Fillthevoid-with-space - Fill The Void With... SPACE

Ep. 11 Satellites, Spacecraft, and Probes - HD and the Void

An overview of the little machines that taught us about our solar system, from Sputnik to future missions into deep space.

An episode late is better than none at all! Hear about satellites, space probes, orbiters, and landers through history. 

Below the cut are sources, music credits, an awesome infographic showing all the satellites currently in orbit around Earth, a vocab list, and the transcript of this episode. Let me know what you think I should research next by messaging me here, tweeting at me at @HDandtheVoid, or asking me to my face if you know me in real life. And please check out the podcast on iTunes, rate it or review it if you’d like, subscribe, and maybe tell your friends about it if you think they’d like to listen!

(My thoughts on the next episode were space race history, the transit of Venus, or maybe something about the Moon landing. I’m prepping to interview a friend about her graduate-level research into the history of the universe and possibly dark matter, too. Let me know by the 8th and I’ll hopefully have the next podcast up on September 18th!)

Glossary

Clarke Belt - an area of geostationary orbit in Earth’s atmosphere, 35,786 km directly above the equator, where a satellite orbits the Earth at the same speed the Earth is rotating.

geostationary orbit - when an object orbits directly above the equator and appears stationary to observers on Earth’s surface.

geosynchronous orbit - when an object orbits Earth at an orbital period that matches Earth's rotation on its axis. From the perspective of an observer on Earth's surface, the object would return to the exact same position in the sky after a period of one day.

gyroscopes - a device consisting of several rings that spin freely around different axes. The rapidly rotating wheel has a large moment of inertia and therefore resists change from the plane in which it is rotated. Large gyroscopes allow for steady navigation of ships, submarines, and space ships. See examples in the link.

heliosheath - the outer region of the heliosphere. It is just beyond termination shock, the point where solar wind abruptly slows down and becomes denser and hotter as it presses outward against the approaching wind in interstellar space.

heliosphere - a huge wind sock-shaped bubble that extends beyond Pluto’s orbit and contains our solar system, solar wind, and the entire solar magnetic field.

lander - a spacecraft launched with the intent to land it, unharmed and fully functioning, on the surface of an object that is astronomical in nature. It is aimed at a specific target that astronomers want to learn more about and investigates the object at the surface level. It can be manned or unmanned.

orbiter - an unmanned spacecraft launched with the intent to bring it into orbit around a larger body in order to study that body. It is similar to a satellite but does not orbit Earth.

probe - an unmanned machine sent into space to collect data. It is aimed at a specific target that astronomers want to learn more about.

spacecraft - a pilot-able vehicle used for traveling in space. It can be manned or unmanned.

Van Allen Belts - belts of radiation in Earth’s atmosphere.

Transcript

Sources

Timeline of space exploration to 2013 via the National Archives

Timeline of NASA, the space shuttle, and near-Earth space flights

Space exploration timeline via Sea and Sky

Gyroscope definition via USC

Infographic on satellites launched 1950-1978 via the CalTech Jet Propulsion Lab

List of satellites via Wikipedia

A history of Sputnik via an excerpt from Paul Dickson’s book Sputnik: The Shock of the Century on PBS

“Instead of being concerned with winning the first round of the space race, Eisenhower and his National Security Council were much more interested in launching surveillance satellites that could tell American intelligence where every Soviet missile was located.”

Explorer 1 overview via NASA

Vanguard 1 overview via NASA

SCORE overview via the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

Pioneer lunar mission overview via the CalTech Jet Propulsion Lab

Various probe/satellite mission overviews via NASA

Australian WRESAT mission via Australia’s Department of Defence

Pioneer expeditions via NASA

Mariner 10 mission overview via NASA

Magellan mission overview via NASA

Synthetic aperture radar overview via radartutorial.edu

MESSENGER mission overview via JHU Applied Physics Lab

Mariner missions to Venus overview via the CalTech Jet Propulsion Lab

Mariner missions to Mars overview via the CalTech Jet Propulsion Lab

“The final Mariner to Mars, however, was the lab’s greatest planetary success to date.”

