Water Origins: Comets, Satellites, and Rocket Fuels

This is Spacetime Series twenty eight, episode one hundred and ten, for broadcast on the twurth of September twenty twenty five. Coming up on space Time, another clue about the origins of Earth's water. Israel launches a new spy satellite and discovery of a new high energy rocket fuel. All that and more coming up on space Time. Welcome to space Time with Stuart Gary. Water is essential for life as we know it Now. A new study has shown that the composition of water on the comet twelve P ponds Brooks as the same isotopic signature as Earth's oceans. The findings are reported in the journal Nature Astronomy strengthens the idea that commets may have played a crucial role in delivering water, possibly some of the molecular ingredients for life itself, to planet Earth. The your research is based on observations by Alma the Adda Kama Large millimeter submillimeter array telescope in Chile. It revealed that water in the Halle type Comet twelve P has an isotopic composition virtually identical to that found in earth oceans. Now. Depending on which hypothesis you prefer, Earth's water either formed in situ as the planet itself condensed out of the protoplanetary disc around the still nascent Sun some four point six billion years ago, or alternatively through impacts by comets, asteroids, and meteoroids. Now in that second hypothesis. For a long time, scientists thought comets may have been the likely origin. That's because they're composed of a lot of water ice. But as they grew better at analyzing cometure composition, scientists discovered that the actual composition of the water, that is, the deuterium to hydrogen ratio, didn't match that which we found here on Earth, or previous measurements in many comets showed significant deay differences from Earth's water. The new results provide the strongest evidence yet that at least some Hali type comets carried water with the same chemical fingerprint as that found here on Earth. Astronomers use alma's sensitivity and imaging capabilities to measure the comet's coma that's the cloud of gas surrounding its nucleus. They looked at the spatial distribution of both ordinary water that's hydrogen and oxygen H two oer, and also heavy water that's water containing deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen which contains a neutron as well as the proton and its nucleus. These observations, made as twelve p ponds Brooks approached the Sun, were combined with infrared measurements from NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility to determine the ratio of deitium to hydrogen with unprecedented precision for a comet of this class. By mapping both regular and heavy water in these cometary comas, astronomers can tell if these gases are coming from the frozen ices within the solid body of the nucleus, rather than forming from chemistry or other processes in the gaseous coma Steadies. Author Martha Cordner from NASA's got Out Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, says the deuterium to hydrogen ratio was the lowest ever measured in a Hali type comet, and it falls at the lower end of all cometary values in the process, matching earths oceans. Cordiner says comets are frozen relics left over from the birth of the Solar System. The new results provide the strongest evidence yet that at least some Halli type comets carried water with the same isotopic signatures as that found on Earth. That supports the idea that comets could have at least help make our planet habitable this space time still to come. Israel launches a new Spice satellite and discovery of a new high energy rocket fuel. All that and more still to come on space time. Israel has launched a new advanced by satellite to monitor terroist activities across the trouble plagued Middle East. The OPHEC or Horizon nineteen Savelli satellite was launched aboard a Chavat Comet two three stage rocket from the Palmachim Air Base spaceport near Tel Aviv. The launch caused a brief panic in Tel Aviv and central Israel, where residents mistook the orbital rocket for an interceptor missile. The IDF says the spacecraft successfully entered orbit was performing as planned, passing a series of initial tests and transmitting data. The launch comes as Jerusalem continues its against multiple Palestinian terrorist groups in response to the October seven attacks, which saw the massacre and rape of over twelve hundred Israeli civilians, including many children. Since Palestinians began their attacks. Iran, together with Iranian backed terror groups, have fired over one thousand ballistic missiles and tens of thousands of rockets at Israel, with Tehran also financing thousands of often violent hate protests around the world, including anti Semitica tax reminiscent of the Nazis in the lead up to the Holocaust. Jerusalem says the Jewish States response will only end when Palestinians return the hostages they kidnapped on October seven, and Hamas terrorists surrender their weapons. The OFK nineteenth spacecraft is equipped with high resolution optical and multi spectral synthetic aperture radar systems, providing continuous imagery coverage day and night in all weather conditions. The new satellite will serve as a force multiplier, able to image objects with resolutions down to under fifty centimeters day or night. The spacecraft was developed by Israel Aerospace Industries, the IDF, including Unit ninety nine hundred of the Intelligence Directorate and the Israeli Air Force. It joins a growing constellation of IDF intelligence gathering of conaisance satellites, which include optical, infrared radar and electronics, single surveillance capabilities. This is space time. Still to come discovery of a new high energy rocket fuel, and later in the science report, researchers develop a glue gun which can print out buron grafts. All that and more still to come on space time. Okay, let's take a break from our show for a word from our sponsor into three sixty. The trailblazers in three sixty. In action cameras pushing the boundaries of what's possible, or creators everywhere. The go Ultra a pocket sized camera that's reader finding how you capture life's adventures. Imagine it a camera no bigger than an oro, weighing just fifty three grams, yet packed with a power to shoot buttery smooth four K video at sixty frames per second. 