Astronomy Cast

It’s almost time for our annual summer hiatus, but before we go, we wanted to direct you towards all the fun and space stuff we’ll be enjoying this summer. We’ve got meteor showers, planets, rocket launches, TV shows, movies! Here’s what’s good.

In a couple of weeks, we’ll go on hiatus, but we want to make sure you are ready for stuff we can anticipate happening. 

Show Notes

• Space News & Missions
  • Blue Origin: Building a rocket factory; working on the New Glenn moon-capable rocket (likely launch: Sept).
  • NASA’s Escapade: Launching two Mars spacecraft with Blue Origin.
  • Other Missions: TRACERS (NASA–ISRO) and ESA’s Space Rider.
• Summer Skywatching
  • Mercury: Greatest elongation on July 4 — tough to spot, but try before fireworks.
  • Perseids: Peaks Aug 12–13. Best viewing ~8:30 PM before moonrise (~11 PM).
  • Delta Aquariids: Aug 29–30, fewer meteors (~20/hour).
  • No Eclipses/Conjunctions, but still plenty to enjoy under the stars.
• Summer Entertainment
  • Movies: Pamela recommends Superman and Jurassic Park.
  • TV Shows: Fraser recommends Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (S3); both excited for Foundation and Alien Earth.
• They often subscribe briefly to services like Paramount+ or Apple TV to binge and cancel.
• Project Focus on content production this summer, including interviews and Space Bites.

Transcript

Fraser Cain: AstronomyCast 760 – What’s Happening in Summer 2025? Welcome to AstronomyCast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain.

I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pamela, how are you doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay: I have no internet at my house. An animal removed it from the side of the house. We are recording on my laptop right now over at a friend’s house.

Fraser Cain: No. No, I can’t even imagine. I don’t want to even comprehend a world where I can’t use the internet.

Yeah, it’s, it’s like, I would just have to go and cut down trees or something. I don’t know what I’d do. Um, yeah.

So, so we’re going to get into this episode, but we should explain, like, this is the penultimate episode, right? I think we have semi-penultimate episode.

Dr. Pamela Gay: We have three more.

Fraser Cain: We have three more. Well, today’s the 16th.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So we have two more after this.

Fraser Cain: Two more after this. Yeah. Now I’m looking at my calendar.

Um, yes, we have two more after this, the 23rd and the 30th when we record and then we’ll go. And then we will go on to our summer hiatus. Now, normally this is the last episode of the season.

And then we’ve bid you all a fond farewell. And then we see you again in two months when we return from hiatus, but we are switching things up this week. And that’s because something very exciting is going to be happening when we would normally do the last episode and we want to be able to see on top of that.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So, so well, one thing is super exciting and one thing that sort of we’re waiting for information. So next week, I thought it was this week. It got moved from the date.

I originally wrote down, um, next week, Vera Rubin observatory is releasing their first suite of images. So next Monday we will be live streaming that, uh, over on our various channels. We will be recording astronomy cast on Wednesday, and we will be all of the excitement about Vera Rubin observatory.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. So we’ll just give you the update, you know, the, the episode that Pamela won’t let us do until the thing has gone live. Now the thing will be have gone live and then we, she will allow the episode.

So we will talk about, we will talk about that. And then what’s the other, we’re waiting on another mission.

Dr. Pamela Gay: We’re waiting on budget information. So we were going to do a rundown on just what survived, but Congress still hasn’t passed a budget. They may not pass a budget, but we can at least talk about the proposed cancellations, but yes, we’re giving Congress as long as we can.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. All right. It’s almost time for our annual summer hiatus.

But before we go, we wanted to direct you towards all the fun and space stuff. We’ll be enjoying this summer. We’ve got media showers, planets, rocket launches, TV shows, movies.

Here’s what’s good. And we will talk about it a second, but it’s time for a break and we’re back. All right, Pamela, where do you want to start on the, on the fun things that we’re going to be enjoying this summer?

And you should too.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. Yeah. All of you should.

The thing I am most looking forward to and wish that it wasn’t going to be so amazingly hot is Blue Origin is currently looking to launch on August 15th from Florida with their second giant rocket goes towards moon. If everything goes well, their Mark 1 lander will be on board and they will be sending it towards the moon where hopefully it won’t do gymnastics. And we need more rockets that work and work well so that we can switch things up when things go sideways.

And it would be really nice if we could have more than one thing that was astronaut certified. And, and we are starting the pathway towards having another rocket mill built in the United States. And honestly, I just want something not to fall over when it gets to the moon.

That is my goal. Something to get to the moon and not fall over.

Fraser Cain: Right. But things are a little more complicated than that because there is another set of missions that, that Blue Origin has been contracted to launch. And that’s NASA’s escapade mission to Mars.

And that’s two spacecraft. They’re going to be working in concert. They’re going to fly to Mars.

They’re going to help understand atmospheric loss and, and orbit around Mars. And these were originally supposed to launch back late last year, back in late 2024. But of course, New Glenn has slipped.

We’ve only seen one test launch of the rocket, no attempts to actually capture the booster. And they were supposed to launch sometime in March. And this was kind of impressive because the, the New Glenn, like normally you launch when the window opens and the window opened back like November 2024.

And yet New Glenn was like, don’t, Blue Origin was like, ah, don’t worry about it. We’ve, our rocket is powerful enough. We can still make the window if we launch in March.

Well, March passed, we’re not there. So it might be that the next launch is actually going to be the escapade launch on top of, of New Glenn. And so I think that there’s still some sort of uncertainty about that.

I think the, the August 15th date is overly aggressive. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see it not go until September. There’s like a lot of still additional concerns and then sort of a larger concern about, about Blue Origin being able to produce enough upper stages for the rockets.

But you know, if everything goes great, we could watch another New Glenn take off and continue the testing that will move us to this fully, or I guess reusable first stage, but it’s a monster rocket. And, and as you said, it’d be great to see something go to the moon.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. It it’s, it’s glorious. This is another heavy lift vehicle.

This, this is, this is a get us to the moon vehicle.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Yeah. Um, all right.

So we’re doing, we’re doing missions. Are we okay. Okay.

Dr. Pamela Gay: It’s the thing I am most excited about this summer. And if it gets pushed to September, I might actually go to it. I’m not sure I am up to the August heat nor the August crowds, but September I could get excited for a September lunch.

Fraser Cain: Yep. Uh, so have you got any other missions that you’re looking at?

Dr. Pamela Gay: That was it. That was, that was the one I’m a, I’m a simple girl when it comes to rockets.

Fraser Cain: Okay. Um, so the, so there’s a couple of other missions that you might want to keep your eye on. One is NASA’s tracers mission, the tandem reconnection and cusp electrodynamics, reconnaissance satellites.

Um, and those are going to be our earth based monitoring satellites. Uh, they’re going to analyze the McNeil sphere and they’re expected to launch in the summer. Uh, and NASA is doing a collaboration with the Indian space, uh, research organization, and they’ve got their, uh, it’s a synthetic aperture radar system.

So again, that’s looked like it’s going to launch. And then the other one is ESA’s space rider. So there’s a, there’s some, there’s some activity, but it’s actually pretty quiet.

Like I had to dig pretty deep.

Dr. Pamela Gay: This summer is so quiet.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Yeah. So there’s, so I think that’s the, the big one of course is, is new Glenn.

And then, you know, there could very well be more tests of starship. We’ll see whether or not that happens. All right, let’s move on to stuff to see in the sky.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So normally I don’t get very excited about Mercury, but this year it’s kind of amusing because Mercury is going to be at its greatest Eastern elongation, which means it’s towards the East of the sun on 4th of July. And so that’s cool. That’s just deeply, deeply amusing.

Um, and, and so unfortunately, um, when it’s East of the, the sun, it’s going to get lost in twilight. It’s always lost in twilight. So you can get excited about this.

But the reason I’m bringing it up is 4th of July, everyone goes out at least around here and camps on their firework spot before sunset. So this is a chance to go out before sunset and watch the, the sun go down on the horizon first. And then because Mercury is to the East of it, it’s going to go down in the West second.

Um, so while you’re sitting there, putting on your mosquito repellent and enjoying your hot dogs, look for a small dot in the glare. You take sky Safari or something like that to find it with your son. It’s just the perfect, stupid thing to do while you’re waiting for the fireworks to start is try and find Mercury.

Fraser Cain: Right. I’ve only found Mercury once I’ve ever seen it once because I always live with mountains that block my view to both the West and the East. And so I just can’t see them.

Dr. Pamela Gay: I’ve only been able to find it well on the roof of a building. So in particular, if you’re someone lucky enough to get to go watch fireworks from like a hotel sky patio or whatever, get that sunset direction, at least for sunset and find yourself in Mercury.

