Lunar Relics and Interstellar Insights: Discoveries from the Moon and Comet 3I ATLAS

This is Spacetime Series twenty eight, episode one hundred and twenty seven, for broadcast on the twenty ninth of October twenty twenty five. Coming up on space Time, Relics of the Outer Solar System discovered on the Moon, What Comet THREEI Atlas is telling astronomers about other Solar systems, and another successful test flight space Exis Starship Mega Rocket. All that and more coming up on space Time. Welcome to space Time with Stuart Gary. A new study has confirmed that some meteorites found on the Moon originated in the dark outer reaches of the Solar System. Media Rites are critical objects for studying the formation and evolution of planets. However, most are not preserved very well on Earth because of atmospheric in geological contamination. The problems even more severe of fragile carbonaceous of vunotype chondrites, which count for less than one per cent of all meteorites found on Earth. In contrast, the Moon serves as a natural archive for meteorites, benefiting from its lack of atmosphere and limited geological activity. Now, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have identified seven olivine bearing clasts from two grams of lunar regular collected by the Chungi six Sample Return Mission. The findings that reported in the proceedings the National Academy of Sciences shows that trace elements and oxygen isotope compositions of olivine clasts in the samples confirms that they are relics of carbonaceous or vanotype chondrites. They formed through the rapid cooling induced crystallization of melt droplets and were generated when these chondrites melted as they hit the lunar surface. The parent bodies of these types of chondrites were originally formed in the arter Soul Solar System before eventually migrating to the inner Solar System during the formation of the terrestrial planet's mercury venus Earth and Mars. A preminary statistical analysis of meteoritic materials on the Moon shows that the proportion of these specific types of chondrites is significantly higher on the lunar surface than in Earth's meteorite collection. That indicates that the combination of carbonaceous of Uno type chondrias to the Earth Moon system has been severely underestimated. Furthermore, the authors found that the samples who we are rich in water or organic materials, meaning the discovery also has important implications for understanding the origins of water on the lunar surface. The authors believe that previously detected water signatures in lunar samples were likely the result of the impact of such meteorites. So this study not only reshaped sciences understanding of how materials migrate through the Solar System, but it also provides new directions for future research into the origins and distribution of luke no water resources this space time still to come. What the interstellar comet three ee Atlas is telling astronomers about other Solar systems, and another successful test flight for SpaceX's megastarship. All that and more still to come on space time new images of interstellar comet three eye Atlas telling astronomers how this alien object is evolving as travels through our Solar system and how other distant solar systems might be very different from our own. The new findings reported in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggest that three Iye Atlas may have been active for far longer than scientists expected, thanks to clues hidden in its comet like tail. The new observations, based on data from NASA's tests Transiting Exoplanet Survey satellite, and they provide more information about an object which will only be visible in the sky for a few more months before it zooms beyond even the most powerful telescopes reach. The studies. Lead author aDNA Feinstein from Michigan State University says, each of the three interstellar objects that have been detected in our solar system so far one I a mau Mauer, two I Boris EV, and three I Atlas seem to be quite unique, and the additional data coming from three I Outlass is telling astronomers a story about a solar system very different from the one we live in. In our system, comets that approach the Sun released dust and gases, mostly water, from their surfaces and from inside as temperatures increase, but the images of three I Outlass show activity much further away from the Sun than expected, and that means it's likely releasing other molecules like carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Feinstein says that gives astronomers idea about what comments and asteroids might be made of in systems beyond our own Sun. It's always been assumed that other star systems are different from ours, but now this clear definitive evidence of just how different they might be. Astronomers expect for our outlets to be visible for several more months, but they're also sifting through archival data to see if there are any images of the object from before it was identified. Capturing as many observations as possible is essential to better understand how these objects turn on as they approach the Sun. These interstellar objects have likely not been worn significantly in millions, if not billions of years, and any opportunity to see how they responded to that early heating would be of extreme interest. This report from