Enceladus Unveiled: Fresh Discoveries of Organic Chemistry Beneath the Ice

This is Spacetime Series twenty eight, episode one hundred and twenty one, for broadcast on the eighth of October twenty twenty five. Coming up on space Time, the complex chemistry and the oceans of the icemoon Enceladus, The dream Chase of space plane set for another delay now won't fly until at least next year, and NASA says it's new optical Deep space Laser communications project has exceeded all its technical goals. All that and more Coming up on space Time. Welcome to space Time with Stuart Gary. Scientists have discovered new complex organic molecules spewing from Saturn's icemoon Enceladus. The findings, reported in the journal Nature Astronomy, were made after searchers went digging through data collected by the Cassini spacecraft during its tour of the ring planet and its many moons back in two thousand and five. Cassini found the first evidence that Enceladus has a hidden ocean beneath its icy surface. Jets of water were bursting out like geysers from cracks close to the Moon's south pole, in the process, shooting ice grains deep into space, smaller than grains of sand. Some of these tiny pieces of ice fell back onto the Moon's surface, while others escaped to form the e ring around Satin, which traces Enceladus's orbit. The new data is a clear sign that complex chemical reactions are taking place within Enceladus's global subsurface ocean. Some of these reactions could be part of chains leading to more complex, potentially biologically relevant molecules. Scientists have already found many organic molecules in these ice grains, including precursors for amino acids, the building blocks of proteins essential for life as we know it. But the ice greens in the ear ring can be hundreds of years old, and as they verged, they may well have been weathered and therefore altered by intense space radiation. So the authors of this study wanted to investigate fresh grains ejected much more recently in order to get a better idea of exactly what's going on in the inslida in oceans. Fortunately, the authors really already had the data. See back in two thousand and eight, the scene flew straight through one of these icy guysers. These were pristine grains ejected only minutes before they hit the spacecraft's cosmic dust analyzer instrument at about eighteen kilometus per second. These were not only the freshest ice grains Cassini had ever detected, they also the fastest. The ice grains contained not just frozen water, but also other molecules, including organics. At lower impact speeds, the ice shatters and the signal from clusters of water molecules can hide the signal from some organic molecules. But when the ice grains hit fast, water molecules don't cluster, and scientists have a chance to see these previously hidden signals. The authors found that some of the organic molecules that had already been found distributed in the E ring were also present in the fresh ice grains, so this confirms that they were created within Insuladus asserceans, and they also found totally new molecules that had never been seen before in ice grains from Insuladus on Earth. These same molecules are involved in chains of chemical reactions that ultimately lead to more complex molecules essential for life as we know it. The authors say there are many possible pathways from these organic molecules found in the Cassini data to potentially create biologically relevant compounds. That enhances the likelihood that this moon could have been habitable. One of the studies authors, Frank Postberg, says these molecules found in the freshly ejected material proves that the complex organic molecule's Cassini is detected in Satin's e ring and not just the product of long exposure to space, but are readily available in the insuladaein ocean. Discoveries from Cassini are valuable for planning a future ACIM mission dedicated to Enceladus, and studies for this ambitious mission have already begun. The plan is to fly through the jets, possibly even land on the moon's south pole tiger stripes terrain in order to collect fresh samples. Needless to say, we'll keep an eye on its progress. This is space time still to come. Sierra Space says their dream Chaser space plane is now targeting late next year for its first free flight demonstration flight, and NASA says it's new Optical Deep Space Laser Communications project has exceeded all its technical goals. All that and more still to come on space time. Sierra Space say their Dream Chaser space planes now targeting late twenty twenty six for its first free flight demonstration flight. This mission will validate critical technologies for NASA. Dream Chaser's unique lifting body design will provide additional cargo carrying capacity on missions to the International Space Station as part of NASA's Commercial Resupply Services contract, which already uses SpaceX Dragon and Northrop Grumman Signet's cargo ships to service the orbital outpost. Dream Chaser, which like Dragon, is reusable, was originally designed as a manned spacecraft. It will eventually fly aboard the United Launch a lines of Vulcan Centaur rocket from Pad forty one at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Space in Florida. The first dream Chaser space plane, called Tenacity, arrived at the Kennedy Space Center back in May from the Neil Armstrong Test Facility at the Glen Research Center in Ohio. When it does finally take off, dream Chaser, together with the Shooting Star cargo module, will transport some five and forty kilograms of supplies and cargo on regular missions to the space station, then return to Earth after each mission, landing conventionally on the former Kennedy Space Center Space Shuttle runway, Carrying up to one thy, seven and fifty kilograms of returned experiments and equipment. The idea of a gentler runway landing will allow the return to Earth of more delicate equipment experiments which could be damaged in a rougher high G capsule splash down. With the early retirement of NASA space shuttle fleet in twenty