transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] How will we power the moon bases? Which places will be the primary targets for the Habitable World Observatory? Which nuclear reactor is the new NASA proposal about? And in Q&A+, how long will it take to clear the L2 Lagrange point? All this and more in this question show. It's time for the question show, your questions, my answers, as always wherever you are, across my channel. If a question pops in your brain, just write it down, I'll gather them up, and I will answer them here. Alright, let's get into the questions. Nunya, are there moonquakes or Marsquakes that are strong enough to cause issues with missions? Yes. So yeah, I don't know about Mars. I mean, there are definitely Marsquakes, and NASA's Mars Insight Mission measured them, and some of them were fairly strong, like up to magnitude five, I think. And Mars is, although we don't see any active volcanic activity on the surface of Mars, we see the giant volcanoes, we see some of the structures that we know that there were volcanoes on Mars in the past. And then the same thing on the moon. When the Apollo astronauts went to the moon, they put down a seismometer, and they were able to detect the presence of very faint moonquakes on the surface of the moon. It's very unlikely that it would cause any damage to any moon base or Mars base. But this is considered by mission planners. So we're down to about 11 spots. So we don't know where the Artemis IV astronauts are gonna be setting up on the surface of the moon. And we don't know where the future moon base is going to be. It's gonna be in the south of the moon, near the permanently shadowed craters. And we've been reporting on Universe Today about the selection process for where these final locations are gonna be and that the mission planners are thinking about how scientifically interesting are these places, how close are they to the permanently shadowed craters of the moon? Will they have access to energy? Is the terrain very flat? But one of the considerations is, is there a landslide risk? There are examples on the moon, you can actually see where there are boulders that have rolled downhill on the side of a crater. And that's because there was a moonquake and that kicked off a boulder that rolled down the side of a crater on the moon. And you can imagine if you were set up inside a crater on the moon, that there is a risk that a chunk of the side of the moon is going to be shaken loose, it's going to roll down and hit your base. So this is a thing that is considered, the risks are very low, but they're not zero. And so it's all about, it's all about choosing where you set up your base. Arjun, is there any talk about making batteries to be used to hold solar power that is collected during the lunar day? Yeah, yeah. So I've reported this in the past. The idea is a sand battery, that you run pipes into the regolith, and then you run a fluid that you heat up with solar panels into the sand, and you heat up the sand and heat up the sand and heat up the regolith on the moon until it's like 400 Celsius. And then you can extract that heat during the lunar night, and use that to create electricity and also to keep your base warm. Someone had done a paper that we had reported on Universe Today, that you would need like a sphere or a cube of regolith, just a few meters on the side, that you would run those pipes into, and then that would be enough to keep your base warm through the lunar night. That technology is being tested out here on earth, like I think in Finland, they're building sand batteries. So they're just pumping hot liquid into just sand, and then heating it up, and then they're extracting that heat again throughout the course of the winter. And it works, and it's like dead simple. And so that's the kind of technology that we want for the exploration of the moon. Something that is dead simple, doesn't require complicated electronics. You are just heating up the dirt under your feet, and then you're extracting that heat later on. One thousand dots. Is the nuclear reactor on the proposed new spacecraft a similar kind to what they want to use for a moon base? So yes, sort of. So the idea, the problem with space, when you're traveling in space, when you build a base on the moon or wherever, is that you require power. You need lots and lots of power, electricity. Electricity to heat yourself, to run all of the equipment that you use. And especially if you're going to do some kind of propulsion, you need power. There was an interview that I did, and the person I was talking to was saying like the top, your top priorities are power, power and power, right? One, two and three are power. And right now, you can get power from solar, which is great, but you need a lot of solar panels to be able to give you any significant amount of power. And then if you're going to be traveling in the outer solar system, then they use these radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which is a decaying chunk of plutonium. And then you have the plutonium connected to a thermocouple. The heat turns into electricity, but not a lot. You get a couple of hundred watts out of what would be enough nuclear material to run a fission reactor that would give you then hundreds of, or give you kilowatts, hundreds of kilowatts of power. And so the sort of one of the long-term ideas has been to send nuclear reactors to space. And, you know, there are nuclear reactors in ships, submarines and aircraft carriers have nuclear reactors on board. And actually both the Americans and the Soviets built nuclear reactors that they tested in space. The Americans tested two of them, and the Soviets tested 31 nuclear reactors, fission reactors in space. And so the technology absolutely works. And yet, you