Astronomy Cast

Normally we try to end the season on a high note. But there’s unfolding news that we just HAVE to cover before we leave you for the summer. NASA’s new budget is here, and it’s 25% smaller. We’ll cover what the changes are and try to understand the implications. It’s a bad decade to be a researcher. We’re going to look at why, and what US cuts will mean for the world. 

Show Notes

• Podcast Update
• Website and Patreon Changes
• NASA New budget
• Missions affected:
  • OSIRIS-REx Apophis mission
  • Mars Sample Return
  • Earth science missions (Terra, Aqua, Aura, DISCOVER)
• Education and outreach funding is cut to zero.
• DEI programs and teacher training (like REACH) are eliminated.
• Impact of Budget Cuts
• International Perspective
• Artemis and Human Exploration
• Call to Action
• Behind the Scenes and Summer Plans
  • Website redesign and content improvements are underway.
  • A fundraiser is tentatively scheduled for the weekend of October 11.
  • The team will focus on new projects and development during the break.
  • Hosts express gratitude to editors, the production team, moderators, Patreon supporters, and all listeners.

Transcript

Fraser Cain: Welcome to AstronomyCast, your 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 am doing well. This is our last episode before summer hiatus. I am planning this summer to upgrade our website to Divi5, so if any of you out there want anything specific added to our website, drop us a message.

Fraser Cain: Right on.

Dr. Pamela Gay: We’ve just swapped over our Patreon so that I no longer do public messages. I do free and paid subscriber messages, so go join our Patreon, get regular updates, even if you join for free.

Fraser Cain: Yes. This is really important. While you’re listening to this, Patreon allows you to just follow a creator for free.

For example, on AstronomyCast, Pamela sends out tons of information, and most of it is just freely available. A lot of the stuff that we do is just free, and you don’t have to subscribe. It’s the same thing over on my Patreon for Universe Today.

Almost all of the content that we release is released for free and public. It has longer versions of our news stories, longer versions of our Q&As, longer versions of the interviews, and it’s all just free. Why do we do this?

We do this because if you’re using social media or if you’re using YouTube or all these kinds of things, these are walled gardens that are trying to keep you in, and they can change the algorithm and cause us no end of grief at a moment’s notice. But if you use Patreon, then we have a direct relationship. When we provide new information or create a new version of the show or want to give you some other cool content, we can connect directly and send it to you.

So, again, there’s no commitment. You just go to Patreon.com slash AstronomyCast and then just follow us for free. I don’t know if we’re doing this with AstronomyCast, but on the Universe Today one, we’ve got a custom podcast feed that has additional content in it, and it’s also free, and yet is way better.

You just have to follow that, and now you’re getting this additional content. Obviously, we’d love it if you became a patron, but even so, the thing that’s most important to us is that we have a direct connection to you, and it’s not intermediated by YouTube or Twitter or anything, that we put out a message and you receive the message because you’ve chosen to listen to us. So that’s why we’ve got that, and please go there and do it.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. So this summer, we aren’t going to be producing new episodes, but the website is getting a major refresh. I’m going to go through and enhance a lot of our audio because there are tools that exist today that did not exist when we started doing this show, where I can just run it through a machine learning algorithm, not generative AI, machine learning, they are not the same.

And it will find the noise and make it dead without removing the parts of my voice and Fraser’s voice that we want to keep. And I’m also going to be planning for a giant fundraiser that we’re tentatively scheduling for the weekend of October 11th, because we have recognized with CosmoQuest and everything else we do, there is no longer going to be any federal funding for this kind of stuff. It’s gone.

It’s dead. That is the topic of this episode.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Well, this will be part of the conversation. So like, hang tough.

We’re going to bring this up as part of the conversation.

Dr. Pamela Gay: October 11th. Save the date.

Fraser Cain: All right. Now, before we get into this episode, I need to issue about a thousand caveats because it is going to be a very controversial episode. And I know we’re going to get emails from people who are saying that this is overly politicized.

But the reality is that this is news. This is financial information. This is the new budget for NASA.

And this is going to have implications for science. And I think some people are going to say we’re going to be fear mongering. You know, I am going to do my absolute best to rein in the emotions of this episode so that we focus on the facts.

And I think that, you know, our audience, there are sort of two political factions here. There is a there is a one faction that is for the current administration and there’s another faction that is against the current administration. That’s fine.

Right. Like, feel free to disagree. But I think everyone who’s listening to this is pro space exploration and pro science.

And that is our agenda. Right. That is that is our bias.

That’s where we’re going to put our thumbs on this is that we are pro space exploration and pro science. We are not against these things. We’re pro the scientific method.

So that’s the first thing is that this conversation can be held as much as possible in that vein, which is that we’re going to try and just convey the information, going to try to minimize the emotion, even though we are definitely feeling emotion. And we’re going to try to give you something that you can understand what’s going to happen coming forward. The other thing that I think we’re willing to do is sort of explain, you know, provider disclosures.

The first thing is like, I’m Canadian, I’m not American. And while Canada is entrenched in a lot of negotiations with the United States, we have a an astronaut, part of Artemis 2. We build arms and put them on everything that we have all kinds of existing obligations.

One of the instruments on board James Webb. There’s also sort of, you know, a renaissance in hiring scientists happening in Canada right now, an increase in our budgets for space exploration that is coming as a direct result of this, you know, I hate to use the word opportunity for Canadian research firms. So keep that in mind that, you know, when I say things, it might be that I am unintentionally being Canadian when I sort of consider the perspective of this.

Pamela, you have your own caveats that I think we should really definitely get through here, which is that, you know, you are funded in part by government programs that are going to go away.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. So, so my funding has always been a wild mix of different sources. Right now, my federal grant funding is about the lowest it’s been other than during the pandemic.

And so I’m not going to be as hard hit as many of my colleagues. So I’m dealing with survivor guilt more than I’m dealing with terror and fear. But I am watching the people I have collaborated with for 20 years, leaving NASA, leaving academia, redefining who they are.

So for me, I’m going to figure out how to be okay. That is what I do. But I am watching the people around me suffer and I’m watching the Institute that I work for really, really suffer.

Fraser Cain: So yeah. Right. So like your caveat here is that, you know, the funding, the agency that you work for, the Planetary Science Institute, is going to lose a ton of funding.

Yeah. And you have tons of colleagues and friends who are going to either be laid off, fired, or are taking early retirement. The forms of funding that you have been able to access in the past to do the kinds of education outreach are pretty much going away.

And fortunately, you know, we have support through our patrons. We have the support of various fundraising and the other projects and funding sources that’s going to make sure the Cosmic Quest exists in some form moving forward. But it’s hard not to see all this stuff and not feel like they’re gut punches.

So we are collectively feeling gut punched. And so there. I think that’s all the caveats out of the way.

Let’s proceed. Here’s my introduction. Normally, we try to end the season on a high note, but there is unfolding news that we just have to cover before we leave you for the summer.

