Euclid's Debut, Europe's Space Leap, and Arctic Mysteries Unveiled | S26E137

This is SpaceTime Series 26 Episode 137 for broadcast on the 15th of November 2023.
Coming up on SpaceTime, the Eucalyleid mission releases its first science images.
Europe announces plans to build its own cargo ship to supply the International Space Station,
and harp issues an artificial air glow warning to the good people of Alaska.
All that and more coming up on SpaceTime.
Welcome to SpaceTime with Stuart Gary.
Astronomers have released the first images from the European Space Agency's Eucalyld spacecraft,
which is on a mission to study the Dark Universe. Eucalyld will investigate Dark Matter and
Dark Energy, mapping the universe's evolution over the last 10 billion years to try and understand
how Dark Matter and Dark Energy have shaped it. Dark Matter is a mysterious invisible substance,
which appears to only interact with normal matter through gravity.
Scientists know it exists because they can see its interactions with normal, so-called
"baryonic matter" preventing galaxies from flinging apart as they spin and acting as a sort of
gravitational lens magnifying the light from deep space objects. Dark Energy, on the other hand,
is a mysterious force causing the universe's red of expansion out from the Big Bang to accelerate.
It will determine the ultimate fate of the universe, whether we end up in a big freeze or a big rip.
Launched from Cape Canaveral back on the 1st of July, Eucalyld's now travelled some 1.5 million
kilometers to a position in space known as the Lagrangian L2 point. It's a sort of gravitational
well on the night time side of the Earth directly opposite from the Sun. It's a point in space where
spacecraft can remain relatively stable without needing to use lots of fuel in order to maintain
position. The L2 points also being used by the web space telescope. Following a period of commissioning,
testing its instruments and other components, mission managers believed all systems were performing
nominally and so instructed Eucalyld to perform first light, taking a series of engineering survey
images of starfields to see how well it worked. First light images are typically just showcasing
the instrument. Of course, to show the public it's nice to have it focused so we went through the
focusing procedure that takes about a week and towards the end we got a very fine crisp deep image.
The first light image is just one of these exposures. The 566 second integration image. The visible
size of the vis-vocal plane is about 0.7 degrees, 0.7 degrees. One of the primary science goals for
Euclid is weak lensing survey and weak lensing relies on the distortion of the galaxy images
and so what we want is a very clean crisp image of galaxies so that we have a reliable source of
what this weak lensing distortion could look like. For the first light we were going to
show a detail of the full focal plane and this is for one CCD in particular which happens to contain
a stellar cluster, a large galaxy, another large galaxy and a very bright star. Nothing has been processed,
the cosmic rays are still there, the bias has not been removed. Now besides this beautiful
vis-image we also observe in the infrared and for that we have an infrared instrument
called NISP, the infrared spectrometer and photometer. We turn on the NISP instrument very quickly after
the launch of the Euclid satellite. Mostly we turn on the instrument control unit to monitor the
cooldown of the instrument and once the temperature reaches thresholds so below 130 Kelvin we turn on the
data processing unit and the focal plane array of NISP instruments. We undergo first several tests
on the NISP instrument to verify operational and be aware of the NISP instruments.
