Science Friday - Saving Manatees, Nighttime Satellite Streaks, Webb Telescope Update. Jan 28, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

Space-X Booster To Hit The Moon, After Years Of Hurtling Through Space A Space-X rocket booster is on track to slam into the moon, which scientists predict will happen on March 4. The rocket was originally launched in 2015 to deploy a space weather satellite. Now, it’s a piece of space junk that’s been caught in limbo for the past seven years. Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American, joins guest host Miles O’Brien to talk about that and other science stories of the week, including implications of Russian cyber warfare, climate scientist Lisa Goddard’s legacy, a Lego robot with an “organic” brain, and everlasting bubbles.   A Race To Save Florida’s Manatees Florida’s waterways are home to a charismatic mammal: the manatee. These gentle giants are sometimes called “sea cows” for the way they graze on seagrass, the long, green plants that grow underwater in their habitat. But in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon, the seagrass is disappearing fast due to algae, which is caused by pollution in the water. This loss of food has put the manatees in great peril. Last year, over 1,000 of them died—more than any year on record. While threats to manatees are not new, this accelerated die-off concerns scientists, and is prompting a search for novel ways to help the Sunshine State’s sea cows. Joining guest host Miles O’Brien to talk about manatee conservation in Florida are Patrick Rose, executive director of Save the Manatees Club in Maitland, Florida, and Cynthia Stringfield, senior vice president of animal health, conservation and education at ZooTampa in Tampa, Florida.   It’s A Bird. It’s A Plane. It’s An Astronomical Photo Bomb. Anyone who’s spent any time gazing at the stars at night has had the experience of seeing an occasional satellite whizz by—a sighting that usually happens around twilight. But if you’ve been out in the dark lately, you may have noticed that there’s a lot more traffic in space these days. With keen eyes, you might spot a series of dots moving in a straight line. That line is a “train” of satellites in low earth orbit, launched to provide broadband internet access from space. Starlink is the main company behind such efforts currently, with thousands of satellites in orbit already, but other players, such as Amazon, are joining the market as well. The companies behind them say they can provide high-speed broadband internet access to rural areas that might be out of range of a fiber optic cable or a good cellular connection. But just as you can see those lines of glowing dots, astronomers and their telescopes can see them too, making their jobs more difficult. The problem is especially acute in long-duration exposures of the night sky—in which the dots become bright streaks across an entire image. Over the past few years, astronomers and some of the companies behind the large satellite constellations have been trying to find ways to mitigate the optical interference the satellites can cause. Dr. Bruce Cameron, the director of the System Architecture Group at MIT, describes the capabilities of some of these huge satellite constellations, and who might stand to benefit from them. Dr. Connie Walker, a scientist with NSF’s NOIRLab and the co-chair of four panels looking at the impact of these satellite constellations on astronomy, joins guest host Miles O’Brien to discuss the challenges these constellations could pose in the future, and her hopes for collaboration with industry to solve the problems.   Webb Telescope Arrives To Its Final Home In Deep Space After weeks of travel, the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, moved into its final orbit this week. Following a Christmas day launch, the spacecraft has spent a month in transit, deploying its solar array, unfolding its heat shield, and unpacking its hexagonal mirror segments. On Monday, the craft fired its engines to brake into a circular orbit around a point in space known as L2, where astronomers hope it will operate for at least 10 years. Amber Straughn, an astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center and Deputy Project Scientist for James Webb Space Telescope Science Communications, joins guest host Miles O’Brien to talk about the telescope’s journey to L2. Straughn explains what will need to happen in the months ahead to fine-tune the mirrors and commission the science instruments on board before the telescope takes its first science images sometime this summer.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Miles O'Brien. I'm guest hosting this week for Ira Flato. You might know me as the science correspondent for the PBS News Hour. A bit later in the hour, we'll talk about the plight of Florida's manatees and the work being done to reverse their bad fortune. But first, part of a SpaceX rocket is on track to slam into the moon. Scientists predict the booster will collide with the moon in just a few weeks. The rocket was originally launched in 2015 to deploy a a space weather satellite. Now it's a piece of space junk that's been caught in limbo for the past seven years. Joining me now to talk about this and other science stories of the week is Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American based in New York City. Sophie, welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me.

All right, Sophie. Why is this rocket, which has been orbiting for seven years now on a collision, course with the moon. So this is the upper stage of a SpaceX rocket. And typically when this type of rocket launches, the stage will have enough fuel left to push it back down towards the Earth. But what happened in this case is it was launching a space observatory pretty far. And so it didn't have enough fuel left. So it ended up moving into this big looping orbit around Earth where it's sort of past the orbit of the moon. And so as it's moving, it's being pushed on by the gravitational force of Earth, of the moon, of the sun, and even sunlight is actually able to push on this object as well. And so

amateur astronomers have calculated that its orbit is on a course to intersect now with the moon, and they think that it's going to smash into the far side of the moon in March, and that it's going to possibly leave a crater as much as 65 feet across. that will be visible from some of the satellites that are orbiting the moon. Very interesting. Well, how big a deal will that be when it hits the moon? Would it actually disrupt the moon's orbit potentially? So the good news is this is not a doomsday scenario.