NASA’s new budget is here and it’s 25% smaller. We’ll cover what the changes are and try to understand the implications. All right, well, let’s get into this.

So let’s go back in time and sort of get a sense of what is NASA’s historical budget levels for the last couple of years. What is normal for NASA?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Well, NASA’s been struggling more often than not. Its highest budget in history was just over $25 billion. It’s unclear when we’re going to get back there.

That was the 2023 budget.

Fraser Cain: Right. So that’s historically, it’s about 20, what’d you say, 23, 24?

Dr. Pamela Gay: It’s been in the 20s for a long time.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Yeah. And so it had been sort of 20, you know, 24 billion, 23 billion.

And in fact, back during the last Trump administration, there was mild increases to the, to the NASA budget. There was a lot of really interesting planetary science. There was the recommitment to send the human astronauts to the moon.

So and that’s where it’s been. It has been a sort of like a slight increase over time and there’s been a few budget, you know, projects have been canceled and so on. So all right.

So that’s where we’ve been. Then about two months ago, we got a, an announcement from the White House that they had released their skinny budget and this was going to be a sort of shortened version, high level view of what they were going to be resetting the budget at. And then about three weeks ago from when we’re recording this, we got the full budget.

And so now we see in detail what is the amount that the White House administration is hoping that will actually be passed through Congress and the Senate. So what is that sort of baseline? What is the budget that they’re looking for?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 18.8 billion with a significantly more cuts to science and learning opportunities. So things like internships, then cuts to space exploration.

Fraser Cain: All right. So let’s talk about the things that are, yeah, let’s talk about the things that are getting cut.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Um, 19 different space missions that are currently active.

Fraser Cain: Okay. So let’s list a few so people know some of them.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So the, the one that I think is hardest on my heart is the OSIRIS-REx extended mission to the asteroid Apophis. Right. In a couple of years, that mission is actually, was actually supposed to be flying along with an asteroid that’s going to be potentially daytime visible here on the planet Earth.

Fraser Cain: Right. So this is an existing mission. This is the OSIRIS-REx mission.

This brought back a sample of asteroid Bennu to Earth. Now the mission, the plan was to retask this spacecraft that is already in space, that already has propellant to chase down asteroid Apophis, go into orbit and be there when it goes in, does a flyby of Earth, giving us a really good understanding of what happens to a near-Earth asteroid when it makes a flyby of Earth and make observations directly there. So, so they’re just, and so like, I just want to understand this, they’re just canceling it?

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: They’re just not like the no, like, are they going to just shut down OSIRIS-REx?

Dr. Pamela Gay: And, and it’s, like I said, 19 active missions, it’s 41 planned missions altogether are getting shut down. And this means that the greatest opportunity to get cheap and easy data of an asteroid is one that NASA is going to be ignoring. There was discussion for about three seconds where NASA posted to their website a call for proposals to use the in-storage, completely built Janus missions that had to stay grounded due to changes in the Psyche mission profile.

There were thoughts of how can we use Janus? How can we take advantage of other existing hardware to go take advantage of this amazing opportunity? And when news fully hit that not only are we not launching anything new, but OSIRIS-REx is going to get pulled, I got a notice I never thought I’d get.

My, my planetarium software on my phone sent me a notice to call NASA and complain about this. Not NASA, call the Senate and complain about this.

Fraser Cain: Right. So, you know, some other big ones that I think we should be aware of, the Mars Sample Return mission is essentially canceled.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Juno, Roman.

Fraser Cain: And, you know, that’s not a big surprise because that was sort of starting to get over budget and we were starting to see people were having a hard time making that fit within any budget, even within the existing budget. But there’s a lot of other stuff that I think people are quite fond of. New Horizons, which is currently sort of in interstellar space, trying to potentially find its next target.

Juno, which is exploring Jupiter, then it’s upcoming missions, Da Vinci, Veritas, which are going to be going to Venus. There’s a lot of planetary science missions. But do we know for sure?

Because the other ones, like SeaNancy, Grace Roman, looks like that’s still go.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So what we’re dealing with is a confusing situation because NASA is an executive branch agency and civil servants legally in this country are not allowed to do anything that could be construed as lobbying, which means they’re not allowed to make a case to keep things funded to Congress or representatives. And so the way it normally works is the president puts forward the name of an administrator. Congress confirms the administrator, usually in the first couple of months, if not sooner, of a presidency.

And then that person, Bridenstine was an amazing example of this, would go to Congress and say, we need to do these changes. We have to do this. And that person, behind the scenes in some of the best cases, would also go to bat fighting the president to keep things funded.

Right now, we don’t have that political appointee, that person who is legally allowed to lobby. Well, it’s not technically lobbying, isn’t technically allowed to advocate. We don’t have that allowed to advocate person.

Janet Petro, who’s the acting administrator, is a civil servant. She is required by law to do what the president says. And this means that right now, we are in a situation where it appears that NASA is obeying in advance, where Congress hasn’t passed a budget.

Congress determines the budget, determines what is funded. A mission isn’t canceled until its budget line is canceled by Congress. This is why Viper is canceled, but not canceled-canceled.

Fraser Cain: Right. Yeah. And I think it’s really important to be clear that there is, you know, everything we’re talking about here is the budget that the White House has been requested.

The possibility is that Congress and the Senate will refuse, will vote a different budget in, that will stand, and then it’ll be business as usual for NASA and these missions will get cut. But I think, you know, it’s been pretty safe to say so far, we’ve seen that Congress and the Senate, because they’re, you know, in the same political group as the president, have done, have sort of fallen in line. And so this, you know, although there could be something different that happens, I, you know, I’m not sure where I would place my odds right now.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, it’s, it is a difficult thing to understand on many different levels. Currently, as we record this on June 30th at 1.30 in the afternoon Central Time, they are doing various votes on the Senate floor over amendments and riders to the overarching budget bill that the president is pushing for. A few Republicans have said no to the bill.

One of them, Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, changed her mind after she got a special dispensation that cuts that other states will face won’t affect Alaska. We have seen a few people stand out, like Josh Hawley in Missouri, because they are in rural states. It turns out rural states are going to be particularly hard hit, and they’re concerned that their state budgets won’t be able to keep things maintained.

So at this point, we have Schrodinger’s budget bill.

Fraser Cain: Right, yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: We don’t know what’s going to happen.

Fraser Cain: And when we come out sort of the other side of summer, we might go, you know what, you know, false alarm, everything’s fine. You know, the new budget begins in October. And so, so this all has to be sort of settled before then.

But already, I mean, you’re seeing, for example, NASA has put an early retirement option in the hands of people. I think 8% of NASA’s workforce has already taken this retirement option. And, you know, a lot of times these are very senior people who’ve been working in the agency for a long time.

So a lot of institutional knowledge that even if this doesn’t happen in the same way, you’re going to have a hard time just rebuilding that. Okay, you know, right now, we don’t know exactly how it’s all going to play out. You know, someone is going to have to do the unfortunate job of saying, well, I’ve got a fraction of my original budget.

