EXCITE Mission: A High-Altitude Balloon Telescope Mapping Alien Worlds - podcast episode cover

EXCITE Mission: A High-Altitude Balloon Telescope Mapping Alien Worlds

Feb 21, 202632 minSeason 3Ep. 321
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Episode description

The EXCITE mission is using a specialized infrared telescope carried by a high-altitude balloon to study the atmospheres of distant hot Jupiters. Floating above most of Earth’s atmosphere, the observatory can continuously monitor these exoplanets and build three-dimensional maps of their temperature structures and weather patterns.

Unlike heavily scheduled space telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope, EXCITE offers a cost-effective platform optimized for capturing full orbital phase curves. After a successful 2024 test flight that validated its stabilization and cooling systems, future launches over Antarctica aim to deepen our understanding of exoplanet climates and atmospheric chemistry

Thank you for listening to Bedtime Astronomy — your guide to the cosmos. New episodes on space exploration, NASA missions & the latest astronomy breakthroughs.

This episode includes AI-generated content.

Transcript

Speaker 1

Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos with our soothing Bedtime Astronomy podcast. Each episode offers a gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful slumber under the night sky.

Speaker 2

Welcome back to the show. We are doing something a little different today. Usually when we sit down to talk about the bleeding edge of astrophysics, when we try to visualize what it looks like to steady worlds that are hundreds of light years away, we all have a very specific, almost Hollywood style image in our heads.

Speaker 3

Oh absolutely, it's the Cape Canaveral aesthetic, isn't it.

Speaker 2

Totally.

Speaker 3

We picture these massive vertical integration buildings, clouds of steam, you know, the whole countdown clock thing, and millions of pounds of thrust just fighting gravity.

Speaker 2

It's loud, it's fast, and it involves billions of dollars of titanium and composites hurling themselves into the vacuum of space.

Speaker 3

It's drama, pure raw power, right, and.

Speaker 2

So we have this conditioned bias that space science equals rockets. We just assume that to get high quality data, well, you need high velocity and extreme altitude.

Speaker 3

You need to escape Earth entirely.

Speaker 2

That's the assumption. But the documentation we're looking at today, specifically a fascinating report from Universe Today and fizz dot org about a mission called Excite, it completely dismantles that assumption.

Speaker 3

It really does. It's a wonderful reminder that sometimes the most sophisticated solution to a really high tech problem isn't about going faster or higher, or you know, just using more brute forests.

Speaker 2

Look about being smarter.

Speaker 3

It's about being smarter with where you put your instruments. It's about finding the clever workaround.

Speaker 2

Right, Because the vehicle at the center of our conversation today isn't a rocket, not at all. It doesn't have thrusters, it doesn't have a heat shield. It's a balloon, a.

Speaker 3

Balloon, and it's a balloon that, if everything goes according to plan, is going to tell us more about the weather on alien planets than perhaps any rocket based telescope currently in operation. We are talking about the Excite mission.

Speaker 2

Let's break down that acronym before we get into the physics. Because it sounds intense excite.

Speaker 3

It does sound pretty energetic. It stands for the Exoplanet Climate Infrared Telescope. Okay, And while the name suggests all this high energy and excitement, the actual method of deployment is remarkably gentle. It's almost floaty, floaty.

Speaker 2

I like that. So the plan is to float a telescope to the very edge of the Earth's atmosphere.

Speaker 3

Exactly and just have it sit there to stare uninterrupted at a very specific type of alien world.

Speaker 2

Okay, let's establish the scale here. When we say float a telescope, I mean, are we talking about something like a weather balloon you'd see on the local news or is this more like the red bull stratos jump? How high are we actually going?

Speaker 3

We are definitely talking stratospheric think, much much bigger than a standard weather balloon. The mission profile calls for an altitude of forty.

Speaker 2

Kilometers forty kilometers yep, and to put that.