The moon is going to be just fine. It'll keep moving in its orbit. This object, though, will leave evidence that it's passed. So the spacecraft have crashed landed on the moon before, but usually that's because they were trying to land on the moon, trying to land there safely. I think this is the first time we've got an accident of this kind happening. And it's going to give scientists a chance to study what happens when this type of object crashes into the moon, I think. And India has a satellite orbiting the moon that'll be

able to take images of this. NASA will be able to take images of this. So we'll be able to get an idea of what this looks like, what the impact, literal and scientific impact of this kind of event is. and to learn a little bit more about this type of crash. All right. Let's continue on the subject of collisions. This one is a little more closer to terra firma, put it that way. Tensions mounting on the border of Russia and Ukraine. We all know about that.

But less visible is this cyber war that is burgeoning as we speak. Tell us what's going on. Russia has a history of using cyber attacks. and also of there have been cyber attacks that Russia has denied responsibility for, but that security experts say can be traced back to hacking groups based there. So Russia and Ukraine have been having this conflict since 2014. And there have been occasions when Russian hackers have knocked out Ukraine's electric grid. Most recently, they have hackers have defaced government websites in Ukraine. And there's also a history of using malware attacks against Ukraine.

But one of the issues is, so for example, not Petia, which was one of these malware attacks, seemingly started as an attack against just one country, but it spread. And it ended up impacting a lot of other, a lot of companies, a lot of countries that were not even close. So it sort of shows how cyber warfare, it's not limited geographically. It can really spread out across the world in a way that we're not used to from physical, traditional warfare. And it's very asymmetric, of course. This is. could change the nature of war itself, couldn't it? Absolutely. It's a completely other front. It's the ability to attack a nation economically and to use intimidation without ever having to put boots on the ground. But at the same time, there are limitations.

So it's possible for Russia to use cyber attacks against allies of Ukraine. But if it does, it could face pushback. So if Russia were to attack the U.S., the U.S. could say this is an act. of war and we're going to respond in kind. It's unclear how much of an effort is going to be put towards deliberate attacks on, say, infrastructure versus more subtle use of cyber attacks like trying to spread misinformation campaigns. Well, I don't know about you, but I'm ready for something a little more fun. How about that? I wouldn't mind a little bit, something a little bit lighter. We need a light moment here. Okay, researchers have developed an organic computer chip that they've

implanted into a Lego robot. Tell us, first of all, what is this chip made of? For a couple decades now, researchers have been interested in a type of chip called neuromorphic. So this is a chip that's designed to function, kind of like the way the human brain functions. So the human brain is a little thing, right? It fits right inside your head. It's not nearly the size of like a supercomputer, but it's still capable of doing these incredible calculations shins and reasoning and doing so very quickly. So researchers have been trying to develop a kind of chips that are structured sort of like a circuit of neurons. And in this case, these researchers have made such a chip out of these polymers. So it's an organic material. They behave in some ways like

neurons and they can still carry a charge. So you're able to have this electronic circuit made out of organic materials and it's capable of learning things. So to really put it to the test, Researchers used a Lego Mindstorms EV3 kit, which you can use to make robots. And instead of having the standard controller, they use their neuromorphic controller to control this robot. Then they dropped it in a maze to see if it could learn to navigate it. How does it learn? So this maze, it's structured sort of like a honeycomb, like a bunch of hexagons. So it'll travel short distance and then it'll hit a branch where it could go either left or right.

So it was designed to always turn in one direction. But sometimes if it kept making that same turn, it would hit a sidewall or it would end up back where it started. And when that happened, the researchers would give it a tap or it would physically impact the sidewall. And so those touches sent a message to the chip that said, that's the wrong direction. And it learned, oh, when I get to this intersection, I'm going to turn the other way. And so by trial and error, by learning at each time it turns wrong that it made a mistake, it managed to slowly learn. It took it about 16 tries to complete a full run of the maze, but it finally did it. It would be cool if you could teach a Lego to get out of the way of a bare parent's foot as they're walking in their kids' room.

