The Dawn Mission

what the space behind space? Uh yeah, we're talking about space today because we wanted to talk about NASA's Dawn mission. If you've been following the space news, as I know a lot of our listeners, do you are aware that this spacecraft has gone in orbit around a dwarf planet, series in our Solar system and serie that's C E R E S No, like the Syria on your phone. Right, So if you say Siri, where is Dawn, it says it will be in eight hours, and you're thinking, no,

you're just giving more questions. Uh no, that's not the case. We're talking series the planet and that or dwarf planet, I should say, And that was after it already visited another astronomical body vesta, And so we're gonna talk all about what it did, why it's important, and what these these actual astronomical bodies are because it's a really cool story. Yeah yeah, So I want to start this story off

pre launch. Okay, all right, so like like you know, two thousand like way, pre launch, like circle the formation of the Solar System. Okay, that goes back before my calendar. Yes, yes it does. None of us like four and a half billion years ago or four and a half five billion years ago, Yeah, sure, sure, so none of us were there. No, I mean I know that away. I thought I was going to get away. So it only occurred to me to say, because you because you made

a point of I don't know. Okay, So at any rate, the leading theory among astronomers and physicists is that everything in our Solar System was once just one big, nebulous cloud of of gas and dust and ice um, and something would have had to have happened to kickstart the formation of all the bodies in the Solar System are Sun and planets and moons and asteroids and etcetera. But we're not entirely sure what that is, but we think

it might have been a nearby star going supernova. It's really cool, and it's one of those things I didn't really think about the idea of, uh, what sort of of circumstances would have led to all of these coalescing into what we know today, And the idea that it had to be or potentially had to be an external

source of energy is really fascinating. Yeah. I'd often heard about the formation of the planets, but but I'd always thought about it in terms of how the planets and other rocky bodies and and gas giants and things formed around the Sun. And so you have the idea of the protoplanetary disks. Yeah, yeah, the Sun already being there, but of course the Sun has not always been there.

It had to happen at some points. Yeah. So, so the radiation from this explosion could have like squished and pushed all the matter in this in this cloud nebula um. You know, each bit formally would have been an equilibrium, but but suddenly they would be exerting their gravitational force on all the other bits in really new exciting ways. And so as they started colliding and forming bigger, denser bits,

they would have started orbiting around each other. And more bits would collide until the Sun would form in the center, and gradually all the other stuff formed around the Sun's orbit. Yeah, rocky bodies, some of them containing liquid water, like okay, so not Rocky Balboa. No, not Rocky Horror. Neither of those things. Both have exquisite bodies, they do well, and they do contain liquid water. That's uh so, that's cool. No, rocky planets as we know formed closer to the Sun

and gash bodies like Jupiter and all of that. Um some of them having sort of rocky really icy moons formed further out and between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroid belt formed instead of an actual planet, which is pretty interesting. Yeah. Yeah. The leading theory right now is that not that there was a planet therapy and it was destroyed by aliens or something like that. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Um No, we think that Jupiter's immense gravity mucked about with the

planetation formation process and prevented I am inventing new words, Joe. Yes. So, in other words, Jupiter, being such an enormous body with its own gravitational pull ends up interfering with the process that would allow these bits to otherwise glom on together. And eventually coalesced to another planet. Yeah. Yeah, it just just got right up in its grill, and gravitationally speaking, Jupiter is all like that. It does get all up

in the grill. So um. So. The asteroid belt contains lots of bodies of different shapes and sizes and compositions, and the two biggest are Vesta and Series. Alright, so let's start with Vesta. What do we know about that? Well, it is a rocky asteroid. I have heard Vesta has more in common with the inner planets of the Solar System. Yes, it was formed some like four point five billion years ago. It's uh. The apparent surface is of basaltic rock, which

is what happens when lava cools down really fast. So what they think happened is that UM lava would have oozed up from the asteroids like hot Chewy set shortly after its formation and then cooled down pretty quick after that. Um. It was the fourth asteroid ever discovered by human people. That happened on March seven, thanks to Henrich William Ober's I don't I don't think I said that, right, Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers. Okay, thank you, UM of Germany if you

couldn't figure that out, y'all, Uh, don't feel bad. Jonathan served in Kaiser Wilhelm's government shortly after the dinosaurs died out, and honestly, my my concept of time is somewhat elastic. Alright, So, how how big is this thing? It's pretty big. It is not small. It's about about and I'm about to read some very very precise numbers here, five hundred and seventy eight kilometers by five sixty by four eight in miles. That translates to mine by three eight by two eight five.

