Science Friday - Private Spacecraft Makes Historic Moon Landing | New Cloud Seeding Technique

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

Private Spacecraft Makes Historic Moon LandingThursday evening, the Odysseus moon lander successfully soft-landed on the moon, becoming the first U.S spacecraft to do so in over 50 years. The lander mission wasn’t created by NASA or another government space agency, but by the company Intuitive Machines, making it the first commercial mission to successfully soft-land on the surface of the moon. The mission was part of a NASA program called the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which aims to make lunar missions faster and cheaper. There are other commercial moon missions planned for later this year. Umair Irfan, senior correspondent at Vox, joins guest host Sophie Bushwick for an update on the mission.They’ll also talk about other stories from the week in science, including the move by some automakers toward plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, work on freezing antimatter, a strange meat-rice hybrid, and progress towards a universal snake antivenom.A New Recipe For Cloud Seeding To Boost Snowfall In IdahoWe’re taught in school that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.“It usually happens like that in the lake or on the ground,” said Derek Blestrud, a Senior Atmospheric Scientist at Idaho Power.But the process differs in the sky, he said. Clouds contain supercool water that doesn’t turn to ice until it reaches about -40 degrees F. That is, unless some other substance initiates the freezing.“Water’s really dumb,” Blestrud likes to say. “It doesn’t know how to freeze unless something else teaches it how to freeze.”That’s where scientists like Blestrud step in. They help clouds produce more snow through cloud seeding, which involves releasing tiny particles that serve as nuclei for snowflakes to form.Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Imagine encouraging a cloud to make more snow. It's not magic or psychology. It's cloud seeding. Scientists have been cloud seeding since about the 1940s to increase winter snowfall in the mountains. It's Friday, February 23rd, and you guessed it, it's also Science Friday. I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis. I don't know about you, but the past few winters have not had nearly as much snow as I grew up with. And I know that I'm not alone in this feeling.

A handful of states across the country have been using a technique called cloud seeding to get more precipitation on the ground. We'll talk about that story in just a minute. But first, let's hear a roundup of the biggest science stories of the week with guest host Sophie Bushwick. On Thursday evening, the Odysseus Lunarlander successfully landed on the moon. This mission wasn't created by NASA or another government space agency, but, by a private company called Intuitive Machines, making it the first commercial mission to make a successful soft landing on the surface of the moon.

The mission was part of a NASA program called Clips, the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program, which hopes to make moon missions faster and cheaper. There are other commercial moon missions planned for later this year. Joining me now to talk about that and other stories from the Week in Science is Umair Irfan, senior correspondent at Fox. Welcome back, Umair. Hey, Sophie. Thanks for having me.

Last week, we talked about the launch of this craft. So bring us up to date. Right. As you noted, this is the first private spacecraft launched by any company or any country to land on the moon. But it was also launched aboard a private space vehicle, a space X rocket. And Thursday evening, it began its descent. And what was remarkable about it was that this was automated that essentially it received no input from the ground. But about an hour before landing, there was a bit of a software glitch that mission control detected and they had to scramble to fix it. But finally, when it entered its descent, they had to wait a few tense minutes. But it did manage to automatically select a landing site and prop itself up upright and then start sending signals

back to Earth, letting us know that it's made it safe and sound. That's really exciting. So what's special about this lander? Why is it important? Well, it's land. in an area of the moon that we previously haven't explored very much before near the south pole of the moon. This is an area where scientists believe that there is ice and water, and potentially that's something that could be a useful resource for a lunar colony and a springboard for future missions to other parts of the solar system. The goal with this mission, though, is also to do a lot of testing of technology that we will potentially be using in a future crude missions where humans will return to the moon as well. So this is a bit of a test bed as well as a scientific experiment.

