The Supermassive Podcast - 19: Radiation Belts and Billionaires

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

This month it’s all about the trapped charged particles around our planet - the Van Allen radiation belts. Izzie and Dr Becky find out all about them with the help of Dr Maria Theresia Walach from Lancaster University, and Dr David Devorkin from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum explains how Explorer 1 discovered the belts in 1958. Plus, Dr Robert Massey joins to take on your questions and shares his top stargazing tips for July.  The podcast is looking for sponsorship to keep the series running. It'll help fund the recording, editing and time needed to bring you the latest from space. If you have a business that would be interested in supporting the series - or just a single episode - then email [e-mail] with the subject “sponsorship” for more information. This is a Boffin Media production by Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham 

Do we see these types of radiation belts on other planets as well? There's still questions on how exactly the particles get trapped in the first place. Have you turned on your mini magnetosphere? Hello, welcome to the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, science journalist Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethurst. Yeah, buckle up. This month, it's all about the charged particles trapped around our planet, the Van Allen radiation belts.

We'll find out all about them with the help of Dr. Maria Theresia Valach from Lancaster University. Plus, we have Dr. David Dvorkin from the Smithsonian to explore how Explorer 1 discovered the belt in 1958. But that is not all, obviously. Dr. Robert Massey, the Deputy Director of the Royal Astronomical Society is here too. So let's start with the basics, Robert. What are the Van Allen belts? Well, it's almost like a topic that's hard to start with the basics, but the

summary of it is these are belts of radiation near the earth they're between about 660 000 kilometers altitude from the earth so up in space and they're charged particles primarily from the sun that are trapped in the earth's magnetic field the magnetosphere now that's a good thing in many ways because it stops these things interacting so much with the Earth's atmosphere and protects our atmosphere too. So part of the reason that the Earth is a clement and nice place to live is because we've got this protective magnetic field around us. It's not true for all the other planets, let alone planets around other stars. These things are great for that, but as we'll find out in the program, they're also not brilliant, say, for space travelers. So you do have to consider that. It's not that it's impossible to get through them, as we'll discuss,

but they are a sort of risk for space travelers and also for sensitive satellites as well. We have to protect our equipment from the strong effects of radiation. Cheers, Robert. Yeah, I guess we're really going to have to dive into this. Astronomers' least favorite topic, magnetic field, and the uh the stuff that comes with it but we'll catch up with you a bit later in the podcast but is it really fair to call them belts though i mean that implies a skinny line around the center of our planet but in fact they're shaped more like onion layers becky's favorite quote from uh shrek do you want to dive in here? Ogres are like onions. Van Allen-Pept are like onions.

My accent is so terrible. I need to work on my Shrek accent. That can be your homework. So yeah, they are more shaped like onion layers around the earth that protect us from this radiation and trapped high energy particles so that they don't make their way down to us. I spoke with Dr. Maria Terezia-Vallach from Lancaster University who started by explaining how many there are. Typically, there's two belts and sometimes there's a third one

discovered quite recently actually. But in general, we can say that the inner belt starts about 400 miles above the Earth's surface and extends up to around 6,000 miles. So it's a big space that it's covering really. The second belt starts from about 8,400 miles and goes up to about 36,000 miles above the Earth's surface. The second one can move as well, so that can overlap with the inner belt. so it can sometimes look like one big thing. Oh wow okay so they're they are they're really dynamic then. Yeah yeah especially the outer one so the inner one is much more stable

and the outer belt moves about and changes size and shape. Oh wow okay so and you mentioned that these belts contain highly charged particles. So where do those particles come from? So there's two main sources, the solar wind and the atmosphere, really. The Earth's magnetic field can trap particles from the solar wind. So these are particles that are coming directly from the sun. And the magnetic field protects the atmosphere from destruction to some extent, but sometimes particles get energized in the atmosphere and they manage to escape and sort of join

the belts, if you will. And so the inner belt is mostly filled with protons and to a lesser extent electrons and also the occasional atomic nuclei. So its size and population is very, very stable. Whereas the outer belt varies much more, but we do know that some particles definitely come from the atmosphere because there's some oxygen ions in there. And so we know that that probably comes from the Earth's atmosphere.