Fraser Cain: And I’m very accustomed to seeing the planets during the summer. I don’t know why, but they’re shifting into the morning now. So, uh, you should be able to see Venus and Jupiter, Venus and Jupiter both been really bright in the evening for the last few months.

And now they’re lost in the glare of the sun, but they’re going to come out in the Dawn in July. So, you know, if you do camp out and then you wake up the next morning, uh, go outside and you should be able to see Venus and Jupiter and they may get really close, uh, sort of late into August. But in fact, a lot of the planets are going to be visible.

Like we’ve been watching all of the planets in the fall. Like I was out watching them, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter, Venus, uh, all in the evening sky throughout the fall. And so in the spring and now things are shifting over again.

And so you will start to see all of them sort of pop out into the morning sky, which, you know, is less interesting for a lot of people who wakes up at four in the morning or three in the morning to go watch planets. But, but, you know, if you’re, if you’re that kind of a morning person, this is your, this is your chance in August. Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So in August with all those planets in the morning sky, and we’re also going to have Mercury heading towards its greatest Western elongation, because that sucker moves quickly. We have the Perseid meteor shower on August 12th, 13th, and it’s better in the morning. So go out, get yourself a hammock with a hammock stand.

So you’re not under any trees nap until it looks like it’s a good hour. Um, and one of the cool things nowadays is you watch the Perseids, watch the Perseids, and then you can see when a sunset starts at low earth orbit, because suddenly you’re seeing satellites all of the time. And, uh, then you get to at least if you live somewhere like I do with fireflies, it’s a game of, is that going to be a satellite, a firefly or a meteorite?

Fraser Cain: Right. And you know, my question every year about the Perseids is what is happening with the moon?

Dr. Pamela Gay: It’s a waning gibbous. It’s pretty awful.

Fraser Cain: It’s how it’s not going to be that, especially if you’re like, if you don’t stay up too late. So it will have been a full moon on August 9th, which is, and then, and then with the actual Perseids on the night of the 12th, 13th. So now you’re three nights after.

And so if normally say the full moon rises just as this, you know, as it’s getting dark sunsets, yeah, it’s getting dark. And then the full moon comes up a couple of hours later. Then in this case, now you’re waiting a few hours before the sun comes up.

So you’ll have like a moment where, uh, it’s dark and you’ll be able to enjoy the Perseids. And so if you are planning any Perseid related activity, aim for the early evening because, because then, and that’s good for like the kids and stuff. Like you go out, it’s just starting to get dark.

I don’t know what, you know, what time it gets dark for you around there. Probably, you know, mid-August is probably starting to get dark around eight, 39 o’clock for you there. Go out then and then watch as many Perseids as you can.

And probably by around 11 o’clock midnight, the moon is going to rise. It’s going to put a lot of glare into the sky and make it a less enjoyable experience, but it won’t matter because you will have all fallen asleep in your cots with your, you know, eyes to the sky. Uh, so that’s, that’s okay.

Um, and then the other one that you want to keep an eye out, and this is like not as great. And these are the Delta Aquariids and they’re on the 29th and the 30th. And they are like, the Perseids, you can get upwards of a hundred an hour and they’re like, the weather is warm.

And the Perseids are always the, the, the crowd pleaser while the Delta Aquariids, they only give you like 20 per hour. So, uh, you know, but you will see something like if you go out and you, you lie out on the night of the 29th, eyes to the sky, you should see a meteor go by every four or five minutes, which is, you know, it’s better than no meters.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And, and the thing to remember is if you have a camping trip planned this summer, not during one of these events, try and schedule it around new moon if you can. And there’s always going to be meteorites. There’s always going to be rocket debris falling out of orbit.

And all of these things create nice, pretty streaks and, um, just go out and enjoy the sky no matter what. It’s, it’s not a summer with any great events. We’re not looking at any big eclipses.

We’re not looking at any super important planets right next to each other. It’s just a summer to survive and look up. And sometimes that’s enough.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. I like, I can’t, I did some research beforehand. I couldn’t even find some interesting comments that you could see in a small pair of binoculars or a small telescope.

There’s like not a lot. There’s like, there’s like one that might brighten, brighten up to the point that it’s magnitude like 15 or 12 in the summer. Like, yeah, if you’ve got a good setup, then maybe you can go find that.

But, but no, it’s not there. There are no comments that could potentially be exciting. All right.

We’re going to move on to media in a second, but it is time for another break. And we’re back. All right.

So what are you going to be trying to watch this summer?

Dr. Pamela Gay: So I have to admit, I am stupidly looking forward to Superman. I know it’s cheesy. I’m also looking forward to the Jurassic Park movie.

Cause dinosaurs, even if they’re terrible dinosaurs and none of them have feathers. So I’m apparently going to be going and watching big blockbuster movies. Cause that’s what I do.

What about you?

Fraser Cain: So there’s three TV shows that I’ve got my eye on. The first one is Star Trek, strange new worlds season three. And that’s just, it’s so great.

Like it really feels like somebody continued the old show of Star Trek. And if you’d like that kind of feeling. Yeah.

Yeah. And it’s like, they got the same outfits sort of, um, the, the actors are great. The sets are great.

And the, the sort of the themes of the show and the plots are very much kind of in the, in the vein as the original Star Trek shows, but they’ve, you know, sort of re-imagined the Gorn and other stuff. So that starts on July 17th on, you have to watch that on Paramount plus, but you know, what we always do is, is sort of turn on Paramount plus for a month with our existing like prime, watch it and then turn it back off again. So, um, and then the other show, and this is on Apple TV and like we got Apple TV and we could, we’re like, we’re just going to watch, then we’re going to cancel our Apple TV, but they keep releasing stuff that we keep wanting to watch.

And so we’re like, they’re clearly stringing us along. So right now we’re watching Murderbot, which is terrific. Um, but then on, uh, July 11th, you get the season three of Foundation, which is, is pretty good.

Like it’s very different from the books. And so if you’re waiting for someone to properly adapt the books, don’t, don’t, you know, don’t hold your breath. But if you want something that has sort of is, I don’t know, is singing from the same song sheet as the books, like it’s just, it’s similar-ish.

Um, and there’s a lot of really cool ideas that they’ve implemented and I’ve been really enjoying that. And then the one that’s kind of a sort of a mystery is that there’s going to be a TV show called Alien Earth, and this is going to be on, uh, FX. And this is sort of like kind of interesting to me.

So it’s made by the same people that did Fargo, the same director and Legion. And I don’t know if you remember Legion, Legion was this- Yeah, I loved it. Yeah.

Legion was this show sort of set in the X-Men universe about this, uh, you know, this very powerful mutant and it was very weird, like super weird. But, you know, when TV shows are weird, they can be on, like, they can be too weird or they can be just weird enough to be entertaining. This one was just weird enough.

Yeah. So this one walked the line nicely on the side of, of comprehensible and enjoyable weirdness, as opposed to incomprehensible navel gazing weirdness. And so this show covers the Alien franchise and it’s set just two years before the original Alien movie.

And so my expectation is that this is how they found out about the planet where the alien was, uh, that, you know, maybe there’s like more of a conspiracy going on why the crew of the Nostromo were sent to there. Uh, so we’ll see if it can sort of give some interesting background, but done by a creator who is, who’s a pretty sort of interesting person. And I also, well, I’m not going to watch Superman in the theater, but I’ll, I’ll wait for it to show up.

Dr. Pamela Gay: I have a season pass to our theater. So we just go see a bunch of stuff. Like I recently got to see Alien in the theater on the big screen and Blade Runner on the big screen.

Fraser Cain: That sounds great.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. It’s cool to get to see that stuff. Now I do have a question for you about strange new worlds.

One of the things I personally love about strange new worlds is just like Buffy, the vampire Slayer used to do. They’re able to get in these super weird, nonstandard episodes that they make work somehow. So they had one that was like they were in a storybook.

They had one that was musical theater. Um, what are your thoughts on these completely ridiculous episodes?

Fraser Cain: I couldn’t, I couldn’t tolerate the musical. I just couldn’t take it. Not everyone can sing well.

No, I just like, I’m not into it. Um, so, but I, you know, like whatever, like I, like I’m always such a huge fan of people experimenting. And so like, I think a lot of people, when they watch someone, some creators experiment like that, they, they gripe about it and will complain loudly on the internet.

And I’m just like, it’s not for me. It wasn’t for me. Like good on you for trying something experimental.

Uh, yeah. It wasn’t my bag, man. So yeah.

Um, yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Don’t yuck anyone else’s yum.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, exactly. So we’re going to chat about what we’re going to be up to this summer next, but it’s time for another break and we’re back. All right.

So this is weird, right? Because we’re going to talk about what we’re going to be doing this summer. And at the same time, we’re going to still be here with you guys for another couple of weeks.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Yeah. So what, what projects are you hoping to get done over the summer?

