Heidi Campo: And blast off. We are
launch. We are go for launch on another amazing out
of this world episode of space nuts.
Voice Over Guy: 15 seconds. Guidance is internal.
10, 9. Ignition
sequence start. Space nuts. 5, 4, 3,
2. 1. 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 4,
3, 2, 1. Space nuts. Astronauts
report it feels good.
Heidi Campo: I am your host for this lovely
evening. For me morning for Fred your host,
Heidi Campo. And joining us is
Professor Fred Watson, astronomer at large.
Professor Fred Watson: Hey, Fred, how are you doing? Heidi,
it's great to see you after our
trepidations yesterday.
Heidi Campo: We are coming to you on schedule, but we
are a day late. But the stories
are still the same high quality you can expect.
Professor Fred Watson: That's right.
Heidi Campo: we had a little bit of troubleshooting to do, but
just like, the folks over at NASA, failure for
getting this episode out was not an option.
And we put our brains together and figured it out.
Professor Fred Watson: So I think you did most of the brain work there, Heidi.
I don't think I qualify as being included in that. I
just, watched the magic happen when you finally appeared
on my screen, which was good.
Heidi Campo: Half of it was luck. I think I just clicked on the right buttons in the
right order.
but speaking of luck and a little bit of
magic, it looks like our first story this week is some good
news. We are not
going, going to be crashing into the
Andromeda Galaxy.
Professor Fred Watson: so we believe. That's right. So,
the mantra among astronomers
for probably
decades has been, hang on
to your hats, folks, because one day we're going to crash into the
Andromeda Galaxy, probably in about three
and a half billion years. The Andromeda galaxy, just
to remind people, is the
largest, the
nearest large galaxy to our own.
Ah. And it is, actually rather bigger than
our own galaxy. and so we,
have measured the speed of,
what we call the radial velocity, the closing speed
between our galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy. That was a
measurement that was probably made getting on for 100 years
ago, actually, and maybe more.
and the two are closing up now. We do get questions
occasionally on space knots from people saying,
if the universe is expanding, why aren't
galaxies all being drawn apart?
And. Well, they are, but that's on the sort of
mega scale. That's on the bigger scale of the universe. When you
look at galaxies in the local environment,
they are, sort of their motions are
dominated by gravitational forces rather than
by the expansion of the universe. And that's why in what
we call our Local group, which is a group of about two dozen
galaxies, the two Biggest are ourselves and Andromeda.
they have motions that do not reflect the expansion
of the universe because we're looking on too small a scale. It's when
you look on the big scale that you see all galaxies,
whizzing away from us. So, as I said,
an easy observation to make. a long, long time ago,
astronomers deduced that, yes, the Andromeda Galaxy
is heading towards us. I can't actually remember. The figure I should have checked it
out is something like 200 in the region of 200
kilometers per second, which sounds fearsome,
excep, but it's two, and a
half million light years away. So there's quite a long
time to go, which is why we're talking about three and a half billion
years. So bringing us a little bit up
to date, more than a decade ago now,
a European Space Agency spacecraft called
Gaia was launched. And Gaia was an
astrometry satellite. And what that means is it
measured very accurately the positions of
stars on the sky, their
celestial coordinates, the kind of equivalent of latitude and longitude
that we call right ascension and declination,
just to give them fancy names. so,
that spacecraft, measured, of course,
many, in fact, billions of stars in our galaxy. It's been one
of the most productive spacecraft. It's now been switched off.
but, it also had a look at the Andromeda
Galaxy. And the reason for that was
to see whether there was any possibility
that you might pick up what we call a transverse motion.
So what you measure, what's been measured for a long
time, is the radial velocity. That's the velocity along
the line of sight. And yes, Andromeda's coming towards
us in that dimension. But there's,
of course, also possibly, a motion across
the line of sight. We call it the transverse motion. And
if that was big enough, then you'd get a miss.
The Andromeda Galaxy would, by the time it
reached us, be somewhere else. It wouldn't be along the same
line of sight. So, that was measured by
Gaia. And sure enough, I think what they did was
put up a limits on the transverse motion
because it's a very hard thing to do for an
object 2 1/2 million light years away.
