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Hello, and welcome to Astronomy Daily, your daily guide to
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what's happening in space. I'm Anna and I'm Avery.
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It is Tuesday, February twenty fourth, twenty twenty six, and
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we have a busy show for you today.
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We do the big headline, the one everyone in the
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space community is talking about right now is Artemis and specifically,
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what is happening to that rocket at this very moment.
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Quite literally, as we record this, the SLS rocket is
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making a very slow journey about one mile per hour
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back to its garage.
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We have all the details on that. We also have
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a genuinely exciting story from Mars, a wild mission concept
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to chase an interstellar comet. Tina's mystery space plane is
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back in orbit, and we wrap up with some beautiful
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red giant science that solves a mystery that's been bugging
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astronomers since the nineteen seventies.
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Plus we run through this week's launch schedule. It is
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surprisingly busy despite all the Artemis drama. Let's get into it.
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So, Avery, let's start with Artemis, because this is a
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story that has taken yet another dramatic turn.
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Honestly, Anna, this one stings a little because just last week,
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we were watching a really successful second wet Tress rehearsal
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and NASA was talking about March six as a real
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launch date. Things were looking.
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Good, and then Saturday happened, And then Saturday happened.
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Overnight on February twenty first engineers noticed something concerning an
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interruption in the flow of helium to the rocket's upper stage,
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specifically the interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage or ICPS.
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And just to be clear for listeners who might be
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newer to the show, what does the ICPS actually do?
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Great question. The ICPS is the upper stage of the
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SLS rocket. It sits above the core stage and it's
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what fires to push Orion and the crew on their
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trans lunar trajectory toward the Moon. It uses helium internally
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to do two critical jobs. It maintains environmental conditions around
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its engine, and it pressurizes the liquid hydrogen and liquid
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oxygen propellant tanks. So helium is not optional. Helium is fundamental.
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And this helium flow issue appeared after the wet dress
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rehearsal had completed, not during it, which makes it particularly
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tricky to pin.
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Down exactly the WDR itself went smoothly. It was during
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reconfiguration afterward that data showed the interruption. NASA administrator Jared
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Isaacman posted about it on Saturday, saying the team was
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investigating three possible causes, a blocked filter between the vehicle
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and ground support equipment, a failed quick disconnect umbilical interface,
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or a failed check valve on the vehicle, similar to
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what caused delays on Artemis one.
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And regardless of which of those three it turns out
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to be, the answer is the same.
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The answer is always the same. They have to go
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back to the vehicle assembly building. You can't fix any
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of those things on the launch pad. So NASA confirmed
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a rollback, and that rollback is happening today, February twenty fourth.
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The sls Orion and the whole stack are being loaded
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onto the Crawler and making that four point two mile
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journey back to the VAB at roughly one mile per hour.
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Which takes several hours. It is not a fast vehicle.
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It's not. The crawler itself weighs about six and a
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half million pounds unloaded, and it's burning around one hundred
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and sixty five gallons of diesel per mile. It is
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an extraordinary piece of engineering in its own right.
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So where does this leave the mission timeline?
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March is definitively off the table. Isaac Man was very
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clear about that April is now the earliest possible window,
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and NASA has said that quick action to get back
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to the VAB could still preserve April. A full media
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briefing is expected this week. Crewe commander Red Wiseman, pilot
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Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Coch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy
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Hansen had just entered quarantine and have now been released again.
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This would be their second exit from quarantine, which.
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Tells you something about how hard this process has been.
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And this is still the first crude mission beyond low
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Earth orbit since Apollo seventeen in nineteen seventy two. The
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stakes are enormous.
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They really are. NASA's under pressure, both from the public
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and from the White House to get this done. Isaac
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Men has been quite transparent about the challenges, which is appreciated.
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We'll keep you updated as the investigation progresses. A media
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briefing is expected this week.
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Okay, let's lift the mood a little because our next
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story is genuinely brilliant and it comes from Mars.
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This is one of my favorites of the week. NASA's
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Perseverance rover has just been given something that effectively functions
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as GPS on a planet that has no GPS sett
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lights whatsoever.
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So how do you navigate on Mars? Walk us through
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how it used to work.
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So Historically, Perseverance used a system called visual odometry. Every
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few feet, it takes camera images of the surrounding rocks
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and geological features, and it tracks how those features shift
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and frame to estimate how far it's moved. It's clever,
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but the problem is that tiny errors add up. On
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a long drive, the rovers internal sense of where it
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is could be off by more than thirty five meters
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that's over one hundred feet. When it hit that threshold
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of uncertainty, its safety systems would kick in and it
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would just stop and wait for instructions from Earth.
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And with communication delays of up to twenty four hours,
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that could mean an entire day of lost exploration time exactly.
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So, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab developed a new system called
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Mars Global Localization. Here's how it works. Perseverance takes a
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full three hundred and sixty degree panorama with its navigation cameras.
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Then an algorithm compares that ground level view with high
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resolution orbital maps captured by the Mars reconnaissance orbit or
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far above. It matches the terrain, the ridges, rocks, slopes,
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and triangulates an exact position. The whole process takes about two.
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Minutes two minutes to know where you are with twenty
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five centimeter accuracy. That is remarkable.
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What makes it even cleverer is where the computing power
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comes from. It runs on the helicopter base station. The
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processor that Perseverance used to communicate with Ingenuity. Ingenuity fluid
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seventy second and final flight last year, so that processor
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was sitting idle. It runs more than one hundred times
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faster than the rover's main computers. The team essentially repurposed.
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It so Ingenuity keeps giving even in retirement.