The image of the show is a raw image so no processing, I just add a little color to emphasize
position of star otherwise the image is not naturally black and white because of the
monochromatic detector and you can see some cosmic ray events in the foreground from the
cosmic sky in the background here. So the image quality is evaluated by measures the size of the star
because the star on very far away they are like point source but we measure from star on the
instrument is what we call the point spread function so the response of the instrument to a point
like source and the smallest sees response the higher the quality of the image so basically we measure
the size of the star to control the quality of the image. The infrared part we can determine the
from the spectral energy distribution of these galaxies the redshift and we call it photometric
redshift so together combined with the infrared observations and the optical observation
be to do weaklensing experiment. This is the spectroscopy and what this means is that each of
these lines is a spectrum of the sources that NISP generally detects so if you saw the NISP image
you had all of the little points some of them stars a lot of them galaxies and each of those
points is now smeared out into its wavelength components to get its spectrum and what we can do
with the spectroscopy for galaxies is we can measure the distances and this is very important for
galaxy clustering which is one of the main goals of euclid and this tells you how far each of the
galaxies is and with that information you can then build a 3D map of what the galaxies look like
around us. Now is what we call first light so we are very proud to show that we can really see
what we expected. If you look at the images very carefully you still see defects that is cosmic
rays and all these things. In the first few months of euclid we are going to check out the instruments
but also do the calibration necessary calibration and it's not yet looking at the sky which we want
to do after we have done all these all these verifications. Once we look at the sky we come with
some images we will take during this checkout phase which is taken in a way we will do during the
survey and that will tell us how good the quality is of the survey. We have already selected a set
of images and they must be really stunning. If this is already so so nice I mean the images we will
show you the extreme stunning. And in that report from ESA TV we add from euclid this instrument
scientist Rico Nakajima euclid project scientist Renee Loritz from ESA euclid Nip's instrument
scientist William Gillard and euclid collaboration support scientist Kerry Patterson. Following some fine
tuning a series of five science images were then taken including views of a large cluster of
thousands of distant galaxies close ups of two nearby galaxies a gravitationally bound group
of stars called a globular cluster and the iconic horse head nebula an immense cloud of gas and dust
in deep space deep inside which newborn stars are forming. There are mysteries in deep space
the nature of dark matter and dark energy has perplexed astronomers for decades
but ESA's euclid space telescope is now ready to help its first science images are released.
I started to work for euclid 2013 10 years ago. Over that time the spacecraft has been designed
it has been manufactured it has been assembled tested and verified the mission is almost ready
to start its six years collection of data. ERO is an acronym for early release observations
a program where we observe a number of very interesting targets which are appealing for the
public but also have scientific value. I have seen the first ERO image and had this enormous
pleasure the subs of the distance so this is a very exciting moment scientists are still working
on the on the images the result is really astonishing. Euclid is designed to map approximately
1.5 to 2 billion galaxies by analyzing the shapes and distribution of those galaxies
astronomers will gain clues to the nature of the dark matter and dark energy.
For the first time we euclid we can take a sample of galaxy with for which I know the stellar
mass which I know how much stars they form etc and I can go and measure very accurately how much
total mass how much dark matter mass there is in them and that's what I want to do with euclid
on my side. During its mission euclid will generate a vast amount of data the equivalent of a million
DVDs that must be stored and made available to the world's astronomers. These images together
will give us the total structure of the universe up to a look back time of 10 billion years so we
can follow the evolution of the structure of a 10 billion years and this is really the aim of
euclid to make this giant 3D distribution map and derive from it the properties of dark matter
and dark energy. Now that we have real data in place that's really a game changer for us so we
now can test everything that we can offer this real data to our interfaces which is really,
really exciting for us so this is very emotional moment and very challenging also.
There are cosmic secrets in these images invisible to the human eye but waiting to be revealed by
computer analysis and our understanding of physics euclid's scientific mission into the dark side
of the universe is about to begin. And in that report from ESA TV we add from Euclid Deputy Project
Scytus Roland-Wavreck Euclid Project Scytus Renee Lorrid from ESA Sarah Nita from ESA's Euclid
Science Archive and Euclid Science Ground Sigmunds Scientists Herve Ausel. At this stage with all systems
working Euclid's expected to begin regular science operations in early 2024. During its planned
six-year mission Euclid will produce the most extensive three-dimensional maps of the universe
ever undertaken. It'll cover a third of the sky and contain billions of galaxies up to 10 billion
light years away. To do this, Euclid needs a wide field of view. In this way the spacecraft differs
from targeted observatories like web which focuses on a small area of the sky at any one time but
typically offers far higher resolution images. Wide field survey telescopes like Euclid on the other
hand can observe large sections of the sky all at once. They can therefore cover the sky much faster
than targeted telescopes. But Euclid still has higher resolution than previous survey missions
which means it'll be able to see more galaxies in each image than previous telescopes.
For example Euclid's wide view will enable it to capture the entire Perseus Galaxy cluster
and many galaxies beyond it all in just one image. Okay, the 248 light years from Earth Perseus
is among the most massive structures in the known universe. Euclid's full survey will
ultimately cover an area 30,000 times larger. The telescope survey approach is necessary if it's
going to study dark energy that mysterious driver behind the universe's accelerating expansion.
Well gravity should theoretically be pulling everything in the universe together instead everything
is moving further apart and it's moving apart at a faster and faster rate. And dark energies
the term scientists are using for this unexplained expansion. Now to study this phenomenon,
scientists will need to map the presence of another cosmic mystery, dark matter.