Because if you've done that, you know how painful that can be, right? I think if scientists came up with something to protect bare feet from Legos, they would be absolutely eligible. for a Nobel Prize. I mean, I would want to see it happen. Absolutely. I'm voting for that one. All right. Let's talk also about some kid stuff, seemingly, bubbles. Kids love bubbles, blowing bubbles. We all enjoy that. Scientists, however, have figured out a way to make them stay intact. I mean, you know, there's nothing more ephemeral than a bubble, right? But maybe not anymore. Tell us about that. Researchers have recorded the lifetimes of a few different kinds of bubbles, and as you would expect, a soap bubble does not last very long, but they're talking about a type of bubble called a gas marble, where instead of having the outer shell be made out of a soapy water solution, it's got these little tiny plastic beads in it that make it stronger. And they took one particular type of this bubble where it was a mix of water, a substance called glycerol and these plastic beads.

And they wanted to see how long it lasted. Well, it lasted 465 days, which is a world record for that type of object. Who knew there were bubble researchers like this? Tell us how this happened in the first place. So researchers are really interested in bubbles because you've got this pocket of gas or air. and then it's surrounded by an extremely thin shell. You know, in a soap bubble, that little bit of liquid can be only a couple microns thick, and it can still keep the inner part separate from the air outside.

And so there's all sorts of interest in using bubbles to make up foams or as even detectors for gases. And these particular researchers had been looking into this gas marble type of bubble for a while. And because it's so strong, they think that there could be kinds of novel applications for it. And even if it's not in bubble form, if you use this stuff that makes up the bubble as a basis for a foam or a film, they think it could have other applications as well because it is much stronger than you'd expect from something that's just little pieces of plastic with water and glycerol. It's interesting. This was serendipitous, you know, like a lot of great science, penicillin, cornflakes, Vaseline, all serendipity. in this case, pleasant accident in the lab, right?

That's right. A graduate student was studying this film with little teeny plastic beads floating in the surface of a solution. And she dipped a wire frame into it. So sort of like the loop that you use to blow bubbles that you can get these little plastic bubble wands. When she pulled it up, she created a gas marble, which was this cool, new type of bubble.

It was strong. It could be rolled along a surface. It could be put under pressure in the hand. Did she say Eureka? That I don't know. All right. Unfortunately, now we've got to take it in another direction. This is a sad note to mention to everyone. We lost an important scientist this week.

Climate scientist Lisa Goddard died this week and lots of contributions. What would you say her biggest contribution to the field of climate science was? Lisa Goddard worked in this in-between space that when she started researching it, it was not commonly studied. So a lot of people study weather events like day-to-day weather. And then there was researchers who studied the long-term impacts of climate change and how it would change Earth 50 or 100 years down the line. But Dr. Goddard specialized in looking in between those two at short-term events, at being able to predict whether there's going to be a drought next season, if there's a flood coming, these extreme weather events that are actually incredibly important for day-to-day function,

but that don't really fall into the realm of daily weather or of that long-term climate prediction. And she also was really great at communicating her findings, at helping governments learn how to track these events and setting up programs to study them and to focus on what the needs of different regions are. So a region that's subject to drought might not necessarily have to worry about floods. So, you know, their predictive model is going to focus on one type of weather event rather than the other. What a great legacy. Our condolences to her family. May she rest in peace.

That's all the time we have for today. Thank you, Sophie. Thank you. Sophie Bushwick is Technology Editor for Scientific American. We have to take a break. And when we come back, we'll talk about the plight of Florida manatees and what it'll take to keep them healthy. We'll be right back after this short point. break. This is Science Friday. I'm Miles O'Brien. Florida's waterways are home to a charismatic

mammal. The manatee, these gentle giants are sometimes called sea cows for the way they graze on seagrass, long green plants that grow underwater. But in Florida's Indian River lagoon, the seagrass is disappearing fast. Algae caused by pollution is to blame. And this loss of food has put the manatees in great peril. Last year, more than 1,000 of them died, more than any other year on record. Today, we talk to two people who are deep in the world of manatee conservation in Florida to find out why this is happening and what can be done to reverse this loss. Joining me today are my guest Patrick Rose, executive director of the Save the Manatee Club in Maitland, Florida, and Cynthia Stringfield, Senior Vice President of Animal Health, Conservation,

and education at Zoo Tampa in Tampa, Florida. Welcome both of you to Science Friday. Great to be here. Thank you for having me. All right, Pat. You go back to the beginning when it comes to the effort to save manatees back really in the late 70s. Give us a short history of your experience with these animals and the efforts to save them.

Well, I literally moved to Florida to work in saved manatees in 1976. And I had been a diver, underwater photographer for years before that, finishing graduate school. We packed up everything. And I would like to relate, the first part of a manatee I saw underwater was a scar. And it was a scar from a boat propeller. And that stuck with me my entire life in terms of what needed to happen. These were defenseless marine mammals. They can reach more than 10 feet in length, over 3,000 pounds, although that's large on average.

but they really are defenseless. They're not capable of aggression, and they're a vegetarian. And that's the main problem we're having at this moment in time with hundreds of them dying because man polluted the Indian River lagoon so much with the nitrogen from our wastewater and it produced algal blooms that shaded out the seagrass and killed it, and so we'd have them literally dying by the hundreds. So when you first got involved, there were on the order of 1,000 or less manate, One of the big problems at the time was the boat strikes, the propeller strikes.