So sizeable, very sizeable body. They're not really like planet or moon size, but like but you know, bigger than a car. Yes, four hundred three miles is significantly larger than most vehicles. It's almost a sphere, but does have this giant chunk that's four hundred and sixty kilometers or two eight five miles across and thirteen kilometers or eight miles deep that's missing from the south pole. That now, that is one of the things that is particularly interesting

about this this asteroid body. It was one of the reasons why it was a great candidate to send a spacecraft to get a closer look because there appears to be you know, this is a chunk missing. It's not like it formed and it just has this interesting shape. It looks like this. This is an area where uh, something has forcibly impacted uh Vesta, and we we ended up having the entire body reshaped from that impact. I mean,

that's how massive it was. And also this could end up teaching us more about some of the stuff we found here on our planet. Right. Uh. Yeah, we think that as much as five percent of the meteorites that fall to Earth are come from that missing chunk. Fine, what's crazy? All meteorites come from this from Vesta, from Vesta. Yeah, yeah, whatever happened that knocked that bit out? Uh do you know how they determine that? Actually, I do know, and I can tell you when we get to the part

about the Vesta mission. So yeah, So it's one of only three non earth bodies that we have a sample of here on the planet, that the other two being Mars in the moon. Right. So we you know, it's so neat that we ended up having this stuff like it ended up landing on our planet. We know where it from, or at least we we have very strong belief that it came from that place. Like there's not like a receipt, Like we can't say, like we could go back to Vest and return it for credit. But

we do. But we do know, and I'll talk more about how we know when we get to that part of the episode. So now we move on also to talk about series. The dwarf planet. Yes, uh, like Earth, it has a dense core and a lighter crust, and we think it might have a lot of ice beneath the crust and in the mantle because the crust is less dense than Earth's and um also appears to contain all of these like water bearing minerals and stuff. Um, it might maybe even have just a wee bit of atmosphere,

but we're not sure. Sort of like a whiff of atmosphere. Yeah, yeah, just an idea of acting. You know. It's kind of like a restaurant that's just getting started. It's got a little bit of an atmosphere, but we haven't really developed it yet. This series was the first dwarf planet we ever discovered, though. Yes, that happened on January one, eighteen o one, thanks to Giuseppe Piazzi of Italy. Excellent pronunciation hold on now, would that that would be including Pluto, now,

wouldn't it that series was actually discovered before Pluto? Yeah, yeah, Pluto also being a dwarf planet, pluto status changes on a day to day basis. Yeah, it's it's real independable. Like we never we never know exactly what we're doing dealing with when we talk about Pluto, because by the time we record and by the time something publishes, things

have changed occasionally. So, like we've said, series is about nine seventy five kilometers by nine O nine a k A six or six by five five sixty five miles. It's hard to picture exactly how big that is. Yeah, it's bigger than a car, significantly larger than any vehicle. Yes, yeah, no it is. It is difficult, right, I have those problems too, because that you sit there and you think, like, how long would it take me to drive? Ye, this distance? That that tends to be the way we tend to

think about it. Uh yeah, And there's before we send a spacecraft there. We had, of course observed these I mean obviously that they were discovered in the nineteenth century, but we've since made other observations using other equipment. Right, Well, we've used telescopes like the Hubble and ground based telescopes that are on Earth or close to Earth, and the problem with that is when you're looking at very small objects that far away, it's hard to resolve them even

with a very powerful telescope. Right, and there are lots of things we could potentially learn from a closer examination, which is precisely why these this mission exists, right the Dawn mission, the Dawn Mission, the NASA's Dawn mission. So first, these are protoplanets, and we know very little about protoplanets in general, apart from some hypotheses we have come up with.