Speaker 3

In imperial units for those of us who think that way, that's roughly twenty five miles straight out.

Speaker 2

Twenty five miles Okay. Can you contextualize that for me? If I'm looking out the window of a seven forty seven on a transatlantic flight. How far above me is this balloon?

Speaker 3

Right, So a commercial jet cruises at what between thirty thousand, forty thousand feet some like that. Yeah, so that's roughly ten to twelve kilometers up. This balloon is going four times higher than a.

Speaker 2

Commercial flight, four times higher.

Speaker 3

If you were in that jet looking up, the balloon would still be just a tiny dot in the black sky above you. It's not in the blue part of the sky anymore. It is cruising the upper stratosphere.

Speaker 2

But and this is a really important distinction we need to make. It's not technically space. Is it the Carmen line, which is sort of the international welcome to space sign, that's at one hundred kilometers.

Speaker 3

Correct, It is not technically outer space. You are still within the influence of Earth's atmosphere thin as it is up there. But here's the thing. For the specific scientific problem they're trying to solve. Forty kilometers is the magic number.

Speaker 2

The sweet spot.

Speaker 3

It's the absolute sweet spot where you get I mean, something like ninety nine percent of the benefits of being in space, but without the billion dollar price tag of a rocket launch.

Speaker 2

I want to really dig into that magic number concept, because that really seems to be the lynchpin of this whole project's economic and scientific argument. But first, what exactly is XITE looking at? You mentioned alien weather.

Speaker 3

Yes, the target is a very specific, very dramatic class of planets known as hot jupiters.

Speaker 2

Hot jupiters. It's a vivid name.

Speaker 3

It implies a lot, it does, and it's quite literal. Actually, these are gas giants, so planets with the mass and composition roughly similar to our own Jupiter. But they are not sitting out in the cold suburbs of their solar systems like our Jupiter.

Speaker 2

Is right Jupiter's way out there.

Speaker 3

These guys orbit incredibly close to their parent stars.

Speaker 2

How close are we talking? I mean, Mercury is close to our Sun is like.

Speaker 3

That, oh much much closer, so close that a year one full orbit around their star might only last two or three Earth days.

Speaker 2

Two or three days. That is incredibly fast. So they are just speed running their orbit.

Speaker 3

They are They're absolutely whipping around their stars. And because they are that close, they are just roasting. I can engine temperatures on the starfacing side can reach thousands of degrees. We are talking about worlds that are essentially glowing with their own heat, where the atmosphere is being constantly blasted by stellar radiation.

Speaker 2

So we have these massive, scorching, fast moving planets, and Excite is designed to map the climate of these these.

Speaker 3

Hellscapes, that's a good word for them, exactly. But to do that, you immediately run into a massive obstacle in observational astronomy. To see the heat signature of a planet, you need to observe in the infrared part of the spectrum. Infrared, that's heat radiation right right our eyes see visible light. But if you want to see temperature, if you want to see the thermal glow of a hot planet against the cold darkness of space, you have to look in infrared. It's the only.

Speaker 2

Way, Okay, So what's the problem with that.

Speaker 3

The problem is Earth's atmosphere absolutely hates infrared light.

Speaker 2

Hates it in what way it absorbs it.

Speaker 3

Specifically the water vapor in our atmosphere. You can think about humidity. Water molecules are incredibly good at absorbing infrared energy. It's the greenhouse effect basically. So if you put an infrared telescope on the ground, even on a super high Mountain in Hawaii or the Atacama Desert in Chile, where the air is really thin. You are still looking through this thick, soupy blanket of water vapor.

Speaker 2

So the signal from the planet just gets lost in the noise of our own atmosphere.

Speaker 3

It's worse than noise, it's a total block edge at certain wavelengths. It's like trying to look at the stars on a foggy night, or trying to see through steamy window. The signal just doesn't get through.

Speaker 2

And this is where the balloon comes in.