Dark matter is important because there's five times more of it than the regular matter that
makes up the universe. And so if dark energy is expansive influence on the universe has changed
over time, that change should be recorded in how dark matters distributed on light scales across
the universe and Euclid's three-dimensional map should be able to capture it.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman mission will also study dark energy but in ways that are complementary
to Euclid. Roman will study a smaller section of the sky than Euclid but it will provide higher
resolution images of hundreds of millions of galaxies and it will be deeper into the universe's
past providing complementary information. Nancy Grace Roman is slated to launch in May 2027
and mission planners will use Euclid's images to inform Nancy Grace Roman's dark energy work.
This space time still to come. Europe to build a new cargo ship to supply the International Space
Station and scientist's tissue warning that the hop instrument in Alaska is being activated
and that could result in an artificial air glow. All that and more still to come. On space time.
[Music]
The European Space Agency has announced plans to develop a spacecraft to carry supplies and
eventually possibly people to and from the International Space Station and even beyond to the
Lunar Gateway Space Station project. The agency is looking at developing a reusable commercial space
cargo shuttle servicing the orbital outpost by 2028. The proposal comes at a difficult time for
E Sir as delays in the development of the new Ariane 6 launcher has left Europe without an
independent heavy lift means of accessing space. Already delayed by some four years,
Europe's replacement for the Ariane 5 launcher is now not slated to fly until much later next year.
Europe's last cargo ship, the ATV or automatic transfer vehicle, was designed for single use only
and so wasn't capable of atmospheric reentry. And that's where this new spacecraft will be
different. It'll be capable of returning cargo back to Earth. The new cargo ship will be launched
aboard the Ariane 6 thereby providing Europe with its own independent and uninterrupted access space.
Right now with restrictions on Russia because of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine,
Europe's totally reliant on the United States for access to space.
Still, the viability of the new spacecraft project remains somewhat in doubt.
That's because only in initial 75 million years has been allocated for the first phase of the project.
That compares with NASA's 790 million dollars in funding which went towards SpaceX's Dragon
and Northrop Grumman's signage cargo ships which are also providing services to the
International Space Station. Europe currently supplies service modules for NASA's Orion spacecraft
which will eventually take humans back to the moon and then onto Mars and beyond.
And it's planning to use its ATV design as the basis for the new Habitat modules for the Lunar
Gateway Space Station. This is space time. Still to come, warnings of artificial air glow in the
co-optic skies as scientists initiate the hop experiment. And later in the science report
and you study finds that a fifth of all European species are now under threat of extinction.
All that and more still to come on space time.
[Music]
Alaskans were being warned last week that half the high frequency active
auroral research program might be about to create artificial air glow in the co-optic skies.
Scientists from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Cornell University, the University of Colorado
Denver, the University of Florida and the Georgia Institute of Technology were undertaking a
variety of experiments with the highly classified instrument focusing on the Earth's ionosphere.
The ionosphere is the part of the Earth's atmosphere between 80 and 600 kilometers in altitude.
It's the region where extreme ultra-violent x-ray solar radiation ionizes that rarefied
atoms and molecules there creating a layer of electrons. The ionosphere is important because it
reflects and modifies radio waves for using communications and navigation. The hype scientists are
investigating ionosphere mechanisms that cause optical emissions. They're also trying to understand
with the certain plasma waves that is gas so hot that the electrons are knocked off the atoms can
amplify other very low frequency waves and they're investigating how satellites can use these plasma
waves in the ionosphere for collision detection and avoidance. Prior to the experiments taking place,
the scientists issued a warning that artificial air glow might take place over a four day period.
If so, that air glow would be visible up to 500 kilometers from the HEP facility, which is located
on the halfway between Anchorage and Fairbanks. So, how would it all work? Well HEP creates air glow by
exciting electrons in its ionosphere with a series of often on pulses of high frequency radio transmissions.
In a way, it's very similar to how space weather from coronal mass ejections can trigger a rural
activity at high latitudes, generating the northern and southern lights, the Aurora Borealis and Aurora
Straalus. And as it turned out, the last week or so has seen so much continuous solar activity
that it's triggered nightly a rural displays anyway, so any additional air glow caused by HEP would
have been drowned out by the sun's activities. HEP scientists' Fairbanks Research instrument is a
phased array of 180 high frequency antennas. They spread across some 33 acres and can radiate some
3.6 megawatts of energy up into the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. The air glow would appear as a faint
red or possibly green patching the sky, depending on which atoms and molecules were being affected.