But you know, without going in and taking a closer look, you can't really put those hypotheses to the test us to see if you're on the right track or if you need to adjust the way you were thinking. And perhaps there is a different explanation for some of the observations you've made. This is the way science works, in other words, So that's really exciting. Will literally be learning stuff we have not and perhaps could not have anticipated

as we go into this. We also learn more about the formation of our solar system by studying these planets, which will give us a few more pieces to that puzzle of how we got here, and by we, I mean the entire Solar system, not just the people in this podcasting studio. UM. So that's really cool, always getting more of a complete picture. I doubt we'll ever have a complete picture, but we have that desire to continuously add to our body of knowledge as far as this goes,

and I think this will help us add to that. Also, the presence of water always leads us to the possibility that the planet may have at one time supported life, or perhaps there might even be a habitable ocean on Series. We'll talk about that a little bit later too, and we may discover there. There's one hypothesis that suggests that a body like Series and a body like Vesta may

have been responsible for the way the Earth is right now. Uh, and the idea being that something like Series might have been the source of the water on Earth, and a body like Vesta might have been the source of the Earth's iron core. So there's some theories exactly they formed Vultron,

but Vultron in this case was Earth. So it's again it's one of those things where the hypotheses have been proposed, but now we get a chance to explore this more directly and see if those still hold any you know, value, or if in fact we have to re reconsider a thinking. So if we're just now reaching series and Series is very far away, we must have launched quite a while ago.

I don't remember this launch. Uh yeah, well, let me tell you the story about how this launch came about, because it is its own really drum addict tail like one that could have easily like there needs to be a documentary to explain what happened, because it was one of those things where for a while, I'm sure the leaders on this project were convinced that it was never gonna happen, because they were thinking about launching a mission to look at Vesta and Series as early as nineteen two.

So that's when you said pre launch. That's why my go to who first was two thousand and then. Now NASA has these pitch periods where different potential missions can come and present to various heads at NASA and say this is where I think we need to dedicate some of our resources. This is the sort of mission I think we need to do, and here's why. And they the project leaders of what would become the Dawn Mission went before NASA three separate times in n but didn't

receive any interest in their posed mission. It wasn't until two thousand, when they were selected as a finalist for NASA Discovery Mission that they finally had a chance to really uh to to to get like established as a mission. So that meant there have been eight years that had gone by since they first came up with the idea till when NASA was saying, all right, let's really look at this as a potential mission, which also meant that the idea itself had evolved over those eight years. They

began to tweak it, perfected, that kind of thing. So two thousand crazy. I mean, in that span of time, you'd have to imagine even the science that informs the mission is probably changing. Yeah, technology of the things that we're learning just through other missions, I mean, all of that is making an impact. But it gets even crazier. So in two thousand they're selected as one of these three finalists and there to go to NASA in September

of two thousand and one. Yeah, two thousand one September, so they're going to go and talk to NASA when the terrorist attack happens and it cancels their meeting obviously, I mean everything, everything, everything was canceled because of that. So everyone goes home and the mission and it's it's future is put on hold. But after a while things got back on track. The mission was picked up to be a Discovery mission, so it went from finalists who

picked for a Discovery mission. So now it's ready to go. On Christmas Eve two thousand three, the project has canceled due to budget cuts on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Eve, but Mr screws Right apparently whoever was in charge of

the budget was visited by three Spirits and reconsidered. And also another big thing that happened was the project partner, Orbital Sciences Corporation, offered to continue working on the mission at cost, so not not charging anything that would result in a profit, but providing their their part at cost if it would mean the mission could continue. And things kept moving. Two thousand five, so we're still not into the point where anything is launched yet. Two five it

gets in trouble again. The projects in trouble again because NASA administration changed. Now I don't know if you guys have ever you know, we we've experienced this a little bit in our company. Just one of those moments where you don't really know what's going to happen because there's a big change of leadership way above your pay grade, and you just don't know how that's going to trickle down and affect you. We've been very fortunate here and

how stuff works. Um, but I have also been at other jobs where a big boss has changed and suddenly everyone feels like they're defending their job, like they have to, they have to justify why their job exists. The same thing is true at NASA with projects where there's a big administrative change in NASA, often you have people who have to defend their missions, their projects to the new administration to convince them that this is in fact worthy

of funding. And that started up again. So the project got shut down two thousand six, but the Jet Propulsion Laboratory protested the shutdown. There was a review, and as a result of the review, the project was reinstated. So this this is just like I mean, this is in a way, this part is more crazy than any of the science and technology behind it. It's just the fact that all these hoops had to be jumped through in

order for this to even happen. So at two thousand seven, the project finally got full approval, full backing from Nasson. It was officially official and stuff. So the team had hoped to launch the spacecraft between June and July two thousand seven, but bad weather scrapped those plans. I know, right, It's like there was a black cat that crossed the road. They had to go. They had to They had the wheel the Dawn spacecraft under a couple of mirrors broke

on the way there. It was just crazy. But they were able to push the launch back to September two thousand seven, and and it did go up. It did, It did go up. Everything was fine. And here's the