Mariner 9 via the CalTech Jet Propulsion Lab

Viking mission overview via NASA

Pathfinder/Sojourner mission overview via NASA

Opportunity mission overview via the CalTech Jet Propulsion Lab

Spirit mission overview via the CalTech Jet Propulsion Lab

Curiosity rover via NASA

Pioneer 10 mission overview via NASA

Pioneer 11 mission overview via NASA

Juno mission overview via the CalTech Jet Propulsion Lab

Cassini-Huygens mission overview via the CalTech Jet Propulsion Lab

Voyager mission overview via the CalTech Jet Propulsion Lab

“The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.”

Voyager mission trackers via the CalTech Jet Propulsion Lab

Heliosphere definition via NASA

Heliosheath definition via NASA

New Horizons mission overview via NASA

Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory via NASA

Chandra X-Ray Observatory via NASA

Spitzer Space Telescope via CalTech

Einstein Observatory (HEAO-2) via NASA

International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) via NASA

International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) via ESA

Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE) via NASA

Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics (ASCA, formerly ASTRO-D) via NASA archives

Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) via JHU

Active space probe/observatory missions via NASA

Chandrayaan-1 via the CalTech Jet Propulsion Lab

Hayabusa 2 mission overview via NASA

Hayabusa-2’s twitter account

A map of every active satellite orbiting Earth via Quartz

Union of Concerned Scientists Satellite Database

Cul-de-Sac comic by Richard Thompson

“Well, there’s dust everywhere, and there’s all kinds of trash—food wrappers and broken parts of things and gloves and shoes. And gas giants and black holes and rocks and dirt. And there’s old TV shows and strange creatures and there’s unidentifiable stuff that no one can explain. And it’s expanding all the time. Toss in a few trillion stuffed toys and it’d be just like your room.”

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Filler Music: ‘Satellite’ by Guster off their album Ganging Up On The Sun

Filler Music: ‘Sunn’ by Radical Face off his album Sunn Moonn Eclippse. Check out the video in the album link, it’s amazing.

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught.

This is Kjell Lindgren. He’s a NASA astronaut who just got back from 5 months on the International Space Station. There are two reasons why this picture is hilarious:

His wife is flawless and makes bad space puns to make him do household chores.

I have that shirt. Thousands of people have that shirt. That shirt is available at Target. Which means actual astronaut Kjell Lindgren, with his wardrobe already full of NASA-issued and logo-emblazoned clothes, was at Target, saw a NASA shirt, and was like, “Yes, I am buying this because this is what I want to spend my actual astronaut salary on.”

 tl;dr NASA employs a bunch of fucking nerds

Ep. 28 Tidal Forces - HD and the Void

Tidal forces are not only the cause of ocean tides, but affect how satellites orbit objects in space, and they can even tear some objects apart under their extreme stresses. Learn about types of tides on Earth and in our solar system.

This episode’s been a long time coming because the topic’s come up before. I originally conceived of this podcast as a way for me to learn about space things I’d always taken for granted, and truly, there is nothing closer to home that I’ve just agreed to believe than the statement that the tides are affected by the Moon. What? How? Why? All these questions and some I didn’t even realize I had will be answered in this episode on tidal forces!

Below the cut are my standard glossary, transcript, sources, and music credits. Send me any topic suggestions via Tumblr message (you don’t need an account for it!). You can also tweet at me on Twitter at @HDandtheVoid, or you can ask me to my face if you know me. Subscribe on iTunes to get the new episodes of my maybe now monthly-updated podcast (we’ll see how the weeks unfold), and please please please rate and review it. Go ahead and tell friends if you think they’d like to hear it, too!

(My thoughts on the next episode are Stephen Hawking and his theories, or famous comets. The next episode will go up in September—ideally, September 10th!)

Glossary

barycenter - the common center of mass between two objects that allows them to orbit.

Roche limit - the distance in which a celestial body will disintegrate because of a second celestial body's tidal forces exceeding the first body's gravitational self-attraction, or the force that’s holding it together. Within the Roche limit, orbiting material disperses and forms rings, like how Saturn’s rings are within the Roche zone; outside the limit, material tends to coalesce.

spaghettification - when extreme tidal forces pull an object apart in space.

tidal force - an apparent force (sometimes also called the differential force) that stretches a body towards another, more gravitationally-strong body’s center of mass. This can cause such diverse phenomena as tides, tidal locking, breaking celestial bodies apart to form ring systems within a Roche limit, and in extreme cases, spaghettification. It arises because the gravitational force exerted on one body by another is not constant across its parts: the nearest side is attracted more strongly than the farthest side.

