USA’s Crazy Moon Landing // Problems for Perseverance // New Glenn Goes Vertical

Odus successfully lands on the

moon

China plans to build bricks on the lunar surface James web finds the neutron star at the heart of the 1987a supernova and blue Origins finally presents the new Glenn All this and more in this week's space bites, as well that the first big story was the successful

landing

of odyusa intuitive machines and this was one of the most exciting and action packed

landing

s I have seen in many years, so what happened is that this intuitive machines company built this Odus Lander e They were going to attempt a commercial landing. on the surface of the Moon, so there hasn't been a successful landing from the US in over 50 years, so this was an attempt to not only demonstrate that a private company can land on the surface of the Moon.

Moon and in some ways demonstrate that they can deliver commercial payloads to the surface of the Moon, but it is also just a demonstration that engineers in the US have the ability to land on the Moon and this sets the stage for the Future return of humans to the Moon Last week we reported that the spacecraft successfully launched on a Falcon 9 and we got some stunning images of Earth as it zoomed away with this fisheye lens. You can even see SpaceX's upper stage falling from the spacecraft after it has taken its kick toward the Moon. It took about a week to get to the

moon

and when it arrived it went into orbit and then we entered the phase where it was going to try to land and this is where things got very complicated, the spacecraft was equipped with a landing system designed to allow it to measure the distance to the surface to detect all potential hazards and would then autonomously choose the perfect landing site, but as it was preparing to land we learned that this system had failed and therefore its method of finding a safe landing place and know how far away it was. from the surface of the moon was no longer available and this was the problem that doomed a previous Indian lander, you know, knowing the distance to the surface of the place you are trying to land is essential, this is where the story It gets pretty amazing aboard the spacecraft there is a payload for NASA that was designed to test a new method of measuring the distance to the Moon and when engineers realized that their main system was not working they were able to patch The NASA. system and then rely on that to transmit telemetry, as it was getting closer and closer to the lunar surface, which caused a delay in when the landing was actually going to happen, it took them about an additional hour to hack the system .

I don't think they did it that quickly and then they had this backup system as a way to measure their distance to the surface of the Moon and then they did their attempt and everything turned out great. I mean, we received these regular communications and we saw each other. getting closer and closer to the surface of the Moon and then it landed on the Moon and then no one heard anything and then we waited several minutes while several antennas on Earth were trying to make a connection so they could confirm whether the lander was there or not. alive and then finally it seemed like an eternity but it was about 5 minutes or so we got confirmation from the spacecraft's main antenna that he was alive but we don't really know much more than that we're still waiting to find.

To find out exactly what happened, there are a lot of interesting things that should have happened and that we will find out soon. Moon. I hope one of them is that shortly before landing on the surface of the Moon, it deployed a separate camera that it dropped onto the surface of the Moon. Moon and was designed to take a video of the spacecraft as it landed on the Moon, essentially deploying its own selfie stick. It's equipped with six NASA instruments as well as six commercial payloads and we talked a little about this last week. He has a telescope.

On board, designed to take wide-angle images of the Milky Way from the surface of the Moon, it has an electrostatic system on board to test whether this is a way that will work to remove dust, so we are still waiting to find out if the lander or not. it's for sure if your instruments are working properly, if we got that selfie image, so keep an eye on all that and the moon landing has been complicated, there have been many attempts over the last few years and we're running about 50/50. we saw failed landings from Israel space, we saw the Japanese ipace team and the Russian space agency fail their landings, and yet we saw successes with India's shran 3, with the Japanese space agency's slim lander , although it was backwards, and the Chinese lander that sent a sample. return to Earth, so even landing on the Moon is very difficult and is not a danger that should be taken lightly, so congratulations to everyone from intuitive machines and NASA who have worked on this mission to try take this to the surface of the Moon and we'll give you more information next week.