Dr. Pamela Gay: So I had my meeting with my NASA program officer last week. We look like we’re going to be launching new citizen science projects over on a psi.edu domain. Uh, the first week of July, I am aiming for July one.

Uh, but we have a couple of terabytes of imagery to process. And I had a moment of like looking at the math of that. So we’re aiming to launch either July 1st or right after 4th of July.

I’m not going to wreck anyone’s 4th of July. Go look at mercury and enjoy the fireworks, everyone. And we’re going to be, uh, testing out a new mosaicing algorithm for building a full globe mosaics of Mars that will allow us to see much better how the entire planet changes from season to season.

Uh, and then we’re mapping out little, little crater on the moon, trying to understand, this is one that when an asteroid impacted the moon, it melted the surface and we can see how the melt slushed and flowed. And we’re going to be mapping all of those features out. Um, and then, uh, hopefully by the end of the summer, entirely privately funded Cosmoquest is now entirely privately funded.

So we can keep all of our diversity, equity, and inclusion content. We can keep our queer content. Um, so Cosmoquest is completely privately funded thanks to our Patreon and one-time donations.

And I’m hoping to relaunch, uh, our old projects over there that still needed processing done. So like mercury mappers and, uh, yeah, I’m going to be writing software all summer is what I’m going to be doing.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Awesome. Um, I’m going to be doing something very similar, actually, which is that I, you know, I bought the sea star S 50 and w I want to turn that into the star parties.

So the plan is, um, I’m working with star front, which is the group that has the, you know, the Colo, the server co-location in Texas.

Dr. Pamela Gay: They’re excellent.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. The telescope co-location. It’s an, it’s an incredible service where you just go take your telescope, drop it off with them.

They set it up and then you connect to it remotely. And then you’re controlling your telescope and Bortle one skies with 300 nights of clear skies every year. It’s incredible.

And so, um, my, I’ve been hacking so far, but I’ve been able to get, I’ve been able to control the sea star, my, my telescope, the telescope, not using the app, I’m able to actually use a completely separate, uh, sort of piece of software running on my computer. So I’m controlling the telescope remotely and you can’t do this right now. You can’t actually control these sea stars when you’re outside of your network.

And so my plan, my medium term plan is to, is to make, have this interface that we can then control a bunch of sea stars all at the same time and then let a bunch of our friends control these things and, and put on the star parties, but make it really kind of fun and very simple where a person doesn’t have to know very much. They can just start putting in objects they want, watching as the live view updates, call it when they’re, when they’ve had enough, and then we’ll share the images and sort keep it pretty light. But I’m sort of building the interface and, and application layer that will connect to these sea stars.

So that’s sort of a big project that’s going to keep me pretty busy for the, probably the next month or so to make this work. But hopefully this will solve a lot of the problems that I’ve been having. Cause we, you know, we’ve done a couple of the star parties and the, the technology is just, it’s just not there yet.

It’s just not there. Like the interfaces, these telescopes are just not usable to go fast, to do the kind of broadcast that I need to do solo. And so I need to build the right machine to then allow this to make this work a lot better.

So that’s, that’s a big project. And then, um, you know, we’ve been doing a lot of interviews, so we’ve got a lot of interviews that are going to be planned over the summer. Uh, we’re going to be switching into our overtime broadcasts for all of the Q and A’s.

Uh, so we’ve got a ton of content. We’re still doing space bites all summer long. So we’ve got a lot of content and a lot of time, but really for me, the hiatus is there are these big projects that have, that require focus and concentration, a lot of moving parts.

And I just need hours per day to stare at them and not get distracted every few minutes. And so that’s why hiatus is just so important. And then I’ve got to get out into the forest and keep cutting down trees and, and you know, the diversity is growing.

It’s really great to see all of the life that we’re, we’ve got here. We’ve got our little, uh, they’re called Douglas squirrels and they come running into the house and looking for peanuts and zipping back outside again and birds everywhere. It’s great having a really good time.

I always forget how much, how wonderful summer is.

Dr. Pamela Gay: That, that is amazing. I, I do admit that with fear and trepidation, I’m going to have to take on my front flower bed that has weeds that are now so tall. I can’t reach the top of them.

Yeah. And, and I’m afraid of my front flower bed and the front flower bed is like, what is in front of our patio where I have looked out while recording and seen skunks. And it’s just like, am I going to get in there and find a family of skunks living in the weeds that are taller than I am?

Um, so this, yes, yes.

Fraser Cain: Almost certainly.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: I’m, I’m afraid of my front flower bed.

Fraser Cain: Awesome. Well, that sounds great. All right.

Well, so normally we would say goodbye to everybody for the summer, but we’re not because we’re going to be back here next week. So, uh, we’ll see you next week and then eventually we’ll say goodbye. But, uh, until then, we’ll see you next week.

Thanks, Pamela.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Thank you, Fraser. And thank you so much to all of our Patreon patrons that allow us to keep doing what we do this week. I want to thank in particular Abraham Cottrell, Alex Rain, Andrew Stevenson, Arnaud DeGroot, Benjamin Davies, Bill Smythe or Smith, sorry, uh, Boogie Net, Brian Cook, Buzz Parsec, Cody Rose, Daniel Loosley, David Gates, Dianne Philippon, Dr. Jeff Collins, Eran Segrev, Felix Gut, Frodo, I’m so sorry. I never say it right. Um, uh, Gertrude Schweitzer, Gordon Dewis, Helen McKinney, James Siknorowicz, Jean-Baptiste Lamartine, Jeremy Kerwin, Jim of Everett, John Drake, Jonathan Poe, Justin Proctor, Keith Murray, Christian Golding, Laura Kettleson, uh, Lana Spencer, Mark Steven, Raznak, Mathias Hayden. Oh, it just jumped.

Okay. Mathias Hayden, uh, Michael Prashada, uh, Michelle Cullen, Nate Detweiler, Papa Hotdog, Paul L. Hayden, Philip Walker, Red Bar is watching, Robert Hodel, Ryan Amari, Sharesam, Sean Matt, Simon Parter, uh, Stephen Coffey, The Air Major, The Mysterious Mark, Time Lord Iroh, Van Ruckman, and William Andrews.

Thank you all so very much.

Fraser Cain: Thanks everyone. And we’ll see you next week.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Bye-bye. AstronomyCast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. AstronomyCast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license.

So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website, astronomycast.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon.

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Anyways, keep looking up. This has been AstronomyCast.

Live Show

The post #760: What to Look For This Summer appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

Humanity has turned its focus back to the Moon, sending a fleet of spacecraft to the lunar surface. Some are run by the government, but there’s a whole new group of commercial landers bearing instruments to the lunar surface. Is this the future of lunar exploration? Space used to be a place occupied by government-funded and military missions, but today, we’re seeing the rise… and fall (somersault, crash, and explosion) of missions with commercial design and funding. Let’s talk about how this is good, bad, and maybe just too soon.

Show Notes

• Commercial Lunar Exploration
  • Rise of Private Missions
  • NASA’s Role
  • XPRIZE Legacy
• Lunar Mission Highlights
  • Astrobotic’s Peregrine
  • Intuitive Machines (Odysseus)
  • iSpace & Firefly
  • Other Efforts
• Science Goals & Outcomes
  • Survivability
  • Scientific Payload
• Technical & Financial Challenges
  • Landing is Hard
  • Costs Vary Widely
  • Navigation Systems
• NASA & Future Outlook
  • Shift in Contracts
  • Private Innovation

Transcript

Fraser Cain: Astronomy Episode 759 Commercial Lunar Landers. Welcome to AstronomyCast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain.

I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest. Hey, Pamela, how are you doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay: I’m doing well. My audio is… Yeah, we should explain.

Fraser Cain: You should do the explain of shame for why your audio sounds a little teeny this week.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So I’m normally using a little tiny lapel mic, except I wandered off with it. And I knew where it was this morning. And between my office upstairs and the studio downstairs, I stopped to make coffee and then got distracted by the dogs on the outside and somewhere in my kitchen, I sat down the little tiny black box of audio goodness.

And my kitchen is chaos incarnate of bikes and gardening stuff and cooking stuff and the stuff that gets dumped when you come in from the driveway. And so apparently, I will clean my kitchen just so I can find my microphone.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. So everybody who’s listening, start your engines. This is the first week of Pamela Can’t Find Her Microphone.

We’ll see what happens next week. So if you hear this and we continue the joke, then things have gotten very serious. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she starts getting creative and sort of repurposing other old gear to end what is now going to become a running joke week after week after week.

Dr. Pamela Gay: I may have to steal a preamp from my husband and pull out one of the good condenser mics that requires a preamp because that may be easier.

Fraser Cain: Let me know if you need some gear recommendations. I’m using the Focusrite and I really like it.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So we have a I think it’s M-Audio Red.