nass A TV. Right now, a fleet of NASA spacecraft are turning their attention to an unusual object speeding through our Solar system. NASA funded telescopes have their eyes on the sky all the time and first spotted this object back in July. It's a comet now named three I Atlas, and it's only the third object ever confirmed to have come from interstellar space. In case you are wondering, this comet does not pose any threat to Earth, but it does give scientists a rare chance to study something from beyond our Solar system. So what are we doing. In addition to ground based studies, NASA's space telescopes like Hubble, Web and Spherx have made unique observations and scientists are pouring over the data. Soon, though, the comet's path will take it past even more of our robotic explorers. Next, it's heading towards Mars and spacecraft in orbit and on the surface, we'll try to catch a glimpse. After that, it's on toward Jupiter. What will our spacecraft see We'll soon find out. This space time still to come. SpaceX has completed a spectacularly successful eleventh test flight of its massive Staship Mega rocket. Later in the science report, new satellite images show that Iran is rebuilding its span nuclear weapons infrastructure. All that and more still to come on space time. SpaceX has completed a spectacularly successful eleventh test flight of its massive stash It Mega rocket, The world's largest and most powerful spacecraft, blasted off into the early evening skies from the company's star based launch complex at Bocachica on the Texas Gulf Coast to ten nine eight seven, six, five four three two one. We have liftoff. Go Super Heavy Go Starship. Thanks for all the historic flights bad one. Eagles catch you down rage ster Raptor chamber pressure nomenal, Who's sternership, nominal power, intelemetry. All right, we are about forty five seconds into flight. We're still getting the rattle here at star Factory. We are seeing thirty three out of thirty three Raptor engines lit on Super Heavy as it arcs across the Gulf, coming up next on max Q. MAKS cut. So at this point we've passed through that period of maximum aerodynamic pressure. The next thing we're looking forward to is going to be hot staging. At that point, we're going to see all but three of those Raptor engines on super Heavy shut down our version of MIKO most engines cut off instead of main engine. And then after that we're going to release the clamps that are currently holding Starship to that hot stage adapter. It's then going to ignite you. It's six Raptor engines to push it away from super Heavy and then start making its flight uphill the vehicles. Super Heavy booster stage separated just as planned two and a half minutes after launch, undertaking a successful boostback burn before making yourself splashed down just as planned. In the waters of the Gulf of America. During its descent, SpaceX lit up thirteen raptor engines at the start of the landing burn before switching to five to steer the booster instead of the three used in earlier tests. This setup was designed to give the super Heavy more control, serve as a backup if any engine shut down. See the engines throttling down. Strodan got off ship ignition stage separation, U specburn startup. All right, successful hot staging maneuver. So we've got twelve to thirteen engines lit back up on boosters, so it's doing its boost back real excitingly though. We've got six out of six raptors lit on ship there, so it's now going to continue to make it's a scent into outer space. Meanwhile, this boostback is happening. We're using those thirteen engines, so everything well, twelve out of the thirteen and then we go down to three and then we're going to shut down for the end of boost back. That's sending Super Heavy back towards its planned splash down zone in the Gulf. The Booster then finished its descent using three central engines, offering briefly above the water for undertaking itself splash down. All right, So for Booster, this is one of the main things we're trying to get is going to be this landing burn. That's Starship is on nominal trajectory. Looking good on our trajectory, looking good on everything. As we approach that landing, just like tower catches, we will be doing a thirteen engine landing burn to slow down. This time it will be in a V three configuration, and as we're starting to get into the denser part of the atmosphere, the Booster is using four hypersonic grid fins to guide itself through atmospheric entry towards its landing site. Booster landing burns shut down. We saw a thirteen to five to three B three demonstration and into the water we go. Meanwhile, all the starshape up. The stage successfully continued its journey on its suborbal dejectory into space. The next major milestone we're going to be looking for is CICCO. That's our second stage engine cut off that should be coming right at about eight minutes and fifty eight seconds into flight. Just a reminder, this is putting us into a suborbital trajectory. So we're intentionally just going slow enough that we're not going to achieve full orbit. This puts us on a course where those engines shut off and no matter what, we're coming back internal guidance in the Indian Ocean terminal guidance. So we should start seeing the shutdowns come up. In just a couple of seconds. Our vacks have shut off. Three