know, because people were very concerned about nuclear reactors for the longest time, worried about nuclear waste, things like that, the emphasis went away from nuclear reactors and on to other things like solar power or RTGs, which are kind of nuclear waste anyway. But in the last, say, 10 years or so, NASA has been developing with the Department of Energy a new class of nuclear reactors. So one of the ones was called the Kilopower. And this was to put a 100-kilowatt fission reactor on to, say, the moon. But this same kind of nuclear reactor could be used for spacecraft. And so there's kind of two ways you can use a nuclear reactor for spacecraft. One is with a nuclear rocket, with a fission rocket. So you run your nuclear reactor, it makes it very hot. You then expel some kind of propellant out the back of your spacecraft, like hydrogen, and you get a much higher specific impulse, higher thrust from your rocket than you would with a traditional chemical rocket. You can get just a lot more force. If you watch For All Mankind, they talk about nuclear rockets in that show. The other way is that you use the fission reactor to generate electricity, and then you use the electricity to run an ion engine, an electrodynamic thruster. You use the electricity to accelerate ions out the back of your spacecraft, and your spacecraft gets a kick in the opposite direction. There's a thing called the Hall Effect Thruster that's being tested at NASA. They've got much more powerful versions of the ion thrusters. Things that were on the Dawn Mission, or even on all of the Starlings. They all have ion engines. NASA has been working on this technology, and there have been times when there's been some funding for this, and other times when people have tried to cut the funding to these space-based nuclear reactors. And now we're in this time where it's all the rage again, and Jared Isaacman wants to do a mission to Mars, but testing one of these fission reactors, where they will pair up a fission reactor with an ion engine, carry multiple Mars helicopters to Mars, but also test out this whole technology stack. But for any future moon base, they're going to need one of these fission reactors, because you've got that 14 days of darkness, of cold, that you've got to be able to get through. And a fission reactor provides you this base load power. The thing is, runs hot, provides a lot of heat, and can provide you with a lot of electricity that you can use to power your base. But the underlying technology is exactly the same as the fission reactors we have on submarines, on aircraft carriers, and various nuclear plants on earth. Just different scales. It's time to shout out our new patrons at the $5 level and above. Sergio Sansevierio, Farouk Xsakbati, Chip Marshall, One EO Archaote, Hondo Hondo, Michael Vandenberg, Haven Slost, Nicholas Schreiber, Rosemary Dwyer, and James McMahon. Join the community at patreon.com. slash universe today. SM Collins, is anyone setting up a public access list of new finds of Vera Rubin? I know some let you sift through things, but more of an astronomy picture of the day kind of review. That's an interesting question. So I interviewed one of the data brokers, the Antares group that is part of the Noir lab. And they're one of the data brokers. They're essentially taking the full feed from Vera Rubin. And then they're filtering out for the kinds of events that their astronomical community is interested in. There's another one that's working on solar system objects. And there's other there's like nine data brokers. And all of their APIs are publicly available. And so you can go and use any one of these these APIs. And you can make things with it. And I've been suggesting that people programmers and even non programmers now that we've got these, these tools like Claude and codecs from Chad GPT, you can actually make a tool that interfaces with the Vera Rubin data and turns up some kind of information. And you know, some of the systems that people have built are really cool. You know, people have shown me a lot of really cool ideas that they've built so far, I should really start gathering them together and kind of presenting them on a regular basis and giving links so they can get more publicity. But these things are out there for sure. Really cool visualizations of using the Vera Rubin data. None have become very widely known yet because it's still a fairly niche thing. But I should definitely do a harder job, a better job of helping to promote. So this is my open call to you. If you have built something that uses the Vera Rubin data that is a really cool visualization so people can look at it, like maybe Astronomy Picture of the Day, or maybe something more useful for people who want to do fallen observations, discover asteroids, comets, variable star observing, supernova, things like that. Let me know and I will try to promote what you're doing here on my channel. Testing, testing, will the Habitable World Observatory plan to look in many directions or will it focus on where Kepler looked first? Habitable Worlds has two priorities once it does finally get built. The first thing is going to find candidate Habitable Worlds, and then it is going to observe them. So one of the big problems that we have right now in the field of exoplanetary research is that we don't know where the Earth-sized worlds orbiting around Sun-like stars are. We know of Earth-sized worlds orbiting within the Habitable Zone of Red Dwarf stars. We know where there are Hot Jupiters, Mini-Neptunes, Super-Earths, things like that. But we just don't have the telescopes to be able to find the Earth 2.0, right? Kepler was the mission that should have been able to do it. But the problem, of course, was that Kepler lost its reaction wheels, and so it was unable