cool thing. So you know, we talk about things like like missions to Mars and how you have a limited window when you can launch right because of the way that Mars and Earth line up in there, and you want to get them when the right so that way you are expending the least amount of fuel and thus you have you don't have to have too, you don't have to add more weight to your launch vehicle. There are a lot of reasons, right, I mean, it's a

very big picture kind of thing. The Dawn spacecraft had a little bit more flexibility because it doesn't depend upon chemical rockets for its propulsion in space. Ion propulsion drive ion thrusters. What. So we've talked like crazy science. I know, I know, we've talked about ion thrusters a couple of times in the podcast, and there's only been a few, relatively few examples of ion thrusters used uh in space missions. So here's what an ion thruster is. You use a gas.

You are energizing a gas. You're essentially bombarding it with electrons so that those electrons can freely roam in at gas. That's that's where it becomes ionized. I can actually conduct electricity that way. The Dawn spacecraft uses xenon gas and it emits this charged ion gas as exhaust, So that is what actually creates the propulsion, which is really neat.

It means also that it has a very gentle but steady acceleration, so it doesn't chemical rockets can accelerate very rapidly, right, and you can make these incredibly uh powerful motions, whereas ion thrusters, they are much more gradual in their acceleration.

The flip side of that is that the top speed for a chemical rocket is much lower than the top speed for an ion thruster, because even though an ion thruster is going to take longer to accelerate to a really fast speed, it can continue to do so much longer than a chemical rocket, like like a factor of ten more because it like uses its fuel more slowly.

And also it just it has a continuous acceleration acceleration thrust as opposed to chemical rockets where you get that that amazing amount thrust at the beginning, but it's not something that can continue perpetually because then you use up all your fuel. So yeah, very much, it's very much like it's because it's it's making very very good use of the fuel. But this is the sort of thing that is not necessarily going to work well for every mission.

It's good for particular ones, like like the Dawn mission. It's a it's a perfect implementation for the Dawn mission, and it has turned out to be that way. So the ion thrusters came online on October sixth, two thousand seven, and from the Dawn Mission Journal entry for October seven, two thousand seven. By the way, the I don't know if you guys had a chance to look at the

mission journal at all. But the the project leader from Jet Provulsion Laboratories who wrote the mission journal, he is a poet as well as an engineer, like he uses such poetic language to explain what is happening and the you know, like the the that there are now two uh to two bodies in the asteroid belt, one brand new and one ancient. Beyond words that are rendezvousing. I mean, it's like you're reading and like, holy cow, this guy must love science fiction because he's got a he's got

a really eloquent way of putting it. Everyone that I that I read, um either interviews or papers from connected with this mission, was just delightful to read. It was altering. It's not dry engineering text in other words, So if you are interested in this, I highly recommend going to the NASA website and looking at the mission Journal. But this is an excerpt. This one is more of a

technical explanation of the ion thrusters. While the three ion thrusters are the most familiar part of the i p S the ion propulsion system, they are not it's only elements. The system includes two computer controllers, only one is used at a time. When mission control selects one of the one hundred twelve throttle levels, each corresponding to a certain

power consumption and thrust. The operating controller translates the command into currents and voltages that must be applied to parts of the thruster and the flow rate of xenon propellant to the thruster. The controller also provides the principal communications between the main spacecraft computer and the rest of the IPS, accepting commands and reporting on the IPS performance. While the controller is the brain of the system, the two power units, again only one is used at the time, are the

braun Following instructions from the controller. A power unit receives power from the solar rays at about one hundred volts and converts it to more than one thousand volts for use by the thruster. One hundred and twelve throttle levels. Yeah, that a hundred and twelve speed bikes. What we're talking about? Why doesn't it just go up to one? Because because this exactly, I gotta tell you that working the clutch gets a little sticky. Between sixty seven and sixty eight,

it does. Okay, well, you know, you gotta be a little careful. Now, everything has its So when it was using the ion propulsion as as thrust, which it did not do for the entire journey, that would have made it go far too fast for by the time it was reaching its destination. But when it was using it, it was applying thrust on an average of six days sixteen hours per week, so out of every week only, uh, you know, you had six days and sixteen hours of

it being used. As as as acceleration, the brakes would be used for times when they needed to orient the the spacecraft so that the antenna was facing back to Earth so they could beam back engineering information just to make sure everything was going well. So that communication time obviously got longer and longer as the spacecraft got further from the Earth. Now, one of the maneuvers that the Dawn spacecraft made was one of my favorites in space travel,