Fraser Cain: It’s that’s older.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, it’s older, but solid.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, I don’t think they’re even. Yeah, it’s solid. I don’t know if they’re even supporting it anymore.

So anyway, that’s that’s that’s something that the podcast listeners don’t need to hear. Let’s let’s move on. Humanity has turned its focus back to the moon, sending a fleet of spacecraft to the lunar surface.

Some are run by the government, but there’s a whole new group of commercial landers fearing instruments to the lunar surface. Is this the future of lunar exploration? We will talk about it a second, but it’s time for a break and we’re back.

All right. Let’s talk about commercial lunar landers, exploration, because there’s been a lot of activity already and and we’re going to get to that. But I’d like to just focus on on the history.

And I think we should put this in context of what happened with the with the commercial crew program that NASA has already done. Like NASA has has kind of really developed an an interesting way, an interesting partnership and working with commercial providers to supply the International Space Station. So let’s extend that to the moon.

Dr. Pamela Gay: I was actually going to go back earlier than that.

Fraser Cain: Oh, sure.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. You remember the days of Google and our XPRIZE?

Fraser Cain: Yep. Yep.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So so back in the early 2000s, we had the Ansari XPRIZE that is what got a scaled composite, lost it, launching their little badminton birdie of a spacecraft into space, flittering back down, taking off a few days later. They won the prize. Virgin Galactic bought themselves a space plane.

And now we have one of the commercial options for space tourism. Well, after the Ansari XPRIZE was won, we had the Google Lunar XPRIZE, which had the goal of having a team launch something to the moon entirely funded commercially, academically, donations, anything but government funding was illegitimate. It then had to travel across the surface of the moon.

It could rove, it could flit, it could hop, it could dance, it could burrow. No one tried to dance or burrow. But they had to move a distance across the surface of the moon and then send back video.

Now, unfortunately, by 2015, it was realized, one, we didn’t really have anything we could launch with that that was up to the task at that point in time. And none of the teams were quite ready to go. So Google was like, we’re calling it guys.

But a bunch of those teams kept going. And this was the origins of Bear Sheep from SpaceIL, of iSpace. And I can’t pronounce it correctly with the cute little bunny ears.

Hakato from Japan? Hakuto, I think. Astrobotic, a bunch of these teams that we have since seen become companies, got their origins with the Google Lunar XPRIZE.

Fraser Cain: Google Gurner?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Exactly. Exactly. And so these are teams that have been around for 20-ish years.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. And I think that lead then into what I was talking, sort of starting to prepare, which was that all of these companies had invested all this money and the XPRIZE had been canceled. And yet they had made all these investments and had working hardware and they’re ready to start trying for the moon, probably within months of when they canceled the prize.

And someone said, hey, let’s see if we can continue that process and turn these into, let’s give them jobs, right? And it worked out. I mean, theoretically has worked out very well.

Practically, we’re having some issues, but we’ll get to that.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So we saw various seed funds coming from governments. Israel was the first one to step up with Beresheet. We had the CLIPS program here in the United States, the Commercial Lunar CLIPS.

I forgot the letters.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Something service.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Launch service. Thank you. Commercial.

I can’t.

Fraser Cain: Commercial Partner Launch Service, I think. Anyway, CLIPS.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes. We had the CLIPS program come out and it was the United States saying, all right, we want to go back to the moon and we want to change how we fund it. And the idea was.

Fraser Cain: Commercial Lunar Payload Service.

Dr. Pamela Gay: I knew there was a lunar in there.

Fraser Cain: Okay.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So the Commercial Lunar Payload Services was NASA saying, we want delivery of stuff to the moon to be as regular as sending something via FedEx. And we were starting to get there with low Earth orbit with the Falcon 9 launches where it was just sort of like, okay, we’re going to book a berth on a shared launch. Let’s go.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Yeah. And like, I think it’s important.

I mean, I had mentioned that you had the commercial, like the deliveries of supplies to the International Space Station, the commercial cargo, you had several companies, not just SpaceX, others were also delivering stuff. You had the Cygnus, you had the Dream Chaser. You’ve got all these spacecraft that are delivering to the station.

And then as you said, you do a ride share. And so you’d have like maybe 40 CubeSats or three big satellites on a launch. And NASA would just be one of those satellites on that launch and then pair it up with a commercial company or whatever.

So you’re kind of moving towards this place where NASA no longer has to spend a lot of time thinking about how they’re going to deploy their experiments to the places that they want them to go.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And the argument was that just like with FedEx, when you pay to ship something, FedEx knows how much it should cost on average. And some packages are actually going to cost a whole lot more to ship because hardware failures, weather, and all these other things, changing gas prices in one location and not another.

Fraser Cain: The recipient lives in the middle of a forest far away from a main road.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Exactly, exactly.

Fraser Cain: I know I’m being subsidized by FedEx.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So all these different factors are just things that FedEx knows how to take care of and factor into the cost. The problem with trying to do this to go to the moon instead of to low Earth orbit is no one knows how much it actually costs on average to go to the moon. Because like this isn’t something that just gets done every day.

They don’t have the actuarial tables of 30 launches to look at and figure out, oh yeah, these parts go wrong this often. They don’t even have one launch.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. You have the Chinese. You have the Soviets back in the 70s and 80s.

You have early NASA and then estimates by the folks doing the commercial Lunar X-Prize or the Lunar X-Prize. So yeah, nobody knows what this costs. I’ve heard it said delivering, it’s $100 million per kilogram to deliver to the surface of the moon, right?

$10 million per kilogram. It’s expensive.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And so NASA is trying to move away from doing full cost plus fee to instead doing fixed cost to pay for contracts. And this means that we have all of these little commercial companies, and these are new guys. They are literally small companies with only like 500 employees in some cases.

And they’re trying to go to the moon, not getting paid enough to deliver the individual cargo missions. And they’re having to use venture capital. They’re having to use seed funds to hope that someday, present day investments will allow them to have future income.

It’s the standard model that we see with every venture tech company. It just may take them a bit longer and they may not all survive.

Fraser Cain: All right. So we’re going to talk about, I guess, how these contracts work and what the expectations are in a second, but it’s time for a break and we’re back. All right.

So this is the need that NASA addressed that they came up with a solution. Let’s come up with all these partners. They have signed all of these contracts to various providers.

And so how is this sort of structured?

Dr. Pamela Gay: It is literally them saying, we have this instrument, we have this rover, we have this thing. We don’t care about anything else other than our thing. Fly our thing.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. On the moon.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: Put this thing on the moon.

Dr. Pamela Gay: That’s it. That’s, that’s it.

Fraser Cain: And we will pay you. Here’s some money. Take this rover, get it on the moon.

Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. Simple until they actually try and do it.

Fraser Cain: Yes. All right. All right.

Okay. We will, I guess we’ve got to go into how’s it going? How’s it going so far?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, Firefly Aerospace landed Blue Ghost and everyone else has either not fired their engine soon enough, fired their engines too late, fallen over or fallen over while still firing their engines.

Fraser Cain: Okay. So let’s, let’s, let’s do a quick rundown of all of the, the CLPS programs so far. So who was, who was first out of the gate?

Dr. Pamela Gay: So the first one out of the gate for the CLPS program was Astrobotic with their Peregrine Lander. And, and NASA had really big hopes for this company. Again, this was one of the Google Lunar XPRIZE companies.

They were contracted that on their second landing, they were going to potentially take the Viper rover, which is a half billion dollar rover. And, and Peregrine failed due to reaction thruster leak that made the spacecraft uncontrollable. So it just fell apart in the Earth’s atmosphere 10 days after launch.

Fraser Cain: Right. They didn’t, it didn’t even get out of Earth orbit.

Dr. Pamela Gay: No, no. So needles to say NASA decided they are not launching Viper on Astrobotic’s second mission.

Fraser Cain: But they’re also not launching Viper at all.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Right, right. So this actually probably murdered the Viper rover, which is fully tested, fully functional, ready to go, has an entire science team. Yeah.

Fraser Cain: Okay. All right. So that was Peregrine mission one from Astrobotic.

What came after that?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Intuitive Machines, just like six weeks later, this was NovaSea and Odysseus. This one fell over.

Fraser Cain: Right. And I like, it sounds like it, you know, everything was going well. They were live streaming the descent.

We’re all watching with beta breath. This is it. This was the chance to prove it.

There’s a lot of really interesting science experiments on Intuitive Machines one. And it seemed to like it landed and they lost contact, but then they were able to make this sort of feeble contact with it.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: And, and what had, and I think what had happened, it broke its leg.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. So, so it’s unclear exactly how it broke its leg. It fell over, it ended up at an 18 degree angle.

There were other issues with this one. It turns out lunar laser ranging is hard, especially when you forget to turn your instrument on. They had put a software hard stop in their laser ranger telling it do not fire so that it wouldn’t go off and damage one of the human beings working on mission development.