So, the results, from the Gaia
analysis were that the collision is
inevitable. It's going to happen three and a half
billion years ago. Put it in your diary, everybody.
however, a new analysis. And this is
getting to the point now, by astronomers, if I
remember rightly, yes, the University of Helsinki
in Finland. A, place where we know we've got
many Space nuts listeners, which is great.
What they've done is they've said, okay,
that's all fine and dandy. Those Gaia measurements
are interesting. They seem to suggest that it
is actually coming our way. but what they've
said is, wait a minute. we are, not the only kids
on the block. the Andromeda Galaxy and our own are not
the only large objects in the Local Group.
There are others, including a, galaxy with the marvelous
name of M. M33, in the constellation of
Triangulum, another nearby. A
nearby galaxy, not as big as our galaxy or
Andromeda, but it's big enough to have its own
gravitational forces. It'll have a significant
gravitational pull on both ourselves and
Andromeda. And they also folded in
one, of the two Magellanic Clouds. These, are small
dwarf galaxies which are in orbit around our own galaxy. In fact,
they're being swallowed up by our own galaxy. The Large
Magellanic Cloud is, a, galaxy
containing probably a few billion stars
rather than the few hundred billion that we would get in a
big spiral galaxy. so they've taken, the
gravity of that object into account as well. And when
they do, they, find that
the gravitational forces of those
two other galaxies might well
pull the, you know, the two colliding
galaxies aside so that they
don't collide.
they've reported this in, actually one of the most prestigious
journals, Nature Astronomy. their,
article in that journal is called no Certainty of a
Milky Way Andromeda Collision. So what they've done
is they've kind of, you know,
put the odds of a collision at lower than we thought they were
before. Still could be a collision. We won't be here
to find out. But they've put the odds
lower than before. So maybe we can breathe a sigh of relief.
Heidi Campo: Yeah, Well, I actually pulled up the article,
the scientific article itself, and I have it pulled up, and I was just
browsing over it. and
this really is fantastic because I do love reading
the actual science as it's written by the
scientists.
And there is one thing that I'm seeing here that maybe you can
clarify for me and our listeners. it looks like they use
something and I'm going to butcher this name. Half of you are going to laugh at
me, and the other half of you are going to go, I don't know. Sounded right to me.
A fiducill
Fidical. Fidical model.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, fiducial.
Heidi Campo: Fiducial. I was not close at all.
a fiducial model. So what is the difference between a fiducial
model for predicting these,
orbits or collision courses versus
what, what else might be used?
Professor Fred Watson: I'm just looking at, ah, the context. Are you
reading that from the abstract?
Heidi Campo: I'm reading that it's actually down under
predicting. It's in the main body of the article under predicting
the future.
Professor Fred Watson: A fiducial model based on the most accurate values
available. That's a really interesting term. I haven't heard that
term, used in this context before. Usually,
a fiducial is a, A kind of
marker. You call it a fiducial mark,
which is giving you a zero point.
And maybe that's the context in which that's being
used. But, Yeah,
great question there, Heidi. I should look through
the paper myself in more detail. I did have a quick
look at the abstract. I don't usually get
down into the detail, but, I don't know why they call
it a fiducial model.
Heidi Campo: That's, I think that's the dirty secret of so many
scientists. It's like we, we, we are also guilty of
reading the abstract and if it looks interesting, we'll
read the methods and everything else. But yeah, it's,
you know, unless you're a super nerd, we're
not always reading the entire article. For
me, if I'm reading science, I, I read the headline. Okay, is
this even in my, Is this even in my
wheelhouse of something I'm interested in or need to know more about?
Then I'll read the abstract. If the abstract catches
my attention, then I will actually
jump ahead. I'll skip the intro and background because
if it's something I know about, then I usually already know what they're talking
about. And I'll go straight into the methods and I'll be
like, okay, well what did they do to get their information? Then
I'll jump ahead to their, results and
I'll see, okay, you know, do their results make
sense? And then I'll read their dissemination
of those results to see if I agree with their
conclusions.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, I've just been,
Exactly. You've described the way I look at these things as
well. I've just been googling a fiducial model.