Speaker 3

This is where the balloon is the hero.

Speaker 2

Back to the forty kilometer figure right.

Speaker 3

Because if you can get a telescope up to forty kilometers, you are physically above ninety nine point five percent of the art's atmosphere. More importantly, you're above almost all of the water vapor.

Speaker 2

So suddenly the fog clears, the steamy window becomes transparent.

Speaker 3

Precisely, the sky becomes crystal clear in the infrared frequencies they need to see for the purpose of this specific telescope and this specific science. Forty kilometers is space. The photons from that distant planet can travel all that way and then hit the detector without bumping into any pesky water molecules in our atmosphere at the last second.

Speaker 2

That is a fascinatingly simple workaround. You don't need to leave Earth's gravity. You just need to get a blood the moisture.

Speaker 3

And you save a fortune in fuel and hardware doing it. But there is another layer to this strategy, and it's a really clever one. It has to do with where they are planning on launching it.

Speaker 2

Oh right, you mentioned this for.

Speaker 3

The main long duration mission. They aren't just sending this up from Florida or New Mexico. The source material highlights a launch plan for Antarctica.

Speaker 2

Antarctica that seems I mean logistically that sounds like a nightmare. Why go to the bottom of the world to look up at the sky?

Speaker 3

It does seem counterintuitive. There are two main reasons, and they're both brilliant. First, what are called the seeing conditions. Seeing conditions it's an astronomy term for how clear and stable the atmosphere is. The air above Antarctica is very, very stable. It's incredibly cold, and crucially it's the driest place on Earth, so you get even less of that residual water vapor so.

Speaker 2

It's the best possible place on Earth to be even before you go up exactly.

Speaker 3

But the second reason, and this is the real game changer, is about time.

Speaker 2

Time.

Speaker 3

This brings us to a concept they call loitering. Think about it. If you launch a satellite into low Earth orbit, like the Hubble Space Telescope or the International Space Station, it is moving fast, unbelievably fast. We're taking seventeen thousand miles per hour something like that. It orbits the entire Earth every ninety minutes.

Speaker 2

So from the satellite's perspective, the sun rises and sets every hour and a half exactly.

Speaker 3

And more importantly, from its perspective, the Earth gets in the way for roughly half of that orbit, about forty five minutes. The Earth itself is blocking your view of the stars you want to see.

Speaker 2

You're in Earth's shadow.

Speaker 3

You're in the shadow. You can't stare at anything for very long. It's a constant cycle of observation than blockage. It's constantly blinking sun shadow, sun shadow.

Speaker 2

I can see how that would be a huge problem if you're trying to, say, film a movie of a planet's weather system, you'd have these massive gaps in the footage every forty five minutes.

Speaker 3

Precisely, you'd lose all continuity. It would be a mess. But a balloon over Antarctica during the Antarctic summer.

Speaker 2

Ah, the twenty four hour daylight, you got it.

Speaker 3

The sun never sets because of the Earth's axial tilt. It just circles the horizon.

Speaker 2

So you never have to worry about the Earth getting in your.

Speaker 3

Way, not if you're looking outwards. If you point your telescope away from the Sun, the stars are always accessible twenty four to seven. And because of the polar vortex wines, these stable circular win that just go around and around the continent, the balloon just gently circles the pole.

Speaker 2

It doesn't fly off towards Australia.

Speaker 3

Nope, it just laps the continent.

Speaker 2

It loiters, it loiters, and that lets it stare at a single target, one of these hot jupiters continuously for days on end, no blinking, no Earth getting in the way, just a pure, uninterrupted stream of data.

Speaker 3

That is the whole ballgame.

Speaker 2

And that continuous stream is what allows them to get the very specific kind of data they are after. The report mentions something called phase curves, and I really want to spend some time here because the report makes it clear this isn't a side project. This is the core science of the mission.

Speaker 3

Yes, this is the holy grail for this kind of science. It's what you can do with that loitering capability.