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It really does. Mars Global Localization was used successfully for
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the first time in regular mission operations on February second,
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and again on February sixteenth. JPL's chief Engineer of Robotics Operations,
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Vandy verma U, described it as giving the rover GPS,
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saying it can now drive for potentially unlimited distances without
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calling home.
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And this has implications beyond just Mars, doesn't it big implications.
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NASA is already looking at adapting this for future lunar
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missions where you have difficult lighting conditions and long cold
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nights that make precise location data even more critical. And
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if we ever have astronauts driving pressurized rovers on Mars,
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they won't be able to wait for Houston to tell
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them where they are. This is exactly the kind of
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technology they'll need.
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What a story five years on Mars and perseverance just
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keeps getting smarter, and hopefully so are we now this
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next story. I love this one because it is genuinely audacious.
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We're talking about a mission concept that was published this
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week for Chasing Down an interstellar comment. Avery said the scene.
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Right so our audience will remember comment three. I slash
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ATLS the third confirmed interstellar object ever detected in our
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Solar System. Discovered in July twenty twenty five. It came
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screaming through from outside the Solar System, made its closest
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approach to the Sun last October, swung past Venus in November,
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and came closest to Earth in December. It is now
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racing away from US at over sixty kilometers per second.
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Which is extraordinarily fast. For context, that's faster than any
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spacecraft humanity has ever launched.
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Much faster, and that speed is the whole problem. Researchers
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from the Initiative for Interstellar Studies published new work this
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week exploring how you could actually send a spacecraft to
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intercept it. The short answer is you need to do
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something genuinely extreme. They call it a solar O birth maneuver.
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Explain that to us.
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So the O birth effects is actually a principle used
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in basically every rocket launch. It says that if you
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fire your engines when you're moving fast, you get a
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bigger boost then if you fire them when you're going slowly. Normally,
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it's applied when a spacecraft is at the closest point
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of its orbit around the planet. What this mission proposes
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is doing it at the closest point of a solar orbit,
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a literal close flyby of the Sun itself. We're talking
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three point two solar radii from the Sun's surface. That
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is extremely close.
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How close is that actually?
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To put it in perspective, the Parker Solar Probe goes closer,
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but even that is an extraordinary engineering challenge. At that distance,
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the heat and radiation are intense the spacecraft would need
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serious shielding, but the gravitational kick from firing your engines
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that close to the Sun is so powerful that you
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could theoretically reach speeds never achieved by human made objects,
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And then.
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You'd still need how long to actually reach three I
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gosh atls.
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If launched in twenty twenty five, which the researchers identify
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as the optimal window based on the alignment of Earth, Jupiter,
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the Sun, and the comet, the spacecraft would reach three
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I dash atls by around twenty eighty five, at a
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distance of approximately seven hundred and thirty two astronomical units
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from the Sun. For comparison, Voyager one has been traveling
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for nearly fifty years and is only at about one
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hundred and seventy AU.
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So this would be the most distant rendezvous in human history.
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By a massive margin, and only a flyby would be possible,
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not orbit insertion, because both the spacecraft and the comet
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would be moving so fast, But even a flyby would
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be extraordinary because three I dash atls didn't form an
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hour solar system if formed around the different star, possibly
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one that no longer exists. Its chemical fingerprints could tell
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us things about planetary formation elsewhere in the gallay that
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we simply cannot learn any other way.
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It's one of those stories where the scale of ambition
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just takes your breath away. Is there any serious movement
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toward actually doing this?
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The researchers are clear this is a proposal, not a
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funded mission, but twenty thirty five is only nine years away.
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Decisions would need to start being made soon, and three
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i at lists won't be the last interstellar visitor. The
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more of these we find, the more valuable the case
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for chasing one becomes dang.
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In the realm of things we don't know much about,
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Let's talk about China's shen Long spacecraft, which launched on
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its fourth mission earlier this month.
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Genlong, which means divine dragon in Chinese, is one of
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those topics that generates a lot of fascination, precisely because
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so little is officially confirmed. This is China's reusable robotic
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space plane, broadly analogous to the US Air Force's X
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three seven B. It launched from the Juquon set Light
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Launch Center on February sixth or seventh aboard a long
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March two.
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F rocket, and as usual, China hasn't said.
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Much, extremely little. The official line via state media shein
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Wa is that the mission will conduct quote technology verification
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and will provide technical support for the peaceful use of space.
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No launch time was given, no photographs, no mission duration, nothing, But.
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We can look at what the previous missions have done
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and draw some inferences.
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We can. The first mission in September twenty twenty lasted
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two days, the second in twenty twenty two lasted two
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hundred and seventy six days. The third launch December twenty
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twenty three lasted two hundred and sixty eight days. So
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recent missions have been around nine months in orbit. If
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this one follows the pattern, we might expect it to
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return around November or December.
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And what have analysts pieced together about what it does
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up there?
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This is where it gets interesting. Western space tracking organizations,
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including the US Space Force and private space situational awareness companies,
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have observed that shen Long conducts what are called rendezvous
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and proximity operations. It maneuvers close to other objects in orbit.
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It has deployed small objects possible sub satellites during at
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least two previous missions One of those objects was observed
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transmitting signals over North America, leading some analysts to describe
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it as a potential mobile signals intelligence.
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Platform, and the anti satellite angle.
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Analysts are cautious. Some experts point out that shen long,
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small payload bay, and limited power generation make it an
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unlikely direct space weapon, but the ability to approach other
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satellites at close range is inherently dual use. It could
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be inspection, it could be servicing, it could be something else.
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We genuinely don't know. What we do know is that
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the US X three seven b's eighth mission is also
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currently in orbit, launch last August to test quantum inertial
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sensors and high bandwidth laser links. These are the only