And as it says, fiducials are marks or points of
reference applied to, well, in this case, images
to present a fixed standard of reference.
So that was kind of my
assumption of what the word means. But a
fiducial model gives you, obviously a fixed standard of
reference to start from, which is tricky when you're talking
about colliding galaxies, because which of them's
moving? Well, they're both moving. So, you know, where's your reference
point? Where is your stationary standard point?
Heidi Campo: Yeah, and maybe this can be, you know, you know, and as
scientists, we can say, okay, you know, this was published in a prestigious
article, so we can assume that the
methods were good enough to get published,
because the process of getting published is already so
rigorous. But this could be another point where
we go and we're like, hey, you know, is that mathematical model
something that you would agree with?
The results, you know, is like you just said, is a fixed
model really going to tell us what's moving?
Well, what's not?
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, that's right.
Heidi Campo: Take. This stuff's kind of interesting.
Roger, your labs are here. Also space nuts.
But, you know, fiducial models,
mathematic algorithms and flying
bananas is my next question, Because
a flying banana is the topic of our next
article. And this is going to be another thing I need you to
define, because if I'm thinking of a flying banana,
I'm thinking that somebody's kid at the
grocery store is throwing a fit and they're throwing food.
But in this article, we're talking about,
aura chasers.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah. Yes. So I'll, get to the flying banana
in a minute
because that's, kind of nickname.
But, what I love about this story is
it combines two passions of mine, one
of which is the, aurora borealis, the
northern light, which, we make regular trips up
to the far northern Arctic to watch and take our tour
guests up there to be awed by
the aurora. We get southern lights down here, in the
southern hemisphere as well, the aurora australis. Heidi. And
there's actually been some quite good sightings recently of
the aurora australis from southern Australia.
we're not anywhere near far enough south
to see the aurora overhead as you do from
Alaska or far northern Scandinavia. but
nevertheless, you can see the aurora. So that's one
passion is the aurora. but, this is.
It's a report that comes initially from
fellow aurora hunters. And these are people
in the United Kingdom, actually in Oxfordshire in England.
and they were, you know, basically out on a
clear night looking for, the northern lights, the aurora
borealis. But what they saw was this
strange blue beam of light sort of
slicing through the night sky and
apparently moving. and in fact
these are sort of, you know, very high
level aurora hunters because they've got an all sky camera,
and fixed cameras that have captured this
strange blue light moving through the sky.
Excuse me. the reason why the. Well two
things told them that it wasn't an aurora.
One is that most aurorae aren't blue. the
colors you get typically are
green, and red which come from oxygen
atoms. you get purples and
magenta and a few other colors coming from
nitrogen molecules. But a pure blue light
is something that no you don't actually see.
and so what they wondered
was what is this? It's clearly not a
natural national phenomenon. Sorry, a natural
phenomenon because it's the wrong color and it's moving
too quickly. So they did some
they did some research, and
it turns out that what they had seen
was a very fat, a wide
laser beam pointing upwards that
came from the flying banana. And what
is the flying banana? It's a railway
train. and it's called that because it
is yellow. It's very, very yellow
indeed. The flying banana. its
technical term is the nmt, the new measurement
train. And what it does is at
speeds of up to 125mph
getting on for 200km an hour in our measure.
it flies,
runs over the track. Sorry about our little puppy in
the background. I don't know whether you can hear him barking but he's
excited about the Flying Banana as well.
this train runs over the track 125
miles an hour with lasers pointing downwards
to analyze in real time the
state of the track. So it's all about the safety of
railway passengers in the UK and what it's doing
is it's analyzing things like the separation
of the rails, whether something's moved
in the foundations of the rails, the sleepers or ties as you
call them in the US that hold them together, whether the
rails themselves are distorted. They can check
the shape of the rails, they can check all sorts of
aspects of it at a very high speed. But,
and this is the trick, it also
checks the overhead electrical wiring
because railways in Britain, many of them certainly the
main lines are driven by electric
traction. So they've got what's called the overhead,
the overhead wire which is picked up, from which the
electricity is picked up by the trains. So
as I understand it, it, this laser
is also looking upwards to sense what the
condition of the Overhead wire is hence the
blue light traveling through the landscape.
and, just before, Sorry, I'm not letting you
get many words in here, Heidi, but.