Speaker 2

Okay, so let's untack this. We usually hear about transits in exoplanet news. That's how we find most of these planets. Right. The planet goes in front of the star, the light from the star dips a tiny bit, and we say, uh huh, there's a planet there.

Speaker 3

Correct. That is the transit method. It's fundamentally looking at a shadow, a silhouette. It's incredibly powerful. It tells you the size of the planet, how fast it orbits, and maybe, if you're lucky and the instrument is good enough, a little bit about the chemical makeup of the very edges of its atmosphere as the starlight.

Speaker 2

Filters through the edges. That's a keyword, a very keyword.

Speaker 3

Then you also have what's called the secondary.

Speaker 2

Eclipse, which is the opposite, the opposite.

Speaker 3

That's when the planet goes behind the star from our point of view.

Speaker 2

Okay, so it disappears, it.

Speaker 3

Disappears completely, and just before it vanishes. We're seeing the light from the star plus the light reflected and emitted from the planet's day side. Then it's gone and we only see the star.

Speaker 2

So you subtract the star only light from the star plus planet light.

Speaker 3

And the difference is the light from the planet's day side. That tells us how bright it is, how hot it is on that side facing the star. But both of those methods, transits and secondary eclipses, they're just shots. They are momentary events.

Speaker 2

You see the front when it passes by, or you see the back before it hides right.

Speaker 3

It's like trying to understand a marathon runner. By taking a single photo of them at the starting line and a single photo of them at the finish line.

Speaker 2

You miss the entire race.

Speaker 3

You miss the whole race. You don't know how they handled the hills. You don't know what their pacing strategy was. You don't know if they struggled at mile twenty. Phase curves are the video of the entire race.

Speaker 2

So instead of just watching the planet cross the starter finish line, Excite watches the whole orbit.

Speaker 3

It watches the planet go all the way around for days. And this is where the physics of hot Jupiter's gets really really cool. Because these planets are so close to their stars, they are subject to these massive gravitational forces that lead to a phenomenon called tidal locking.

Speaker 2

We see this with our own moon, right, Yeah, we always see the same face the Moon.

Speaker 3

Exactly the same principle. The immense gravity of the star has grabbed the planet and basically forced it to rotate at the exact same speed that it orbits.

Speaker 2

So one side faces the star.

Speaker 3

Forever eternal noon, and the other side faces deep space forever eternal midnight.

Speaker 2

That sounds incredibly extreme. One side must be boiling and the other must be what near absolute zero.

Speaker 3

In theory, yes, if there were no atmosphere, the day side would be molten rock and metal, and the night side would be unimaginably cold. But here is the mystery. These planets do have atmospheres, and atmospheres move heat around massive supersonic winds. So as we watch this tidally locked planet orbit its star from our vantage point here on Earth, we see different amounts of its day and night sides. We see different phases, just like the phases of our moon.

Speaker 2

So we see the full night side, then a crescent of the day side appears, then.

Speaker 3

It gets bigger. We see half in half. That's the terminator line, the sunrise sunset line. Then we see the full day side, and then it wins back to a crescent and finally back to the night side again.

Speaker 2

And by measuring the infrared light the heat during all of those different phases, we can build a map.

Speaker 3

We are building a three temperature map of the entire world. We're not just getting one number for the day side and one for the night side. We can see the gradient. We can see how effectively the winds are dragging that immense heat from the day side around the night side.

Speaker 2

So if the night side is surprisingly warm, it means the winds are really efficient at circulating heat exactly. And if the night side is freezing cold, it means the winds aren't doing their job, or the atmosphere is too thin to hold the heat.

Speaker 3

Precisely, we are literally measuring the efficiency of the planetary heat engine, and we can get even more granular than that. This is the really wild part. On many of these hot jupiters we've studied, we find that the hottest point on the planet isn't where you'd expect it to be.