So now I’m going to cancel out all of these missions. What other things are going to be, have their budgets curtailed?

Dr. Pamela Gay: So we see, like I said, 41 cancelled missions, 19 of which are active. We are also seeing upwards of 6,000 civil servant jobs being cancelled. These are people who are career bureaucrats working to advance NASA’s mission programs, engineers, grant managers, every different layer of the Institute.

Fraser Cain: Right. And then, you know, I mentioned, you know, 8% have already taken a buyout. So, you know, that’s the kind of thing that you’ll see.

Sort of the, you know, the way things were stated was, you know, here’s the first version, and then next comes the actual layoffs. And so I think a lot of people are saying, well, I’m going to take this more orderly exit before I have to take the disorderly exit.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. So in the best of possible worlds, we are going to come back in September. The Congress, House of Representatives and Senate will have figured out something that isn’t the, it’s literally called the Big Beautiful Bill.

It’s a ridiculous name. They will have figured out something else, and science as it stands will be maintained. No one really thinks it’s going to be that simple.

We think that there could be particular things that survive. But, and this is a timeless statement I’m about to make. If you are in the United States or you are a U.S. citizen abroad, call your elected officials for your region and tell them you want to see the United States fund science. Historically, the Republicans have done a great job with this. There, there’s no reason, however, not to ask for more money for science because we are 0.3% of the federal budget NASA is. And when you reduce down to how much science is funded and recognize NSF is much smaller.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, we haven’t talked about NSF. Let’s, we’ll get back to that in a second. All right.

So, so I guess, you know, we’re talking about the cut of the workforce. We’ve talked about planetary science. Let’s talk about earth science.

This is where some of the deepest cuts have happened.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So earth science is basically going away. I don’t know how else to frame it. So on the list of missions going away, we have Terra.

We have Aqua. We have Aura. I’m scanning through trying.

We have Discover, which is my favorite science mission.

Fraser Cain: And then there’s like, obviously there’s, there’s missions in the, in the works that are going to get, you know, there’s the new Landsat mission that’s coming up. So there’s a bunch of this stuff, you know, effectively, there’s going to be very little earth science being contributed by NASA. And you can imagine, you know, if NOAA took over that role, whatever, but, but NOAA is getting its cuts as well.

So, you know, just in general, this, this, you know, NASA’s role in helping us understand planet earth is being severely curtailed.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Um, education, earth science is getting cut just to add numbers to that from a FY 24, 2.1 to FY 26, they are looking at 1.0. Right.

Fraser Cain: So, you know, and again, we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but you know, all of those missions, like you, you have to take budget away from the people who are maintaining the existing spacecraft or take budget away from the people who are building the new spacecraft, uh, new missions, earth monitoring, airplanes that fly into hurricanes, uh, all of that kind of stuff is going to have, is going to be curtailed at some, to some degree that we’re going to find out the details.

Dr. Pamela Gay: I want to hit on hurricanes real fast in particular. Um, USAID had been funding NASA observations of the earth over, uh, areas where the USAID was working and when their budget got cut, all of that earth science got cut. Um, the department of defense had been working in concert with NOAA to do, uh, microwave observations of the planet earth that were used for, uh, weather monitoring.

We also had all of these earth observing missions that were looking at space weather, trying to protect our spacecraft and orbit around the planet, and then looking at our atmosphere as well. What we are going to see is a continued market decrease in quality of, uh, storm predictions at the same time that storms are getting more severe and the loss of the microwave data in particular means that at night, when we often see hurricanes massively increasing in power, we’re not going to have the ability to observe them. And so it is going to be entirely possible that people go to bed with a category two hurricane six hours out and wake up to category five.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. I mean, like, again, I mean, these are like, we don’t know specifically which missions are going to get canceled. We don’t know which missions are going to get shut down.

We don’t know. But I mean, if I told you that you now have one third of your house finances, you know, then you would have to make cuts in your house.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And they’re making those cuts right now. So, so for instance, that microwave data is no longer getting sent out. I believe it’s either effective today or effective next Monday.

So that’s an immediate change that’s going into effect.

Fraser Cain: And then I think a thing that’s, that’s quite sort of for both of us is all the education outreach and that’s just zeroed.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, it’s zeroed. And one of the more fascinating places that this is getting reflected is in how they’re changing communications. One of the things that research into Twitter has found is if any one Twitter account posts too much like a crazy person with post, post, post, post, people unfollow it.

And so agencies like NASA have taken advantage of this understanding to say, okay, we’re going to have a general account that only posts the most important things. And then we’re going to have all of these sub accounts that allow different missions to get their message across in really interesting ways. Many of us remember fondly the NASA Phoenix mission that basically live tweeted its own death of cold on the surface of Mars.

And these kinds of opportunities to give missions personality and style are only possible when you have mission by mission social media profiles.

Fraser Cain: That part makes me really sad because essentially before you had just the freedom of one small group to just run their own Twitter feed and just use it however they wanted to communicate their stuff. And so now those are all being shut down and everything is being centralized and reviewed in a central authority that is then going to allow stuff to come out of the main NASA feed and a few smaller fees. But you’re going from what was dozens, if not hundreds of separate Twitter feeds into something.

And I think like absolutely, if you put me in charge of managing NASA’s Twitter feeds, I would go through and go, there’s a lot of dead feeds here. People aren’t updating them. Let’s have a policy for this.

But I think if you have a small group that’s working on a mission and they want to talk to the public, they should just be able to do it, right? Because outreach and so on. So anyway, we’re seeing that.

There’s just a lot of funds that NASA spends in making educational material available, interacting with universities, doing a lot of outreach about the work that they’re doing. And I think that brand that we experience of NASA with really cool websites and really amazing real-time data that you can go and access and you can sort of feel like you’re a part of the mission. A lot of that stuff will, you know, there are people at NASA whose only job it is, is to make that stuff all go and work and make people feel enthusiastic.

And that is all getting, you know, the budget is being turned to zero.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And it’s more than just the budget issue. So one of the things NASA and the National Science Foundation have been very good at is recognizing that increased science education is good for the entire world. The more people we have engaged in learning and doing science, the more we can advance civilization.

And there are a lot of places in the United States, because education funds are tied to property taxes, where the schools just don’t have equal opportunity. And NASA and the National Science Foundation prioritized going into these disadvantaged communities and doing educational experiences. And that is now considered DEI, and it is strictly forbidden.

So you have not only massive budget cuts taking place, but you also have this situation where if the school you are serving is minority, majority school, so mostly not white people. If you have a school system that is majority English as a second language, if you have a school system that is majority free school lunches, you’re not allowed to specifically fund them. And so I got an email from USRA, which is one of the major granting bodies for massive NASA and National Science Foundation projects.

And it was letting us all know that REACH, which was a teacher training program, an educational materials development program, was gone.

Fraser Cain Yeah. And there’s a lot of material that’s done for teachers, so that when a teacher is going to be teaching about science, space exploration, astronomy in their classroom, there are all of these resources that they can rely on from NASA to be able to do that part. And, you know, the hope is that you’re going to be able to reach young people and in the schools and get them inspired and excited about and understand the kinds of options, career options that are there for them.