Heidi Campo: No, I'm listening. This is wonderful.
Professor Fred Watson: Well, to, bring back an experience
we had. So back in January this year,
some of our listeners know, I think, you know, Marnie and I
were doing one of our, Aurora Borealis tours up in
the far north of the world. We were in
northern Norway, Scandinavia, sorry, Norway,
Sweden, Iceland and eventually
Greenland, which was enchanting. But,
that's not why I'm mentioning it. in a place
called Abisko, which is in far northern
Sweden, one night we were aurora watching
and we saw this vertical
green beam of light, which
puzzled me completely. it was
just pointing upwards. It was apparently stationary. It did
not last very long. I had my trusty
Aurora camera, ready to take photographs, but it had
gone before, I had a chance
to take any. but I'm guessing now
that that was the same sort of thing
because Abisco is on the main
line between. The main railway line between,
Kiruna, and Narvik. It was buil
built, more than a century ago to
carry iron ore from the big mine, which is still
operational in Kiruna, to the port in Narvik,
where it's exported all over the world to your country and
mine, it's one of the biggest producers of iron
ore in the world. And so that railway line
has been there for a long time. And my guess
is that maybe there is an equivalent in
Sweden of the Flying Banana,
which shines a green, laser beam up at
the overhead wires to see, what the
condition is. And so I'm putting out to our
Scandinavian listeners, on space nuts, because I know a lot of
them are railway buffs as well. Tell us if there
is such a thing as a new measurement
train in Scandinavia that looks at the
overhead, catenaries or, ah, the overhead, power
lines for trains. So we look
forward to hearing your answers, folks.
Heidi Campo: Yeah, and that's, you know, and that's just such a fun story. And it makes
me, you know, cause trains,
trains are such, an incredible
feat of engineering that changed the world.
I think trains accelerated
expansion and growth more than almost anything
else. And I'm sure you and most of the listeners know
the correlation between rocket ships and
trains.
Professor Fred Watson: Okay, tell me what you're thinking of.
Heidi Campo: Okay, so,
now I might be butchering this here because I Think it's, something
about the rockets. The
size of them is a certain size.
And that size is
determined because of the standard size
of. See, what is it? What is it? Because I know you probably have it
down to the figures.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah. So you're absolutely right. It's
railway lines and railway tunnels, that dictate the
size of things. I don't know the exact
thing that you're talking about, but limited. All
sorts of weird things like the size of the biggest telescope mirror
that you can take from one place to another is limited by
the size of the track, the railway tunnels that carry them
around. It might well be something similar that you're thinking of
in terms of rockets.
Heidi Campo: And if you keep going back far enough. The size of
the railroad was determined by the
average size of two horses side
by side. So the joke is two horses
asses is what determines the size of
our rockets in space today. And
trains, which is just such a funny
little thing to think of. And just again,
amazing feats of engineering and there's nothing new
that's ever built. We're always just building and expanding on, the
prior knowledge we already have. So hopefully our
ancestors have done pretty good work.
Professor Fred Watson: Okay.
Andrew Dunkley: We checked all four systems and being.
Heidi Campo: With a girl, space nets, and
sometimes, you know, things are, are
unsuccessful. You know, we have amazing things, we have
things that fall apart. And there was,
you know, that's the case of what happened with the Japanese
company abandoning, their moon
mission. So tell us what happened with that. Just kind of been
a blur.
Professor Fred Watson: Lovely segue there, Heidi. I love your segues. From
one story to another.
And you're right, this is an endeavor which,
you know, again, is being carried out with the highest
levels of technical knowledge, with the highest
enthusiasm, and all the skill, that has
been learned from, well, more than 50
years now of space travel in terms of robotic
spacecraft, as Newton said, standing on the
shoulders of giants. I think every, every one of us is doing that
one way or another in the technology that we make use of.
So, in fact, some of that technology is just going past my
office door at the moment. that's called Grimace. Grimace
is our robotic vacuum cleaner.
And Grimace makes a lot of noise. So if you hear a, whining
sound, it's not me, it's our vacuum cleaner.
