splash down waiting on VLDR. A perfect bullseye splashdown for Integrity and its four astronauts. Integrity's astronauts back on Earth and the landing and Support officer reports the vehicle is stable one. We still will be deploying the crew module uprighting system to maintain that orientation. The unofficial splash down time seven oh seven and forty seven seconds PM Central Time. That would put the end of the mission at emissional lapse time of nine days, one hour, thirty one minutes thirty five seconds. Following splashdown, recovery teams retrieved the crew using helicopters, delivering them to the US Navy's USS John P. Murtha. Once on board, the astronauts underwent post flight medical evaluations at the ships sick bay before being flown back to shore to meet with an aircraft down for NASA's Johnson's Space Flight Center in Houston, Texas. One issue which NASA will definitely need to address is the Orion spacecraft's disastrous Dunny. The LU and THELU initially began to malfunction shortly after launch, and it's been a dare I say, hit and miss affair for one of the better term ever since. Extraterrestrial toilets on space shuttles and on the International Space Station have also had their problems, but they mostly worked well. A version of the Oriyan weightless water closet was tested in microgravity conditions of board the space station before being approved for use on Artemis two, but the cosmic commoders installed on Oriin wasn't a flushing success, forcing mission control to request brew members use back up urine collection bags instead, at least for Number ones. Engineers suspect that ice may have been blocking the line, preventing urine from completely flashing overboard. The good news is the toilet was still open for Number twos, thereby relieving the crew of the need to wear diapers, and the problems didn't end there. The astronauts also reported a smell coming from the celestial throne, which is buried in the floor of the capsule behind a door and privacy curtain, but all that aside. Itemis too marks the start of America's return to the Moon. This time to stay and with plans to land near the Luna South Pole in twenty twenty eight on the Artemis fore mission and begin the long process of setting up a permanent base there by twenty thirty, Oryan onnly tacts astronauts from Earth ta lunar orbit. Getting from lunar orbit down to the surface and back again will be the responsibility of a different type of spacecraft, Luna Lander two of which SpaceX's Giant Starship HLS and Blue Origins more moderately sized integrated Lander vehicle are now being developed for the mission. The next Artemis flight, ATEMIS three, which is slated for next year, will test both lander designs in low Earth orbit, checking out their flight characteristics and practicing docking maneuvers with the Iran spacecraft. Each Lander will also need to undertake a successful unmanned landing on the lunar surface and then return to lunar orbit. Potential landing sites around the lunar south Pole are still being investigated, with nine currently on the short list. Once a permanent lunar base is established and operational, the Moon will then become a jumping off point for future man missions to mass and beyond. This is space time still to come. Astronomers discover the most primitive star ever seen, and there's been yet another fireball spotted, the fifth that has meant weeks, this one over the Australian state of Victoria. All that and more still to come on space time. Astronomers have identified one of the most primitive stars ever seen and the nearest candidate yet found to the first generation of stars created out of the primordial material of the Big Bang. The new research, reported in the journal Nature Astronomy, could lead to new insights about the formation of the universe's first stars. The newly discovered star, cataloged as SDSS JAY zero seven one five minus seventy three thirty four, was located some eighty thousand light years away in the vicinity of the large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite dwarf galaxy which orbits our own Milky Way galaxy. Astronomy is a describing it as a prime example of a population two star. Population twos are a group of stars made directly out of the material created by the very first generation of stars in the universe, which are known as population three stars, and which themselves were formed directly out of the pristine hydrogen and helium created in the Big Bang. See in the first moments of the Universe. After the Big Bang thirteen point eight billion years ago, the cosmos consisted of an ionized soup of quaklu on plasma. Eventually, after around three hundred and eighty thousand years, this plasma had cooled enough for the first atoms of hydrogen and helium to form. Now, some patches were denser than others, and after a few hundred million years they gravity overcame the universe's outward expansion trajectory, and the denser clouds of this material began to collapse inwards on themselves, eventually forming the first generation of stars, the population three stars we mentioned earlier. Now, astronomers have never actually seen at population three star. That's because of their unusual composition. They're thought to have all been extremely massive and luminous giant blue stars. And the thing is high mass stars like these burn through their nuclear fuel supplies much quicker than low mass stars like our Sun. They're often described as being the James Deans of the stellar world, living fast and dying young, often surviving for just a few million years before going supernova. By comparison, a yellow dwarf star like our son will live for around twelve billion years, and even less massive red dwarf stars could theoretically live for trillions of years. The thing about stars is they create heavier elements, either through the fusion of lighter elements in their core during their lifetimes, or through more violent fusion processes as they explode a supernovae or they merge, releasing incredible gravitational forces. Although they were initially formed out of nothing but hydrogen and helium, maybe a little bit of lithium and beryllium there as well, Population three V stars evolved to produce all the other elements in the universe, including the iron in your blood, phosphorus in your bones, and