Speaker 2

Wait, how is that possible? If I stand directly under a heat lamp, the hottest pot is right on top of my head. That's just basic physics.

Speaker 3

It is unless there is a five thousand mile per hour wind blowing across your head. If the wind is strong enough, it physically pushes the heated mass of air, It advects the heat. It shifts the hot spot away from the point directly under the star, usually to the ist in the direction of the planet's rotation.

Speaker 2

So the hottest part of the day isn't noon, it's more like three PM.

Speaker 3

A very extreme version of that. Yes, And by measuring exactly where that hot spot is located using the continuous phase curve, excite can actually calculate the wind speeds and infer the atmospheric pressure on an alien world.

Speaker 2

That is just incredible. We are effectively doing meteorology calculating wind speeds on a planet that's hundreds of light years away using a telescope hanging from a balloon floating over Antarctica.

Speaker 3

It's a huge leap forward. It moves us from what some astronomers call stamp collecting, just finding planets and cataloging them, to characterization, which is actually understanding them as complex, dynamic physical places.

Speaker 2

Now I have to play Devil's advocate here for a minute, because whenever we talk about space telescopes, there is a giant, ten billion dollar elephant in the room. We have the James Webb Space Telescope JWST. It is the most powerful, most expensive, most advanced observatory humanity has ever built. It's an infrared telescope. Why on Earth do we need a balloon if we have WEB.

Speaker 3

It's a great question, and it's one that the scientific community asks itself all the time. You would absolutely think the ten billion dollar telescope would win every single time, But ironically WEB actually suffers from being too good for this specific job.

Speaker 2

Too good. How can a telescope be too good? I don't understand that it's too sensitive.

Speaker 3

You have to remember what WEB was originally built for. Its primary design mission was to see the cosmic dawn.

Speaker 2

The very first stars and galaxies.

Speaker 3

The first galaxies born after the Big Bang. We're talking about objects that are incredibly far away, incredibly red shifted, and unbelievably faint.

Speaker 2

So it's designed to see a single candle on the Moon.

Speaker 3

It's designed to see something even fainter than that. So what happens when you take that exquisite instrument and you point it at a relatively bright star in our local galactic neighborhood. It's over It's completely overwhelmed. It's like using military grade night vision goggles to stare directly at a football stadium's floodlights.

Speaker 2

You just see white. You get no information exactly.

Speaker 3

The sensors saturate, the pixels on the detector fill up with electrons faster than the electronics can read them out. You just lose the data. Astronomers call it blowing out the image.

Speaker 2

So the data is totally useless.

Speaker 3

In many cases for the brightest targets. Yes, and this is especially true for the specific instrument mode on Web it's called prism that is actually the best tool for this kind of continuous atmospheric study. Many of the stars that host these interesting hot jupiters are relatively bright nearby stars in our galaxy. Web literally cannot look at them in this mode without getting blinded.

Speaker 2

So Excite is filling a really specific niche. It designed to be less sensitive, which paradoxically allows it to look at the bright stuff that Web can.

Speaker 3

It has a higher dynamic range, that's the technical term. It can handle the glare. And then, of course there is the time and cost factor, which we just cannot ignore. Web's observing time is arguably the most valuable single resource in all of astronomy.

Speaker 2

I can imagine the line to use. It must be miles long.

Speaker 3

The proposal acceptance rate is tiny, something like one in ten, maybe even less. So to go to the time Allocation Committee and ask for five continuous days of Web time to just stare at one.

Speaker 2

Planet, that's a very hard cell.

Speaker 3

It's an almost impossible cell, because in those five days, Web could have looked at one hundred distant galaxies, or analyzed the light from ten different supernovae, or mapped a star forming region. There's an opportunity cost, a massive opportunity cost. Excite is a specialist, it's a dedicated mission. It can afford to just sit there and stare at one target for a week or more because it isn't competing with the entire rest of the universe for its attention.