Types of ocean tides:

diurnal tide - a daily tidal cycle with only one high and low tide each lunar day, and a period of a little over 24 hours.

meteorological tide - a tidal change due to weather patterns. Wind, or unusually high or low barometric pressure causes variations between the actual sea level and its predicted height.

mixed tide - a daily tidal cycle with two high and low tides that differ in their peaks. This difference in height between successive high or low tides is called the diurnal inequality. They have a period of 12 hours and 25 minutes.

neap tide - a type of bi-monthly tidal cycle that occurs when the Sun, Earth, and Moon are positioned at a 90-degree angle, so the tidal forces of the Sun are acting against the tidal forces of the Moon. During a neap tide, the difference between high tide and low tide is the least extreme.

semidiurnal tide - a daily tidal cycle with two nearly equal high tides and low tides every lunar day. They have a period of 12 hours and 25 minutes.

spring tide - a type of bi-monthly tidal cycle that occurs when the Sun, Earth, and Moon line up so that the gravitational forces of Sun and Moon are working together to form a large tidal bulge. During a spring tide, the difference between high tide and low tide is at its maximum.

tidal locking - when long-term interaction between two co-orbiting astronomical bodies causes at least one of the bodies to rotate in such a way that one face of the body is always pointed at the body it’s orbiting. This is also called gravitational locking or captured rotation. An example is that the same side of the Moon always faces the Earth, and its synchronous rotation means that it takes just as long to rotate around its own axis as it does to revolve around the Earth.

Script/Transcript

Sources

Tidal Cycles in Tides Explained via beltoforian.de

“a tide is a distortion in the shape of one body induced by the gravitational pull of another nearby object.”

Meteorological effects on tides via the New Zealand Government website

Tides and Water Levels via the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Tides by R. Nave, my dude, my guy, my friend and yours, of Georgia State University

The Tidal Force by Neil deGrasse Tyson via Hayden Planetarium (Nov 1995)

“A mild increase in distance between two objects can make a large difference in the strength of the tidal force. For example, if the Moon were just twice its current distance from us, then its tidal force on Earth would decrease by a factor of eight. At its current average distance of 240,000 miles from Earth, the Moon manages to create sizable atmospheric, oceanic, and crustal tides by attracting the part of Earth nearest the Moon more strongly than the part of Earth that is farthest. (The Sun is so far away that in spite of its generally strong gravity, its tidal force on Earth amounts to less than half that of the Moon.) The oceans respond most visibly in being stretched toward the direction of the Moon.” 

“When Earth's rotation slows down until it exactly matches the orbital period of the Moon, then Earth will no longer be rotating within its oceanic tidal bulge and the Earth-Moon system will have achieved a double tidal lock. In what sounds like an undiscovered wrestling hold, double tidal locks are energetically favorable (like a ball coming to rest at the bottom of a hill), and are thus common in the universe.”

Forget “Earth-Like”—We’ll First Find Aliens on Eyeball Planets via Nautilus (Feb 2015)

High Tide on Io! via NASA (Mar 2012)

Tidal forces and spaghettification via NASA handout

Spaghettification via Cosmic Funnies

Single atoms feel tidal force via Physics World (May 2017)

Robbins, Tom. Still Life with Woodpecker. Bantam Books: New York, 1980.

“Being four times larger than the moon, the earth appeared to dominate. Caught in the earth’s gravitational web, the moon moved around the earth and could never get away. Yet, as any half-awake materialist well knows, that which you hold holds you.”

Sobel, Dava. The Planets. Viking: NY, 2005.

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Background Music: ‘Sad Business’ by Patients aka Ben Cooper, who primarily releases music as Radical Face but also has at least three other bands or band names he’s working with/has released music as.

Filler Music: ‘It’s Getting Boring by the Sea’ by Blood Red Shoes off their album Box of Secrets

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught

After 15 years, the Mars Opportunity rover's mission has ended

It's time to say goodbye to Opportunity. The Mars rover's team made its last attempt to contact Opportunity on Tuesday night, and it went unanswered. On Wednesday, NASA confirmed that the mission is over.

RIP, little buddy. 

Mosaic of the nebulae in the Orion Constellation

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Spacewalk complete and new astronaut record set! Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson of NASA successfully reconnected cables and electrical connections on an adapter-3 that will provide the pressurized interface between the station and the second of two international docking adapters to be delivered to the complex to support the dockings of U.S. commercial crew spacecraft in the future. The duo were also tasked with installing four thermal protection shields on the Tranquility module of the International Space Station.