They needed to recompile, or I don’t know if they were doing compiled code. They needed to redo their code before they launched. They did not.

[Speaker 5]Yes.

Dr. Pamela Gay: There was another laser ranger on board that was on the NASA instrument. They tried to use that.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. I remember that. Yeah.

That was really interesting. They tried to patch over to this other system.

Dr. Pamela Gay: It didn’t quite get them there. Um, so it went down, it broke its leg. Um, it fell over, it didn’t get enough sunlight.

It also didn’t drop its camera, the Eagle camera that it was supposed to before it landed. So we didn’t actually get to see what happened for a hot minute. Um, there were a whole lot of things that went wrong with that one, except everything on board survived.

Fraser Cain: Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So we were getting back information saying I’m alive. Deploy me. I’m alive.

Deploy me. And nothing could be deployed because it was sideways.

Fraser Cain: So not nothing, not nothing. So it had a, um, uh, a radio antenna that was going to perform some experiments about whether it could detect the, the presence of, of life on earth, the, um, the, the antenna radio signals. And so it was able to deploy this antenna and it was able to detect the presence of, you know, radio communications coming from earth.

And it was also able to detect radio emissions coming from the Milky way. And, and so this was like a pathfinder for a future, something that would try and search for the 21 centimeter line for a future mission. So it was able to sort of like just barely pull that off.

And I think we got like one picture home before it succumbed to the lunar, to the lunar night, which is a theme. All right. We’re going to talk about the next one, which was a success, but it’s time for another break.

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Now back to your regularly scheduled listening.

Fraser Cain: And we’re back. All right. Let’s get, let’s have some good news.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So, so this one brought me so much joy because first of all, I got to go see it launch in person back in January. And, and so it, it launched on Falcon 9, iSpace and Firefly Aerospace did a ride share to the moon. Firefly took completely different orbital path.

So it went pretty much straight there. It did really good computer vision work as it was landing to figure out where it was, where it was going, how to keep its orientation upright. It was nice and squat with widely placed legs.

It had great cameras so that you could see what was happening during landing and it landed successfully and deployed the things and stuff. And it even observed an eclipse from the moon, which is just amazing.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. It was incredible. It did a little drilling.

It tried some, it tested out an electrostatic coating that would try to remove regolith from its surfaces and that worked well. So there was like a bunch of little experiments, as you said, and then it too succumbed to the lunar night.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And that’s fair. It was designed to do that.

Fraser Cain: Right. It’s, you know, we’re not building things with chunks of decaying plutonium in them anymore. This is fine.

Okay.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So I have one more point. I have one more bit of trivia I need to share. Okay.

So the blue ghost is a kind of firefly. So Firefly Aerospace launched the blue ghost, which is a kind of firefly.

Fraser Cain: Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And I just find that adorable and everyone needs to know that.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. All right. Now, now bring me back down.

Give me some bad news.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So, so I, I have to admit, I went into last week’s landing of ice space with this, if it works, I’m going to argue that I have to see every launch of these landers. Cause they only work if I see them. So, so I’m like, especially sad about ice space because it was a Google lunar XPRIZE team.

I’ve been cheering for them since the early two thousands. And I was there when they launched and I wanted to have two.

Fraser Cain: The first one or the second one?

Dr. Pamela Gay: The, the most recent, well, I, I have been cheering them on since the beginning, but the, the first one also failed.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. The first one failed. Yeah.

Who could it are that mission one, it failed about a year ago. And so they recently launched, you watched it launch. We, we were all ready and excited to watch that land, but actually there was the, the intuitive machines before we talk about what happened with ice space, we should talk about what happened with intuitive machines to the Athena.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: That’s the bad news that I was hoping to hear about.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Oh man. So, so what didn’t go wrong with that mission?

Fraser Cain: Well, I mean it, so from what I recall, it landed and it had a problem with this range finder as well. And it ended up landing really unluckily into a little crater and then it tipped over.

Dr. Pamela Gay: It’s actually unclear what order that happened in there. There was, if you watch during the landing, it was wild because they were getting back data that their engines were still firing and their orientation. If you watch the guys who were holding the model, I’m going to use this as my model.

So this is an upright lander and they walked over to the screen with their model of the lander and they’re trying to figure out what’s going on and you see them do this.

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And then just walk away.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. And so, and so you’re thinking like people think that it might have been firing while it was on the ground.

Dr. Pamela Gay: It had already fallen over and it was still firing its engines.

Fraser Cain: Wow. Okay.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And, and so it, it ended up sideways in the dark.

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: It didn’t last very long yet. Again, everything on board said, hi, we’re happy.

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Including a little Rover.

Fraser Cain: We got one picture.

Dr. Pamela Gay: We got one picture that annoys me because you’re looking up at the earth between the Rover’s legs. Yeah. And it’s just like, that’s not what you should be seeing.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Yeah. But that’s what we see because that’s reality.

All right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And, and everything that flew with it to the moon also failed. The entire launch of things toward the moon failed. And there was also Astroforge.

Astroforge also failed. Sorry.

Fraser Cain: Astroforge failed. Yeah. So, so like, so what are we at now?

We are, we are, so Bear Sheep failed. Um, Hakuto-R mission one failed.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Selene fell over, kind of worked.

Fraser Cain: Odysseus failed. Athena failed. Peregrine failed.

Uh, I’m running out of fingers.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Nova-C failed.

Fraser Cain: Which?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Nova-C, that was the intuitive machine.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Yeah. That’s intuitive machines.

That’s her, Athena. And so, um, we’ve got a success from Blue Ghost. And then the, the most recent, the one that happened last week from when we’re recording this was iSpace’s Hakuto-R mission two.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: How’d that go?

Dr. Pamela Gay: It turns out lunar laser ranging is harder than people give it credit for.

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Um, we still haven’t got the full reports. People who were looking at the telemetry during landing, uh, noted that they were going really fast when their altimeter said they were really close to the surface. And they were about a minute closer to the surface than they thought they were.

Yeah. So Scott Manley did a lot of work on this. Uh, just like figuring out what happened from publicly available data.

And it looks like, uh, they didn’t slow down early enough. Um, they got close to the surface ahead of when they were planning and they just landed hard.

Fraser Cain: Yep.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Um, nothing survived.

Fraser Cain: I haven’t seen, like, we always get pictures from Lunar Surveyor after the attempts and I haven’t seen…

Dr. Pamela Gay: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Yeah. Sorry.

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. And I haven’t seen any pictures from this yet, but I’m sure there’ll be out soon.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. And it, it’s one of these things where the question I keep getting asked is why did they have so much less trouble? It seemed like 70 some odd years ago.

And, and one of the things that is really being brought home by all of this is these teams are by and large trying to have smart spacecraft. Decades ago, before we were born, they were relying on kinematic equations and dead reckoning and thinking they knew where the surface was and doing the, okay, we fire for this long at this time. We then fire for this long at this time.

And it was like freshman physics level equations with graduate school level orbital mechanics. It was just time position engine. And what they’re doing now is they’re trying to say, okay, so we can see that we’re in this place.

We are now going to react to being in this place. And that means you’re subject to any of your environmental detection stuff gets out of sync either with time or fails, and you no longer know where you’re located. You’re not dead reckoning.

And it’s a lot harder to do something based on knowing where you are versus calculating where you are. This is why autonomous cars struggle so much.

Fraser Cain: Yep.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So we’re, we’re, we need to solve autonomous cars before we solve autonomous landings.

Fraser Cain: And I mean, we’re only covering the commercial lunar landers. So we talked about, we talked about bear sheet, which fail, we talked about the, the ice base ones that failed. We talked about intuitive machines and pair and osteobotic and, um, Astro forge.

Um, so we haven’t talked about the, the government ones. They’re working there. Well, are they most?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Okay. Chandrian has become rock solid. Sean has become rock solid, right?

Fraser Cain: So this was the first Chandra and failed the second shot. Yeah. The first hundred and failed the second Chandra and succeeded.

Um, the Chinese had been successful so far. Um, the, the Russian return didn’t work so well. There was a Japanese failure.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. That was Celine. It, it lasted a little while.

It was like, it, it got data. It also fell over.

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Falling over is really easy to do. It turns out.

Fraser Cain: Okay. Yeah. So, uh, but you know, I mean, this is, this is how this works.

And I think the plan is very compelling that you will, you will have a future of, of lunar exploration where again, you just say, I need this and I need it on the moon and, and, and some provider will go, no problem. Uh, we’ll see you on the moon. And that like, that sounds great.

That, that sounds like what it should be. But, and, and I think what’s really important is to get across these things are cheap, that we are looking at tens of millions of dollars to deploy in, you know, a lot of these are, are much less than, than a hundred million dollars. This is a fraction of the price that other government run programs have done in the past.