And turning to earth-based engineering, you have a story about the future of cars, but not electric vehicles exactly. Tell me about that. That's right. You know, you may have been seeing some news about EVs and people having a lot of trouble with charging them and some car makers are pulling back on production. And that's because sales haven't quite been where they were hoping for them to be. but car companies like General Motors and Ford recently have announced that they're going to actually be investing more in hybrid cars. So these are cars that have both an electric drive train and a conventional gasoline drive train. And one of the things that they're leaning more into is a variety of hybrids called plug-in hybrids that have a battery that can run fully electric for a little while. You plug it into a wall like an EV, but it also has a backup gasoline engine.

And they think this is actually where the market is, that a lot of people are still interested in these cars and that that, That's where most of the growth will be in the coming years. But, I mean, does that mean we're going to be stuck with at least partial gas engine power for a while yet? Right. This is the big strategic question. Do we make the leap into fully electric vehicles as soon as possible, or do we give people more runway? The issue is that with a technology like electric cars or hybrid cars, we have to wait for people to buy them. It's not like power plants where you can have a government or a utility make a decision for a handful of sites. We're talking about millions of car buyers that have to make these decisions, and we can't exactly force them to buy the kind of car that we would like them to buy.

We have to make this an attractive vehicle, an affordable vehicle. And so waiting for the market and the technology to align has been tricky, and the Environmental Protection Agency recently is proposing and thinking about new rules for future cars and is trying to balance this, the need for zeroing out emissions from vehicles, but also trying to see what people will actually buy and trying to sort of make a lot. real-world case for what kinds of regulations we need. And in a story that's related to the impact of climate change, the East Coast of the U.S. is sinking?

Yeah, NASA reported this week using data from GPS sensors that parts of the East Coast are actually sinking fast enough that they say to threaten farms, to threaten wetlands, and to threaten infrastructure. The land over the past 20-odd years or so has been subsiding by about 1 to 2 millimeters per year. but in some areas that's been sinking two or three times as fast. So what's causing that? There are two main reasons for this.

One is the retreat of the Laurentide ice sheet. This is something that covered much of the North American continent 12,000 years ago. And as it retreated, it caused the land to start to sink. Think of like sitting in a beanbag chair. If you sit down in one area, it causes another part to come back up. And then as you stand up, it sort of levels out. That's kind of what the ice sheet was doing with land here in North America. As it retreated, it started to level out and parts of it began to sink.

But another reason that the land is sinking at a much faster pace is due to the fact that we're not using water as well as we should be. The main causes here are things like groundwater withdrawal from aquifers, but also things like damming rivers and restricting the natural flows of water that would ordinarily replenish sediment and help keep the land propped up. And so by changing the way that we use water and by drawing on it too readily, we're seeing the land sink faster. Turning to some food news, people may have seen this picture on social media of a bowl of pink goo, but it's actually a meat rice hybrid. Tell us about that. Right. These researchers have been developing a way to try to cultivate meat or animal-based cells,

but they used rice as a scaffold. And this is a way to actually get it to develop a three-dimensional structure. You know, it's one thing to grow cells flat in a petri dish, but in order to give it the texture and the volume that we expect for meat, you know, you need to have some sort of infrastructure for it to build upon. And so this team of scientists thought that they could use rice and they figured out that they could actually do that. One of the researchers described it as tasting nutty and a little bit sweet. Wow. But potentially, yeah, I mean, I don't know exactly what dish you would use it in just yet. But potentially they say this could offer a more sustainable and more industrializable way

of generating lab-grown meat and potentially get to lower costs faster. I am curious to try this beefy rice. But moving on from the rice, you have a pair of stories this week about the physics of these super small. So first, there's an advance in antimatter studies? Yeah, that's right. You know, if you are a Star Trek fan, you're probably familiar with the idea of matter and antimatter.

Antimatter and matter were created in roughly equal quantities at the dawn of the universe, but now There's much more matter than antimatter, and if they come in close proximity, they annihilate each other and they generate a whole lot of energy. The problem is because of that trait, because matter and antimatter annihilate each other, it's very difficult to contain antimatter in any way. So researchers have come up with a technique to contain a form of antimatter called positronium. This is basically an electron and it's positively charged antimatter equivalent called a positron. And it only exists for about 142 billionths of a second, which is too short to do anything useful with, let alone, you know, be able to power a spaceship engine. But now they've developed a technique using lasers. Essentially, you can use a laser to pin down this wiggly atom long enough to actually be able to do some research on it.