eleven, dream Chaser is now the early spacecraft NASA currently funds that's capable of maneuvering within the atmosphere. The dream Chess design goes back well over sixty years, with its origins back in nineteen fifty seven in the United States Air Force X twenty dinosaur manned spacecraft, which would have been launched aboard a modified Titan three rocket. NASA continued its development in the nineteen sixties and early seventies with a range of experimental spacecraft, including the Northrop M two, the Martin X twenty three Prime, the Martin Marietta X twenty four, and the Northrop HL ten. During the nineteen nineties, NASA used the same basic lifting body design that developed the HL twenty, an experimental space plane which eventually evolved into the X thirty eight Emergency crew Return Vehicle, which would have been an emergency escape pod transported to the International Space Station in the payload bay of the Space Shuttle. It would then be docked to the orbiting outpost until needed. However, that project was canned by NASA in twenty oho two following budget cuts. Now a NASA of contracted Sierra Space for an initial seven cargo missions to the orbiting our Post. A second dream Chaser is currently under construction. Each of the spacecraft would be out of fly at least fifteen missions over a ten year lifespan. A third dream Chaser was built purely as an engineering demonstrator for ground and flight verification and validation tests and Siera Space having given up on the idea of a fully manned spacecraft as well. A fully operational manned version of the space plane could carry crew into lowerth orbit, and it doesn't end there. The company also plans the used dream Chaser to launch and build its own orbiting habitat in space before NASA reties the International Space Station into a twenty thirty Now we mentioned earlier, Dream Chaser had a cargo module, the Shooting Star. It's a fully independent spacecraft which can be attached to the space plane before launch in order to increase capacity, Shooting Star is fitted with docking ports at each end, allowing it to attach to the rear of dream Chaser at one end and to the space station at the other. Now this allows Shooting Star who act as an additional cargo module for astronauts to work in and hold supplies before they transferred to other areas of the space station. Shooting Star also carries external marting points for three additional cargo containers. But unlike the reusable dream Chaser, which returns to Earth after each mission landing on a conventional runway, Shooting Star is designed to burn up during re entry. I. Meanwhile, the Pentagon's looking at using the Shooting Star cargo module as the basis for its own autonomous, unmanned military space station for research and development, training, and operational missions in low Earth orbit. For this, Serias space will redesign the module to include guidance, navigation and control systems in order to be at a maintain free flat operations. The military version wouldst specialized payloads, undertake experimental testing, manufacturing assembly in microgravity, and carry out a range of logistics operations. Longer term plans could include high elliptical and even geosynchronous Earth orbits, as well as more distant missions to the Moon. This is space time still to come, NASA's new Deep Space Laser Communications project, and later in the Science report, a new study shows that people whose dad's smirk during puberty appear to age faster than expected. All that and more still to come on space time, NASA says its new optical Deep Space Laser Communications project as exceeded all its technical goals, setting up the foundations for high speed communicationtions for future man missions to Mars. The technology successfully showed that data encoded in lasers could be reliably transmitted, received and decoded after traveling millions of kilometers from Earth to spacecraft at distances comparable to that of Mars. Nearly two years after launching about NASA's Psyche mission in twenty twenty three, the technology demonstrator recently completed its sixty fifth and final pass, sending a laser signal to Psyche and then receiving a return signal from more than three hundred and fifty million kilometers away. Just a month after its launched desk, the Deep Space Orbal Communications demonstration proved it could send a signal back to Earth after establishing a link with an optical terminal about the Psyche spacecraft. The technology demonstrated data rates comparable with those of broadband Internet services, sending engineering and test data from Earth for record breaking distances. Back in December twenty twenty three, the demonstration achieved a historic first by streaming an ultra high definition video to Earth from over thirty million kilometers away, about eighty times the distance between the Earth and the Moon, and it was done at the system's maximum bit rate of two hundred and sixty seven megabits per second. The project also surpassed optical communications distance records a year later in December twenty twenty four, when a down linked Psyche data from four hundred and ninety five million kilometers away, which is further than the average distance between the Earth and Mars, managed by NASA's Jet Proportional Laboratory in passing into California. The experiment consists of a flight laser transceiver mounted on the Psyche spacecraft, along with two ground stations to receive and send data from Earth. A powerful three KILLO white uplink laser at NASA's Jet Proportional Laboratories Table Mountain facility transmitted a laser big into Psyche, helping the transceiver determined way to waim the optical communications laser back to Earth. See. The thing you got to remember is that Psyche and the planet Earth are both moving through space at tremendous speeds. They're also so far away from each other that the laser's signal can take several minutes to reach its destiny, even traveling at the speed of light. The project enlisted the two hundred inch telescope at Caltex Palomar Observatory