Dr. Pamela Gay: The entire mission will cost that much. The amount of money NASA is spending is tiny bucks.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Even less. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you think about how much NASA is spending now to get something deployed to the moon.

It’s a, it’s, they’re only paying a part of that price. So, so this is really worth, like, I know it sounds like this is all not working, but blue ghost showed us that it’s not impossible. And so hopefully we will see more.

And so there’s like a bunch more coming and we will sort of stay tuned and maybe we’ll do, you know, two or three years from now, we’ll come back around and do another video and we’ll go like, yeah, everything’s working great. Or the galactic ghoul eats lunar spacecraft for breakfast.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And, and the big thing that I know I, for one, I’m really looking forward to is blue origin is on their next launch. Their very first launch of their big old rocket was able to send a spacecraft healthy around the moon for their second launch, their very first launch of their big old rocket was able to send a spacecraft healthy around the moon for their second launch. They’re looking to launch their Mark 1 robotic lander and this is NASA’s other contracted company for getting humans on the moon.

Mark 1 is not going to be human certified, it’s a cargo vessel. But if they can get New Glenn working consistently, and they’re one for one so far, and they can get their Mark 1 lander working, suddenly we have another path to getting humans on the moon that isn’t beholden to whether or starship is ever made to function and stop polluting beaches.

Fraser Cain: Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

So you’ve got what’s going to happen. I mean, potentially it’s going to be the exact same thing. I want this astronaut and I want him on the moon.

And, and, you know, some provider will go, no problem. You know, we gotcha. Here’s what it’s going to cost, but we’re not there yet.

But I, but I, I’m a big fan of this method just because it, it’s in the exact same way that NASA might say, I want this scientist and I want them in France. Right. And they go like, okay, they buy a plane ticket, they get on an airplane and they go to France.

They don’t, you know, NASA doesn’t build a new aircraft to, to solve the problem. You know, I really want NASA taking on risk. I want NASA to do stuff that everybody’s just too cowardly and afraid to try to do.

That’s, that’s my, that’s my favorite version of NASA, the thrilling space agency that is out there, uh, trying crazy ideas and proving, de-risking them so that, that either other space agencies or they, or commercial providers or whatever can actually, you know, bring us that science fiction future that we have been promised.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So I, I like the way you dream. This is not a topic for this week. We’re in fact going to take it on in a few weeks.

We’re waiting to see if the U S is capable of passing budgets. Um, like currently we’re looking at like essentially nothing, nothing. I’m just going to go with nothing.

Um, so, so the fact that commercial companies like blue are blue origin are out there saying we see a commercial reason to develop this technology may be what keeps space going in the United States as we defund our country.

Fraser Cain: Right. Uh, well, we’ll keep you posted on, on what happens to NASA’s budget.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Hopefully we’ll know an answer before we go to summer hiatus.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Otherwise we’ll report on after.

Dr. Pamela Gay: We’re going to at least talk about it. Yeah.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Or we’ll come back after summer hiatus and give you an update on the budget. All right.

We will see all of you, uh, next week. Thanks, Pamela.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Thank you. And thank you to everyone out there who’s supporting us through Patreon. I, I have to say at my institution, my humans working on producing this show and everything we do over at Cosmo quest are the only ones that are mortified instead of terrified by the U S budget, because you are what pays a portion of their salary and your donations and sponsorships matter more than ever before.

Um, this week I would like to thank a pronounceable name. You’re welcome. Dr. Alex Cohen, Andrew Pleistra, Arctic Fox, Bore Andro Levsvold, Benjamin Carrier, Bob Crell, uh, Brian Kegel, Bury Gowan, Claudia Mastriani, Daniel Donaldson, David Bogaty, David Trobe, Don Mundus, Elliot Walker, Father Prax, Frank Stewart, Jeff McDonald, Gold, Gregory Singleton, James Roger, uh, Jason Kwong, Jeff Wilson, uh, Jimmy Drake, Joe Holstein, uh, Jonathan H Starver, just me and the cat, Katie and Ulyssa, uh, Kimberly Reich, uh, Larry Zott, uh, Lou Zealand, Mark Schneider, Matthew Horstman, Michael Hartman, Michael Regan, Nala, Olga, Paul Esposito, Philip Grant, Rondo, uh, Robert Cordova, Ruben McCarthy, Sam Brooks and his mom, Scott Briggs, Seggy Kembler, Steve Rutley, TC Starboy, The Lonely Sandperson, Tim Garish, Tashar Nakini, Will Hamilton. Thank you all so very much.

Fraser Cain: Thanks everyone. And we will see you next week.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Astronomy Cast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So love it, share it and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website, astronomycast.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep this show going, please consider joining our community at patreon.com slash astronomycast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up.

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The post #759: The Commercial Space Program appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

Computers are getting smaller, faster and more capable, which has enabled an entirely mew class of satellites: CubeSats. A mission small enough that you can hold it in your hands, and yet powerful enough to even travel to other planets and send messages home. 

Every year, our electronics seem to get smaller and more powerful, with today’s smart watches being more fully featured than the computers Pamela and Fraser had as little kids. These tiny processors, sensors, and transmitters are allowing tiny satellites with powerful functionality, and today we take a look at how this is changing space exploration. 

Show Notes

• Updates & Announcements
• Citizen Science Project Launch:
• Current Rovers in Space
• Challenges in Space Terrains.
• Prototype Exploration Ideas
• Aerial Exploration: Helicopters & Drones
• Legged & Spider-like Robots
• Winch and Tether Rovers
• Titan & Venus Exploration Concepts
• Under-Ice and Swimming Bots

Transcript

Fraser Cain: AstronomyCast, Episode 758, Non-Roving Rovers. Welcome to AstronomyCast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the Publisher of Universe Today.

With me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay, a Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute, and the Director of CosmoQuest.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Hey Pamela, how are you doing? I am doing well. I think tomorrow I get to actually preview our new Citizen Science project on Twitch.

Oh, that’s amazing.

Fraser Cain: Cool. So, if people want to watch this, they should go make sure they’re following CosmoQuest.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, subscribe to our newsletter.

Fraser Cain: I guess when this comes out, it will have already happened, but I guess you can go to the CosmoQuest Twitch channel and see what happened and see all your other announcements and stuff all around.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: Can you even say what you guys are premiering, or is that even still a bit of a secret?

Dr. Pamela Gay: So there’s two projects. The one that I know is go for tomorrow is to map out Little Lowell Crater and look at all the melt features to try and understand how melted regolith sloshes around when an area of the moon gets melted during an impact. The other project is trying to understand if improved algorithms successfully mosaic pictures of Mars together.

It’s one of these, you look, you click, you look, you click. That one, I’m still working with the scientists to get approval on, so it may not be ready to be previewed tomorrow. The one weird, I’m having a branding nightmare.

So CosmoQuest has a bunch of DEI content on it. We have a very inclusive Discord, and I don’t want to have to delete any of that. So our new citizen science projects are going to be on a new URL that is part of the psi.edu domain. That’s our parent organization. So I don’t have to delete DEI content from CosmoQuest. Yeah.

Fraser Cain: Wonderful. Some of our favorite robots are rovers currently roving around the surface of the moon and Mars, but there are some pretty tricky terrain out there and engineers are scheming up clever ways to explore other worlds inspired by life that crawls, slithers, hops, and flies. And we will talk about it in a second, but it’s time for a break.

And we’re back. All right. So where are the rovers right now?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Okay, so the rovers today, there is several functional on Mars and many less than functional on Mars.

Fraser Cain: Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And there are many that died unfortunate deaths on the moon prior to getting to do their job. There are a bunch that got dropped on asteroids by Japanese missions, and that’s very pleasing. But so far, that’s it.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. And that’s just rovers. And there’s been a couple of alternative ideas that have been tried out.

Obviously, we’ve got the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars that went with Perseverance, the first rotor craft that has explored.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Minerva 2 on Hayabusa 2 is my favorite. What were they? So they were torque thrusters, for lack of a better way to explain it.

I mean, they weren’t actually thrusters. These were disks. They looked like really thick record players, essentially.

And they had inside of them a torque device that would basically move slowly, and they’d go ka-thunk. And the counter motion to the ka-thunk would fling the spacecraft. And the reason they had to do this was the gravity on the asteroids.

They were planning to do this on Itokawa initially, but Minerva 1 didn’t work so well. But when they got to Ryugu, Minerva 2 A and B, the gravity is so low they couldn’t rove without accidentally sending themselves into orbit or worse. So this torque mechanism allowed them to fly 50 feet or so, no big deal, on a ballistic trajectory after launching themselves with a solid ka-thunk.