And so all of these resources are just going away. Um, not to mention a lot, you know, again, we don’t really know that the, the, we don’t really know what the implications are going to be for our job as communicators of this stuff. I’ve felt a sort of a silence in the feeds.

So, you know, every day I go through all of the RSS feeds from all the different agencies. NASA wasn’t at the American Astronomical Society meeting this year, this, you know, a month ago. And so there was a fraction of the news that was coming out of the AAS.

I’m not seeing a lot of press releases coming out of NASA anymore. So I’m having to go back to first principles. I’m going to, you know, uh, archive and journals and things like that and finding this, this research, but you can feel that this communication of, of interesting information is as just this tap has, has turned down to a fraction of, of what it was.

All right. We are way over time budget on this one, but who cares? Like we’re just going to roll until this one ends.

Um, all right. So let’s talk about Artemis because this one is, is, this is not surprising to me.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: And yet, you know, still kind of feels a little weird and sad.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So, so I, I’m going to open this up a little bit broader last week for escape velocity space news. I, I did a deep dive, uh, into Starship after realizing Starship and Rubin Observatory have both been in the works the same amount of time, both of them were supposed to launch in 2019. And it was just an interesting side by side.

Fraser Cain: Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And one of the things I realized was Starship has already spent half as much money on its development as SLS. And so while the future projected per mission costs will be significantly less, the development costs aren’t proving to be anticipated. And comparing it instead to new Glenn, we have new Glenn is estimated to be about 68 million per launch currently.

And Starship is at a hundred million per launch currently. And Starship has been blown up 10 times on nine launch attempts. And when the number of blown up vehicles exceeds the number of launch attempts, I have concerns.

Um, so Artemis is trying to move forward where it has made these contractual agreements that are fixed fees. So the company’s trying to fulfill these, these budgets are not getting all the money they need to do their innovation where Starship is, it was, it was supposed to have orbital in 2019. We still haven’t hit orbital.

It was supposed to have already landed crew in 2024. It’s now estimated that between four, instead of the between four and six refueling missions that were originally planned, it’s instead going to take greater than 20. And I need to give a shout out to Dustin over at smarter every day.

Cause he was the first person I found to point this out. And it has now been confirmed with NASA numbers.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Dustin Sandler did a great job of that amazing video. All right.

But, but let’s, let’s talk about like specifically like with Artemis. So a couple things are going to happen. First, the lunar gateway is going to be canceled, even though a lot of the modules are already complete.

Um, we’ve got Artemis two, which is due for launch very soon now. And then we’re going to have Artemis three, which is going to bring the people back to the surface of the moon. And then, and then the Artemis mission is essentially going to be canceled.

The, or at least the, the SLS and the Orion capsule are going to be canceled. And then whatever the future holds will depend on what’s possible with the current space fleet. And, you know, you’re looking at potentially Starship if it, if it functions, uh, or some combination of Falcon heavy or new Glenn, uh, or, you know, and then current landers, you know, obviously Starship can be a lander.

Uh, blue origin has their lander mark too. Yeah. Plus there are the various smaller landers and various science platforms, you know, Firefly, uh, intuitive machines, so on.

So I think that the SLS is done and, you know, we, in theory, Artemis three will be an SLS launches with an Orion on top. It’s going to dock with a Starship that’s already proven that it can land safely on the surface of the moon. Uh, but even that, I mean, we’re seeing the, the launch delays happening with, with Starship, with the various tests.

So, you know, I think that right now is all up in the air. We don’t know how that’s going to play out, but we do know that the SLS is over and the lunar gateway is, is a goner.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Um, I, I am honestly not as 100% on SLS being gone for the very simple reason that Alabama can really lobby well, right. And between Alabama, Texas, and Florida really wanting to keep it alive. Um, Texas is trying to steal the space shuttle from the Smithsonian.

Fraser Cain: Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So, so, you know, there’s weird stuff going, right.

Fraser Cain: If there is going to be a battle for the budget, it could very well end up being, you know, starting or continuing with the SLS, since we might see the SLS and the Orion continue on, especially if Starship continues to have challenges in getting into orbit and demonstrating orbital refueling and getting to the moon and a landing on the moon. Like if that, if that pushes out, then people are going to go like, what about the moon? And, and, and so the, who knows, I think you’re exactly right.

That I, that I think what the budget is called for and what will actually happen is one of the places where we could see a lot of action. Now let’s talk about a couple of things that are increasing because there has been an interest in increasing, uh, NASA’s exploration of Mars with people.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes. So currently, and, and I actually was talking with the program advisor three weeks ago, uh, one of my program officers and our advisor program officers at NASA, um, about things that are still getting funded and science supports human exploration and, uh, rovers, landing systems on moon Mars, as well as, uh, being optimized for machine learning and AI solutions are things that they are interested in funding.

The current thinking is twofold. Uh, on one side, we have people arguing, you need to go to the moon before you go to Mars. On the other side, you have people arguing, let’s just go straight to Mars.

Um, that’s, that’s an argument for the ages ranks right up there with Linux versus windows versus Mac. It’s a religious debate at this point. We are not getting into that.

Fraser Cain: We settled it here on this channel already. So I feel, you know, that’s, that’s already been decided. Everyone’s just going to have to decide if they’re going to be able to, to get up to speed with, with how we feel about this.

Um, yeah, so we, so I think there was an increase in development in spacesuits that could go to Mars, some interested in some other platforms technology. Um, but at the same time, we’re seeing cancellation of advanced propulsion techniques like, um, like nuclear, uh, fission, your propulsion is going away.

Dr. Pamela Gay: That is no longer an idea that’s getting canceled.

Fraser Cain: So a lot of the interesting propulsion ideas that might take you to the mock to Mars are all getting canceled. So I want to sort of stop this part of the conversation. And you did a little bit more research just to talk about how the world’s space agencies are sort of compared to NASA and what we might see as they respond.

So can you give us a sense of, of just like what other people are, you know, how does the rest of, cause I think, you know, a lot of people feel like, why is this NASA’s job to do all this? They’re just, the United States is just one country. What’s Canada doing about this?

What’s China doing about this? What’s, what’s Europe doing about this? So what, what are the other nations doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay: So, so I, I love Canada. I’ve worked with you for, for longer than I’ve known my husband and my husband is also Canadian. And somehow you both went to university together and didn’t know each other.

Fraser Cain: We were in the same engineering, like literally the same engineering program at UBC and didn’t know each other.

Dr. Pamela Gay: The morning they discovered this was absolutely hilarious. One of, one of my favorite breakfast conversations. Yeah.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Like, where’d you go to school? I was like, what, what, what year?

1980, you know, what? 1999. Me too.

What program? Engineering. Wait a minute.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. It was, it was a wonderful morning. I, I am entirely a fan of Canada.