more to go. Ship engine cut. Off, all ship raptors have shed insertion. You just heard nominal orbital insertion. So we are on the path that we wanted to be. So we've got a ship back in space. Flight eleven followed a similar mission profile to the previous test flight back in August. Starshape ran through series of tests, deployed a satellite, simulated payloads, and undertook a restart of one of it's vacuum wrapped a rocket engines. We are currently venting down the nose cone, essentially the payload area of starship as we get ready to open up this payload door. We were able to do this successfully for the very first time on our last flight on flight ten. All right, so payload doors open. Next up going to be to start deploying these Starlink simulators They are roughly the same size as the V three Starlink satellites. That starship's going to be carrying. Our next iteration of starships also going to have a more powerful pez it's going to deploy these head a little bit faster speed. There we go, all right, first one going out. All right, first one's deployed, Getting ready for the second one. Here we do a little reset back to the center position. Yeah, it takes about a minute for each one. Looks real smooth too. They made a couple of tweaks of those rails. There goes another one. We're going to relight one of those center engines. This will be the third time that we've tried this. We did it successfully back on flight ten, and then we did it for the very first time back on flight six. This is not a deorbit burn. This is demonstrating essentially all of the systems you would need to do a deorbit burn. So that's obviously your raptor engine, and then also your your header tanks, your smaller tanks in the nose cone where we have liquid oxygen, liquid methane, and a smaller, more easily pressurized container which we can use for on orbit burns. And we're also going to tap into those and we do our landing burn. So this will be a critical capability. Once we go to full orbital missions, you'll have to do a deorbit burn to break out of orbit send it back down to Earth. Here we go, all right, there was that raptor RELIGHTE looks like Engine three full duration. As Dan mentioned, it's a third attempt, and we've just did it three times in a row. Very hard. No second orbital insertion. The mission involves more in orbit and re entry and maneuvering operations in order to test different scenarios. The flight also tested several upgrades aimed at helping Starship eventually fly back to its loan side. As part of those tests, SpaceX Engine's also removed some of the spacecraft's hate shield tiles in order to see how unprotected areas would hold up when re entering its atmosphere. Starship is approaching entry interface. Ship is starting entry, good autitude and. See plasma starting to build on the windward side of the rocket there. And you know, reentry is a critical phase of flight and we need information on how the ship systems perform. Reentry is also extremely demanding portion of flight because we need the ship to scrub off all of the energy we used to launch the rocket. So remember the thirty three engines plus the six engines on ship that we used to get up into space. We now are using aerobraking essentially to scrub off all that energy. We have some tiles on. The leeward side of the flaps here, and we have some different mechanisms stud out basically to see if these towels will hang on. Re Entry is typically a portion of flight where we don't have communications with spacecraft because it's re entering at or around orbital velocity, which is roughly eight kilometers per second or five miles per second. At those insanely high speeds, the spacecraft moving through the atmosphere creates a plasma field around the vehicle. Yeah, net blanket of plasma distorts communication frequencies, so it's not uncommon to experience brief blackouts in communication. So big picture here, Starship is designed to land on Mars where there are no runways or other humans to help out, So that means we need to do a propulsive landing instead of a more traditional means like parachutes, which is what our Dragon spacecraft uses or a runway like the Space Shuttle. Propulsive landing enables more rapid reusability. Now, as the ship makes its way back to Earth, we should start hearing some callouts. When we hear at entry max heating and entry max queue, that means the ship has made maximum heating and aerodynamic loads it will experience as it returns. So if it makes it through all of those, that's a pretty good sign that we're doing well. Yeah, we heard flaps have controlled the vehicle. Now. Transonic refers to the period of flight where the velocities of airflows surrounding and flowing past the vehicle are concurrently below at and above the speed of sound, somewhere in the range of mock zero point eight to one point two. All right, a lot of numbers coming up here, but for reference, commercial jets have a range of cruising speeds, but most fly around mock zero point seventy four to mock zero point eighty five, which is four hundred and eighty to five hundred and seventy five miles per hour or seven hundred and seventy to nine hundred and thirty kilometers per hour. Right now, we're going a little over twenty six thousand kilometers per hour, So compare that to the airplane at nine hundred and