 Having completed her eighth spacewalk, Whitson now holds the record for the most spacewalks and accumulated time spacewalking by a female astronaut. Spacewalkers have now spent a total of 1,243 hours and 42 minutes outside the station during 199 spacewalks in support of assembly and maintenance of the orbiting laboratory.

 Astronaut Thomas Pesquet of ESA posted this image and wrote, ’ Shane and Peggy on their way to their first #spacewalk tasks.’

 Credit: ESA/NASA

Does an ecplispe cause any unusual effects on the Earth?

Yes, and this is one of the things we’re hoping to study more with this eclipse! If you are in totality, you’ll notice a significant temperature drop. We are also expecting to see changes in the Earth’s atmosphere and ionosphere. You can help us document these changes using the GLOBE Observer app https://www.globe.gov/globe-data/data-entry/globe-observer ! There are lots of great citizen science going on during this eclipse, and we’d love to have everyone here helping out! https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/citizen-explorers

The Galactic Starburst Region NGC 3603

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Ep. 32 Black Holes - HD and the Void

I have mentioned black holes in previous episodes, but now feels like the right time to talk about them in their very own episode! I also discuss the new photos of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy Messier 87 and the telescope that was nee...

New Zealand was lovely, but I already touched on what I’d be tempted to talk about with my Southern Stars episode. A person I interviewed as a potential new housemate gave me the idea for this episode because the joy of outer space is truly everywhere and anywhere. The field of astrogeology was not something I had heard of before, though I had indirectly heard of Eugene Shoemaker. I knew the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was named after him (and Carolyn Shoemaker, his wife). It turns out he basically founded the modern field of astrogeology! So I talk about him for quite a while, too.

Below the cut are the glossary, transcript, sources, and music credits. Send me any topic suggestions via Tumblr message (you don’t need an account to do this, just submit as anonymous). You can also tweet at me on Twitter at @HDandtheVoid, or you can ask me to my face if you know me in real life. Subscribe on iTunes to get the new episodes of my semi-monthly podcast, and please please please rate and review it. Go ahead and tell friends if you think they’d like to hear it, too!

(The next episode is definitely going to be on famous comets, and I’m hoping to publish that episode in May.)

Glossary

active galaxy - a galaxy with a small core of emission embedded at the center. This core is typically very variable and very bright compared to the rest of the galaxy. These galaxies emit much more energy than they should; this excess energy is found in the infrared, radio, UV, and X-ray regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

black hole -  a region of spacetime where a great deal of mass and energy have been compressed into a relatively small space. Black holes exert such strong gravitational effects that no mass or energy, not even light, can escape from inside them. There are supermassive black holes in galaxies that contribute to the development and life cycle of galaxies.

blazar - a subcategory of active galaxy, it is an extremely bright, distant object, powered by a black hole, which emits massive amounts of energy. It is distinct from a quasar because it is even brighter.

interferometry - a group of techniques to extract information from superimposing electromagnetic waves to create interference. In radio astronomy, this is done by using a wide spread of receivers to look at the same distant object, then bringing that data together with a correlator that can create a larger, clearer picture than an individual radio telescope alone could.

Messier object - a deep-sky object included on a list of 103-110 deep-sky objects made by Charles Messier and his colleagues in the 18th century in an attempt to prevent fuzzy, bright objects from being confused with comets.

torus - a donut shape.

quasar - a distant, massive celestial object that emits extremely large amounts of energy. These star-like objects may reflect a stage in the evolution of some galaxies.

Script/Transcript

Sources

Black Holes, explained via National Geographic

What Is a Black Hole? via NASA

Black Holes via NASA

Black Hole via Swinburne University of Technology

Darkness Visible, Finally: Astronomers Capture First Ever Image of a Black Hole via the New York Times (April 2019)

Event Horizon Telescope

Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole via ESO (April 2019)

How They Took the First Picture of a Black Hole via New York Times (April 2019)

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Filler Music: ‘Flame On Flame (A Slow Dirge)’ by Kishi Bashi off his album Sonderlust

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught

Peak Perseid mornings: August 11, 12, 13 | EarthSky.org

When is the peak of the Perseid meteor shower in 2020? The greatest number of meteors is most likely to fall in the predawn hours on August 12, yet under the light of a wide waning crescent moon.

Where to look, and when.