Fraser Cain: Right. Right. So they just spun up for a second, gave themselves a kick in the opposite direction, in the low gravity, flung themselves wildly, randomly, and then landed somewhere else and took a look around and then did it again.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And because it was rotatable, they could kind of sort of pick what direction they flung themselves in.

Fraser Cain: Right. That’s awesome. I mean, it just shows you like in that low gravity, it’s surprisingly difficult to be able to explore around.

Okay. So, so then I guess that sort of leads into the weird terrain and the fascinating terrain that is out there across the solar system that we would want to explore that is beyond the reach of a six wheel rover.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. So we have basically three different issues to deal with. One is how do you maneuver when the gravity is so low that one wrong move and you’ve left the world?

Fraser Cain: Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: The second is low gravity worlds can have much steeper faces, much more easily deep holes and taller mountains than we get with our gravity.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. We think about like the Rosetta mission on, on 67P where the Philae lander tried to land.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: And it is a nightmare of deep crevasses and jagged mountains. One of the most compelling pieces of space media that has ever been made, in my opinion, is this short animated sequence, like, like actual pictures taken where you’re seeing this steep cliff on the side of the comet 67P and it’s kind of almost like it’s snowing around there and it just looks so rugged, like the Himalayas almost. And this was images taken by the Rosetta mission as it was an orbit around it.

It just gives you a sense of just how nasty that terrain is. And so you get, as you say, those steep cliffs and when you match that with almost no gravity, it’s really hard to get purchase, to be able to move confidently in such low gravity across such steep terrain. Okay.

So there’s, there’s two horrible nightmares.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And then the last one is we have icy landscapes and we have those on earth too. And we know from earth just how easy it is to lose things into crevasses and other bad icy features. And so as we look to go to Titan, which is lower gravity, different thickness of atmosphere allows it to have methane, ethane acting like water does on earth.

We have to start worrying about completely different icy snowy surfaces. And then someday we’re hopefully going to be going to Europa with more than a flyby mission. Europa Clipper is basically a very fancy flyby mission that’s in orbit around Jupiter.

If we’re landing on that surface, we’re going to have to contend with all of the massive cracks on that world and a desire to not fall through the ice.

Fraser Cain: All right. So we’re going to talk about some of the interesting prototype ideas that have been tested out here on earth in a second, but it’s time for another break. And we’re back.

All right. So now that we know the horrible, horrible landscape that awaits us out there in the solar system, what are some really clever ideas that people are working on to be able to try and explore these regions?

Dr. Pamela Gay: The one that made me giggle the most is called the Lunar Pogo. Have you interviewed anyone about this one? Yes.

Fraser Cain: Well, not specifically the Lunar Pogo, maybe. But there was a NIAC grant for an Enceladus Pogo, and I’ve interviewed the engineer behind that. But it could be the same team.

I don’t know if you’ve seen, like they actually have, it’s a one-legged robot that can bounce around on that one leg, and they actually can have this thing and they can drive it around here in the lab with a remote control, and it just goes boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, and they can actually operate it like a rover, yet it can hop from across varying and weird terrain.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And so the idea here is it has this one leg, and the leg touches down, and the important part of your hopper goes down the leg, capturing the energy in the process, and then it uses some mechanism, often expanding gas, to fling itself back up the leg and initiate the hop. And so you’re once again looking at that conservation of momentum process. There’s also the spring energy involved.

There’s a little bit of combustion with the hopping mechanism that’s using expanding gases. And so it allows you to be, in some ways, much more effective with your expanding gases to hop around than just using expanding gases, which is like what IM2’s GRACE mission would have done had it been allowed to operate.

Fraser Cain: The thing I like about that mission, and the one that I did the interview, so it has two wheels as well, which are at 90 degrees of each other. And so they act as reaction wheels. And so then the hopper, if it falls over onto the ground, it can roll around on these wheels, and then it can position its hopper leg underneath itself and then hop again.

And then it uses the reaction wheels to maintain its position and even rotation while it’s upward. So you can sort of mix and match. And a lot of the issues that you may be thinking of, like, well, what if it falls over?

Well, it can right itself, prepare for another jump, and then just get back into jumping. And in fact, it might be necessary that if these things are solar powered or some kind of battery, then they’re going to have to hop for a while until the battery runs out, and then they’re going to have to rest, refill their batteries, and then begin the hopping process all over again. And so you can kind of mix and match.

And so you get the reaction wheels that keep it stable, but also allow it to drive around on the surface, depending on the terrain.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And being able to put yourself upright again is kind of the dream.

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: I’m so tired of missions falling over. Yes.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Yeah. That should be like now, like, has to be mandatory that you’ve got to put some kind of writing arm on your on your lander.

It would save so many problems if they just had a little arm that could push themselves back upright. I mean, I guess not if they broke their leg, but anyway. Yeah.

So there are a bunch of hoppers and they have been proposed, you know, imagine you have this one on Enceladus that is jumping back and forth through the plumes, taking samples as it just jumps from crag to crag around on Enceladus, something jumping across the surface of Mars, down into deep, deep craters, something on the surface of Mercury that’s getting a lot of electricity from solar panels that are just being filled up. Hoppers that could work on, you know, asteroids, things like that.

You know, how are there any that are like really considering being deployed? I know of one, but if you know any others.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, so there was grace that was planned. May it rest in peace in whatever crater it landed in. And, and I space has payloads on it that it just lists as and other payloads.

So the one they’re talking about is they have a rover on board. That’s just like a traditional little wheels to go. So I don’t know of any right now, but this is where, you know, the missions that haven’t launched far better than I do.

So hand it over to you.

Fraser Cain: Yes, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So the Chinese are planning one with their, with one of their upcoming lunar landers.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Okay.

Fraser Cain: And it’s going to have a hopper on board, but I think you’re right. There’s a, it’s an eye space or it’s an intuitive machines. There’s a bunch of these.

And then the Japanese space agency is planning various versions of this, considering this for their upcoming mission to Phobos sample return mission to Phobos. So there’s a bunch in the works and I think we will see more and more of these as this technology gets, gets developed more. Okay.

So hoppers. Uh, let’s talk about things that can fly, you know, obviously we know about ingenuity, but what else?

Dr. Pamela Gay: So ingenuity was a traditional helicopter with the main rotor, uh, which they tend to be more stable, but they require one large fiddly engine and don’t have redundancy with the dragon fly mission. They want redundancy. And so they have their own rotor craft.

It’s 450 kilograms and it has, uh, it’s not a quad copter. It’s an optic copter and this mission can handle if one of its engines decides, I won’t, I won’t do the work today. I, so they had, they have the ability to fly on diminished numbers of rotors the same way we see we have Mars rovers that can rove with a diminished numbers of wheels.

And this allows missions to keep going even when stuff breaks and stuff does break.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Especially in those kinds of conditions. Like what a, it’s cold.

There’s hydrocarbons everywhere that’s going to turn into like soot that’ll get into some of its mechanisms.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: That could be a bad day.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. Yeah. So, so as we start trying to understand what are the ways to go, it really depends on what size you’re looking at and how much redundancy you’re worried about.

Um, the control systems for quad copters require a lot more computational ability. I, the engines can be much smaller, much lighter. I, the counterbalances helicopters are much more stable, require less computational power, but have no redundancies.

And uh, then you just keep adding writers after that.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. So that’s all that’s firm that we know of. And so now I’m going to move into the stuff that are proposed and planned.

Um, you know, the, the obvious solution. Like now that with the success of ingenuity, the obvious answer is let’s put a helicopter on everything. Like they’re so light, can produce such amazing science.

They serve as the scout that you can bring. So uh, the Chinese are considering a helicopter with their sample return mission, something that could go a little further afield from the landing spot to try and grab some interesting samples.

Dr. Pamela Gay: You can only do this on worlds with atmospheres, just to be clear.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, and then there’s an, an really interesting proposal for a helicopter was it was presented at the recent lunar and planetary science conference. I forget the name of it, but it would be like a beefier version of ingenuity.

So it would still be a twin rotor, like, like, you know, a helicopter with like two rotors on top of each other, if it’s spinning in opposite directions to keep balanced, but it would have, um, or maybe no, actually they had proposed an, uh, hexacopter. That’s right. So it would have six rotors and it would be like a drone with six rotors.

And then it would have the ability to carry a fairly large payload, like a couple of kilograms would be able to fly for longer periods of time before it had to come down and recharge. And there’s some, you know, some really interesting regions that we want to explore like Valles Marineris. So you can imagine a helicopter taking off from the rim of Valles Marineris and dropping into the largest, um, chasm, you know, longest, largest chasm in the solar system and exploring that.

Dr. Pamela Gay: That would be amazing.

Fraser Cain: Yes, please. Yeah. Um, and there’s also some really interesting jumbled terrain that it would be a nightmare for, uh, any kind of rover.