China wants to build bricks on the Moon. Now China continues sending missions to the Moon. The most recent mission is the Chong Five mission. This is the one who sent a sample home. There are many more. planned missions chonga 6 chonga 7 and chonga 8, so the next two missions will go to the scanning regions of the Moon around the south pole trying to learn more about the permanently shadowed craters at the moon's South Pole, but the mission that I'm really What you're interested in is Chonga 8, which is scheduled for 2026 and the goal is to test various technologies that will try to use local lunar resources to do things in situ: isru resource utilization, which is a term we've used a lot and, for example, one.

One of the plans is that they are going to have an instrument on board that is designed to collect lunar gifts and then center it in the microwave, solidify it, glue it together in some way and turn it into 3D printed objects. They just called some supplier. within the country to do this experiment and the goal is that they need to be able to melt the lunar regolith into usable parts at a rate of 40 cubic cm per hour, so if they can achieve that it will show that we can use local resources on the moon to build things , so chonga 6 should be released this spring. chonga 7 should be released in 2026 six and then we should get chonga 8 and this will lead to the Chinese setting foot in humans. the Moon by 2029 2030 Perseverance has a problem with one of its instruments that's why NASA's Perseverance Rover has been exploring the surface of Mars recently had to say goodbye to the Ingenuity helicopter but Perseverance is having its own problem with one of its instruments called Sherlock , so this is an instrument that Perseverance uses to analyze the material in rocks.

It shoots a laser, it's able to vaporize a little bit of rock, and then it can sense what chemicals are in that rock to know what it's made of. The problem is that it has a dust cover that is supposed to go in front of the instrument and the dust cover has partially opened and this is bad for several reasons, one is that the dust cover is designed to stop that Martian. dust getting into the Optics, which we know covers things up, degrades the solar panels and in this case you really don't want dust getting into the Optics.

The other problem is that the door is halfway open and therefore you can't use your instrument because the door is in the way, so NASA is trying to solve the problem, they have been sending commands to try to get the door to open and close and are collecting information if it turns out they can't do it. To solve this problem all is not lost because they have a kind of overlapping capability of the different instruments on Perseverance and so there are several instruments on board Perseverance that can do spectroscopy to learn what chemicals are in the rocks and even if It's like that.

If we can't use this instrument, the rest of your instruments will be able to take over and this is always part of the plan waiting for it to degrade, but you know, we've seen

problems

like this in the past and this feels like the kind of thing that NASA will be able to solve it, so we will let you know when they solve it. Webb finally finds the neutron star in Supernova 1987a. The closest Supernova in modern history was Supernova 1987a and exploded in the large Mulena Cloud. which is about 170,000 light years away, so yes I know it happened 170,000 years ago and the lights have been traveling towards us, but other supernovas were seen 400 years ago, so we haven't seen a supernova nearby since this one, It's amazing to think.

That's how it was more than 35 years ago. I remember when the supernova exploded and when a large star dies in a supernova explosion, some kind of compact object should form in the middle, whether it be a neutron star or a black hole. So over the decades, astronomers used better and better telescopes and different instruments to look at the expanding remnants of supernova 1987a, and the question was: could they find the remnant that was left? There is a pulsar that has been found in the Crab Nebula, where is the neutron? star in Supernova 1987a and finally guess who James Web found the neutron star, but he didn't find it directly.

You know it's an infrared telescope and it's not very good at seeing bright, hot, amazing objects, like the neutron stars you'd expect. That's the kind of work that says an X-ray telescope could see what happened. James Web was able to find a lot of chemicals like iodine that were ionized and were very close to the center of the supernova and when these chemicals are ionized, it means that there is some source of photons that is energizing the chemicals and that source has to be the neutron star embedded in the center of this cloud of material, so Webb was able to confirm that Supernova 1987a left a neutron star as a closed remnant case the Kyper belt continues and in the new spacecraft horizon of the NASA has been exploring the outer solar system, completed flybys of Pluto, gave us our first close-up images of Pluto and its moon Sharon, and then did a flyby of the Kyper built the Aroth object, still has plenty of fuel on board and, hopefully, In the coming years it will carry out another flyby of some other object.