And they think that this could potentially lead to research that they can do in the future. And in other weird physics news, there's this new theoretical study with an idea for the smallest possible, motor. Right. Researchers at the University of Granada in Spain, they've designed an engine that could be powered, they say, by a single atom. And so using theoretical framework and computer models, they developed a system where this atom could be put inside a reflective cavity, and it bounces back and forth, and it's powered by a phenomenon called quantum radiation. Now, scientists say that this isn't just a gimmick. It could potentially produce actual mechanical work, maybe not running like a very tiny fan, but they say that potentially in a very small device it could be used

for regulating temperature. We've got some good news for snake bite victims. You have a story about a possible universal anti-venom. That's right. You know, snake bites are kind of this underrated public health threat. They kill about 138,000 people around the world, and it's mainly people in poorer countries and in very remote areas. The challenge is that the conventional treatment for snake bites is anti-venom, but it's produced

from sheep and horses, and that can trigger allergic reactions in people when they're administered, but also it's unstable, it's expensive, and in order to actually make it useful, you have to know what snake bit you. And oftentimes if you're in the middle of the jungle or in the middle of nowhere, you don't know what specific species caused that by making it tricky to administer the precise antivenom. Right. So scientists have been trying to come up with a way, a more universal way to do that. And what they did was they developed a synthetic human antibody that. that could potentially target venoms from a couple hundred different species of venomous snakes found in Asia. That is definitely good news.

And finally, we all love science, but we know it's not perfect. But now there's a program to try to catch any errors that creep into scientific papers. Tell us about that. Right. If you're a pet ant or a nitpicker, this might be the ideal side gig for you. A team at the University of Bern in Switzerland says that it will pay. a reviewers to find mistakes in influential papers, and they're going to start with the field of psychology. The more errors you find, the more money you can make. And right now, they've put up

about $285,000 to start with. The idea with this is, of course, to get more scrutiny on papers, but they're also going to try to get the scientists who produce these papers in the first place to be a bit more careful about the kind of research they put out. You know, the authors, they'll get a fee as well to give them an incentive to submit their papers to the program, about 285. and they'll get to keep that money if there are no errors found. But if you're a very good nitpicker, you could make up more than $1,000 or more depending on what you find. And if the mistakes that you find lead to a retraction, you could get an additional $2,000 or more on top of that. So this really does reward finding mistakes, particularly big mistakes. And the hope is that this will lead to more

robust research and more careful publishing of results in the future. I can see how this is great for picky people, but why is it so important for us to be scrutinizing scientific papers in this way? Well, of course, science depends on things like peer review and validation and replication. And oftentimes in some of these fields, when they get more and more obscure, it becomes easy to publish results that are not as high quality or based on experiments that aren't very robust. And those results don't actually end up being that useful. Those results are hard to replicate or they don't actually lead to any tangible work that can be built upon. And so in order to filter out some of that noise, in order to catch some of these mistakes early on, the idea is that if we can invite more

scrutiny on the back end here, then potentially we can get to more robust research and lead to things like fewer retractions and that the findings that do result are things that we can be much more confident in going forward. All right. So nitpickers have a chance to help society. Finally, something that rewards my skills. Or my in. instincts. Thank you, Umer. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Umair Irfan, senior correspondent at Vox based in Washington, D.C. For decades, scientists have used a technique called cloud seeding to create snow. This could be a big boost for states that need more precipitation, whether that's for hydropower or for crop