the calcium in your teeth. And when these population three stars explode, they spread all those elements throughout the universe, eventually to be recycled into the first population two stars. Population two stars like SDSS JAY zero seven one five minus seventy three thirty four can be identified by their composition. They have what's known as low metallicity, meaning their metal poor because the only contains small amounts of heavier elements. That's because there were so few heavy elements available in the ancient universe. Now by the way, astronomers refer to all elements other than hydrogen and helium as metals. Over time, as more and more stars were born and ultimately dyed, greater and greater amounts of heavier elements became available to see the universe, eventually leading to the creation of more and more high metallicity stars, including the metal rich population one stars like our Sun. So by studying a star's metallicity through its composition, astronomers can determine the age of the star, at least in terms of its evolutionary position in the universe. SDSSJ zero seven one five minus seventy three thirty four is still composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, and it contains less than zero point zero zero five percent of the metals we find in the Sun. One of the studies authors, Kevin Schlaufman from Johns Hopkins University, says the properties of the first stellar generation some of the most important unknowns in modern astrophysics. It was Schlaufman who originally identified sdss J zero seven one five minus seventy three thirty four as a star of interest back in twenty fourteen. As part of the current fifth generation of the Sloan Digital All Sky Survey. He says, while this start doesn't have a primordial composition itself, it's the closest astronomers have ever gotten to Population three stars. SDSSJ zero seven one five minus seventy three thirty four was formed directly out of the cloud of gas that had interacted with material ejected by a Population three stars supernova. Working backwards, Schlauveman and colleagues can use the ratios of the elements in the star to explore the mass of that earlier Population three star and the energy of its supernova explosion. The authors of analyzed data gathered with the Magellan Clay telescope and its high resolution spectrograph to determine that SDSS JAY zero seven one five minus seventy three thirty four is almost entirely hydrogen and helium, with any trace amounts of carbon and iron. They say the composition of the star indicates that the earlier progenitor population three star that produced its carbon and iron was both unusually massive and exploded with uncommon vigor. Schlaufman says SDSS JAY zero seven one five minus seventy three thirty four s long history of living alone has allowed it to ingest material from the cosmic web for longer periods than stars in the Milky Way. Those conditions may have promoted the production of other low metal city stars. Schlafman thinks it's possible that astronomers will ultimately find relatively higher proportion of ultra low metal port stars in galaxies like the Magellanic Clouds compared to the stars we see in our own Milky Way galaxy this space time still to come. Yet another fireball spotted, the fifth in five weeks, this one over the Australian stead of Victoria, and later in the Science report, a new study has shown that summer is arriving earlier, lasting longer, and packing more heat than ever before. All that and more still to come on space time. Residents in the town of Rutherglen and the Australian state of Victoria have reported a large green fireball streaking across the sky. It's the latest in a speed of high visibility meteor sightings over the past month or so, with others reported in Germany, Ohio, Texas, and Washington State. NASA says it's all part of what astronomers call fireball season an annual increase in meteor sightings between February and April. In fact, the rate of these very bright meteors can increase by as much as thirty percent, especially in the weeks around the March equinox, which usually falls on March the twentieth or twenty first. Because different elements inside a meteor will burn at different temperatures, the color of the meteor as it streaks through the atmosphere can help astronomers identify its composition and the atmospheric gases that ionize during its entry. The common colors include yellow, which indicates lots of iron, orange, which suggest the presence of sodium, blue and green meteors usually contain lots of magnesium, Violet suggests calcium, and red means atmospheric nitrogen and oxygen. And the more intense the color just the faster the media is traveling this space time and time that to take a brief look at some of the other stories making us in science this week with the Science Report, a new study has shown that summer weather is arriving earlier, lasting longer, and packing more heat than it used to. And it's all happening much faster than scientists had previously measured. The findings, reported in the journal Environmental Research Letters, shows that between nineteen ninety and twenty twenty three, the average summer between the tropics and the polar circles grew about six days longer per decade, and that's up from the roughly four days per decade found in past research investigating the years leading up to the early twenty tens. For many cities, the numbers are even more striking. Sydney, for example, as summer temperatures now lasting around one hundred and thirty days, up from the eighty days back in nineteen ninety, which means an extra fifteen days per decade, and even colder climbs like Toronto summers are expanding by about eight days per decade now. The authors didn't use the calendar definition of summer that's Dune through to August in the northern Hemisphere and December through February the southern hemisphere. Instead, they defined summer based on the weather stretch of days in each year when temperatures rise above what was historically typical for a given location during the warmest part of the year, a threshold set using climate data gathered between nineteen sixty one and nineteen ninety. Now these findings have widespread implications for agriculture, water supply, public health and energy systems, many of which have