All of his instruments are working very well. Your nuclear power source is working well and it should. For the past few years, in the 2040s, New Horizons has been examining its surroundings and observing the type of dust it finds in its surroundings. It was expected to reach the outer edge of Kyper Bel, which is this region. of IC objects in the solar system and therefore the amount of dust should be decreasing, but instead it has still been discovered that there is a large amount of material in its surroundings and these particles are caused by micrometeorites impacting objects in the solar system.

Kyper belt all over the belt and then they cause debris, which means it's still on the Kyper belt, so which would explain this well. One possibility is that Kyper's belt is simply much larger than anyone expected or had observed. The other possibility is that it actually came out of Kyper's build and is now moving. towards a second belt that is further away, so more research is needed, as I mentioned above, because New Horizons is doing so well that it is expected to live until the 2040s and the hope is that it will eventually leave the region dominated by dust from the solar system and moving to a region dominated by interstellar dust and this is really important because when you think about future missions, if we want to go and send spacecraft to other stars, we have to understand what the terrain is like, what kind of dust there will be.

We hope to find out as we make these trips between star systems, and hopefully New Horizons will be able to tell us how much dust there is, how big the particles are, and how much damage we could expect some spacecraft to experience as it tries to fly. from star to star and if you're interested in the Kyper belt, I recently did a fascinating interview about how ays and makim Maki, which are two dwarf planets in the region, probably have geothermal activity and some form of cryovolcanism. There is much to learn. about Kyper's belt, so check out that interview every week, we do a vote where you tell us what you think was the best story of the week and this week's winner was the discovery that even little Mimis has some kind of underground ocean, so thank you. everyone for voting, we post this poll within about 24 hours after we make a space in the community tab on our YouTube channel so you can go and find it there, but also, if you're just scrolling through YouTube, just scrolling , feeding the algorithm and If you see the vote pop up, go ahead and vote and we'll let you know the results next week.

The best way to ensure that you will see theVoting is to subscribe to the channel and click the notification bell, so make that space. Grown drugs come back to Earth, so this week a capsule landed in Utah and in the capsule was not an asteroid sample, it was actually a crystal grown in space. Now the mission was sent into space by a company called vaa Space Industries and they were testing. how various antiviral drug crystals grown in space compare to terrestrial crystals, we know that when crystals are grown in space when they are in a weightless environment, they can be very pure and we have seen examples such as fiber optic cables that can be se They are grown in space and are optically perfect compared to the types that can be produced on Earth, so they are better for communication systems and the question is, for certain types of chemical medicines that require growing crystals, will you get a better result if you do this? in space, so the drug is an antiviral called ronov and it is used to treat HIV, AIDS and hepatitis C, so the hope is that if it is grown in space it will be more effective and if that is the case, then you can imagine some facility in space on a space station that is growing crystals and then returning them to Earth and to provide benefits to people here on Earth, the mission was launched in June 2023 and was only supposed to last a month , but they were having trouble getting approval from the US Air Force to land at the Utah test facility, so they had to wait. until they got approval and when they did, they were finally able to get the capsule back to Earth, so maybe space-grown drugs will be the next industry to use space.

Speaking of sample capsules landing in Utah, we finally know how much material was sent back. When Osiris Rex visited the asteroid Benu, we had a couple of rough estimates floating around the Internet, but NASA was finally able to open the sample capsule and carefully weigh everything they had gathered and it came out to 121.6 G, which is almost 4, 3. of rock and dust now the goal was 60 G of material, so they got more than double that and the plan now is to preserve about 70% of this material, store it in a deep cold place and then it will be used by future scientists and NASA It does this very similar to the Apollo missions, when they brought those samples to Earth, they put a lot of them in very cold, very secure storage and knowing that there would be better instruments in the future that could analyze the samples, etc.

We still see new research being done with the Apollo samples, so you could imagine future generations of scientists having access to these Osiris Rex samples to try to understand the early solar system with lab equipment we can't even imagine. still. About 200 researchers around the world will get small pieces of sample material that they can start studying today, just for comparison. the hiusa 1 mission that went to asteroid iawa brought home less than a gram than the husa 2 mission that went to asteroid ryugu produced 5.4 G and the Stardust mission that went to comet 81p brought home about 1 G, so 121 GS is enough.

