S02E15: Rocket Lab's Baby Come Back Mission and the Mysterious Hot Celestial Body

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Welcome everybody. It's another episode of
Astronomy Daily. I'm Steve Dunkle, your

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host, all the way from the
East coast of Australia down Under. It's

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the twenty sixth of June two thousand
and twenty three, whole Dunkle and with

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me as usually as our digital assistant, Hallie. Welcome toward Hallie. Hello

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everyone, Yes, it was great
to have you here. What's on the

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menu today, Steve, Well,
there's a great story about Rocket Lab and

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their plans for a new launch soon
that's next month in New Zealand. Right,

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Yes, that's right. And there's
also been a call for something to

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be done about the growing mess of
orbital debris that would include old inactive satellites,

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spent boosters, and even tiny bits
and pieces. Yes, every little

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piece is a hazard to future missions. I was thinking about that while watching

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the Russians dump things off the ISS
the other day, which seems strange.

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And I've got a story about a
super hot celestial body that's breaking some records,

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but could use a proper name before
it gets eaten by a son.

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Oh hello on Sands. Really exciting. I'll get into it then, Okay,

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halle ol yours. Rocket Lab USA
reports that its next Electron mission will

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deploy seven satellites to space and include
an attempt to recover the rockets booster after

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launch. Rocket Lab's thirty ninth Electron
launch, dubbed that the Baby come Back

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Mission is scheduled to deploy from the
rocket Lab Launch Complex one in Mahia,

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New Zealand, on July fourteenth,
UTC. Rocket Lab is also planning to

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conduct a marine recovery of Electron's first
stage. As part of this mission,

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their recovery team will retrieve Electron using
a customized vessel and transport the stage back

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to its production complex for analysis.
The Baby come Back mission is a rideshare

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mission and will carry satellites for multiple
customers. Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter

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Beck said this mission demonstrates rock labs
ability to provide responsive space capabilities on accelerated

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timelines by making access to space possible
for customers when they run into roadblocks.

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Payloads aboard the Baby Comeback Mission include
NASA's Starling Mission is a four cube SAT

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mission designed to test technologies to enable
future swarm emissions. Spacecraft swarms refer to

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multiple spacecraft autonomously coordinating their activities to
achieve certain goals. Starling will demonstrate technologies

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for in space network communications, onboard, relative navigation between spacecraft, autonomous maneuver

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planning and execution, and distributed spacecraft
autonomy. Space Flight Laboratory selected rocket Lab

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to launch Telesat's Low Earth Orbit three
demonstration satellite that will provide continuity for customer

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and ecosystem vendor testing campaigns following the
decommissioning of Telesat's Phase one Low Earth Orbit

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satellite, and Spire Global will launch
two three use satellites carrying Global Navigation Satellite

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System Radio Occultation payloads to replenish its
fully deployed constellation of more than one hundred

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multipurpose satellites. SPIRES satellites observe the
Earth in real time using radio frequency technology.

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The data acquired by SPIRES payloads provide
global weather intelligence that can be assimilated

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into weather models to improve the accuracy
of forecasts. A weird, super hot

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celestial body is breaking records and challenging
astronomers understanding of the boundary between stars and

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planets. The object, called w
D zero zero three two DASH three seventeen

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B, is a brown dwarf that's
a mouthful. What would you have called

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it, Steve? Maybe Darren typical
anyway, it's a type of bright gashous

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of protostar. Brown dwarfs typically have
a similar atmospheric composition to Jupiter, but

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are thirteen to eighty times larger.
At that mass, these objects begin to

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fuse hydrogen isotopes in their course.
However, they aren't quite massive enough to

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spark the kind of full, self
sustaining stellar fusion that power stars like our

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sun. Think of smoldering charcoal rather
than a lit wood fired oven. Brown

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dwarfs usually burn at around four thousand
degrees fahrenheit two thousand, two hundred degrees

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celsius. That's fairly cool compared with
most stars, whose surface temperatures reach about

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six thousand, seven hundred fahrenheit three
thousand, seven hundred celsius. But w

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D zero zero three two dash three
seventeen B, which is one thousand,

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four hundred light years from Earth,
is not like most brown dwarfs. In

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a paper published excepted by the journal
Nature Astronomy, researchers measured the object's surface

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temperature and found it was a blistering
thirteen thousand, nine hundred fahrenheit seven thousand,

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seven hundred celsius. That's hot enough
for the molecules in its atmosphere to

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fall apart into their component atoms.
It's also several thousand degrees hotter than the

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surface of our Sun. This should
be impossible for a brown dwarf, but

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the researchers discovered that the object got
an assist from the star it orbits.