in San Diego as its primary downlink station, which provided enough light collecting ERIC to gather the faintest photons. These were then directed to a high efficiency detector array at the observatory, where the information encoded in the photons could be processed. In another test, data was downlinked to an experimental radio frequency optical hybrid antenna at the Deep Space Network's Goldstone Complex near Barstow, California. The antenna was retro fitted with a ray of seven mirrors, totaling a meter in diameter and enabling the antenna to receive both radio frequency and optical signals from Psyche simultaneously. The project also used Caltex Palomar observatory at a smaller one meter telescope at Table Mountain to receive the same signal from Psychi at the same time. Known as arraying, this is commonly done with radio antennas to better receive week signals and to build redundancy into the system. This report from Nasser TV. Is the Deep Space Optical Communications Project. It is the first demonstration of using lasers instead of radio waves to transmit data to and from a spacecraft out to distances beyond Luna. Orbit two one engine ignition. The experiment launched in October twenty twenty three, attached to the side of Massa's Psyche spacecraft and for its first big test, it's streamed a cat. Video in dinner. Why was it a cat video because the Internet loves cats. Future astronauts are going to need faster broadband style connections with Earth and is currently available for navigation, health updates, streaming video, and for sending back science. This is the first step in making that possible. So how does it work. Let's zoom in with laser precision to find out. Not far from Los Angeles, JPL's Table Mountain facility plays a big role the optical communications telescope laboratory sends a powerful laser beacon over millions of miles to Psyche. We've done that is by using ten separate lasers. So we have put lasers that come into the enclosure. We have ten individual channels tound of ten of these collimeters, those long clear cylinders. We have a few lenses that then shapes the beam to get it the right size. So by the time it gets to Psyche, you know, millions and million kilometers. Away, it has the right shape. Think of it as a cosmic game of catch. Table Mountain throws the pitch, Psyche catches it. Imagine walking outside at night with a laser pointer and try to point it back at Mars. That's the kind of level of accuracy we need to achieve. And after catching table Mountain signal, Psyche used its own laser to send data back to Earth, reaching a record breaking distance of over three hundred million miles. That's more than three times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The Palamar Observatory uses its powerful two hundred inch hail telescope to catch Psyche's laser light, which is now extremely faint after traveling millions of miles, so. By the time the signal from the spacecraft reaches us here Palomar, it has spread out over the Earth so that the light level is very faint. It's on the single particle of light level called photons, and the way that we send data using these photons is to encode the data in the time of arrival of laser pulses, kind of like sending worse code using a laser pointer. The light from the telescope gets relayed down onto the optical rail and then into this optical systemed Optics then takes the light and focuses it down onto a detector and crystat which operates at a temperature just one degree above absolute zero. Inside this chamber there's a detective with a very tiny active area. So we're taking the light from our giant telescope and coupling it down to less than a millimeter. And tracking a moving spacecraft across the Solar System is not easy, but when conditions are right, data flies ms. This is GLR. We're starting to see flashes of light. DSAC broke records almost immediately after being commissioned. We have established data rate records giving broadband comparable data rates in the hundreds of megabits per second from Mars close range. That's the first time that anything has been done like this at distances beyond the Moon. The idea here is to slowly start having more optical communications rather than radio frequency communications, to just get more data down from space. There's kind of bottlenecks now in just how much volume of data we can get down in a given amount of time from the transmitters that we have. So we have the downminand sign BIL from Psyche that's bull loots from and then very five million alls away. One of the things that we hope to do is enable Internet around the Solar System. You can send an astronaut to Mars and have them take like a high dev video of the Martian landscape and send that down in like one pass. A new era of space communications has begun, and it all starts with a beam of light. And in that report from MESSATV, we're from d suck Ground Software laid showing Maynham d suck Ground Late the transmitter Lead Angelo Velesco, Deesock Flight LADSER Transceiver Lead Kenneth andrews Esock, Ground Detector assembly Lead Emma Woolman, and DSOCK Operations Lead Mira Shrinavazan this space time and time out to take another brief look at some of the other stories making using science this week with a science report. A new study has found that people whose father's smirk during puberty seem to age faster than expected. A report presented at the European Respiratory Society's Congress found signs of faster biological edge and compared to chronological age and people whose dads began smirking at the age of fifteen or younger. They found that smirking during puberty creates damage in boys developing sperm cells, and this can be passed on to their children. Quantum computed chips have just cleared a major manufacturing hurdle. A report of the journal Nature claims the University of New South Wales Nanotech's startup DIRAC has shown that its lab perfect prototype quantum chips can be fabricated under real world production conditions, maintaining the ninety nine percent accuracy needed to make quantum