been built around assumptions about when the warm season begins and when it ends. A new study confirms that people living with abstructive sleep apnea have a seventy one percent higher risk of heart issues or death. The findings have been presented at this year's European Congress on Obesity in Istanbul. The study compared twenty three hundred people diagnosed with sleep atnea to some ninety seven thousand people without the condition. Along with heightened heart and death risk, the group with sleep atnia were also more likely to develop obesity, diabetes, osteoarthritis, anxiety and depression. The authors say the findings highlight the need for early screening and diagnoses of the condition. The Australian Navies investing in a new fleet of forty locally designed and built Blue Bottle unmanned surface vessels. The new drones, which are being built in Sydney, will increase the Navy's operational fleet of Blue Bottles to fifty five. These vessels are used for long range intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations, silently monitoring Australia's maritime approaches. News of the new contract follows a recent deal by the Navy to purchase dozens of ghost Shark autonomous underwater vehicles. That fleet will looking in conjunction with manned submarines and surface vessels, providing long range stealth capabilities for underwater reconnaissance, intelligence gathering, strake missions, and mind clearing operations. There's growing evidence that many teachers are taking up the profession not to educate children and teach them how to think, but to indoctrinate them in what to think. That's why public school attendances are dropping or private and home schooling is increasing in popularity. But it seems not all private schools are doing the right thing by children in their care. As the Skeptics timendum. Explains, Queentian has always been a bit of a hotbed of creationism, which is the fundermentalist view that the Bible is literally correct, thirty is six thousand years old, and that Noah's art existed and the animals were put on there, including maybe dinosaurs keep and going. So skepty has had a bit of a history. That's one of the earliest sort of projects the skeptics did in Australia was to put out a book called Creationism. It we go through all the arguments of being put forward at the time, like scientific inques creationists and analyze them and assess them and found them wanting. And this was because creations was being taught in science classes in state schools. It was successful. It certainly disappeared from the science classes and things, and it's always been a bit of a French area. Unlike in America where creations it is quite large and active in Australia, it's not because we're not a particularly religious nation as well, for a start, but also because people just don't regard this fundamentalism as scientifically valid. Anyway, the creationist movement split one lot staying in Australia, one log going up largely to America. A lot of the leading American creations are Australians, one of their more successful exports. But it's now coming back a bit now in a religious school and there are private schools in Australia run by religious organizations. So this one is run by the Open Brethren organization through the Christian community ministries. I think they have about fifteen schools around Australia, not just in Queensland, and they have had a lot of interest in Noah's Ark and dinosaurs et cetera. I think they probably visited the one in the US started by in Australia a huge model of Noah's Ark, including dinosaurs in the little stalls eating vegetarian dinosaurs. Obviously they are dinosaurs and page through the art. And now they've said that this should be taught in science classes. Obviously this has led to a lot of controversy. There is a curriculum which is established by state government's education departments saying this is what you have to teach, and evolution is one of the things that you have to teach rather than a divine creation idea, and they are bligs to teach it, even these private schools. But what they're throwing in is this extra bit which some people justified by saying it's good to have both sides of the story. Well, of course teaching evolution, as we understand that scientific evolution and creationist views of fundamental creation of the world. There's not just two sides of the story. There are a lot of other creation stories out there, but they don't cover those. They don't cover First Nations creative stories or other relieg brooders into creation stories. They only covered this Christian knows our literal truth story and then they begrudgingly also teach the evolutions. So it's not giving people a balanced view by any means. For Star, the science behime creationism is whoor just to be generous to it, and that there are other creation stories as well, which if they were honest about or digit about it, they would be covering. Those of See, I don't mind kids being taught about creationism, but you teach it in a specific religious class. You don't teach it in a science class. Science class should be science only. That's always been the skeptics point of view. Take it in a comparative religion class. That's fine, you can compare with other religions, but it's not science. So I should not have that information of being taught to science class. What the fear is that is it's being allowed to get in by a distrust of science, which is being fed through a lot of different avenues about that have propped up anti vax, anti climate change, and this case anti evolution is in a general view that scientists don't know what they're talking about with the Bible. That therefore it's a symptom of a couple of things. One is religious fundamentalism, which is not strong in Australia even in Cassiskils and things. They don't teach it in capital. That's the skeptics timendum, and this space Time, and that's the show for now. Spacetime is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through bytes dot com, SoundCloud, YouTube, your favorite podcast download provider, and from space Time with Stuart Gary dot com. Space Time's also broadcast through the National Science Foundation, on Science Own Radio and on both iHeartRadio and tune in Radio. 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