the slingshot maneuver. Yeah, yeah, in February of two thousand nine, it kind of ricocheted through Mars orbit in order to pick up speed on its way to Vestep right, So it uses the gravity well of a planet in order to accelerate. Yeah, which is you know, it's that's awesome. Right, whenever you can make use of the the actual elements of space itself to help you on your journey, and that thus reduced the amount of effort you have to

do yourself. Yeah, it's it's sort of like a it's sort of like a skateboarder in a silly action movie, kind of like catching the rear bumper of a car and then then using that cars forward momentum to to drive itself forward faster or and what action movie do you have in mind? Back to the future action There was no there was no word whether or not Power of Love was playing at the same time. So there's some other stuff that's aboard. There's some other stuff that's

aboard the spacecraft. Besides it's it's propulsion thrusters, I mean, yeah, getting the soap, getting their nose. Yes, the Dawn mission, I was. I was so hoping we could get through without having to talk about that. Well, obviously, from the amazing images we've seen already, it must have an awesome camera and a photographer he's great. Obviously, it's an automated camera. Yes, it was made in Germany. Uh, and it does not just take those pretty pictures. It's also being used for

for orbit navigation. Um AND is mapping the surfaces topography and can even help us determine what the surfaces of these things are made of based on the reflective and refractive properties of the stuff down. They're going to be very important as we get to it a little bit later. Yes, Um,

there's also a visible and Infrared Mapping spectrometer UM. That's a mapping the body's surfaces and helping determine their composition and temperature and properties UM AND and that works of course by taking you know, very detailed note of the wavelengths of light that the surfaces are reflecting. UM. There's also a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer good, so I

can detect like the Hulk, Yeah, excellent. Yeah, the Hulk probably lives on series UM constantly playing that sad music, just just blogging with his thumb out and there's no one there, sad Hulk um. Uh. These are these are good for for determining the precise elements that are present on those surfaces and it and it works by measuring the effects of energetic particles that are bombarding the surfaces. I mean, you know, there are so many particles out

there in space that are bombarding everything. Um, the researcher that I read and an interview from likes to call it splat because because that's just what's going on all over our galaxy. All yeah, um so uh so yeah, so there's radioactive stuff on the surfaces, there's energetic particles bombarding the surfaces, and all of those create radiation coming up off of the not planet things. I keep wanting to say planets, and I'm like, no, they're tot's not planets,

asteroid and dwarf planet. It just seems like if you wanted to be mean, you could say pseudo planets. If you want to be If you want to be diplomatic, NG say objects objects proto planets, proto planets. At any rate, if you very carefully measure that radiation, you can extrapolate what must be down there. Um uh you know, either being bombarded or or giving off that radiation itself. Uh. And then this is my favorite. Uh, they have a gravity science unit. I first imagined that this would just

be an Apple science unit, very little joke grenade for Joe. There. No, this this sucker is our way of peeking into the objects interiors without actually landing on them UM. And you know, you can tell a lot about the inside of a space thing by measuring its gravitational field, especially if you've

got some information about what is on the surface. You can extrapolate the density of the thing and therefore the composition of the interior based on how the thing is pulling and pushing at objects that are near it UM And the gravity science unit does this using radio waves UM, so it bounces radio waves off of the surface and back to the unit in in route that the waves

get Doppler shifted by the gravity of the thing. So so by measuring that Doppler effect really precisely, you can figure out how much force the thing is exerting on the spacecraft from moment to moment, and then deduce some models about what must be in the interior to be creating that force. Right, Because of course we know that gravity is a function of mass one one part of that, right, So the mass is also going to be dependent upon what matter is there and the density of that matter.

So if you're able to measure the gravity, you can start to make some good guesses about the nature of the matter that is actually there. That's really neat. I never really considered it that way, I would have thought like I tend to think of it the other way around, where you get a good idea of what the matter is, and therefore you can guess how how strong the gravitational poll is going to be. Actually, wouldn't have to guess. You would know if you know what the stuff is

made of. But that's really really interesting. Uh So let's talk a little bit about the Don's mission and its encounters with Vesta and with Series. Right, So, before it got to Series, which it's orbiting now, it had to run in with the asteroid Vesta, not not a little literal run in. It didn't know, Yeah, I know, it sought Vesta out. This was an intended encounter. They hung out for a while, you know, the exchange numbers, that kind of thing. Uh. This would have taken place between