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For the first thirty Spacetime listeners who purchase the Inster three sixty Go Ultra at store dot Inster three sixty dot com, you'll score a free sticky tabs accessory to mount your camera on anything from backpacks to winter jackets. Just use the promo code space time at the checkout that store dot Inster three sixty dot com promo code space time. Just go to our links page for full details and descriptions. So don't miss out on this titan of a camera that's ready to capture your world like never before. That's the Insta three sixty Ultra and now it's back to our show. Scientists have created a new high energy compound that could revolutionize rocket fuel, making spaceflights more efficient. A report in the Journal of the American Chemical Society says that on ignition, the new compound releases more energy relative to its weight and volume impaired to current fuels in a rocket. This would mean less fuel required for the same flight duration or increased payload, and more room for mission critical supplies. The newly synthesized compound, known as manganese diboride, is over twenty percent more energetic by weight at about one hundred and fifty percent more energetic by volume compared to the aluminum currently used in solid rocket boosters, and despite being highly energetic, it's also very safe. In fact, the only combusts when it meets an ignition agent like kerosene. Maganese diboride belongs to a class of chemical compounds thought to have unusual properties. Exploring exactly what these properties entail has been limited by an inability to actually produce the substance. One of the researches involved in the project, Josef Doane from the University of Albany says dot borides first started getting attention way back in the nineteen sixties. Booster ignition and lift off of discovery. Ramjet technology and rockets has really a focus for the United States as well as the rest of the world. So in current solid state rocket engines they use aluminum powderized as part of their formulation. But now with the manganese diboride, we hope to see that we have a large enough return on the investment to say, yes, we should be swapping out aluminum and see if we can get more bang for our buck out of igniting this material over the standard materials. If you translate the energy that we discovered into energy per cubic centimeter, we are actually one hundred and forty eight percent more energy dense than the aluminum that's being used. You could actually load less manganese diboride to make it the same distance, which allows you to put more weight on the rocket itself to transport key mission equipment. This enables us to take more with us to do more research in distant places. SpaceX, NASA satellite companies, any of those low Earth orbit applications could certainly be used for this. Since those initial looks. New technologies are now allowing scientists to actually synthesize chemical compounds that were once only hypothesized to exist. Knowing what scientists do about the elements on the periodic table, you also suspected that meganese di boroid would be structurally asymmetrical and unstable, facts which together wouldn't make it highly energetic. But until recently they couldn't test the id because they couldn't make it successfully. Synthesizing pure manganese di boride is an exciting achievement in itself. It means they can now test it experimentally discover you to use it. Synthesizing manganese diboride requires extreme heat generated using a tool called an arc melter. The first step involves pressing manganese and boron powders together into a pellet, which is then placed in a small reinforced glass chamber. The anc melter then trains a narrow electrical current on the pellet, heating it to a scorching three thousand degrees celsius, half the temperature of the Sun's surface. The molten material is then rapidly cooled to lock the structure in place. Now at the atomic level, the precess forces the central manganese atom to bond to too many other atoms, making for an overly crowded structure, packed tight like a coiled spring. When exploring new chemical compounds, being able to physically produce the compound is crucial. You also need to be able to define its molecular structure in order to better understand why it behaves the way it does. Another one of the researchers, Gregory John also from the Universe of Albany, built computer models to visualize manganese di borid's molecular structure, and these models revealed something crucial, a subtle skew, and it's a defamation which gives the compound it's high potential energy. John says the muddle of the manganese di borid compound looks a lot like the cross section of an ice cream sandwich, where the art cookies are made of a ladder structure composed of interlocking hexagons. John says, when you look closely, you can see that the hexagons aren't perfectly symmetrical. They're all just a little bit skewed. That's defamation. By measuring the degree of defamation, they can use that measures a proxy to determine the amount of energy stored in the material, and that skew is where the energy stored. I specialize in material science. I'm a computational chemist. So you're not going to see me in the wet lab mixing chemicals. You're going to see me in the computer lab doing calculations, frantically scribbling on the whiteboard with my head in my hands. Once we got past the initial point of whether they had really produced what they thought they'd produced, the initial calculations I started running were just to see this is all check out? You know, is this all kosher? Is this even possible? And from that point I started trying to model the material. The material is almost like a layer cake of alternating layers of boron and metal, and they're perfectly flat, and so I set out trying to come up with a model where we could force it to deform artificially. The effect of that is now the material is storing a lot of energy like a sprint. Once we combust it, that energy is released and accounts for the larger energy of combustion than the other similar materials, which don't have that sort of internal strain. The rocket fuel project that we're talking about right now. I'm telling my family like, oh, yeah, like we just