thirty. It's like, pretty crazy how fast we're going here? All right? And after we hear the call out that starship is transonic, we should hear the call out that starship is subsonic. Subsonic a course refers to the speed that is much less than the speed of sound. So at that point, the ship's velocity will be starting to slow down. Yeah, so rea untrue. So far is looking pretty good with those missing tiel experiments especially. We're putting the ship through a lot today, but things are looking pretty good so far. Do want to remind people that we are pushing ship to the limits. We've done a lot of these missing tile tests. We did it back in flight ten. Every time we do it, we throw something new and the ship makes it through. This time, we're really pushing it. We've removed these tiles in some of the spots that see the highest level of heating, and we remove tiles that have zero backup protection underneath, so there's essentially just bare steel. It's among the heat of reentry. We had a bunch pulled over the primary fuel the LOCKX tanks. Everything also have some tiles missing around the aft flaps, specifically on the leading ed. Gonna see if it can make it through, see if all the flaps hold on, see if Starship holds together. Could be a bumpy ride, But this is why we're putting Starship through these flight tests to really understand what its limits are. Looks like we're starting to scrub off velocity a little bit quicker. Ship is entering the peak heating phase of flight. As we passed through seventy kilometers. Altitude forward splash down. Starship also form the banking maneuver simulate how future missions will stay during their return fly its. In addition to these missing tile tests, we're doing kind of a unique flight on the way in. It's going to do what we call a banking maneuver. So while we're still going supersonic and even ipersonic, we're doing kind of a banking turn, and then we'll do a pretty aggressive turn right as we get into the subsonic and start doing our belly flop. And that's designed to essentially be the approach that we would do on a return to launch site and the tower catch we can see that speed just continue to bleed off under twenty thousand kilometers an hour. Ship still holding together. Looks like we've made it all the way to the Indian Ocean. We're coming up kind of near Australia, the west side of Australia there, So pretty crazy. We're only fifty six minutes in and we've made it all the way, you know, halfway around the world. It's actually a good demonstration of a future capability we hope to have on Starship where we will do point to point transport on Earth, so essentially travel anywhere in the world in about an hour or so, which is going to be pretty crazy. Imagine going from New York to Sydney in one hour instead of the twenty hours it takes. Currently, we see some. Of the heat rate picking up a little bit. It's like we're getting into our bank maneuver now power sliding through the atmosphere. Next toll temperatures are coming down. Vehicle is now at maximum dynamic pressure all right. That was basically our reverse max qus so most aerodynamic stress that it's going to see during re entry, we just passed through it. So we're past that. We're past p heating. Ships still holding together, so we're currently in this bank maneuver. We're going to see it kind of roll over and do a pretty pretty significant shift as we get down closer to the subsonic speeds. Yeah, and that bank maneuver that Dan's mentioning is all in part of us to learn about the guidance navigation control for return to launch site missions. So in the near future, we're hoping to return the ship back to the same pad we just took off on fifty nine minutes ago, and we've got to do some of these pretty dynamic bankings to make that trajectory workout. All Right, the light show kind of calming down is we're starting to move into the lower parts of the atmosphere. Our landing burn should happen right around of an hour and six minutes after launch. This does almost like a half circle loop to our actual trajectory. We're heading to the same exact splashdown point, but we're kind of doing a more roundabout way to get there, where it's this kind of big long half moon loop and then a really aggressive and a twist right at the very end, and that would line us up with the launch tower. Starship on a return to launch site would fly over the tower, do do a quick landing burn flip and then come down for catching the arms. Totanure is coming down. Yeah, and once we get to around the fifteen kilometer altitude mark, that's where we have a lot of flight. His starship starting a belly flop shose a flight. Yep, the belly flop phase that we perfected into sub overloll campaigns. We're entering that now. It's sorry to get those raptors ready. Should be two minutes away from landing burn again. We're going to do do a flip after we ignite those engines. We'll go from three down to two for the final phase of the landing burn and look for another soft splashed out. Then, just over an hour after launch, starship splash down right on target the warm waters of the Indian Ocean off the Western Australian coast. Seeing all three center engines have entered the chill phase. The ship is making its term for final approach. And here's this kind of aggressive final turn that would essentially