computers viable. Direct achieve the feat by teaming up with European company iMac to show that their chips work just as reliably coming off the superconductor chip fabrication line as they do in experimental conditions in a research lab. It's now emerged that around a quarter of all press releases published on major public relations platforms in the United States are probably written by artificial intelligence. The findings reported in the journal Patterns also shows that science and technology releases were especially likely to be AI generated. The authors used an hour detection program to estimate the amount of AIS being used to write consumer complaints, job postings, and press releases from both corporations and the United Nations. They found that across the board, AI usage had increased from one point five to fifteen percent in the nine months after chat GPT was released, and it's likely AI is being used even more than the detectors can pick up now. That's because it struggles once AI generated content has been heavily edited by a human. There's a new warning today about AI agents. These are software programs that act autonomously to achieve user to find goals by perceiving their environment, making decisions, and taking actions using reasoning, planning, and memory capabilities. Unlike basic chatbots that merely respond to prompts, AI agents are capable of complex multi step tasks by dynamically creating workflows, utilizing external tools, and adapting their behavior over time. They function through a continuous sloop of understanding the environment, planning the next steps, and executing actions to achieve their objectives with minimal human overse leveraging large language models to facilitate this process. AI agents are now being widely used in business, but companies failing to secure them, limiting their access and knowing what they're doing is causing security risks. Experts are wanting that artificial intelligence need to be treated the same way as what you would a real human in terms of access to your computer network. With the details, with joined by technology editor Alex saharov Royd from Tech Advice Start Life. So, I was at a company's conference called Octa. They secure identities, and I mean doing that for sixteen years, and they've been doing that so well that they realized that because of the AI agents that now proliferate across different businesses for customer service or to help employees do aspects of their job in a better way. And there are dozens of these AI agents for marketing and other reasons. But they're sitting on the network and sometimes they get forgotten about and often they have access to all kinds of data that they shouldn't necessarily be having access too. And often these agents can also be hacked. AI wants to be very helpful, and if a hacker can get into an AI agent that is no longer being used and it's just sort of sitting there on the network, all sorts of information can be exfiltrated and obtained. And so the need to treat AI agents like their humans in being able to block and restrict their access and deny access up to a certain period of time. And you know, once somebody has been logged out of a system, be it a human or an our agent, they get logged out everywhere. This has all become quite paramount. And it's quite funny that in science fiction movies we see robots wanting to get human rights, you know, and were treated like humans. And here we are in twenty twenty five and we're treating AI agents, which is sort of the least sophisticated form of artificial human you can guess as humans. It was an interesting agent. So are we talking about the sort of people who answer the phone when you're in a company. Is that what we're talking about? The sort of product. Should I say that answers the phone when you're in. A company, Yes, well, customer service agents are one form of AI agent, but they're also used for marketing, to create digital content, to analyze business information and data. I mean an a agent can be any sort of program that is augmented with the ability to analyze information far faster than a human and then respond in converse with humans in a very human like way. And agent now and I wouldn't know. It, well, I could be. I mean, part of what they're talking about with death bots. With death bots is where somebody gathers all the information about themselves before they die, or somebody does it on their behalf after they die, and then you have this virtual version of you that has access to everything you've ever written, every recording that's ever been made about you, you know, featuring you on the Internet, or that you've uploaded from cassettes and audio and video and CDs and whatever else you've done through your life, and then the AI can simulate you. And there are. Already people who've used these. Well, it is a form of digital immortality. Obviously, it's not you, it's just a similar crom It's a fake version of you. But there are people overseas who use this technology to get closure with unfortunately deceased relatives that they couldn't get closure with beforehand. And even though it's all fake, it's sort of you know, the brain is kind of fulled. It's very comforting. Yeah. So this ability to have an AI version of yourself at the moment, it's very primitive, but you can imagine in the future when technology is able to almost clone the existing human brain. I mean, you will have a digital version of yourself that could then one day, in theory, be downloaded, whether into a robot or some sort of organic version of you. And even though the real you has departed this earth, if there is an exact copy or a very near copy of you, then do you live forever? That's Alex Sahara Ryd from Take Advice, Art Life, and. That's the show for now. Spacetime is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Stitcher, Google podcast pocker Casts, Spotify, Acast, Amazon Music, 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 Zone Radio and on both iHeartRadio and tune In Radio. 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