two thousand and eleven two thousand twelve and Yeah. So in order to get to Vesta, Don had travel two point eight billion kilometers or one point seven billion miles there, so longer than the length of a car, longer than longer than a car. The journey lasted nearly four years to get there. Uh, and it confirmed a lot of what we suspected about Vesta, which is fine. Like that was again one of those things where we had some hypotheses and this is a way of finding out if

we were on the right track. So one of those was that Vesta is related to three classes of meteorites, Howard, it's eucrites and diogenites, collectively referred to as H. E. D meteorites. I've never heard of these before. Do you know what the differences? Well, there used to be shimp bights, but he left and was replaced by diagenites. Come on, now,

you made a dawn dish, all right. So the giant crater at the south pole of Vesta that Lauren was talking about earlier, it did suggest that perhaps there was some sort of enormous impact that blasted a huge chunk off of Vesta, and at that chunk either are broken too smaller pieces, many of which ended up entering Earth's atmosphere and became meteorites. And this was a way of saying, let's take a closer look and see if that in fact is accurate. They use spectral analysis essentially, because we

knew what the meteorites were made of. They're on Earth exactly. Yeah, we had a real good look at them, and so using spectral analysis originally from things like the Hubble telescope, it looked like the Vesta was a really good candidate. And then using the closer look with Don we were able to say that, yeah, it does look like this stuff is in fact, uh, the same, the exact same stuff that we found back on Earth. All of that seems to be holding true, So that hypothesis looks like

it's pretty accurate now. Also, we saw that Vesta seems to have kind of like an onion like layering, and these different layers have different densities and compositions. So a big chunks you know you talked about how it was eight aisles deep on that south pole means that several layers are represented by those meteorites. That's why we get different types of stuff. It's like almost on the way to be in a blooman onion exactly. Well, we're totally goofing off on this one. I love it, by the way,

I'm not I'm not criticizing. I'm having a good time. So the mission also found evidence of hydrated materials, which sounds exactly what it what you you know, it means what you think it means hydrated, means there's some sort of water involved, whether it's water that's captured within certain minerals, not water like water pooling on the surface of Vesta, because Vesta was believed to be way too hot and

and not hydrated like hail hydrated. No, not that kind of cut cut off one meteorite and tool rise to take its place. That's not the way it works. Sorry I interact. No, it's fine, but but one of the things about that is that the Howardites class of meteorites have carbonaceous material in it, meaning that it's carbon rich. Now, carbon rich is one of those things you would not expect to find on a body like Vesta. You wouldn't expect to find water or carbon rich material. So what's

up with that? I just said that it looks like H. E. D. Meteorites have originated from this massive collision that happened in Vesta's past. How could that be if, in fact this

planet wouldn't have had carbon rich material or water on it. Well, the thought is that whatever slammed into it did have carbon rich material and water on it, and so some of it ended up going off into space and becoming other chunks of rock eventually becoming meteorites that land here on Earth, and some of it said I think I'll

stick around. Yeah, So if you look at the pictures of Vesta, you will see in some of the images they'll be darker spots along it that tends to be that carbonaceous material, the the type of meteorites or the type of rocks that were mentioning here. And so it's they a lot of the study I've read, people have suggested that they didn't originate on Vesta. This was stuff that was deposited on Vesta as a resort, the result of collisions. So I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Of course after it left Vesta, Dawn was on track to meet up with Series. So right now the Dawn spacecraft is has entered Series orbit. It entered on March sixth, I believe, or did it in around March six There is that one we found out about it, or I guess would be the same time. It's not that far away, It's not it's not all that far away, um, I mean it is very far away. It's not so far that it would take us like days to the radio. I mean even even in Mars. You're talking like less

than twenty minutes to get the information. Okay, okay, So it entered orbit around Series. Now on the approach, it started getting some really good pictures of Series. On Monday, January nineteen, so a few months ago, NASA released some photos of Series that were taken on Janu and it was blurry, but you could clearly see, for example, a white spot on the surface of Series. It's something that seemed to be reflecting way more sunlight than the rest

of the surface of the object. And this wasn't the first time that we realized there was a bright spot on the surface of Series, but suddenly we could see it a lot more starkly than ever before. And a lot of people started asking what is it. And it's really cool because initially the scientists said, we don't know. My thought was that it was the Hulk. He had fashioned a very highly reflective sign because the thumb sticking out wasn't working out and it said will work for

gamma rays. Nice well. So there have been subsequent photos taken with better resolution and still we don't know. We don't know what it is. It Uh. It turns out there are actually multiple spots on the surface that have a much higher albedo a higher reflective index um than the rest of the surface, and the main bright spot actually has a sort of dimmer companion right next to it. There are other bright freckles. I've seen them called on the surface of series. You should check out the photos.