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W D zero zero three two Dash
three seventeen B is extremely close to its

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Sun, an ultrahot white dwarf star, so close that its year lasts just

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two point three hours. That proximity
means w D zero zero three two Dash

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three seventeen B is tightly locked,
with one side forever facing its star while

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the other faces away. According to
Science Alert, because of this, the

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brown dwarf is only superheated on one
side, even though its day side temperature

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reaches thirteen thousand, nine hundred f
its night side is a comparatively balmy one

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thousand, nine hundred to four thousand, nine hundred fahrenheit one thousand to two

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thousand, seven hundred celsius. That's
the most extreme temperature differential astronomers have measured

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on a substellar object. According to
the researchers, but these conditions won't last

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long as its molecules continue to fall
apart. The brown dwarf is actually being

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evaporated by its host star. Research
on objects like w D zero zero three

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two DASH three seventeen B could help
scientists understand how hot stars slowly consume their

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companions. It can also add to
the growing body of knowledge about the conditions

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that stars need to ignite. And
I'm sorry, Steve, I don't think

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Darren will cut it as an official
name this time. The European Space Agency

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Airbus Defense and Space and fails Alenea
Space demonstrated their commitment to promoting the safety

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and long term sustainability of space operations
at the Paris Air Show twenty twenty three

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Thursday. Satellites in orbit underpin are
modern lives. They are used for space

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science, Earth observation, meteorology,
climate research, telecommunication, navigation, and

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much more, but swirling fragments of
past space endeavors are trapped in orbit around

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Earth, threatening our future in space. Over time, the number and mass

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of these debris objects grow steadily,
boosting the risk to active satellites. Encouraged

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by its member states to implement hazero
debris approach for its missions and to encourage

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partners and other actors to pursue similar
paths. ESA is updating its internal space

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debris mitigation standards. We are calling
upon all stakeholders from across the European space

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ecosystem, including new space actors,
to display a strong commitment towards achieving global

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leadership in space debris mitigation and remediation
through the Zero Debris Charter initiative set EESA

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Director General Joseph Ashbocher. The Zero
Debris Charter aims to bridge previous EESA initiatives

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aiming to shape global consensus on space
sustainability and the agency's technical work on the

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technologies and solutions enabling safe and sustainable
space operations. It's the Astronomy Daily podcast

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with Steve Dunkley. Thanks again forward
joining us on Astronomy Daily. I'm Steve

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Dunkley, your host, and don't
forget. You can catch up with all

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past episodes of Astronomy Daily and our
parent podcast, Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley

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and Professor Fred Watson at this address
Space Nuts dot io. Now here's an

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interesting story not for the faint heart, and i would imagine. Astronauts aboard

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the International Space Station have achieved a
ninety eight percent water recovery rate in a

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breakthrough achieved by a method that might
make the faint of heart a little bit

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squeamish. They hit the peak,
Oh dear astronaut p recycling. Yes.

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The water recycling achievement is an important
milestone for low orbit space missions that aim

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to provide the basic needs of astronauts
without resupply missions. This means recycling or

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regenerating things like food, air,
and water. In terms of the International

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Space Station, each crew member needs
about a gallon of water each day for

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drinking, food preparation, and hygiene
users like brushing your teeth. The ideal

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goal in terms of water has been
ninety eight percent recovery of the initial water

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that crews taken to space with them
at the start of longer missions. This

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is a very important step forward in
the evolution of life support systems. Part

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of the team at Johnson's Space Center
that manages life support systems on the ISS,

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Christopher Brown, said into statement,
Let's say you launch with a hundred

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pounds of water, and you lose
two pounds of that and the other eight

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percent just keep going around and around, he said. Keeping that running is

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pretty awesome and it's quite an achievement. The water recovery milestone was achieved by

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the Environmental Control and Life Support System
that's ECLS during a demonstration of the improved

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Urine Processor Assembly UPA, which recovers
water from urine using vacuum distillation. I

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don't even want to imagine what that
is. The ECLSS is made up of

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a combination of hardware, including a
water recovery system that collects wastewater and advanced