But, but one of the things Canada doesn’t have is a giant budget. Your GDP in 2025 was 2.23 trillion compared to America’s 30.51 trillion. So a, a very solid coming in, still in the top 10 and Canada’s space agency, CSA has a budget of 0.612 billion, 612 million. Call it 612 million.

Fraser Cain: That sounds better than 0.6 billion.

Dr. Pamela Gay: It does, but everyone else has numbers in billions. So I turned you into a decimal billion.

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And so one of the things that we’ve been hearing is Canada is recruiting American scientists. True statement. And Japan is recruiting American scientists and students of the world.

True fact. France, France is going overboard, attracting American scientists, but they’re looking to collect our best and brightest in the few to few tens of people. And the problem is the United States has the largest GDP in the world.

We’re at 30.51 trillion. The next closest nation is China at 19.23. Impressive can actually compete. The next closest is Germany with 4.74 trillion. And so when you start looking at this level of difference in gross domestic product, the next set of numbers I’m going to give you totally makes sense. So the European space agency had a total budget converted from euros to US dollars today of 9.03 billion. So their total budget and NASA’s budget cuts are the same order of magnitude.

So the European space agency would have to double their budget, more than double their budget to compensate for what we’re cutting here in the United States. JAXA is at 1 billion. ISRO is at 1.5 billion. The budget for all these partners, JAXA, ESA, ISRO, and CSA, the total budget for all those partners is 12.2 billion.

Fraser Cain: Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: So they’d have to increase their combined budget by 50%, increase it so it would need to be 150% of what it currently is to compensate for cuts. And that’s just not something that can happen. The one place where we can see things compensate is in China, where their civilian budget in 24, which was the most recent I could find, the civilian budget for space was 14.15 billion. And they have a significantly larger amount in defense. And so we’re actually in this situation where when we were starting in this field, we were seeing Chinese scientists coming to America. I went to university with a bunch of Chinese scientists.

And now we’re seeing American scientists born and raised getting recruited to go to Peking University and other institutes to do science there. And I had someone ask me yesterday if we’re going to see American scientists, rocket scientists in particular, get recruited by Germany in a reciprocation of what happened post-World War II. And that’s entirely possible.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, of course.

Dr. Pamela Gay: ESA has major facilities in Garching, Germany, and currently has 300 job openings.

Fraser Cain: Yep.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Look at their website. Apply.

Fraser Cain: All right. I think we need to wrap this up. I think it’ll be interesting.

Probably when we come out the other side of summer, two months from now, a lot of these unknowns will have been solved. And what I would like to do, hopefully, is that we can give a less vibes-based episode and a more now just hit retrospect what happened. At that point, the big beautiful bill should be passed.

And then NASA and the various agencies across the US will have figured out which things are getting cut. And we will be able to follow on. But I think, and this is back to what the intro that I gave at the beginning, which is that we try to maintain a neutral stance here.

But the thing that we all agree on is space and science are important, that education is important, that these are the kinds of things. So if you’re an American and these changes are concerning to you, then our recommendation is to have a chat with all of your local representatives at every level and hash it out with them. And that if you have better recommendations, if you want things to go in a different direction, it’s up to you to have these conversations.

And now is the chance to do it before this is all locked in and it’s just the way as it always was and everything just moves on. So this is your chance to take action for the kind of world, the kind of universe that you want to live in. Pamela, thank you.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Thank you, Fraser.

Fraser Cain: Do you have some patrons?

Dr. Pamela Gay: I do. So this week, I would like to thank Alan Gross, Andrew Allen, Antasaur, AstroSets, Bebop, Apocalypse, Bob Zatzky, Brett Moorman, Bruce Amazine, Smansky, Cooper, David, David Rossetta, Dr. Whoa, Ed, Fairchild, just as it sounds, Frederick Salvo, Galactic President, Scooper Star, McScoopsalot, Glenn McDavid, Greg Vylde, Jay, Alex Anderson, Jarvis Earl, Jeff Hoinworter, Jim Schouler, Joanne Mulvey, John Fayes, J.P. Sullivan, Katie Byrne, Kim Barron, Kinsaya Panfenko, Les Howard, Mark Phillips, Matt Rucker, MHW1961, Super Symmetrical, Michael Wichman, Mike Heisey, Noah Albertson, Paul D.

Disney, Peter, Rajev, Akari, Robbie the dog with a dot, Ron Thorson, Sachi Takaba, Scott Bieber, Sergei Monolov, Stephen Veidt, Taz Talley, The Brain, Tiffany Rogers, Tricor, and Will Field. Thank you all so much. And we will see you on Patreon all summer.

Fraser Cain: Thanks, everybody, for another wonderful season. Now, as I mentioned, we’ve mentioned, you know, we’re doing a lot of work. In fact, we probably get our best work done during the summer hiatus because we have time to think.

And so, you know, we’re both going to be producing a lot of content over the summer, as well as, you know, new stuff coming from all of our various small projects and so on. So stay tuned for all of that. But thank you, everybody, for your ongoing support.

Thanks for everyone who works on this show, all of the editors, both video and audio and production that helps make this happen. We couldn’t do this without you. Thanks to the moderators who show up in the channel every week and help wrangle and keep things under control.

Thanks to everybody who watches us live and everybody who listens to this podcast on a weekly basis and has done so for, you know, the 18 years, the age of a child who could now drink alcohol in Quebec, in Canada. So thank you, everyone. And we will be back in two months for season 19.

See you then.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Bye everyone.

Live Show

The post #762: Science in Crisis – NASA’s New Budget appeared first on Astronomy Cast.

The time has come. The mighty Vera Rubin Observatory has finally come on line and delivered its “first light” images. And by Pamela’s rules that means we get to talk about it! So let’s do that! After decades of waiting, we have images from Vera Rubin Observatory!

Show Notes

• First Light Images:
  • Release of three major products:
    • SkyView Tool: Navigate Rubin’s ultra-high-res images (1 image = 50 standard 4K images)
    • Galaxy Field: Millions of galaxies at varying redshifts
    • Trifid-Omega Nebula Region: Detailed star-forming region
  • Asteroid Discoveries:
    • In just 10 hours, Rubin identified 2,104 new asteroids
    • Expected to increase total known asteroids to 5 million
    • Revolutionizes planetary defense and solar system inventory
• Variable Stars & Supernovae:
  • Detected brightness variations in real-time
  • Rubin will detect 4 million supernovae, including 1 million Type Ia
  • Key for refining cosmic distance ladder and understanding dark energy
• Telescope & Camera Tech:
  • 8.4-meter telescope with F/1.234 focal ratio (extremely “fast”)
  • 3200 megapixel camera, 10-micron pixels, 189 CCDs
  • Field of view: 10 square degrees
  • 30-second exposures reaching 20–24.7 magnitude
  • Produces 1,000 images per night → 2 million/year
• Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST):
  • Rubin will image entire southern sky every 3–4 nights
  • Every point will be captured ~800 times over 10 years
  • Enables a “video” of the sky to detect transients, movements, and rare events
• Scientific Goals (Four Pillars):
  • Mapping the structure of the Milky Way
  • Inventory of the Solar System
  • Understanding dark matter and dark energy
  • Exploring the transient optical sky (supernovae, variable stars, etc.)
• Data & Infrastructure:
  • Collects 20 terabytes/night, totaling 15 petabytes over the survey
  • Real-time data transfer from Chile to the U.S. (SLAC, Stanford), and Europe
  • Will issue alerts on transient events like supernovae and moving objects
  • Public access to time-tagged image archives for long-term studies
• Impact & Future Potential:
  • Enables unprecedented monitoring of:
    • Asteroids, comets, & interstellar objects (dozens expected annually)
    • Rare stellar phenomena (e.g., disappearing stars, exotic variables)
    • Galactic halo structures through RR Lyrae stars
  • Synergy with missions like Euclid and the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Telescope