And you literally put the manatees into public consciousness and on the license plates and help turn things around in a very significant way. So the manatee population today is bigger. And you were actually not too long ago thinking about retiring, right? Because you had succeeded. Well, I've had more than 45 years professional work in it. And we had over several decades actually helped improve the population through major recovery efforts. And we were gaining ground, you know, right and left, so to say.

But about a decade ago, we started seeing these problems increasing. But still, we were managing and we had developed a good network of researchers. The Manatee Rescue and Rehabilitation Partnership was coming on strong. but we really did not believe that it can get so bad in the Indian River Lagoon that we would see starvation being a problem for manatees. No retirement for you yet. We'll talk a little bit more about how we can fix this problem in a minute. But Cynthia, let's put manatees in their ecosystem. What is the role they play in the environment? Well, that's a great question. So as Pat was saying, they're unlike, most other marine mammals in that they're herbivores. So they eat plant material. I think most people

are used to whales and dolphins and sea lions and they eat fish. And so they're carnivores out there keeping that population in check. These guys are keeping the greens and the environment in check. So as things are growing in the water, they're coming along and munching on them. Well, Pat, you mentioned those algal blooms. And, you know, I think we can guess what the causes might be. Why don't you run through it, though? And that would potentially get us to some ideas and how this might get turned around. But frankly, it's not as easy as telling people to slow down their boats, is it? No, not at all.

In fact, the three main factors that give that extra nutrient or pollution to the environment come from leaking, draining septic tanks and drain fields that work their way into the groundwater and into the bay. You have runoff from the uplands that include the fertilizers, whether it's, from residential, from the lawns, or from the agricultural side of it. And then human waste, even when you have the sewage treatment, it's not being treated to advance wastewater levels. Those are combining, and it's come over decades of time. So we've built up too much nutrient in the environment,

and then basically the phytoplankton blooms in such billions and trillions, it gets so thick that it cuts off the light to the seagrasses, and the seagrasses die. And then those nutrients became available, and it repeats that cycle with one bloom after another over the years. One thing I'll add about the manatees, they're kind of like nature's gardener, as Cynthia's talked about. And they co-evolve with the seagrass communities over millions of years.

And so for those people that might think, well, the manatees are eating it, and that's the problem, that's not it at all. When the manatees graze and move around naturally, they actually stimulate the re-gras. growth, and you have a higher productivity within those seagrass communities. Now, the Indian River Lagoon stretches from Cape Canaveral all the way down through Fort Pierce. It's a big body of water, very shallow, doesn't have a lot of flow back and forth, and there's a lot of septic fields alongside it golf courses, you name it. Is it something with that many people living around it that can be cleaned up in a reasonable way?

Well, the answer is yes, but it is going to take, it's going to take foresight, it's going to take money, and it's going to take commitment. Florida has been growing unsustainably. We have not been treating our wastewater to a standard that really what it should be is like drinking water. And we've been mortgaging our future by development actions, putting houses and septic systems where they didn't belong, where they leach it. into the groundwater. And in mortgage in that solution, I think right now, Mother Nature is about

ready to foreclose on Florida along the East Coast in particular, because we have so much excess waste going into that. And we're going to have to invest the billions of dollars it's going to take to turn that around. And we hope that that would be a part of even the efforts in Congress right now, because what's more basic to infrastructure than how we deal with our own human waste? I don't think you're going to be retiring very soon. Pat, I'm solving that one. Cynthia, tell me a little bit about why this comes to attention when it's colder. Yeah, we've, you know, manatees face multiple problems out there. And recently, the the UME or the mortality event that we've been talking about on the East Coast has gotten a lot of

attention, which it should. But there's also a lot of other things that are still going on out there. We talked a little bit about them being hit by boats, and that's something that we work really hard to educate the public about because that's something that can be prevented. The thing that we deal with normally in a normal winter is cold stress. So these animals are not adapted to be in cold water. So as our climates change and the environment changes, sometimes we can see animals having a hard time with that. So we just released three animals the last couple of days and all three of those animals came to our critical care facility because of the syndrome called cold stress. So they're in water that's too cold for them. For whatever reason, they didn't make it into warm water. They didn't know

how to go into warm water or the area that they normally would have been in became colder that year because the climate is changing. And they become very, very ill from that. And how is that related to the lack of seagrass? Yeah, it really has come together in the Indian River Lagoon in a way that the manatees are having to make that terrible choice between staying warm and not dying of cold stress or literally starving to death over a longer period of time. So they're coming into the winter less fit. They're already malnourished quite a lot. And so as they have to stay there and forego feeding, it leads further to starvation. That's one of the things that's being looked at this year. We thought it would never happen, but there's an actual supplemental feeding program that's

being established for that area along the East Coast. It's having some limited success so far, but it has a long way to go before it's going to be able to forestall the continued starvation this winter. And that supplemental feeding program, just to help people understand, they're actually around power plants where the manatees gather in the winter because the water, the discharge water, is warm. They're actually throwing in romaine lettuce to try to feed the manatees, which gives you an idea of how desperate the situation is. One really important thing related to that, and to speak to the prior thing, too, is my understanding is that the manatees have learned over many, many, many years that they actually migrate to certain areas during the winter. And so they migrate to this Indian