Speaker 2

Okay, that makes sense for Web, but what about Hubble. It's been up there for decades. It's certainly less sensitive than Web. Can it do this kind of work.

Speaker 3

Hubble has done some of this work, and it's been groundbreaking, but it runs smack into the orbit problem we mentioned earlier. It's in low Earth orbit.

Speaker 2

Right, the blinking issue in and out of shadow every ninety minutes exactly.

Speaker 3

But there is a secondary, much more subtle issue that comes with that shadow. Temperature swings. The telescope gets cold, it gets cold, and then it gets hot again, over and over. When Hubble dips into Earth's shadow, it cools down significantly. When it pops back out into the direct, unfiltered sunlight of space, it heats up very.

Speaker 2

Quickly, and that causes the structure to expand and contract.

Speaker 3

Yes, thermal expansion and contraction. We all learn about it in high school physics with railroad tracks, sure, But in a telescope that's trying to measure infinitesimal changes in light, even a microscopic amount of expansion or contraction is a potential disaster. The whole structure sort of breathe.

Speaker 2

Breathing that sounds very ominous for a precision machine.

Speaker 3

It creates noise and jitter in the data. The focus changes slightly, the align of the mirror's drifts every time Hubble comes out of the Earth's shadow. The scientists have to basically discard the first chunk of data from that orbit while the telescope settles and stops shivering from the temperature change.

Speaker 2

So you get these unavoidable gaps in the data. Even when you're not behind the Earth.

Speaker 3

You get gaps, and you get wobbles. It makes it incredibly difficult to stitch together a perfectly smooth, continuous phase curve. Excite, on the other hand, floating in the eternal, gentle sunshine of the Antarctic summer, stays at a much much more stable temperature. It doesn't shiver.

Speaker 2

It all sounds like the perfect solution on paper, a stable platform above the water vapor, relatively low cost, with specialized sensors for the job. But paper is not reality, and the report does mention they actually took this whole thing for a test drive. Recently.

Speaker 3

They did, and this is where the strike gets really interesting from an engineering perspective. In August of twenty twenty four, they launched a test version from Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

Speaker 2

New Mexico, not Antarctica yet, no absolute not.

Speaker 3

You don't go to the most logistically challenging and hostile continent on Earth for your first try.

Speaker 2

That would be brave or foolish.

Speaker 3

You do a shakedown cruise somewhere accessible. If something falls off in the New Mexico desert, you can drive a truck out and pick it up. If it falls off on the Antarctic ice sheet, it's gone forever.

Speaker 2

Right, good point.

Speaker 3

So it was a short flight, relatively short, yes, about ten hours. The goal wasn't to do science. It was just to prove that the core systems work in that environment.

Speaker 2

And how did it go? Did it, you know, work?

Speaker 3

There was a classic engineering story, a mix. There were some absolutely spectacular successes and some really frustrating but ultimately very illuminating failures.

Speaker 2

Okay, let's start with the winds. What went right?

Speaker 3

The biggest win by far was stability. You have to remember, this telescope isn't bolted to bedrock. It's a heavy instrument package. The gondola hanging from a giant balloon on a long.

Speaker 2

Cable, so it twists its ways.

Speaker 3

It bobs in the stratospheric winds. It's a pendulum, a giant, multi ton pendulum. And yet the planing system, the gondola itself achieved what they call sub arcsecond precision pointing.

Speaker 2

Okay, break that down for me. What is an arcsecond in real terms?

Speaker 3

Okay, so imagine a circle is three hundred and sixty degrees. Each degree is split into sixty arc minutes. Each arc minute is split into sixty arcseconds. So an arcsecond is one three thousand, six hundredth of a single degree.

Speaker 2

That's a tiny, tiny sliver of the sky.

Speaker 3

It's incredibly small. It's like the width of a human hair seen from about sixty feet away.

Speaker 2

And they kept the telescope pointed that steady.