The HEP transmission frequency is very, they usually occur between 2.8 and 10 megahertz.
HEP was originally developed by the United States Air Force and Navy to analyze their ionosphere
and investigate the potential for developing ionospheric enhancement technology for radio
communications and surface surveillance. It's all very similar to Australia's groundbreaking
Gindalee over the horizon radar, now called Jorn. Jorn monitors air and sea movements across
some 37,000 square kilometers north of the Australian mainland. Now I know exactly how
powerful it is, that's classified, but we keep hearing stories about military personnel able to
monitor ships sailing in and out of Asian ports. By the way, Jorn also operates at the same frequencies
as HEP, however it's never featured the sort of notoriety that HEP's experienced. HEP has become
the subject of "modible conspiracy theories" with claims that it's a military weapon designed to
change weather patterns, triggering floods, hurricanes, droughts, and even earthquakes, and there
even suggestions it's capable of setting the skies on fire. Sounds like a potential story for
Australian skeptics. This is Spacetime.
And time matter to take another brief look at some of the other stories making using science this week
with Science Report. A new study is determined that some 19 percent that's nearly a fifth of the
nearly 15,000 European species on the International Union of Conservation of Nature's red
list of threatened species are now under threat of extinction. The red list is the most comprehensive
source of species extinction thread information on the planet, with about 10 percent of all animals
and plants found in Europe now on the list based on their conservation status. The new findings
reported in the General Plants 1 are based on a detailed analysis of the European species list
finding 27 percent of plant species are in danger of extinction, along with 24 percent of
invertebrate animals and 18 percent of vertebrate animals. The authors found that agriculture
remains the major factor driving these extinction risks. A new study is found that kids aged 9
and 10 to drink caffeinated beverages on a daily basis tend to try alcohol at a younger age.
The findings are reported in the journal Substance Use and Misuse also looked at their brain
activity as they performed a series of tasks finding daily caffeinated beverage drinkers
developed different brain activity patterns compared to kids who consume caffeinated beverages
less often including more impulsive behaviors and poor or working memory. The research is based
on the international study of more than 2,000 children. The authors found that a year after asking
kids about their soft drink consumption those who drank caffeinated beverages daily were more than
twice as likely to have tried alcohol. The researchers say the study can show if the caffeinated drinks
are causing differences in behavior and brain activity and it's possible that kids who are more
impulsive are also more likely to drink caffeinated soft drinks on a regular basis and they're also
more likely to try alcohol at an earlier age. Is your child a poor sleeper? Well if so a new study
suggests it might be in their genes. The study reported in the Journal of Child Psychology and
Psychiatry looked at 2,458 children of European ancestry and found that kids who genetically predisposed
to insomnia had more insomnia like sleep problems such as frequent awakenings or difficulty falling
asleep as reported by their parents. Those who were genetically predisposed to longer sleep did
indeed sleep longer but are also more awake during the night as teens. The authors say the research
provides indirect evidence for a lifetime poor sleeper trait and therefore the need for early
recognition and prevention of sleep difficulties. What appears to have been a major software update
managed to cripple the entire Optus network across Australia last week. Although the TELCO
won't admit it, it appears the update imposed on ageing 2012 era Optus technology failed to cope
with the dramatically increased traffic demands brought about by today's 5G world. With the details
with Jumbo Technology Editor Alex Harovroyd from TechAdvice start life.
Optus is Australia's second largest TELCO behind Telstra and in front of Vodafone and they're
a Singaporean owned company and they're known for competing in this smartphone space with
their mobile network and with Indian services and at about 4 or 5 in the morning an update of some
sort was applied. That's normally the time you put up the time the network is being least used
and various sources online have claimed that whilst the update could be applied it was being applied
to very old hardware which couldn't take the 5G workloads which is all sounds a bit strange to me but
that's what sources are claiming. But clearly something went wrong with the upgrade and it didn't
just take down the mobile network but it took down just about the whole network. People couldn't make
an emergency triple zero or 911 calls as it would be in the US through their landlines but they could
do it through mobile phones but then some people on mobile phones sound that they couldn't make
triple low calls because they weren't in range of another network that could be roamed to but of
course people's mobile phones were completely down as was mobile data and some of the people had
their broadband connections also unable to be connected to so people went for more than 12 hours
without having an internet or phone connection. There were big lines at the competing Vodafone and
Telstra stores that people couldn't port out because you couldn't receive the verifying SMS to port out
and the CEO didn't run up to the media for several hours. Now they had a big
cybersecurity hack last year Optus had and you would have thought that they would have learned.