If you haven't seen them, look this up because it looks really cool and really strange and people don't know the answer yet. Yeah. I love the one that has the pair of the spots, the bright one and the slightly dimmer companion that are very close together. Like if you weren't if your vision wasn't good, you might think it's one spot, but it's too. It is too when you look at it more closely, and it is strangely compelling to see because it almost looks like light is

being admitted from there. They're very bright. Space dot Com wrote this up when when the new higher resolution photos come out and they got a statement from Mark Raymond, the Dawn mission director and chief engineer, and I love this quote. He said, we do not know what the white spot is, but it's certainly intriguing. In fact, it makes you want to send a spacecraft out there to find out. Okay, look what we do. Yeah, yeah, and that's what he said, and of course that's exactly what

we're doing. So as Dawn brings series into sharper focus, we will be able to see with exquisite detail what what it is, what the white spot is. And I'm very excited to find out because there have been all these conjectures and people have said it could be cryo volcanoes or or ice guyser's you know, shooting up ice or materials from underneath the in the icy mantle. Another idea I read, I think I read this in a piece on I O nine that was interesting that said

it could be exposed icy crust from recent impacts. So in other words, like you've got like the you've got the thin, thinner outer layer that got chipped away by an impact, and now you're seeing the icy goodness underneath. Yeah yeah, yeah. So so the other places where we're not seeing this brightly reflective surface, or places where like dust is settled over time and it's sort of dulling the normally shiny surface. So one can only imagine what

it would look like if this is the case. Yeah maybe, no, no, maybe if we like polish it up, yeah, yeah, that would be awesome. I also remember seeing one person who had suggested that it may also be that the uh it's deposits of some sort of highly reflective mineral at

that particular spot, which is also a possibility. That's one of the other things they'll be looking at, and they'll be using lots of different methodologies to test these different hypotheses to find out which ones are the ones that are accurate. Yeah, I'm really excited to find out what

it is. Now here's a funny thing, a little peak behind the curtain, as Jonathan would say, we record these podcasts a little bit ahead of time, so it'll be really funny if they find out the answer between the time we record this and the time it comes out. Hopefully that won't happen. But this is today, is Friday, March thirteenth, So if we just sounded like idiots, um, that's why. That's that's one of the specific reason why

for this thing right now. Yeah. So there's another interesting thing that they're going to be investigating, and Jonathan, you brought this up earlier, is the possibility of oceans on series, not even just oceans, but possibly habitable oceans, which is great, The awesome I mean, it does seem like kind of a far off chance. It's not like that they think they're likely to find this, but just the possibility is insane. On something like if you look at pictures of Series,

it doesn't look like something that would host life. It looks like the moon. It's this kind of like crazy dead rock in the middle of space. But before the Dawn mission reached Series, scientists had suspected that a good bit of Series mass was made of water. So NASA says that if of Series mass is H two O is water, that would mean Series has more fresh water

than Earth. That's not more water, but more freshwater. So if it does have a substantial amount of water, is any of it liquid And if it's liquid, could it support life? That might not be as crazy as it sounds. Um, if Series does have a substantial amount of ice, the rock and the ice could separate into different layers that onion effect you were talking about. And some sigh, just think that the icy mantle of Series was once an

underground ocean. So underground ocean, Yeah, okay, that's great. Yeah, it's sort of similar to uh, though not exactly the same, but sort of similar to what you've heard about might be the case on Europa where there is there is frozen ice on the surface, but then probably liquid water

underneath it. But anyway, that's something that maybe possible on Series, and we want to find out if that's the case, and if there is any liquid water, then there's always the chance that we could find evidence of life, which obviously be incredibly exciting. Yes, I'm betting on cave dwelling ice frogs. Yeah, there's a piece you can look at in Science magazine called don Probe to look for a Habitable Ocean on Series by Eric Hand in February of

this year. On top of the water, one of the other things we could do is learn more about the early formation of the Solar System. Like Lauren was talking about early on, these objects out in space can and help give us clues about what happened when they were created and therefore how everything was created right right right, and it may also lead to us learning about how

the Earth got its water. I think the reason why this is also really cool is that the more we learn about these processes, the more we know what to look for when we're looking outside of our Solar System. Things that if we know the various criteria that came together to form our solar system. If we can look for other similar systems, then that increases our chances to find other planets that could potentially support life. Yeah, and and just getting more data about these things that we've

only been able to study via via telescope so far. Uh, lets us check back in the data from those telescopes and see more patterns of where we got it right, where we got it wrong, and therefore make better guesses about other things that we're seeing through those telescopes. It's awesome, so awesome, And I one of the other things we can talk about that you know, we have a little section in our notes about the future of asteroids, and one of the things I wanted to mention is that water.