Speaker 3

They kept it steady within that tiny sliver while dangling from a balloon twenty five miles up in the air. It's the equivalent of standing in one city and holding a laser pointer perfectly steady on a specific dime in another city miles.

Speaker 2

Away, while you're hanging from a rope.

Speaker 3

While you're hanging from a rope. It proved that the stabilization technology, the reaction wheels, the star trekers, the control software, it all works flawlessly. That is a massive engineering hurdle to clear.

Speaker 2

That's a huge way. What else worked.

Speaker 3

The cryogenics, the cooling system for the infrared detectors worked perfectly, and that's essential because remember, infrared is heat. The detector itself must be kept incredibly cold or its own sheet will blind it. So two huge successes.

Speaker 2

Okay, that's the good news. Now for the growing pains. The report mentioned some failures, and I want to get into the details here because usually, you know, these press releases just say successful test. They rarely get into the nitty gritty of what actually broke.

Speaker 3

And that's what's so great about this report. They were very open about the failures, which is how science moves forward. First, a simple one, the GPS went down.

Speaker 2

Even NASA has GPS issues. Yeah, that makes me feel so much better about my phone's mapping app failing in the middle of a city.

Speaker 3

It happens. High altitude GPS can be tricky, but that was a minor glitch. The more fascinating failure, and the one that really teaches us about material science and extreme environments, was the aluminum housing for the telescope s bearings.

Speaker 2

Ok what happened there?

Speaker 3

So the telescope needs to be able to tilt up and down. It's called changing its elevation. It has to do that to track the stars as they move across the sky. The bearings that allow the smooth tilting motion. The joints effectively were housed inside a casing made of aluminum.

Speaker 2

Okay, aluminum seems pretty standard for aerospace stuff. It's light, it's.

Speaker 3

Strong, it is it's a great material for a lot of things. But at forty kilometers up, the ambient temperature is brutal. We're talking around medic of sixty degrees celsia's maybe even lower. It's a deep freeze.

Speaker 2

Colder than an Antarctic winter on the ground.

Speaker 3

Much colder. And when metal gets that cold, it shrinks. It's called thermal contraction. But here is the crucial catch. Different metals shrink at different rates. That property is called the coefficient of thermal expansion.

Speaker 2

I think I see where this is going.

Speaker 3

The aluminum housing shrank more and shrank faster than the steel bearings that were housed inside it. It crushed them, not crushed, but it clamped down on them. It's called a pferential contraction. The housing, which should be a loose sleeve for the bearings, effectively became a powerful vice.

Speaker 2

It squeezed them so tight they couldn't move.

Speaker 3

It froze the mechanism solid. The telescope got stuck looking at one spot in the sky. It couldn't tilt, it couldn't track anything. The science part of the mission was a total failure because of this.

Speaker 2

That sounds absolutely catastrophic. You launched this incredibly complex mission and a simple shrinking piece of metal ruins the whole thing.

Speaker 3

On a real science mission, Yes, it would be a complete disaster if that had happened on the first day over Antarctica. The mission is over. You have a very expensive, frozen telescope staring at nothing useful for weeks.

Speaker 2

But this was the test flight exactly.

Speaker 3

This is why we test. To an engineer, this failure isn't a disaster, it's a gift. It's a piece of priceless data. How so, because now they know they have the data. If they had skipped this test and gone straight to Antarctica, they would have lost the entire season millions of dollars. Now they know, Okay, the tolerance on that aluminum housing was wrong for these temperatures, the materials are incompatible. They can go back to the lap and

fix it. And fix it. They can swap the aluminum for a material with a lower thermal coefficient that shrinks less like titanium or a special alloy called invar or. They can simply redesign the housing with a slightly larger gap to account for the shrinkage they now know will happen.

Speaker 2

So it's a cheap lesson learned in the New Mexico Desert that saves a very expensive, very important mission in Antarctica.