position it so it's right behind the launching catch tower, flapshold and strong. Ship landing startup. There's our landing burn three down to two Starship flober Hey, welcome back to our starship and we are down in the Indian Ocean. Let him here at starbase. What a day. The success of these last two test flights comes in the wake of a series of explosive test failures, including audible booster explodes osians, loss of Starship vehicles during stage separation, and limited success in achieving orbital velocity. This mission was the last flight for the current iteration of the Starship spacecraft. The next test will launch the new improved Version three model. As always watching on with great interest was NASA. You see, NASA plans to use a version of Starship known as the HLS the transfer crews from the Orion spacecraft down to the lunar surface and back up again on the Atomis three mission, slated for launch in mid twenty twenty seven. Starship will also eventually replace SpaceX's current fleet of Falcon nine rockets and Dragon capsules, But SpaceX boss Elon Musk as a far grander vision for the massive one hundred and twenty three meter tall, reusable, stainless still spacecraft. He sees Starship as an interplanetary transport system, eventually carrying up to one hundred people at a time, or one hundred and fifty tons of supplies on missions not just to the Moon but also to Mars and beyond. But challenges remain. Must admits developing Starship's fully reusable orbital heat shield is proving to be the toughest hurdle so far, but he believes it's worth the effort because it took nine months to refurbish a space shuttle's heat shield between each flight. Another problem yet to be overcome is developing a reusable inflight refueling system capable of handling the cryogenic propellants used by Starship. You see, in order to Shuttle between translunar orbit and the Moon's surface, Starship will need to be refueled, and that's a crucial step for the Atomis three mission. This is space time and time that to take another brief look at some of the other stories making news in science this week with a Science report. Satellite images are showing that Iran is rebuilding infrastructure at its Tullagan II nuclear research site at the par Chen Military Complex in southeastern Tearran Province. The Institute for Science and International Security says it's all part of Iran's efforts to reconstitute its nuclear weapons and missile programs in the wake of the Iranian war against Israel. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard previously used their Teligan II facility for designing and testing nuclear weapons. The new satellite images show that Iran has already covered at least two structures at the facility with layers of soil to improve survivability in the event of future air strikes by the United States or Israel. Israel struck the facility back in October twenty twenty four, destroying equipment needed to design and test nuclear devices. Then, in mid June this year, Israel launched a non precentited bombing campaign on Iran in response to the Terracets supporting nations multiple attacks, and the US briefly joined in, using B two stell bombers to strike key Iranian nuclear facilities. Now, Iran Supreme leader the Aetola Ali Khameni claims the Islamic Republic's nucleus sites were not destroyed in the air strikes. Meanwhile, Newsweek's reporting that Iran has also upgraded and enhanced its balistic missile stockpiles. These missiles are designed to deliver nuclear payloads to targets in Europe, the Middle East and Israel. Palaeontologists have discovered the fossilized remains of a one hundred and fifty one million euro quiromenid in the Taalbragar fish beds northeast of Ulan in far western New South Wales. Quiromenids are a family of non biting insects which played an important role in freshwater ecosystems. Then you find reported in the journal Gondwanda Research, represents the oldest known member of this group in the southern hemisphere and indicates that these insects were a group of fresh water animals that might have originated in the southern supercontinent of Gondwana. The fossils show unique evolutionary adaptation, a terminal disc mechanism that likely allowed it to firmly anchor it to surrounding rocks. Until now, this mechanism, which functions in tid influenced habitats, was thought to be exclusive to marine species. The new species has been named Talma term Mia taubragar rica, which translates to fly from the stagnant waters and reflecting the nature of its habitat at Talbragar. Current research involved analyzing six fossilized specimens, both pupe and enclosing adults. Scientists are warning about a new spyware technology which is able to infer the identity of a person without Wi Fi devices on them, simply by passively recording communication in radio networks. A report in the ACMIMS Journal of Data Science found that by observing the propagation of radio waves, people can create an image of the surroundings and of any persons who may be present in them. The authors say this technique works in a similar way to a normal camera, the difference being that in this case, radio waves instead of light waves, are used for the recognition, So it doesn't matter whether or not you're carrying a Wi Fi device on you, and switching your device off won't make