irrigation. But researchers in Idaho have found a new, better way to seed clouds, which may have a big impact as the climate changes. So joining me to talk about this story is my guest, Rachel Cohen, Environment and Outdoors Reporter for Boise State Public Radio based in Boise, Idaho. Welcome to Science Friday, Rachel. Hi, thanks for having me. So cloud seeding is not a new concept, but can you walk me through how this traditionally works? Yeah, scientists have been cloud seeding since about the 1940s to boost rainfall, prevent hailstorms, and in the western U.S. to increase winter snowfall in the mountains. And the way it works is that clouds contain tiny water droplets that don't freeze until it gets really, really cold. But scientists can get this water to freeze earlier if they add some

particle to the mix that creates a nucleus for the ice to form around. And for the most part, scientists have used one compound to kickstart this ice forming process in clouds, and that's called silver iodide. And silver iodide has a shape that's similar to ice crystals, so it encourages them to grow. And when storms move through an area, scientists can really small amounts of silver iodide from generators on the ground, usually high up in the mountains or from planes.

And when the silver iodide reaches the cloud, it helps the cloud produce snowflakes that otherwise might not have formed. Okay. So tell me about this new method of cloud seeding that Idaho scientists think could work a lot better. In Idaho, the electric utility Idaho Power does much of the cloud seeding because it relies on water for hydropower. And Idaho Power has been cloud seeding in Idaho for about two decades with silver iodide. But this year, it's doing something new. It's added generators that release a new material, liquid propane. and releasing liquid propane in some cases instead of silver iodide can help it create more snowfall because liquid propane works up to about 30 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about 7 degrees warmer than silver iodide.

So liquid propane actually works to create ice a bit differently than silver iodide. It cools the temperature in the air down to where the water in the clouds will freeze on its own. So how much could cloud seeding in this new way actually contribute to Idaho's snowpack? Scientists have estimated that silver iodide seeding can increase precipitation in the season by about 10% on average. But Idaho Power is really on the forefront of using liquid propane in a larger operational setting. So it's still too early to know what sort of effect it will have on snowfall. But the company says using liquid propane could help it seed on the front end of winter storms, which tend to roll in a bit warmer before the temperature drops.

And it could also extend the winter seeding season by about a week or two on either end. And I spoke with Sarah Tessendorf. She's a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. And she says Idaho could be a good place to explore some of these questions about this newer cloud seeding technology. Many mountain ranges in Idaho aren't as high in elevation as some of the other places in the Rockies. And so they do tend to fall in temperature ranges, especially early winter, late winter, springtime that might be a little bit too warm for silver iodide seeding. So this isn't just something that's happening in Idaho, right? I mean, what's the national demand for

cloud seeding? Yeah, cloud seeding happens all over the world, actually. And in the Western U.S., it's going on in at least seven states, but demand is growing. With climate change and ongoing drought, many areas just don't have the water they need to meet demand from farmers, energy production, cities. And so water managers are under a lot of pressure to conserve water, but also look to technologies like cloud seeding that, could give their area a boost. And so now some states that haven't cloud seeded in the past are exploring it. Montana is conducting a pilot study and other states are expanding their programs like Utah drastically increased its annual cloud seeding budget from just a couple hundred thousand dollars to five million dollars. Do scientists think that this is a long-term solution?

Water managers are quick to say cloud seating. is not a silver bullet solution. It's just another tool in the toolbox. But scientists emphasize that you can't cloud seed your way out of a drought because you need storms to cloud seed, and specifically ones with clouds that already have moisture. Well, that's all the time that we have for now. I'd like to thank my guest, Rachel Cohen, Environment and Outdoors Reporter

for Boise State Public Radio based in Boise, Idaho. Thank you so much for bringing us this story. Thank you for having me. And that's all the time that we have for now. A lot of folks helped make the show happen, including... Melissa Mayers. Jordan Smudjick. Rasha Auredi.

Dee Petersman. Sandy Roberts. Shoshana Buxbaum. And many more. Next time, we'll talk about a new, kind of spooky evolution of AI technology, making videos just from a line of text. But for now, I'm SciFRI producer, Kathleen Davis. Have a great weekend.