The presence of water is a huge, huge deal for us, Like for many reasons for extended space exploration, being able to potentially harvest water from other bodies would allow us a lot more freedom, a lot more flexibility, and also creates the potential for things like terraforming down the road. If you're talking about bringing water in order to not just have something drinkable, but perhaps to help facilitate an

atmosphere on a planet, that sort of stuff. I mean, this is a big deal, another big thing about the presence of water in space, because I mean, one of the things we should mention is, well, we've got plenty of water, why don't we just take some water into space. Well, it's really expensive to ship stuff into space gallons and gallons of fresh water is not a very smart way to invest in your your your payloads. So if you could actually access water once you're already out of Earth orbit,

that that's a really cool thing. So asteroids that have water on them could be harvest, like you said, not just for drinkable water, not just for terraforming and stuff like that, but to make rocket fuel. That's because water has hydrogen and oxygen, the chemical elements you would use to make certain kinds of rocket fuel that we use in our reaction drives today. And while you might argue that we have plenty of water right now, it is a limited supply. It's not like we're getting tons of

water from outside sources. So if you keep shipping water off the planet, I probably wouldn't be worried about that for a while. I wouldn't either. I'm just thinking, really long term. Yeah. Yeah, the the Earth's water cycle is closed. Yeah. Now, if we were to, say, end up siphoning water off of asteroids to bring it back here, uh, that seems like it would be a pretty enormous effort. I would have to think the steaks would be incredibly high for us to put forth that kind of investment. But never

say never. No, I think it's more the idea that we would use this in space where we don't have access, like if we were to create another space station further out from the Earth. This would be a great source

to be able to get water. And of course we would still be implementing the same water reclamation programs that we have on other types of spacecraft to extend use of water as long as possible, because you know, just because you have an access to it doesn't mean you know, you can stop by the series quickie mart and you know, pick up a few gallons, say a bunch of astronauts just brushing their teeth with the water running just bluggle lobs of water just floating around like crazy. We we

could get more. That's just right over there. That's that makes me think of a crazy question. I can't believe I didn't think to look this up beforehand. Uh could you walk on series? Does it have enough gravity too that you could actually, you know, walk around on it. I have a question. I don't. It would have to be, it would be. I mean it's it is definitely it's smaller than our moon. I just looked it up real quick.

Right now. It looks like the gravity on series the downward acceleration is zero point to seven per second squared, whereas on the Moon it's one point six ms per second squared, right, and the moon is is one six could be nine per second square, so so very little gravity. Don't jump real baby. It was second a stroll on Series, and everything was nice until I sneezed and the next

thing I knew. But at any rate, Uh, we've been fascinated with this whole story, everything from all that went into getting the mission together before it even launched to the stuff that we're seeing now, the images that are returning and the information that's returning from the mission. And also we should point out this is this is an

historic mission for an other reason. It's the first spacecraft to visit two different uh proto planets at all, like, not only the first one to go to a pro planet like like series in that sense, but to go to two different ones. So that was a cool thing as well. We will keep our eyes on the news that comes out of the mission, and uh, like Joe said, I hope that this episode comes out before any other

breaking news. Um. I mean, if if it turns out that there's some major thing that happens between when we've recorded this and when it publishes, that's awesome, right. I mean it's not like it's not like we're gonna be unhappy that it happened. We'll just be unhappy that we look dumb. So but this was a really fun topic to cover. I mean, we always love covering space topics. It's one of our favorite subjects to cover on here, Space AI and three D printing, that's kind of our

bread and butter. But of course we love all topics about the future. So if there's anything out there that you dear listeners would love us to cover. Maybe there's some topic but you're just dying to hear more about, I invite you to write to us, let us know what you want, and we will be happy to look into it for you. Our addresses f W thinking at how stuff works dot Com, or drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus. Twitter and Google Plus.

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