Transcript

Fraser Cain: AstronomyCast, Episode 761 The Vera Rubin Observatory. 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 Pam, how are you doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay: I am deeply regretting checking out social media prior to this recording, because today is a day that reminds me it is our next episode where we will contemplate cuts coming to NASA and the National Science Foundation, but…

Fraser Cain: Yeah, and the timing should be pretty good, because we know a lot more now, so we’ll be able to cover it in all the grim details.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, there are a lot of people actively crying right now in the astronomical community. Right now!

Fraser Cain: Next week, it will not be a happy episode, it will be a sad episode. Well, the time has come. The mighty Vera Rubin Observatory has finally come online and delivered its first light images, and by Pamela’s rules, that means we get to talk about it.

So let’s do that, and we will talk about it in a second, but it’s time for a break. And we’re back! Alright Pamela, wow.

What a week.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah, yeah. It has been all the highs, all the lows, all the chaos, but today we’re going to focus on one good thing, which is the stubbiest looking giant telescope on the planet.

Fraser Cain: Yeah, the largest camera on the planet, the fastest big telescope on the planet. The superlatives go on. It’s interesting watching the coverage from the mainstream media about Vera Rubin, because they’re oohing and aahing over the pretty pictures.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Right, but that’s not what it’s there for.

Fraser Cain: That’s not what it’s about. And so it was incredible. They were great pictures.

I love some pretty astronomical pictures, but what I think, what we hope to convey in this episode is why this is one of the most ludicrous astronomical instruments that’s ever been delivered to scientists and how this is going to change astronomy. So let’s, hmm, where do we want to start? Like, do you want to talk about the observatory or do you want to talk about sort of first light?

Let’s talk about first light first. So we got the news, I guess the embargo broke, not broke, the embargo wrapped up, was released, on Sunday night at midnight Eastern Standard Time. For me, that was nine o’clock.

And so I could finally, we saw the first pictures. And, you know, I’m sure many people in the astronomical community had already seen them. People who follow embargoes, you know, had looked at the pictures.

I refuse to look at embargoed stories. And so I saw them for the first time, like everybody else when that embargo lifted. And so you saw them Sunday night and then we saw the full press conference Monday morning.

So what were we looking at when we saw those pictures? And hopefully, you know, people who listen to this episode, you remember the pictures, you can bring them out. What are we seeing?

Dr. Pamela Gay: So they released three significant things. Their SkyView data tool that allows you to take these images. One of the things they kept pointing out is a typical 4k image is 2% of an image that Ruben takes.

So you can’t just enjoy no matter how big your monitor is, all of one of these images at the same time on one monitor. So they released a SkyView image explorer that allows you to pan, scroll, zoom, all of those things. And they released two basic images, one that was a field of literally millions of galaxies, which was kind of awesome.

And they varied in redshift. So we were seeing everything from relatively nearby objects out to the distant extremes of our universe. They also released a image of the Trifid Omega Nebula region.

So star forming region galore, all of the pink pretty details, all of the black globule type stuff floating in front of it. And so we had these two different images, and then they highlighted some of the things in the galaxy image, because the Trifid Omega image, it’s a lot harder to highlight these things in. What they were highlighting is each deep image they showed us was actually a whole series of individual images taken across multiple filters.

This telescope has five different filters. And as asteroids moved through the field, they were able to identify not two, not three, but 2,104, which is a lot and kind of amazing. And these objects ranged from near earth objects, not putting us in any danger, out to the far edge of the asteroid belt.

They couldn’t really see much further out into the solar system because they only had 10 hours of exposure. And you start to just not being able to resolve the motion that well. But they also showed us highlights of variable stars.

Now for the variable stars, you have to look in the same filter for each image. So all of us had a bit of a sad moment, because we didn’t exactly get beautiful images of these variables pulsating in brightness, as all of us, especially me and my variable star loving heart would desire. Instead, we got, here’s an image, here’s several hours later, here’s an image, and you could see several tens of percent brightness change.

This is a machine that is designed to identify everything that flickers, flares and moves in the night. And they demonstrated on Monday that this telescope is here to do its job.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Yeah. And I think what the general public got from this was, look at these pretty pictures.

It’s taking beautiful pictures of galaxies, beautiful pictures of nebulae. But those of you who have been following images from James Webb, images from Hubble, you’ve seen what the Gemini telescope, Gemini North, South, the DESI survey, the Very Large Telescope, the Keck Observatory, the Large Binocular, you’re familiar with pretty pictures of space. Yeah.

And so for me, they were great. I liked them, but they were not the point. The point was the conversation about the asteroids, because that was what really sort of sharpened our idea and our understanding.

And what that telescope did in 10 hours of observing one tiny little patch of the sky is ludicrous. So on average, astronomers report about 20,000 new asteroids a year. We know of about a million asteroids total.

You know, a tiny fraction of those are the near-Earth asteroids. The ones that are crossing are the Earth’s orbit at some point in their journey around the Sun. And Vera Rubin, in 10 hours of observing, found 2,000 previously unknown asteroids.

And so in other words, the expectation is that it is going to find 10 times the number of asteroids that the rest of the astronomical community finds combined. That it is going to find 5 million asteroids over the course of its 10-year mission.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Sort of. They anticipate they will bring the total number of known asteroids to 5 million.

Fraser Cain: Right. So another 4 million, sorry. Yeah.

Yeah. So that was the kind of thing that I was really hoping that they would talk more about, and then talk about that in terms of supernovae, talk about that in terms of variable stars. They hinted at it, but I think they just want to show people like really beautiful pictures and get across the sense of the magnitude of the camera, which is that it is a really big camera.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yes. Yeah. It’s ludicrous.

This camera has a 10-square-degree field of view, and it has 3,200 megapixels per image. They’re planning to take 30-second exposures that are still getting down to like 20th magnitude, which is insane. And they’re planning to do about 1,000 science images per night, 2 million images per year.

They are imaging the entire sky every three to four nights. It is ludicrous.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. And I think the part that I hope people will walk away with is that it’s going to be observed, as you said, every couple of nights it’s going to do this full pan of the entire sky. And then it’s going to come back and it’s going to do it again, and it’s going to do it again, and it’s going to do it again.