But then there's also some helium in there, some helium ions, and they probably come from the sun because we don't have much of that yeah on the earth okay so why is it important to study these radiation belts so we study them to understand them better and the reason for that is really because we've got satellites going around the earth at geostationary orbit and this is where you will have most of your telecommunications satellites. And when these radiation belts get energized, and especially the outer one, when it bloats a bit and moves about, it will be in exactly the region where you would have these satellites. And if you're having some delicate technologies out there, then you want to keep them safe from the radiation belts. So understanding how they move and where

they are and how energetic they are is really important for that. The other reason really is protecting astronauts. So if you're an astronaut in space, you definitely don't want to be flying through them. Yeah, okay, fair enough. Because as we know, radiation doesn't go so well with astronauts, does it? How can we protect satellites and crewed missions from this sort of radiation? Yeah, so I guess one thing you can do is to shield your instruments and your crew. But that can be really tricky because in order to have a good shield,

you want it to be quite sturdy and thick, really. And that obviously adds weight and when you're sending things into space weight is what costs you the most money so that's really tricky really the other thing you can do is just to avoid them all together just try and fly an orbit where you're not gonna be going into it and with working technology in space the other thing you can do maybe is remotely switch it off so if you know that the radiation belt is going to start expanding um and potentially hit your satellite you could you could try and switch it off and then switch it back on again and hope that it still works okay yeah fingers crossed so how do you study the van allen belts you know as we've been hearing these are something that certain crafts want to

avoid so how do you work around that in order to study them there are dedicated spacecraft missions now that go actually through them and that is to understand them so we've got the van allen probes and they are two spacecraft that are going around the earth and they're supposed to be working until 2030 and they are purposefully built to actually fly through and measure these particles so the van allen probes have got more advanced instrumentation if you think of it like a like an actual picture previously we only had some colors and they're sort of adding the finer detail and the extra information in by adding more colors. So, for example, they can measure more ion species than we were previously able to.

So that's sort of giving us a bigger idea of what energy ranges there are in the particles and what the belts are made of. And at the same time as well, Van Allen probes, because they're two spacecraft, you can get measurements in more places. But also you can get a measurement in one particular place followed by another one. And that gives you an idea of the time history. So that's really important for understanding how the belts are changing in size and shape. That was Maria Terezia Valak from Lancaster University. So, Becky, the belts are clearly dynamic, especially the outer belt, which changes in shape and size. Do we know why that happens? What's driving that change?

I mean, yeah, they're dynamic because the sun is dynamic, right? The changes happen in response to like fresh influx of particles from the sun, you know, if the sun's particularly active at the moment, perhaps, you know, it's recently burped up a coronal mass ejection or something like that, right? And these kinds of events, you know, they trigger more spectacular aurora, for example, right? You know, the Northern and the Southern lights too.

And sometimes the Northern lights are seen, you know, as far South as the UK, you know, if we're lucky. So next time you maybe hear of that happening in the news that, you know, the aurora are gonna be seen seen further south, it's because the sun is more active. And so you can spare a thought as well for the changeable Van Allen belts, too, that will come with this extra activity from the sun. So thankfully, the planisphere is also interacting with the Van Allen belts as well. And that causes these trapped particles to scatter away from the Earth.

Essentially, that allows them to drain out of the van allen belts this is why they're so changeable it's all dependent on sun's up to and how fast they can drain away and so robert as we alluded to him as maria said there's a lot of fears about radiation when it comes to the van allen belts rightly so and especially when it came to planning the Apollo mission so why is that exactly? Well if you don't want people traveling through high radiation environments for too long and the Van Allen belts are a high radiation environment however the Apollo spacecraft were going so fast and also and so they were only in the Van Allen belts for you know a matter of hours and also the other great thing is that they're inside a spacecraft, so they have additional protection from the spacecraft itself,