to complete its mission in time to be able to find those candidate planets. They had to switch to the Kepler 2 project where they were finding worlds around Red Dwarf stars, but they weren't able to do that original goal. That was the finder telescope that would then have fed in all of these candidate worlds to the other observatories that were going to come after that. We've got the TESS mission right now, but TESS is really not able to find those worlds. And like maybe if we're really lucky, it'll find a couple of Earth-sized worlds orbiting around Sunlit stars in the habitable zone, but most likely it won't. We've got the PLATO mission that is coming up, and that again, probably will be able to find a couple of these other Earths. But really you want a large collection of them. You want dozens, if not hundreds of candidate worlds, and then you look at the best candidates carefully to detect the presence of various chemicals in the atmosphere. You study the atmospheres of those other Earths. And so right now, we don't have the potential, the targets in the pipeline. And so a lot of the work that's being put into the development of the Haber Worlds Observatory, as well as the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets, the LIFE mission, is that they have to both be the finder telescope and the analyzer. So they have to point at a sun-like star and observe it, block the light from that star, and look for any example of Earth-sized worlds, you know, planets within the habitable zone of that star. And if they find, you know, after a certain amount of observation time, if they find it, then that gets added as a candidate. They move on to the next star. That gets added as a candidate. Then they'll have this big list. And then astronomers will argue over the list. And then they'll go to the, what is the best candidate in that list? And they'll start making those observations. And so unfortunately, they're just not the telescopes in the pipeline right now to get us those candidate worlds. There's a lot of ideas. The Nancy Grace Roman is gonna have the ability to find Jupiter-sized worlds orbiting around some like stars, but not Earth-sized worlds. Right now, the plan for all of these next generation big telescopes is search stars for planets, then analyze those planets to see if there's life there. Matthew, can you envision a technology that will allow us to view other planets in real time instead of as they were? No. I mean, the speed of light is the law, and there is nothing that we can develop that would allow us to see in real time, because that would violate the speed of light. So we have to wait for events to happen, and we have to wait for the light to reach us before we can see them. It would be amazing. When you think about science fiction from Star Trek, Star Wars, but even science fiction books in the 1960s, when they first started to think about some of these ideas, they would come up with a way to allow faster than light communication. That's essentially what you're arguing for, which is, could you flash a light that could be seen instantaneously? Then you can communicate. You're sending video signals back and forth to somebody. That would be great that you could communicate in real time. That would allow you to hold the empire together, as opposed to one side of your empire, your galactic empire requiring signals to take 100,000 years to reach the other side of your galactic empire, and then another 100,000 years for the return signal to go back. Imagine you want to send information, it takes 200,000 years for a return journey to send that information. That would suck, but that's just the reality. So no, unfortunately, we cannot communicate, we cannot observe without having to wait for the speed of light. CILO87, if left unchecked, how long would it take the L2 Lagrange point to clear out? Not long at all. The L1, the L2 and the L3, the ones that are lined up are unstable. And so it actually requires propellant for you to be able to maintain in that position. So you would drift away and be pretty far out of that Lagrange point within a couple of years. So yeah, it is not stable, unlike the L4, L5. All right, those are all the questions that we had this week. Thank everyone who asked your questions into the YouTube comments. Everybody who joined me for the live show, we're doing the live shows every Monday at 5 p.m. Pacific time. So if you want to come and watch and join live, there'll be an event here on the channel for the next one. Now, I'm going to talk about an enormous amount of content that we are now releasing onto the channel that was previously secret. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Andrea Pedretti, Barely Groofing, Brian Bodie, Karendra and Chuck Hawkins, Commander Baylor, Darkfinger, David Gilton, and David Matz, Evan.Pro, James Clark, Janice Smith, Jeremy Matter, Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Josh Schultz, Marcel Sitz, Michael Purcell, and Northspace, once for animals.org. 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But this is perfect if you're working on some project and you just want to have my familiar voice walking in the background or you need something to go to sleep to, or you're genuinely interested in catching all of the live streams that you have missed, then they will all be available. And we've already got dozens have been released so far, and there are hundreds to go. So this will take us a few months to kind of work through the backlog and then we will keep them live from here on out. So enjoy this enormous amount of previously mostly unseen content that we are now making available to you and give us any feedback. If this isn't working for you, if you got some other suggestions, please let me know. All right, we'll see you next time.