And yet it tells us some really interesting information about the, you know, the formation of Mars, its current volcanic activity, things like that. So, um, uh, yeah, those are, those are some ideas. So I think we’re going to see plenty more helicopters going to Mars in the, in the future.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And what I’m intrigued by is Boston Dynamics does insane legged robots. And to be clear, bipedal robots are not the most effective things out there, but there are many legged, often learning from insects, how to move, uh, tiny things are capable of scaling all sorts of wild, crazy terrains. And so we’ve gotten so frustrated now and then with things like Percy struggled through a boulder field, trying to find the right place to cross a dry river bed.

And, uh, curiosity has stared at various skate landscapes multiple times and been like, I shall not climb that.

Fraser Cain: Nope. Yeah. That looks too steep and too sandy and I could get stuck.

No thank you.

Dr. Pamela Gay: But these little spidery things that look straight out of Stargate. If you remember the, the, uh, the, the, the replica, the replicants, yeah, if you remember the replicants, Boston Dynamics has built some very similar looking things and, and take those and start building yourself a wifi network and exploding out from your base. And that’s kind of an awesome way to climb down into a crater and climb right back out.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. All right. We’re going to get weird in a second and talk about some really strange ideas for rovers.

But first it’s time for another break and we’re back. All right. So you started to introduce the idea of spider-like robots and again, you know, people are, are developing versions of this, you know, insect like walking structures.

That’s great. What other really innovative ideas have you seen?

Dr. Pamela Gay: So it’s, it requires going with a friend, which in general is a good idea. Back in the Google Lunar XPRIZE days, there were teams that were looking at, you have your main rover, and then you have a little dude with two wheels and a lot of rope. And you essentially go attached to the big rover, zooming out, and then you lower yourself essentially on your own built in winch into whatever hole it is you’re coming up on.

And there are caved in lava tunnels on both the moon and Mars. And on both worlds, you don’t have a sufficient magnetic field or sufficient atmosphere to protect you from radiation from space. And getting into these tunnels is probably one of the safest places we can eventually put ourselves.

And getting to go and explore these with these winch enabled little two wheeled devices is just kind of awesome.

Fraser Cain: People have described it like mountain climbers who are like roping off of each other. And so you could have a, you know, the, as you say, the main, the main part that is able to clamp in and hold tight, and then it can deploy a smaller rover out on a cable, maybe let it go at the end of the cable or reel it back in and then go look somewhere else. Yeah, that’s a great idea.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And this is where I have to admit, because you read all of the stuff that hasn’t happened yet. I just want to sit back and listen to who you’ve interviewed about what weird stuff is coming in the future.

Fraser Cain: Oh my God, I’ve got, there’s so many. Okay.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So what’s your favorite?

Fraser Cain: Well, oh man. So my favorite is the idea of a submarine on Titan. So, you know, we know that Titan has these oceans at the, near the Northern pole of liquid methane.

And it’s actually surprising, methane, liquid methane, ethane are very clear optically. And so you could deploy a submarine that could go down to the bottom of one of these lakes and could then send messages back through the material to some orbiting spacecraft and, and, you know, explain what it’s seeing. People have proposed a sailboat on Titan, that there is actually enough wind on Titan that you could deploy a sailboat into one of these and it could then tack around and explore and then maybe even deploy a submarine as well.

People have proposed snake bots. So you know, these are being used here on earth for like exploring disaster, yeah, exactly. Exploring disaster zones.

And so you could deploy one of these things into, it could crawl into some kind of jumbled up terrain, crawl down into a lava tube, be able to explore around. There’s been a whole host of really interesting balloon ideas. On Mars, it doesn’t work that well, but what you would do is you would have a balloon that would, that you would put some kind of gas and then during the day, the heat would fill up the balloon.

It would, it would rise up off the surface, fly around, and then when night fell, it would sink down to the surface, rest on the side of Mars, and then it would take off again and continue going around. And so you could explore, you know, large chunks of Mars just by using this, this technique. But balloons work really well on Venus.

And so people have proposed that you would be able to have a balloon that could last in the, in the high atmosphere of Venus for long periods of time. And one idea is you use solar power to suck in the carbon dioxide atmosphere of it, and then you turn that into your lifting gas. So you can extract out the different things that you require to be able to create this lifting gas.

And so you would constantly be able to keep replenishing your, your gas from the atmosphere of Venus. And then you could explore and then you could deploy that, you know, you could deploy a long cable with a rover on the end of it that you could try, or a probe on the end of it that you could go down to lower altitudes.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And Titan. You can also do this on Titan, to be clear.

Fraser Cain: Yes. Yeah. Balloons were great on Titan, although, you know, it’s cold.

So that’s always really tricky. But if you’re, you know, if you have helium, you know, for as long as you can keep the helium in the system, or if you can break up the methane and get at the hydrogen, there’s, there’s ways that you can do that.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And methane is, is quite easy to use to heat things if you want to provide your own heat to the gas.

Fraser Cain: Right. But if you can bring your oxygen, like that’s always the challenge is you need to supply the oxygen. Um, so one of the, I would say one of the weirdest ideas, and this is something that, that NASA is actually testing out, is a rover that crawls on the underside of ice.

And so you have like these, these sea ice apps around Antarctica and they’ve built a rover that floats where it will float up against the underside of the ice and then it can drive around underneath the ice as if it’s driving around on the surface of some smooth material. And it, you know, they’re using it to explore looking for signs of extreme of falls and things like that. But you can imagine this is the kind of thing that might end up in, uh, say if there’s a probe, it’s going to try to melt through the ice on Enceladus or Europa, and then you deploy these guys and then they would just crawl around on the, on the, you know, the shell, the ice shell looking for, for interesting stuff.

Um, NASA is also testing out little, uh, swimming bots, things that can actually sort of kick with flippers and, and, you know, go underwater and go for long periods of time. And so again, something that you could maybe have a melt probe that goes down through the ice on Enceladus or, or Europa, and then deploy these guys and then they’d swim around, uh, looking for, you know, Europa and space whales, obviously. Um, and then like even crazier ideas, like people have been testing out, um, earthworm like stuff that can, um, you know, use the same kind of locomotion where they sort of inflate different parts of their section and be able to, to move and turn and move through various, uh, tight spaces.

So, you know, every single idea that has been proposed, every, you know, the, all the different ways that, uh, people have figured out how to move here on earth, you know, life has found a way, people are considering ways that they can adapt that to work on, on other worlds. And so I think, you know, we are going to see some future where some Mars explorers going to, you know, put their hand out and a little helicopter will take off to give them a good sense of the terrain. You can imagine them walking up to some, some jumbled rocks and deploying a little sneak bot that’ll, they’ll go inside and look around, uh, that there’ll be, as you say, rappelling down the side of a cliff to, to look, get down to the bottom or inside a lava tube.

It’s amazing the kinds of ideas that are, that are possible. Manta ray type flying, uh, vehicles on Venus that would rise and fall depending on, on sort of the, how much energy they have and how much lifting gas they have. You can imagine the, you know, dipping down deep to, to, to explore the, the lower altitude.

And then as it gets too hot, they, they rise back up again and cool themselves off and replenish all of their supplies. So yeah, there’s, there’s been some amazing ideas that people are working on.

Dr. Pamela Gay: It’s, it’s going to be a wild future getting to watch all of this stuff coming into existence and, and I can’t wait to see it.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. And I like ingenuity just to demonstrate it without a doubt, without question that everything needs a helicopter on Mars. You’ve got to bring helicopters.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And, and dragonfly, it can’t get there fast enough. The future flies in so many different ways.

Fraser Cain: Totally does. Awesome. Thanks, Pamela.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Thank you, Fraser. And thank you to everyone out there who’s part of our Patreon. Uh, this week I have a new slate of names to thank this week.

I would like to thank Alex Cohen, Andrew Stevenson, Bob Crail, Boogie Nett, uh, Brian Cagle, Brian Cook, Buzz Parsec, Cooper, Daniel Loosley, David Gates, uh, David Rosetta, Disastrina, Felix Gute, uh, Gerhard Schweitzer, Helga Bjorkog, J. Alex Anderson, James Roger, Jeff Hoinmorder, uh, Jimmy Drake, John Drake, John Faiz, Jonathan Poe, Katie Byrne, Katie Annulisa, Keith Murray, Kimberly Rake, Christiane Magerholt, uh, Laura Kettleson, Les Howard, Mark Schneider, Masa Herleyu, Matt Rucker, Mike Dogg, Noah Albertson, Paul, Paula Spazito, Philip Walker, Planitar Rando, RJ Basque, Ron Thorson, Sachi Takaba, Slug, Taz Tully, The Air Major, The Big Squish Squash, The Land, Lonely Sandperson, Thomas Gazetta, and Time Lord Iroh. Thank you all so very much.

Fraser Cain: Thanks, everyone, and we will see you next week.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Bye.

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