River Lagoon area, because historically that has been a really good place to be. So that makes it really awful, too, that they're going to this place that has normally been a good place in the wintertime, and there's just no food there. As far as the feeding program, something we really want to, want to get out to the public because this is the question we get all the time is if we see a manatee, can we just, you know, chuck them some lettuce and feel like we're helping the situation. And it's been a really difficult nut to crack because you don't want these wild animals becoming dependent on people feeding them. And you also don't want them making that connection behaviorally that, oh, this is a good place to go because somebody's going to throw me some lettuce.

And then that person stops doing it or, you know, it's just a random thing. So it took a lot of time for them to figure out how to do this feeding program in a real scientific appropriate way so that it's targeted in the right location and it's not associated with people. It's, you know, feeders out there that are not actual people giving them food and that sort of thing. So we really plead with everybody that if you see any manatees that you're concerned about in bad body condition, or they look like they're sick or they've been hit by a boat or anything like that to call them in because they're, rescue crews that will go out and assess the situation and help take care of them the appropriate way. And instead of, you know, throwing food or doing what you think might be helpful. Yeah. Pat, it seems like Florida lawmakers may be headed in the wrong direction on this. I know they're considering a bill that would actually make it easier for people to plow over or dump a landfill on seagrass,

which, of course, is the source of food for the manatees. and the bill would create ways to mitigate it by planting it elsewhere. Is this a good idea? It's a terrible idea. In fact, what you would be doing is setting up some of the best seagrass areas in Florida, those that have made it through a lot of tough times and situations and then allow those to be taken away or smothered in the promise that you might be able to restore seagrass in other places.

And we know with wetlands banks and things like that, that they don't work well. They're really a way to sort of bait and switch, get more development, more of that non-sustainable growth in development, and not paying the proper price for that. And so it's just a further way to cause more losses in seagrass and losses of some of the best remaining seabrass areas. So tell us what laws are on the books right now, either at the state or federal level, to protect manatees, and are they good enough? So the basic federal law would be the Endanger Species Act. Manatees where we feel unceremoniously downlisted without the right biological force behind that to threaten species in 2017.

We warned them about these kind of problems that manatees are facing. And there is a very good state law. It's the Manatee Sanctuary Act that we helped establish really going back to the early 1970s as well. It has the right force of law, but it needs to be better supported. And the funding for the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission needs to be increased. Their staffing, both at the federal level and the state level, the staffing and funding for those programs had been going down over these years and they were getting behind. After it being one of the most stellar recovery programs we've had historically, we had decades of wonderful progress. But this last decade, when things were really starting to get worse, the politics began to override the science.

And we've got to return to that. Or we'll be seeing more of these kinds of problems. If you look at Tampa Bay, they went through major seagrass loss in the 1950s and 60s. They woke up to that. In the 70s, they restored most of that habitat, and they controlled the sewage discharges, the dredging, the filling. But now it even is starting to decline again. And same for Sarasota Bay, Biscayne Bay. So we're seeing early signs of problems in all of our major aquatic ecosystems in Florida.

There's time to do something about it. We're getting lip service now from the legislators and those that are in charge. But we need to see more done and soon enough that we can really turn this around. I'm Miles O'Brien. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We're talking about turning around the crisis hitting Florida's manatee but turning something like this around when you consider the causes here, it's like turning an aircraft carrier around. It's going to take time, and the manatees don't have the kind of time that this process might take.

How concerned are you for their future collectively? Well, for the east coast of Florida, I'm very concerned. We lost about 20% of the East Coast population last year. We're on a track to lose another 10 or more percent, depending on our... successfully we can, the supplemental feeding can go, whether we have space. Cynthia, the folks at Zoo Tampa are doing a remarkable job, but they can only do so much. And so we have a team that includes the federal and state government as well as the zoos and aquariums, but we don't have enough space to really deal with all the manatees that need

to be rescued. We're still working on increasing that, but we've got to do more. And so while there's some restoration work already started, we're talking about a decade or more to really restore that ecosystem. And in the meantime, these manatees are, again, facing not just the cold, not just the starvation issue on the East Coast, but nearly every manatee alive today has been hit by a boat and scarred. And we're losing 100 or more manatees every year to watercraft. Cynthia, a final thought here on manatees. you work with them so closely. Are they resilient? They're incredibly tough patients. I can tell you as a manatee doctor that they aren't fragile. They come back from things that you cannot believe they