And it is going to, over the course of its 10 years of operation, it’s going to take a picture of each spot in the sky 800 times. And so, if you want to sort of understand the significance of this, imagine if you could run a video of the night sky where you took a frame that happened every three nights for 10 years, and then you notice something that happened in the sky four years ago. Yeah.

And then you go, oh, wait, does anybody have, you know, we noticed there’s a new supernova remnant over here. Does anybody have archival footage of when that supernova went off? Oh, yeah.

It’s in Vera Rubin. Let’s go back to that date. And you can look back in time and watch that you could make a video where you just put up one frame per, you know, whatever, 30 frames a second of the sky and run it for many seconds.

You would watch all of the asteroids zipping past, all of the Kuiper Belt objects drifting through the field of view, all of the, you know, the planet nines, all of the supernova going off, all of the variable stars that are across that entire field of view, stars disappearing because they’ve just directly collapsed into supernovae, supermassive black holes coming online because they’re now feasting on new material that’s falling in, previously active supermassive black holes shutting down because there’s no more food to eat. So it’s just this way to see the universe in this dynamic way that nobody has ever been able to do. Every single survey that we’ve ever had up until this point has been a, like a one-time survey.

You take one picture of every spot in the sky and you call it a day. And that has been, that’s been a game changer for astronomy. So now you’re not taking one, you’re taking 800 of every single spot in the sky at a level of depth that rivals the capability of the largest telescopes in the world.

So it’s all bonkers. Like, I, like, I hate that we’re having to use these superlative, like it’s crazy. It’s bonkers.

It’s madness. And yet it really is. And I think people aren’t going to really appreciate how much this is going to change astronomy until we’re a couple of years into this and you’re like, oh yeah, another thing that people found on Vera Rubin.

Dr. Pamela Gay: It’s going to, I think it’s going to be more like six months to a year when we start seeing it. This is one of the large telescopes in the world. It’s 8.4 meters. There are a bunch of telescopes in the eight to nine meter class, but what makes this one so weird looking and awesome is any of you amateur astronomers out there know that the focal ratio in a lot of ways tells you how quickly you can take an image. So if you have a super small focal ratio, you can take a wide field, super fast images, but you’re usually have a trade-off that you end up with really bad resolution when you do that. Well, the Rubin observatories, some in the telescope has a focal ratio of F 1.234. It is the stubbiest little telescope I have ever seen. And because of how it’s built, they have 0.2 arc seconds per pixel. So they are super saturating their pixels. They, it’s insane.

They have 10 micron pixels on their CCDs and they have 189 4K by 4K science CCD chips. These are not CMOS, these are CCD chips. They were saying in the live stream that the camera is the size of a car, but weighs a whole lot more.

Fraser Cain: Right. Because it’s like solid electronics. Doesn’t have the air inside where the people might go.

Dr. Pamela Gay: No, it’s wild just how different this observatory is. And the reason it was built this way was once upon a time, it was funded through a combination of private funding, NASA funding, National Science Foundation funding and Department of Energy. Today it’s private funding, DOE and NSF.

I’m not sure what happened to the NASA funding. I no longer question these things. But that combination of funding was in part to do the things that we expect all new telescopes to do, looking at dark energy, looking at dark matter.

But then it was also trying to protect our planet because the total fraction of asteroids known, we knew wasn’t that great. The number of potentially hazardous to our ability to continue as a civilization number of asteroids known wasn’t that great. And with its high sensitivity, with its large field of view, with its constantly repeating the sky, it’s going to find everything moving.

Fraser Cain: Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And help protect us.

Fraser Cain: All right. We’re going to talk about this some more, but it’s time for another break. And we’re back.

So I want to give some other just interesting numbers. For example, we currently know of about, say, 2,000 to 3,000 type 1a supernovae. And we have been finding these for 30, 40 years.

These are the supernovae that have created the discovery of dark energy. Nobel Prizes all around. And each one of these type 1a supernovae is so precious because there’s just so few of them that have ever been found.

They’re a very rare event. Well, Vera Rubin is expected to find a million of them.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. 4 million supernovae in general, they expect to find.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. And a million with a million type 1a supernovae. You’ve got all of these variable stars that are going, they’re changing in brightness and that there are some really rare ones like RR Ellari and even like double RR Ellari stars that are really important to astronomers as sort of standard candles as well as ways to measure the expansion of the universe and so on.

Again, we will know of so many more of them because it’s not just seeing things that happen on a regular basis. Those exist. There’s the Zwicky Transient Facility, which is a telescope that is scanning the sky every couple of nights.

It’s found tons of asteroids and so on. But this is both an incredibly powerful telescope. It could stand up and take as good of a picture as any telescope that’s out there on the planet.

And yet it can do it in 15 seconds and move on. Right. Like done.

Next. Done. Right.

That’s where this thing just comes into, pardon the pun, focus is that it’s not just about the power of this telescope. It is about the speed and how much of the sky it’s going to be able to keep track of.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah. And to give you some ideas of the science with RR Ellari stars, they are horizontal branch stars, which means all of them are more or less the same actual luminosity. And when we look at them, we can identify them by how their light changes over time in very distinctive ways.

And if we can measure how bright they appear and we know how luminous they are, we know where they are. And because our Ellaris are low metallicity stars, we’re going to be able to use them to map out the distribution of field stars in the halo. Right now we’re doing great work with, with, uh, dwarf cerulean galaxies, dwarf elliptical galaxies, globular clusters, all of these groups of stars that exist in the halo.

This is going to allow us to see these fainter objects. They’re fainter than Cepheids, these lower metallicity objects, and actually see the true extent of our galaxy in all directions that aren’t blocked by dust and gas. And that in itself just has me super, super excited.

Fraser Cain: Now, one of the things that I, that I did find interesting with the presentation that they gave and the, and the images that they showed, in many cases they were done with dozens, if not hundreds of exposures in the same area. And that’s sort of like, they were showing you what it might be like if you just compressed all those 800 images into one shot, which is interesting, but then you sort of lose that time dimension when you’re looking at all of that. You’re essentially using all the separate images to improve the, the data and remove the noise, which is great and important.

But, um, you know, in addition to this sort of the general survey, you know, this is the LSST. Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Large Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

Fraser Cain: Right. They’re going to do some special operations where they’re going to look at some specific areas and they’re going to observe them very intensely on a very rapid cadence. And so we’re also going to see stuff where like maybe there’s some place where we’re, you know, trying to, trying to see how variable stars are changing or a place where we know there’s a lot of supernovae going off and get a much better sense as well.

So it does not. And, and I think sort of the images that they shared are sort of more in line with that philosophy that you’re, you’re keeping the telescope locked on one area and going click, click, click, click, click, and taking a bunch of pictures. So for places that are, you know, in addition to just this, the, the, the full survey of the sky, we’re going to get some regions and that will almost be the equivalent of Vera Rubin’s, um, Hubble Deep Field.