I hope you're enjoying the news, but if you want to learn more about the interesting stories and research being done, you should definitely do so. look at all the interviews I do with people behind the scenes, people who actually work on the missions, signals teams that are making these discoveries, these interviews are about an hour long, we go incredibly deep, you know, I know this audience is They're very technical , they understand space stuff, so we can dig in and really understand and answer a lot of questions we have about the next frontiers in space and astronomy, so if you're skipping those, shouldn't you?

They are very funny. After the interviews we finally see the new Glenn, okay it feels like it's been forever and Blue Origin has been bugging us saying they're working on a rocket, I think it's called new Glenn, well apparently it was all true time, so this week we got a chance to finally see what the new Glenn looks like on the Launchpad. They took it out of the factory and then tilted it

vertical

ly at Launchpad 36 at Cape Canaveral in Florida, so now they're going to do a series of tests where they're going to do PR as vehicle integration. ground support transportation and launch operations, but this version of the new Glenn does not have the be4 engines.

They will test them separately at a site in West Texas. After these tests are done they will try filling it with propellant with Pressure Control Vehicle Vent and after that I'm sure we can expect full static Burns tests for the entire time it would take to get into orbit, so if all

goes

well, we should see a new release from Glenn in 2024, the pressure is on them. You have commitments to customers, it's time to launch this rocket Uclid starts its mission Now we have been reporting on the European space agency's Uclid mission which they launched last year and then went through a big testing phase.

We saw some sample images coming from the satellite, but it has finally begun its full scientific campaign. Now the entire campaign will take a total of 6 years and what will be done is that every 70 minutes it will change position and take a long duration image of the sky and then move to another location and take another one and in each of these images it will gather 50,000 galaxies using two separate instruments, one in infrared that will help astronomers know what galaxies are made of and then another invisible one so they can see what their shapes are. of galaxies, then they will be able to map the amounts of dark matter and dark energy in the universe as they separate galaxies and distort the shape with gravitational lensing and, hopefully, we should get the best measurements of both dark matter and dark energy that we have seen so far and over the course of the full six years it will take pictures of billions of galaxies, so we will get the publication of the first data probably in the spring of 20125, after it is roughly completed. 15% of your Mission and then there will be a much larger release in 2026 and then after 6 years we will get that final version and this will feel very similar to the Gaia data releases where we have analyzed three data. releases so far waiting for the next big data release okay I'm going to talk a little more about the moon landing but first I would like to thank your sponsors thanks to Steven Filler Munley Paul robok Abe Kingston hi Twila dougy Stewart Steven Kaki David Richards Mark Anis jool yansy Antony lilara Dustin cable Vlad chiplin Mode George David Gilton Andrew Gross Jeremy murn Josh Schultz and Jordan Young Those who support us at the master of the universe level and all our other followers on patreon, I have to say look at the machines intuitive The landing coverage was fantastic.

They did a great job, both giving updates on how the landing went and also giving simulations of what you know, where the spacecraft was and what the landing terrain would look like, and then I went and did interviews with people from both NASA like within the intuitive machine grew and this was like the first time they did this type of presentation and I was really impressed and you know I'm a connoisseur of this. that sort of thing, so I hope other people have taken notes when covering the moon landing. It's like when these things land on the moon, when these missions happen, we're all over the world and we're watching with our computers and we wish we could be there in the control room to know everything we want, see pictures from all angles, we want to know what's happening on all those screens, as data is sent back and forth between the equipment we want.

I understand and I think that hopefully as technology improves as people learn to put on a good show, we'll be able to see more and more and when you think about what's going to happen when those first people set foot on the moon in 2026 or you know, when it actually happens, like you saw those first moon landings in 1969, before I was born, but you know, people fondly remember being there in this shared moment when humanity achieved something amazing and in the In the coming years we are going to achieve many more amazing things and I really hope that all the space agencies, all the engineers and the people who work on these projects can come along for the ride.

Well, see you next week.