can come back from. So that's always especially scary to me. I think when you link that to what's going on in our ecosystem, because these are all things that affect humans as well. I've been part of some interesting conversations with fishermen and people that make their livelihood on the water. And they're suffering as well. We have red tide problems because of other issues and they kill off a lot of other wildlife in addition to manatees. So the manatees are trying to hang in there. And I look at them as kind of the canary in the coal mine for all of us, that when you have

an animal that's been around for this long and has hung in there through so many things. And like Pat was saying, has been able to rebound. when we do the right thing. And when you look at what's going on with them right now, it should be a huge wake-up call to everybody. The good thing is that Florida loves its manatees. You won't find a person that doesn't like a manatee and isn't so proud to have them as the animal here for Florida. And so I'm just really hopeful that people care. They really do care and they're listening and they want to do what's right for the manatee and intern. They'll be doing what's right for the state and what's right for themselves and their families in living here.

Well, hopefully once again, people will rally to save the manatees and ultimately save the waters in which they live. That's all the time we have for now. I'd like to thank my guests, Patrick Rose, executive director of the Save the Manatee Club in Maitland, Florida, and Cynthia Stringfield, senior vice president of Animal Health, Conservation, and Education at Zoo Tampa in Tampa, Florida. Thank you both. Thank you. Thank you. We have to take a break when we come back, heading into space. This is Science Friday.

I'm Miles O'Brien. Anyone who's spent any time gazing at the stars at night has had the experience of seeing satellites whizz by. But if you've been out in the dark lately, you may have noticed there's a lot more traffic in space these days, bumper-to-bumper traffic. It's actually called a train of satellites, a group of satellites in low-earth orbit launched to provide broadband internet access from space.

Elon Musk's Starlink is the main one, with thousands of satellites in orbit already, and there are other players, such as Amazon, in the market as well. But just as you can see those lines of glowing dots, astronomers and their telescopes can see them, too, making their jobs more difficult. Joining me now are two guests. Dr. Connie Walker is a scientist with the National Science Foundation's Noir Lab, and she was the co-chair of four panels looking at this question. Dr. Bruce Cameron is the director of the System Architecture Group at MIT. He and his colleagues studied the network capabilities of some of these huge satellite constellations. Welcome to you both. Thanks for having us.

It's a pleasure to be here. Good to have you. Bruce, thousands of satellites going into orbit. The term that people are using is that it's the industrialization of space, all of this to provide internet service. What are the advantages of this type of internet network architecture? Well, for anybody who's lived on a rural satellite connection in the past, this is not your grandparents' satellite internet. The significant difference between what we've traditionally done and what these new constellations are doing is that they're closer.

So a traditional satellite internet connection goes all the way out to geostationary orbit, which is some 35,000 kilometers away. By contrast, this new generation is very close, similar in orbit to the International Space Station in what we call low Earth orbit, which can be somewhere on the order of 500 kilometers up. And with that, because it's closer, it's faster. closer, faster, but because it's whizzing by at about 17,500 miles an hour, you need a lot of them to provide continuous service. Is this something that is going to change people's lives in these rural areas or in emerging countries? I think that's yet to come. This is really an

interesting time in the satellite world because there's so many of these going up. The market is predominantly rural and difficult to access areas, as you pointed out. In fact, SpaceX applied to be part of the Rural Opportunities Development Fund and receive subsidies from the U.S. government for providing Internet into rural areas. But when we look at the populations that are of interest here, these are dominantly North America and European audiences that already have some level of connectivity to the Internet. By contrast, roughly 50% of the world's population, 4 billion people don't have reliable internet communications. 35% have essentially spotty or sometime access, and fully 15% of the world's population has

no access to the internet. But that is not the target market against which these constellations are being invested in. These are primarily being invested in to provide rural internet access and then potentially internet access on aircraft and on cruise ships for the developed world. When we talk about, say, countries like India, where they're there is much less internet capability and service. Are there better ground-based alternatives, whether it's fiber optic or 5G cellular, for example, that might be more cost-effective for everybody involved and might not crowd up the night skies?

Certainly. Any way you cut it, this is easier to do on the ground than it is in space, right? Space is an expensive way to solve this problem. And in a densely populated country like India, there are tremendous number of, of terrestrial opportunities. They may not be fiber right away, but whether they are point-to-point networks or whether they are traditional copper lines like we have here in the U.S., there are lots of other ways to grow the Internet access capability of a developing country. So let me get this straight then. It's tens of thousands of satellites serving kind of a

narrow niche of a market. Is that the way you envision it, or is this going to be broadly available to lots of people? Well, I think there's some fascinating policy questions to come from this, right? This is not a government-owned program, right? So it is a for-profit series of corporations, Amazon putting up a network, one-web putting up a network, Telesat. And these companies are looking to figure out what the largest market is by revenue to deliver against this, rather than a question of how might we increase the level of internet access for the global population. It so happens that because, as you point out, these satellites are in low Earth orbit, they're whizzing by, we need lots of them to provide coverage.