Heidi Campo: I named my robotic vacuum, Rosie
after the Jetsons.
Professor Fred Watson: Okay, good, that's great.
Heidi Campo: Robotic made was Rosie.
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, yeah, you've got to give them names. Ours is called Grimace
because A grimace is the expression on its face. It
doesn't have a face, but it just looks as though it's, you
know, it's got a very stern expression.
Anyway, turning back to the Japanese company
Ispace, they have. And as
you've said, it doesn't always work. and
in this case, this does not. This has not
worked. what they have done is,
sent to the moon, basically, a
lunar lander which
indeed had on board a rover,
a little rover. The lander,
if I remember rightly, is called Resilience.
and the rover had a name too, which you can't remember, but it's something
similar. so the idea of, this
company is to be one of the first,
companies in the world to
achieve a landing, a soft landing on the
moon. And it would certainly have been the first one to
have the first private company to have a rover on them
moon. sadly, the mission was not
successful. This was last week, as we are recording
this episode now. everything went
perfectly well with, Resilience, until it
got close to the lunar surface. And then there was a
technical fault that meant that it didn't
decelerate quickly enough, for it to make a
soft landing. So it actually, basically
had a hard landing on the moon, which we usually call a collision.
and that, was the end of the mission.
they're very enthusiastic though, about
keeping going with their, endeavors.
Unfortunately, it's their second failure. I think a couple of years
ago they had another mission, landing on the
moon, which did not, make it. It
landed, but sort of fell over. It was, at the wrong
angle, so didn't get, any kind
of sunlight on its solar panels. I think I'm thinking of the right
one there. And by the way, the rover rover
was called Tenacious, built in
Luxembourg in fact, but carried,
some equipment on board. Sadly, that was never deployed.
So, you know, a story that's
got good parts to it because I'm sure they learned a
lot from this mission, but not as successful
as everybody had hoped.
Heidi Campo: I always have a little soft spot for the rovers. Ever since
they had, the Mars rover sing Happy
Birthday to itself. I've always kind of
humanized them ever since that. I don't know why I'm like, oh, poor
rover. Maybe it was Pixar's Wall E that
gave me a soft spot for these, robots. Good old
Wall E. But, you know, here's another segue for you.
Speaking of Mars rovers, the Mars
Orbiter capture. This is our final
story for today, but the NASA Mars Orbiter
saw some pretty cool
sites. You want to tell us a little bit about these
volcanoes?
Professor Fred Watson: Yeah, that's right. So this is
it's a piece of history almost. This is one of the
longest running
orbiters around Mars. I think
it's been in orbit since 2001 or it
certainly was launched in 2001. And it is
called Mars Odyssey. it's a NASA
spacecraft, one of several in orbit around
Mars. but this is quite a venerable one.
It's been around for a long time but it's still active and
it's still doing the kind of research that it
was basically built to do. looking at the
upper atmosphere of Mars and
basically you know, studying the surface.
the reason why it's made the headlines this week
is because it captured
a beautiful view of one of
Mars's tall volcanoes.
Mars has ah, an area called the
Tarsus Rise. It's a high level or Tarsis
Montesquieu, the Tharsis Mountains. it's
a high level region which has ah,
four really prominent
volcanoes on it. They are extinct. They probably have
not erupted for 3 billion years or so.
they're taller than most volcanoes on Earth, 20
kilometers or so. the biggest is Olympus
Mons, very famous, the largest mountain in the
solar system. but what they've captured with
the Odyssey spacecraft is a view
of Mars in the early morning. It's in
the dawn sky and sorry, the
dawn landscape. but the surface of
Mars is covered with cloud. Now
Mars does have clouds. They are fairly thin clouds
because its atmospheric pressure is only
0.6% of the atmospheric pressure
on Earth. And there is very little moisture
in the atmosphere. There is some, there's enough to form clouds
and they're made of ice, basically water ice.
so there's enough just to form these. But here's this wonderful
view. Encourage people to look at
one of the NASA websites. Actually it's the main
NASA website actually NASA.gov if you
Google NASA Mars Orbiter captures
volcano peaking above morning cloud tops that's exactly
what you see. this is Asia Mons
which is one of the other four volcanoes in that region.