figured out this and blah blah blah. The more bleeding edge or the less there is known about the problem that I'm working on, the happier I am. This space time. And time that To take another brief look at some of the other stories making use in science this week. With a Science report, scientists have modified a glue gun to print out bone grafts, which they say could be three D printed directly under fractures and defects during surgery. A report in the General Device claims the new tool has already been tested and found to quickly create complex burone implants without the need for prefabricated parts being made in advance. The new graphs were shown to have both high structural flexibility, as well as the ability to release anti inflammatory antibiotics and aid natural bone regrowth at the grafting site. Current methods of fixing. Bones use either metal donor bone or three D printed materials to repair the brake, all of which take time to build or repair in the case of irregular bone brakes, but now the authors were able to print in situ, taking a feature of natural bone that's known to promote healing and compatible plastic in mixing them together into a sort of glue, which will then bind and conform to the jagged grooves of a fractured bone. A new study warns that unfit preteens carrying extra belly fat are more likely to suffer from mental health issues. Are reporting the Journal of the American Medical Association found that pre adolescent kids who are carrying extra weight around their middle, as well as those with bad cardio fitness, could be more likely to experience symptoms of anxiety and depression compared with their lina fitter peers. The study looked at over two hundred kids aged eight to eleven found that greater lean mass and higher fitness levels than the kids was linked to fewer anxiety and depression symptoms, whereas higher levels are fat around their organs was linked to higher. Levels of both. A new study has shown that explosions of diversity throughout the evolution of the plant animal kingdom today likely explained why some groups of species are so dominant. Scientists were investigating why some groups of species evolved from a single anset that become dominant. For example, beetles make up some forty percent of modern day insects and eighty five percent of plants of flowering plants. A report in the journal Frontieres in a collagen evolution Ana lies more than three hundred thousand plant species, over a million insects species, and in excess of one and a half million other animal species. They found a consistent pattern with the majority species were part of disproportionately large clades, likely as a result of explosions of diversity when an ancestor had an evolutionary breakthrough, such as developing flight, morving to a new area, or new relationships with other species. A recent survey is found that almost half of news Nation viewers believe the United States government is concealing information about unidentified flying objects. To mendum from Australian skeptics, says the Nationwide Pole found that forty four percent of those surveyed think the government's hiding something. The survey poll carried out by a online TV theywork called Newstation, another called to Season This. They found that in April of this year of twenty twenty five, they found that forty four percent of Americans think the government is concealing information about unidentified flying objects. The interesting thing because News Nation is a big promoter of UFO myths and conspiracies, and it features the Australian journalist Ross Coulthard who has this ongoing series of programs claiming that any day now the proof is going to be revealed about the UFOs. But anyway, so this audience from News Nation, and I don't know how they did the survey, whether it was sort of people just phoned in with their views or whether they just surveyed their own audience somehow, and their audience would tend to have a higher belief in UFOs and things because that's the way the TV program goes. Almost half of the people who are aged under thirty says they believe the government was hiding something. News Nation is big on conspiracy theories. People early forties, et cetera. Much the same percentages, but only thirty four percent of baby boomers there has been taught one between forty six and sixty four said the same. It's almost like a statistical issue. Forty four percent of Americans seek the government sealing it, but only thirty four percent of those who are over certain eight in their sixty seventies eighties strongest amongst those with a high school diploma or less. It's an education thing. It's lower thirty six percent among Collie's graduates. Belief is higher among non white ethnic groups, but that also might be associated with education background. Partially. The thing is it's still high numbers. Thirty four percent of the lowest number among BABY members think that the government is covering up information. It's like it's a no win situation. A third of people think there's a conspiracy. Well, they're probably right. There is a conspiracy the government is covering up. But it's not aliens from another planet. It's black projects by the US military. Yeah, I know, I know. The whole one about UFOs is they're unidentified, so you can't jump to the fact they say they're aliens. They're are identified. You don't know what they are, so you can't really jump to say they're identified, but I know what they are because you've just identified them. Strange and normally, there that this belief in things that we don't know exists that we have never identified as subtly the subject of government conspiracies. Perhaps that's why we don't know what they are, because the governments covering them up. It's a too easy answer held by a lot of people, especially in America, and this particular news nation operation is very much pro and stuff, so I would take what they say with a TV grain of salt. That's timndum from Australian skeptics, and that's the show for now. Spacetime is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Stitcher, Google Podcast poker Casts, Spotify, Acast, Amazon Music, Bytes dot com, SoundCloud, YouTube, your favorite podcast download provider, and from space Time with Stuart Gary dot com. 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