We sort of get global coverage for free, if you want to think about it that way, when we invest in the developed world in this type of network. All right, Connie, you've been patient, as we've been discussing all these little technological nuances. Help us shed a little light, if you will, on what the problem is from your perspective as an astronomer? Well, first I'd like to comment that these astronomers do understand that there's a lot of benefit to broadband access that these satellite constellations provide. However, it has been shown that if the numbers and the brightness of the satellites cannot be minimized, they will create

problems for our publicly funded large telescopes and cause the loss of science. Well, give us an example. I know for one example that comes to mind is an observatory, which is under construction right now, the Virus C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. And I understand because of the nature of its mission kind of wide-scale, long-time exposures, the satellites whizzing by may have a real impact. Yes, the Rubin Observatory will have an extremely wide field of view and have very sensitive detectors a billion times more sensitive than our eyes can see. And they're going to create a movie, basically, of everything that's changing in the universe over a 10-year period. So it's going to be an amazing thing. For them, they have this incredibly huge camera, and that camera is left

open, basically. When the satellites traverse across the sky, there's a trail that's created, not just a single spot. It doesn't just take a picture at that moment, but there'll be a trail that goes across the image. And that is what produces the problem. Given the number of satellites that are going to be launched in the next few years, it's going to come to a point very soon that every second or maybe every third image that's taken with these cutting-edge telescopes that are coming online, we'll have at least one satellite trail running through them. Is there a way to make the satellites less reflective? Well, the good news is that we're actually working with industry to produce solutions.

And some of those solutions have been implemented already by a company, and they have thought of two different ways of lowering the brightness of the satellites. And they have actually tried those, and they've worked to a certain, level in terms of what astronomy needs is not quite there yet, but they're still working at it. We're doing things like coding the surfaces of the satellite and also putting up visors to shield from sunlight, and so that we don't actually see that. Anything's reflected off of the satellite. We see something much less reduced. We should give credit due on that. That is Elon Musk's Starlink that is doing that. Yes, that is Elon Musk and SpaceX and the Starlink satellites.

But they still are launching numerous satellites that are not coded in that manner, correct? Well, they have not been coding their satellites as far as I know since visor has been used. And actually, they're now thinking of a third way of doing things because they actually need to have intercommunications between satellites. And so they might not be able to use the visors. So they're now trying to come up with new solutions, which you have to give them lots of credit for this. There's ways of taking their satellite and having it on what they call 9. edge so you don't see the whole satellite. You can also try, and they haven't quite done this yet, but it's been talked about actually adjusting on orbit if you're going over an observatory

so that not as much will be reflected towards the observatory. So there's a bunch of mitigation techniques, and there's more that we've been trying to create and agree on. You're a scientist, and we've been talking about astronomy, but, you know, the stars and the heavens and the night sky have great spiritual meaning. to many cultures. And to what extent are we dishonoring that long history and heritage? Oh, to a great extent. I mean, life pollution in general affects everything from humans to animals to our cultural heritage, to how important the night sky was, you know, a millennia ago, to even 110 years ago when lights are first used as streetlights. Culturally, indigenous populations rely on the night sky. Animals for

migration rely on the night sky. So it affects it greatly. And even if you're just out there to enjoy the view of the night sky, it's going to be very impacted if we cannot minimize the brightness of these satellites. So are you optimistic that you'll not reach a point where the satellites are completely ruining the night sky for the likes of you? Yes, I'm optimistic that we can mitigate it to a certain point. And it may not be perfect. but we'll do the best we can to do things like use software to remove as much of the satellite trails or work with the companies to know, for instance, where they are going to be with their satellites in the night sky and when and try to avoid them to create software to do that.

So there'll be a number of different mitigation techniques that we'll be able to, I think, invoke. It will be a compromise for astronomy. We will not get entirely what we want, but I think that's the way of life, you know, in general. Well, thank you. We run out of time. Thanks to both of you, actually, for joining me today. Dr. Connie Walker is a scientist with NSF's Noir Lab, and Dr. Bruce Cameron is the director of the System Architecture Group at MIT. For the rest of the hour, the James Webb Space Telescope.

It arrived at its destination this week after launching Christmas Day. It was an eventful month for the team as the telescope went through a complicated origami-like unfolding. Joining me now for an update on how it all went and a look at how the mission. will unfold from here is Dr. Amber Strawn. She's an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and serves as the Deputy Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope Science Communications. Welcome back to Science Friday, Amber. Thank you. It's great to be here. It's been a pretty exciting month. To say the least, what a week. Congratulations on the arrival. A lot happened in the months since launch. Bring us up to date on what happened and how it happened.