They've been in the front-foot to show people they're doing everything they can to
not hide from the cameras but be upfront and say look we are owning this yes something really bad
has happened we're working really hard to fix it and we're not afraid to come and talk to you
and customers and let you know that we're here and we're very sorry and originally Optus wanted
to give no compensation and all they tried to claim that it would be a couple of dollars per person
and it wouldn't amount to much but people had been up in arms about that one lady couldn't
speak to the hospital to inform her that her mother had died other people had lost all sorts of
business because they couldn't take electronic payments their payment terminals were down or
transportation systems and weapons entire round their work shut down. Yeah now a lot of these
systems did have manual backups of sorts but it took time to be put into place there was still
hiccups and you know whilst a number of services were back online through backup systems of various
sorts you know most people were out for the entire day and some people kind of still be having
problems 24 hours later even though it was all meant to be fixed within a half day time frame so look
terrible timing the shingtel board that company that owns Optus in Singapore was in Australia when
they had the big cyber attack last time and then last week there were in Australia for another
board meeting and this particular outage happened so there is maybe the words yeah well the
word for the Singapore board is don't come to Australia but these are the big wake-up call to
show how fragile modern systems are when we rely upon telecommunications networks and technology so
intensely well the role of Australia is of the problem they issued a statement by way of X saying
very simply cash is still king absolutely and look governments wish to turn us all into cashless
societies well when you don't have any cash and you can't pay by cash and there are various companies
that are saying oh no we only take the electronic payments now well you're denying people the ability
to have cash available for a rainy day I mean you don't want to have a central bank digital currency
where the currency can be set to expire it can be outright stolen from you electronically without
anything happening you could be cancelled and have all your money just be sure to disappear
from your account so if this was the cyber attack and it happened to all our telecos well we would
be in big trouble I mean this is how you take a modern society down so a big wake-up call for
the industry for the government for Optus itself moving on there's been more action on the wireless
power revolution wireless power that sounds like something tesla was trying to achieve a hundred years
ago yeah yeah and and what that is is power that is transmitted through the air in much the same way
that your smartphone capital or computer is receiving data over Wi-Fi now the way that most wireless
power currently works is you have to physically place your device onto a wireless charging pad and
you can't take that device away with you and have it continuously being charged because that's not
how current wireless power systems work but what energy is and another company called OSHA and
others out there motor roller splashes and over working on this as well they've been working on
ways to transmit power through the air without cooking you as you're walking through an electrified
airspace and although the future is going to be where all of your devices in the home and the
office are being charged wirelessly so they have to have no batteries or very small batteries
and it's been worked on so it's commercialized so that we will eventually have wireless power everywhere
and this wireless future that tesla himself thought of is finally coming true you know a hundred years
later and there've been some updates for apple and google tell us about them yeah all of the different
to apple devices have had updates for the watch you've got 10.1.1 it's meant to fix a battery drain
for iPhones and there's a problem where some people were charging their phones wirelessly in cars
equipped with wireless charges and that was disabling the NFC chip inside and that issue has now been
sold and also there was an issue with a lock screen widget on iOS 17 where it wasn't showing snow
properly not an issue for us in the southern hemisphere that will soon be an issue for those in the
north clearly lots of bug fixes and security updates and google has also launched this November
updates for its pixel devices and interestingly you know if you've got a Samsung or a motor roller
some other android device those November security updates are not there yet if you want the
updates as quickly as you get them on apple devices on in the android world you need to get the
google pixel devices otherwise you'd be waiting and whilst you're waiting the device is not secure
so interesting that google is able to do that but none of these competitors can but that's
I guess one of the benefits of being a google pixel user and what is on tech advice start life at the
moment reports about apple working on a new form of battery that will last much longer and also
open a i launching a new gpt store a copyright shield that will protect people using its
services from copyright infringement people can create their own tech gpt engines and 20 more that's
Alex Ahara Royd from tech advice start life
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