Yes. Right. That it’s going to take a place that is very dynamic where maybe things are changing down to the second or the minute and see what you can capture if you just take picture after picture after picture of that same area.

So, so there’s a lot of other interesting science that’s going to come out of this as well than, than all of the stuff that we’ve been talking about.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And they, they really designed this around four, they call them pillars of science. And, um, it’s that standard question of where is all of the dark matter and how is dark energy changing the shape of space over time? And so with their image after image, they’re, they’re starting out hitting low twenties in magnitude, which is ludicrous to think about.

Fraser Cain: And then just for comparison, the, the European Southern Observatory, I think they’re at 27. Hubble can do 32, 30. Yeah.

Anyway.

Dr. Pamela Gay: But those are with like significant numbers of hours, days there in 30 seconds. Yeah. Hitting, uh, in our, this, this is a Sloan R they’re hitting 24.7 magnitude in a single exposure. Wow. Yeah. So it’s ludicrous.

Um, so, so they’re able to map out galaxies at a whole variety of different distances. And by looking at what was the universe doing in the great distance? What was it doing in the middle distance?

What is it doing nearby? What are all these galaxies doing? How is the shape and structure of large scale structure of the universe changing?

That can tell us how dark energy has changed over time. So this is working in lockstep with the Euclid mission, with the hopefully to be completed Roman observatory, all these missions and this program are working together to solve dark matter, dark energy. But in addition to that, it’s literally inventorying our solar system.

It is finding the near earth asteroids. We need to watch out for it is looking to figure out just how often do alien asteroids plunge through our solar system. If there’s a planet nine through N out in the outskirts of our solar system, it will find it or them.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. It’s expected to find dozens of interstellar objects every year. You know, we know of Oumuamua and Borisov and that’s it.

It’s going to find dozens, if not hundreds of these every year.

Dr. Pamela Gay: If we have the models, correct. And that’s the thing. This is going to tell us if we have our models correct for things we don’t fully understand.

And so we’re getting discrete data on where are the centaurs, how many of them are there, what all these different things. It just blows my mind. You’re literally going to have more data on what’s going on in our solar system than you could monitor on a computer monitor.

Fraser Cain: All right. We got to take another break. Okay.

And we’re back. All right. So where do things go from here?

So we’ve seen first light, but they’re still in the commissioning phase. The survey has not begun yet. So what is going to be happening next?

Dr. Pamela Gay: So they’re continuing to figure out their entire pipeline process and commission the telescope. So what they’re doing is they’re figuring out everything from how does the system flex depending on where it’s pointed on the sky. This is something every telescope does.

They’re physical objects in a world with gravity, they flex. So it’s figuring that out. It’s figuring out how focus changes over time.

It’s figuring out what are the details for getting the data reduction pipeline working. They’re pulling down terabytes per night.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. They’re going to pull 500,000 terabytes and they’re transferring this all in real time from the telescope to the servers in the US. So they’re not storing it locally on the telescope.

They’re moving it right away and then processing it in real time to give astronomers alerts. We just found a supernova here. We just saw an asteroid over there.

There’s planet nine over here. And then if people want, they can dig through the data for their own specific things. Show me every image that was taken in this part of the sky over the last 10 years and you can get them all.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And one of the things that truly amazed me is, so with 20 terabytes per night, they were originally thinking we’re not going to be able to keep all the data. We’re going to have to throw stuff out. And that’s one of those things that will make any astronomer curse.

And we thought we were only going to be able to keep data tables because there was just no way all the raw data could be stored. But in the 20 years it’s taken them to get this telescope built, commissioned and out the door, there were delays with the pandemic. There were delays with social unrest.

Working with Cisco systems, taking advantage of new infrastructure built into that part of Chile. This is on the Sarah Fashion Mountain, which the subtitles literally wrote Sarah Fashion during the presser. It was hilarious.

They’re transmitting all the data to Slack here in the United States, the linear accelerator out at Stanford. They’re also transferring information to Europe. There’ll be multiple repositories.

And with their 11 data releases, there’s going to be 15 petabytes of data.

Fraser Cain: Wow.

Dr. Pamela Gay: Yeah.

Fraser Cain: So crazy.

Dr. Pamela Gay: This is completely new layers of data management. There will be 6 million orbits of solar system bodies that they figure out through this survey.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. So I think hopefully this gives you all a good sense of expectation, what to be looking out for. It’s not about the pretty pictures.

It’s about the events unfolding in the sky that we will now be able to capture. And I think the thing that I’m most excited about is the thing that I don’t know about yet. What are the, now that we’re watching everything, I always describe it as we’re finally going to see the things that the universe was doing when we weren’t looking.

Now we’re looking and it’s going to be entirely new phenomena that will be discovered through this process where someone goes, Hey, I just saw a thing and I don’t know what it is. Have we ever seen any of these before? Oh yeah.

Here’s 42 of them in the Vera Rubin data. Let’s figure out what they are. And we’re moving to this sort of additional understanding, but hopefully this will prepare everybody for what comes next, because it is going to be a busy decade.

Dr. Pamela Gay: It really is. And what’s exciting is we have other giant telescopes coming online that will be able to do follow-up observations. We have the square kilometer coming in future years.

The amount of infrastructure scattered around our planet, allowing us to understand our universe is unlike anything we thought we would have when you and I were young. And here’s to hoping that there will be plenty of scientists to get to explore it.

Fraser Cain: Wonderful. Thank you, Pamela.

Dr. Pamela Gay: And thank you, Fraser. And thank you so much to everyone out there funding everything we do. This week, I would like to take a moment to thank Adam Anise Brown, Alexis, Andy Moore, and Astro Bob, Bart Flaherty, Benjamin Mueller, Bresnik, Brian Kilby, Kemi Rassian, Conrad Hailing, Danny McGlitchie, David Green, Disastrina, Dwight Ilk, Evil Melky, Flower Guy, G.

Caleb Saxton, Glenn Phelps, Greg Davis, Helga Bjorkhag, Janelle, Jeanette Wink, Jim McGeehan, J.O., John Herman, Jordan Turner, Kate Sindretto, Kenneth Ryan, Christian Magerholt, Lee Harbourn, Marco Iarrazi, Masa Herleo, Maxim Levitt, Michael Purcell, Mike Dogg, Nick Boyd, Paul Pauline, Middle Ink, Planetar, R.J. Basque, Robert Plasma, Sergio Sanseviero, Scone, Semyon Torfason, Slug, Stephen Miller, The Big Squish Squash, Thomas Gazzetta, Travis C.

Porco, Wanderer M101, Zero Chill, Alan Gross, Andrew Allen. I started reading next week’s names. Thank you all so very much.

We have one more episode this season. It’s not going to be a happy one.

Fraser Cain: Yeah. Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next week.

Bye-bye.

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. This has been AstronomyCast.

Anyways, keep looking up. This has been AstronomyCast.

Live Show

The post #761: It’s Here! The Vera Rubin Observatory appeared first on 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.

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. This has been AstronomyCast.

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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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