And you can see its crater, its
caldera, the summit of the mountain, poking
above the low clouds on the surface of Mars. It's
an extraordinary view. It's one that we've not seen before. And
it was, made because the mission scientists managed
to turn Mars Odyssey on its side so it could look
horizontally at the landscape rather than looking vertically
downwards on the surface of Mars.
Heidi Campo: Yeah, this is a great photo. That's, one of those ones that's going to
be hanging up in, someone's office,
one day or a school, you know, in a science building.
I mean, that really is a really neat photo. Like you said.
I mean, what,
ah, crazy, ah, series of
stories today from the things that we've
discovered and the technology and
everything that humans, have done and they're still
doing. it's really. And I think
that's one reason why we're space
nuts here. I mean, all of us here get so excited
about space because there's, I think for the
people who are space enthusiasts, it's because there's
still so much to do and so
many other, fields of
anything. There's so much that's already been explained and
discovered. We're not discovering any new laws of physics
anymore. That's kind of those are written,
but in space it's wide open and we're always
coming up with new mathematical formulas
and feats of engineering and discovery.
We have our highs, we have our lows. But
it's so exciting for the people who are still
curious and want to know more about
the universe we live in.
Professor Fred Watson: Isn't it just. And, you know, I guess that
curiosity is one of the things that drives the million or so
downloads a year that we get of space nuts. Because
we've got people out there who love to hear about this sort of thing just as
we love talking about it. Everything from flying
bananas to colliding galaxies.
Heidi Campo: We do everything and we
just want to, you know, I guess we'll just say thank you to our listeners. Thank you for
making, this, this a show worth recording. We
really do appreciate you guys. And thank you for letting me come on
as your substitute host while Andrew
is on holiday. he will be back with
you in a few weeks, so don't you
worry. If you guys are missing him dearly, he will be back. I am
just filling in for now, but, Go ahead,
Peter.
Professor Fred Watson: Let me just add, forgive me, I
think our producer Huw might well,
include in this podcast, a little
recording that Andrew has sent on his progress
around the world. So, listen on, folks. You might
well hear, Andrew's voice telling us where
he's Got to on his round the world trip.
Andrew Dunkley: Hi Heidi. Hi Fred. Hi Huw in the studio,
it's Andrew.
we've embarked on our around the world trip
on the Crown Princess. we left
Sydney a couple of days ago and we got out
of the heads and it was rough as guts. I
mean it was heavy seas. the
pilot couldn't even get off the ship and we
had to drop him off at Eden down near the Victoria border,
yesterday. So yeah, things calmed down a bit after
that. But it was a pretty rough on first night.
last night we slept quite well. It was very, very calm.
we went through Bass Strait. I was very hopeful
that we'd be able to see Aurora Austral Australis.
There's been a fair bit of sun activity lately and I
was very hopeful. There'd been a bit about it in the news recently
but unfortunately we've
not seen anything and in fact they're not letting us up on
the the decks at the moment because, because of the
conditions which are deteriorating
again as we approach Spencer Gulf
and head to Adelaide. So we'll be dropping off at
Adelaide tomorrow and visiting the German town
of Haendorf. activities on board have been
fun. it's a fun crowd, a fun crew. We're having
a good time. Yes, I got seasick once.
We ordered breakfast and then cancelled it, then ordered
again and got three breakfasts.
So there's you know, you know, a few glitches here and
there. But we're having a great time. I hope all is
going well. I'll report in semi regularly as we,
as we do things around the ship and around the world.
So for now I'll see you later and
have fun with Space Nuts while I'm away.
Heidi Campo: So fun. Thank you Fred. Talk to you next week.
Professor Fred Watson: It's a great pleasure Heidi. Thanks very much. Space Nuts.
you'll be listening to the SpaceNuts podcast
Missing Point, available at Apple
Podcasts.
Andrew Dunkley: Spotify, iHeartRadio or your
favorite podcast player.
Professor Fred Watson: You can also stream on demand@bytes.com
this.
Andrew Dunkley: Has been another quality podcast production from
bytes.um com.