Yeah. So, of course, we had a beautiful, spectacular, amazing, all the adjectives, Christmas morning launch. And the launch itself was super efficient. That means that we have a lot of fuel, actually, more fuel than we expected. So that was the first part. We had an awesome launch. And then, of course, came these two weeks of intense, never done before. deployments in space. So that was a really sort of stressful couple of weeks for those of us working

on the mission. But again, it's all good news. The deployments went also almost perfectly. And then, of course, just earlier this week on Monday, we had this final engine burn, which inserted JWST into its final orbit. It's sort of home and space and million miles away. So wow, it's been it's been an eventful month. Walk us through all the things that could have gone. sideways over the past month, there were a lot of in space parlance single point failures to worry about, right? There were hundreds of single point failures. And, you know, that was really just necessary to build a telescope like this. It's so huge. It had to be folded up to put into the rocket to launch it. And then that process of unfolding the telescope in space. And a lot of

those hundreds of single point failures were involved in the unfolding of this giant tennis court size five-layer sunshield. Again, it just, everything went so, so well. It's been, it's been fun to watch. And without that giant tennis court-sized sunshield, you're pretty much out of business, because on one side of it, it's going to be over 200 degrees Fahrenheit on the other side, almost getting close to absolute zero, which is really important if you're looking for faint signatures, of heat in the distant cosmos. Yeah, the sunshield was absolutely critical for this mission. If the sunshield had not unfolded, we would not have had a telescope.

I'm Miles O'Brien, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Let's talk about the place in space where Webb is, Lagrange Point 2. Now, this is a spot where the gravitational pull of the sun and the Earth-Moon system kind of cancel each other out in a way that the space telescope orbits, with the Earth all around the Sun. Why is that an advantage? Why did you go that far out, almost a million miles? Right.

So it turns out that this is a really good place to put spacecraft for the reason you've just described. We can sort of put it out in that part of space. And because of the combined gravitational effects of the sun and the Earth, spacecraft will sort of stay there and travel along the orbit around the sun along with the Earth. This is great for JWST because it's really cold in that part of space and we need the telescope to be very cold. Also, the telescope can stay in this sort of orbit around the L2 point with minimal fuel consumption, which is also very important.

And also it enables us to have sort of constant easy communication back to Earth, right? It's always sort of in a straight line from Earth. You can sort of think of it as being straight up in the midnight sky. All right, let's talk about this mirror, which is, actually 18 mirrors that all have to line up with precision that is hard to grasp, actually. Yeah, the next three months of this telescope's commissioning process involves this process of aligning those 18 mirror segments. What we'll do is take an image of a bright star, and the first image of that star, it'll be 18 separate images, perhaps even less. We don't quite know what we're

going to see the first time. But the point of. is, is that we're trying to get that star into the field of view of the telescope. And then by tweaking each individual mirror segment, we'll figure out which star image aligns up with each segment. And by that iterative process, over about three months, we'll be able to focus this mirror into really a perfectly smoothly shaped mirror to take these awesome images of the cosmos that we expect later this summer. Okay. Everybody wants to know, what's the first target? What's the first picture going to be? The first images that we'll take, the first science images, the pretty pictures, so to speak,

won't be taken until the very, very end of this remaining five months of commissioning. There are a bunch of different targets that we, you know, the possibility of taking, but I can't tell you what they are. You're being cagey with me, Amber. Come on. I don't even know what they are. They're not people that know what those targets are. This is on a need-to-know basis.

This is compartmentalized. Wow. It's going to be a big surprise. And I tell you what, it's going to be worth the weight. I cannot wait to see these first images that this telescope is going to deliver. It's going to be awesome. Dr. Amber Strawn is an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. And she serves as the Deputy Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope Science Communications. Thanks for joining me.

Thank you for having me. Researchers need brains to understand neurological disorders and trauma, and to get them, they turn to brain banks. How does post-mortem neural matter make its way to these centers? Join Ira for a live Zoom event on Tuesday, February 1st at 6 p.m., all about the science of brain donation. Come with questions for our expert panel. Plus, attendees will get a close-up look at an actual brain donated to science. To RSVP, go to ScienceFriday.com slash live stream. Now, here's Ariel Zich with some of the folks who helped with the show this week.

Nehima Ahmed is our manager of impact strategy. Diana Montana, Montana's manager. Christy Taylor, Kathleen Davis, and Shoshana Buxbaum are our radio producers. And I'm Science Friday's director of audience, Ariel Zitch. Thanks, Ariel. B.J. Leatherman composed our theme music. Have a great weekend. Ira's back next week.

I'm Miles O'Brien.