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dehumidifiers that capture moisture from the air
of the ISS as a result of cruise,

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breadth, and sweat. This collected
water is sent to the water recovery

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assembly, which then produces drinkable water. The UPA element of the ECLSS distills

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urine, but brine is produced as
a byproduct of this process and that still

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contains some unused water. A brine
process or assembly was added to the UPA

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to extract this remaining wastewater. While
demonstrating its operations in the micro gravity of

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space, the BPA pushed the CLSs
to the ninety eight percent goal, reaching

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that record like the other collected wastewater. This is treated by the WPA with

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a series of specialized filters and a
catalytic reactor that breaks down the any trace

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contaminants that may remain. Sensors then
check the purity of the water that doesn't

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meet this with standards sent back for
reprocessing. Dine is added to acceptable water

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to prevent the growth of microbes,
and the water is then stored for the

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crew to use at a ladder point. So this raises the question are our

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astronauts drinking urine in space? Well, the answer is an emphatic no.

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The team points out that in fact, the water produced aboard the ISS is

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superior to the municipal water systems produced
here on Earth. The processing is fundamental,

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fundamentally similar to some terrestrial water distribution
systems, just done in a micro

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gravity Well. Williamson points out,
the crew is not drinking urine. They

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are drinking water that has been reclaimed, filtered and cleaned such that is cleaner

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to the water that we're drinking here
on Earth. We do have a lot

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of processes in plates and a lot
of ground testing to provide confidence that we

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are producing clean, potable water.
The less water and oxygen we have to

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ship up there, the more science
that can be added to the launch vehicles.

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Reliable, robust, regenerative systems mean
the crew doesn't have to worry about

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it and we can focus on the
true intent of their mission now. While

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nassa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is renowned for
piloting rovers on Mars and deploying spacecraft to

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study planets in the Solar System,
their latest project is more down to earth,

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assembling the world's largest publicly available archive
of PDFs for security research. PDFs

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are a most popular form of digital
document in the world, and while they

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might look like scanned copies of paper
documents, there are actually collections of texts,

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images who vies inactive scripts that aretas
secure as they should be given their

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ubiquity. To address this concern,
JPL has partnered with the nonprofit PDF Association

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to develop new archive files that will
help researchers analyze potential threats across a wide

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library of real PDFs. The project
involves assembling roughly eight million PDFs, totaling

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more than eight terabytes of data from
online sources. The effort is part of

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a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DABA
initiative called safe documents or safe docs,

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which aims to make digital documents safe
from malicious code and other security concerns.

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PDFs are used everywhere and are important
for contracts, legal documents, three D

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engineering designs, and many other purposes. I can tell you that as a

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graphic designer, I use PDFs in
my daily work, providing proofs of artwork

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and also finished artwork to all sorts
of publications, and they are a very

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accurate way of providing your artwork.
And they are cross platform compatible too,

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so Tim Allenson, a JPL data
scientists set in a statement, Unfortunately,

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they are complex and can be compromised
to hide malicious code or render different information

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for different users in malicious ways.
To confront these and other challenges from PDFs,

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a large sample of world PDFs need
to be collected from the Internet to

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create a shared, freely available resource
for software experts. Using the freely available

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Common Crawl public repository of web crawl
information as a starting point, JPL researchers

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identified PDFs to add to the collection, including those that were incomplete due to

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common crawls download limit of one megabyte
put download file. JPL then assess those

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bdfuurls directly to download the full documents, ensuring a fully representative archive of the

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types of PDF successible on the web. By making the collection available to the

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public, JPL hopes researchers will be
able to use and analyze the PDFs to

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identify better ways of securing the information
these documents contain. You can see why

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it would be important to make documents
secure, especially ones containing sensitive information.

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It's going to be an interesting what
classification of documents they come up with.

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And just like that, another episode
of Astronomy Daily spins out of control and

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ends for another day. Thanks for
joining us, everybody, lovely to have

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you with us, and we'll see
you again next Monday for another episode.

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I'm Steve Dunkle, your host.
Don't Forget. You can catch all the

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00:15:26.799 --> 00:15:33.360
past episodes at space Nuts dot io
and don't forget. All these past episodes

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of Space Nuts with Andrew Dunkley and
Professor Fred Watson can be found at that

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address as well. See you next
time, see you, HELLI catch you

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next time by an hour whole don't
le