any difference either. It's simply sufficient that other Wi Fi devices in your surroundings are active. In fact, when you think about it, the technology turns every router into a potential means for surveillance. So if you regularly pass by a cafe that operates a Wi Fi network, you could be identified there without noticing it, and be recognized later by authorities or companies. Of course, right now there are still easier ways for secret services or cyber criminals to observe people, for example by accessing CCTV cameras or video door bells. However, the omnipresence of wireless networks may eventually become a nearly comprehensive surveillance infrastructure, with one concerning property. They're invisible and so raised no suspicion after all, when you think about it, Wi Fi networks exist in almost every house, in every office, in restaurants, and right across public spaces. Unlike attax with light our sensors or previous Wi Fi based methods, which use channel state information, that is measured data that indicates how a radio signal changes when it reflects off walls, furniture, or people, this new technique doesn't need any special hardware. It works by exploiting the communications of legitimate uses. Its devices are connected to the Wi Fi network. These regularly send feedback signals within the network called beamforming feedback information to the router in an unencrypted form so that it's readable by anyone in range. This creates images from different perspectives that can serve to identify an individual person. Once the underlying machine learning model's being trained, the identification only takes a few seconds and it has almost one hundred percent accuracy. Well, Amazon's huge computational infrastructure outage went well beyond impacting the Internet giant's online shopping website. The AWS outage had global implications, affecting airlines, healthcare services, banks and finance companies, as sort as disrupting apps such as Snapchat and Reddit. So what caused the ardage and why was it such a big deal? With the details with join by technology editor Alex saharav Roight from Techadvice dot Live. Amazon AWS went down at their cloud service, and there were a whole stack of sites that were affected because they use those particular services. And in fact, there's a thing called downdetector dot com, which is actually part of UKLA, the speed test people as a company called data Dog, which was released something called updog dot ai which gives real time provider status for AWS and over thirty software as a service or SaaS providers. And you know, we're talking about companies like OpenAI, GitHub, Slack, Stripe Service, now, Zendesk, Zoom, and you know various AWS services such as Amazon S three, aws Lander, Amazon Dynamo, dB and the short version is that although this competition which includes Microsoft and Google and I guess there's others as well well, if you have too much reliance on one provider, then you could have all these different services and sites go down. And it just goes to show that, well, maybe you need to have two cloud providers. Might increase your cost. It will increase your cost. But I mean, I remember when Larry Ellison, the chief of Oracle, you know, this would have been ten twenty years ago. He'd be up on stage at a giant keynote and you know, you have some service running and he would yank out one of the services directly, you know, just live from the stage, and the system would go down, but it would immediately fail over to another data center somewhere else. Downtown would be minimal. Now, interestingly, a WS has their big Reinvent conference in December. I'll be there in Las Vegas first week of December, and I'm sure they'll be talking about this and how they can have the resilient systems and what they can do to make sure that this sort of internal DNS misconfiguration, which is apparently what it was, it can't happen again or there can be alerting of this to the relevant tech people in advance of this sort of thing happening, because you know, it went for about fifteen hours. I mean the sort of ongoing effects went on for a bit longer, and you know, people were locked out of being able to accept payments or use services, and yeah, it just goes to show that the Internet can seem like it can be you robust and well, I don't think anyone's going to call it infallible because there's autages all the time from different providers. But this wasn't a cyber attack according to everyone that was being reporting about it. It was a failure of the DNS configuration and when suddenly traffic is routed and doesn't know where to go, everything grinds to a whole. That's alexaharav Royd from Take Advice, Start 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 own radio and on both iHeartRadio and tune in Radio. And you can help to support our show by visiting the Spacetime Store for a range of promotional merchandising goodies, or by becoming a Spacetime Patron, which gives you access to triple episode commercial free versions of the show, as well as lots of burnus audio content which doesn't go to weir, access to our exclusive Facebook group, and other rewards. Just go to space Time with Stuart Gary dot com for full details. You've been listening to space Time with Stuart Gary. This has been another qual podcast production from bytes dot com.