Speaker 3

Precisely, the report says, the engineers are already hard at work fixing those thermal contraction issues. It's a completely solvable problem, but you only find it by actually going there and trying it.

Speaker 2

So looking forward, we've done the test flight, we've found the bugs, we've under a lesson about shrinking aluminum. When is the main event? When does this thing fly for real?

Speaker 3

The target, the big show is the Antarctic summer of twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven.

Speaker 2

That's coming up pretty fast in the world of space missions.

Speaker 3

It is. Yeah, they are going to take the full flight ready excite apparatus down to the ice. And this time they aren't aiming for a ten hour joy ride. They are aiming for a proper long duration balloon flight.

Speaker 2

How long is long in this context.

Speaker 3

It can be weeks. The record for these kinds of scientific balloons is over fifty days. They'll be drifting in that polar vortex circling the south pole, just soaking up that continuous uninterrupted starlight.

Speaker 2

And if it works, if the bearings don't seize up this time, what is the potential scientific payoff here?

Speaker 3

It's huge. The scientists on the project estimate that the single balloon flight one mission could double the total number of exoplanet phase curves known to humanity.

Speaker 2

Double with one flight double.

Speaker 3

Just think about that. Think about all the billions of dollars we've spent on all the space telescope so far, all the decades of Hubble, the Spixer space telescope, Kepler, now Web one balloon ride over Antarctica could equal the total historical output for this very specific, very important type of data.

Speaker 2

That really puts into perspective how data starved we are when it comes to really characterizing these atmospheres.

Speaker 3

We are so data starved. We have a good sensus of planets now thanks to missions like Kepler and tests. We know they're out there in their thousands, but we don't know what they're like. We are just now moving from the era of pure discovery to the era of characterization.

Speaker 2

It's the difference between knowing your neighbor exists because you see their car in the driveway and actually knowing what they cook for dinner or what music they listen to.

Speaker 3

That's a perfect analogy, and xcite is the tool that kicks that door wide open for these hot jupiters.

Speaker 2

It really feels like a shift in mindset. Then we aren't just looking for little dips in light anymore, for dots. We're looking for weather patterns. We are looking for wind, and.

Speaker 3

We're proving that you don't always need a flagship, multi billion dollar spacecraft to do flagship quality science. Sometimes you just need a really big balloon, a clever location, and some very careful engineering.

Speaker 2

I think that's a perfect place to wrap this up. We've gone from the common misconception that space requires rockets all the way down to the physics of infrared light and the mechanics of a freezing aluminum bearing.

Speaker 3

It's been quite a journey from forty kilometers up down to the micrometer level of a bearing contracting.

Speaker 2

It really has. And I want to leave our listeners with one final thought that really stood out to me from all this. We usually draw a very hard line between atmospheric science studding Earth's weather and climate, and astronomy studying space.

Speaker 3

Right, they're totally separate disciplines. One looks down, one looks up. They are different departments at the university, they go to different conferences exactly.

Speaker 2

But Excite just completely blurs that line. We're using the unique properties of our own upper atmosphere. It's coldness, it's dryness, it's stable polar winds as a tool to understand the atmosphere of a world that is hundreds of light years away.

Speaker 3

We're standing on the roof of our own atmosphere to peek into theirs.

Speaker 2

That's a beautiful way to put it. It shows that our planet isn't just a barrier to look through. It's an integral part of the observatory itself. It's a tool that we can use.

Speaker 3

Our atmosphere becomes part of the solution, not just part.

Speaker 2

Of the problem. So keep an eye on the news. In late twenty twenty six, if you hear about a giant balloon launching from Antarctica, you'll know that it's not just checking the weather here. It's checking the forecast for a hot.

Speaker 3

Jupiter let's just hope they got the math right on that aluminum this.

Speaker 2

Time, fingers crossed. Thanks for listening everyone, We'll catch you next time. Past the Sad

Speaker 3

Sad stea

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