enough to protect the astronauts quite nicely. And if you were outside the spacecraft without a spacesuit, I think the exposure time, the exposure would have been 16 rads, which is an old-fashioned radiation measurement, but it's well, well, well below the lethal or even harmful levels of radiation. If you're in the spacecraft, they were so well protected that even in their entire trip, the Apollo astronauts were fine. But it does get brought up occasionally by moon hoax people

who say, oh, it couldn't possibly have got out through the Van Allen belts. But if you look at the numbers, it's just not true. It is entirely possible to do it. There's an interesting point to think about, which is that if you go beyond the earth orbit if you go off to mars you're at much greater risk for much longer and not because the van allen belts but just because actually you're entirely exposed to interplanetary space and if there's a solar coronal mass ejection then you're exposed to

that radiation that's something that is taken very seriously it's probably one of the biggest risks the astronauts face on a trip like that. Yeah, absolutely. Becky, do we see these types of radiation belts on other planets as well? Yeah, it's not just Earth. In the same way that we see aurora on other planets, they're products of magnetic fields, right? So you get radiation belts around planets that actually do have magnetospheres. And we tend to just call them radiation belts. And the size and the strength depends on the strength of the magnetic field so like mars mercury venus they don't have like long-lived

durable radiation belts because they just don't have very strong magnetic fields jupiter for example though has intense radiation belts right it's the strongest in the solar system in terms of its magnetic field and they're actually made more so by the fact that there's volcanic activity on io that's also spewing out charged particles that get trapped there in the belts along with the charged particles from the sun as well so you know it's not just the solar radiation that's having a huge impact on jupiter it's also its own moons you know yeah we're not having any issue so this is actually a big issue for spacecraft that we send to jupiter as well so for example juno has been avoiding the radiation belts around jupiter so far because you know it could it could damage some of the

the equipment on board or some of the electronics on board as well the plan is for juno to eventually actually pass through the radiation belts around jupiter to investigate but i think that might be one of the last things it does just in case yeah fair enough at cape canaveral florida the army's j Jupiter-C rocket is ready for America's second attempt to launch a space satellite. No relation to the IRBM Jupiter, this is a rebuilt Redstone, a 200-mile missile carrying, instead of a warhead, three stages of solid fuel booster rockets and the Explorer, a six-foot

bullet only inches across, crammed with electronic gear. Thirty pounds of payload. This close-up of the United States edition of Sputnik was made at a press conference with leaders of the scientific teams. Dr. Werner Von Braun, Dr. James Van Allen, and Dr. William Pickery. A three-way collaboration between private industry, academic science,

and the military. Jupiter-C stands poised on its launching pad. The hours-long countdown approaches zero. A moment of enormous tension for every missile launching is still an experiment.

Any one of tens of thousands of things can go wrong with catastrophic results. But all that can be done to assure perfection has been done. The moment is at hand. The countdown reaches zero. Some three minutes later, Explorer is in orbit broadcasting to the world it's coded scientific data cosmic ray intensity meteor impact solar radiation these are the dry facts that will help carry man ever farther into the age of space that brilliant clip is taken from reports of explorer

one the first satellite launched by the united states when it was sent into space on January 31st, 1958. But what was Explorer 1 setting off to find and how did it shape our understanding of the Van Allen belts? Well, joining us now is Dr. David Dvorkin from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. So first off, David, thank you for joining us. Do you want to just start by, this mission was led by James Van Allen, right? Who was he? Well, James Van Allen was made famous, of course,

for the Van Allen belts, but that was not by chance. He had been in space science, you might say, well before NASA. He had trained in physics and in meteorological stuff. And he did quite a bit of work with that. And he was fascinated with studying the cosmic ray intensity all around the world. He sent rockets off of ships. He was very much involved in the Navy. And then after 51, still involved, even though he had moved to the University of Iowa. His payloads were the most competitive for the possibility of going into space.

I can imagine just with Van Allen's technology, he was just snapped up by space agency like by nasa then i imagine just with his technology as well so i mean in terms of explorer one what was the aim of explorer one and how did he get involved with that ah well i gotta say the primary aim was to say we're as good as the soviets but uh van allen know, he was really connected and they transferred his payload to the first Explorer. Well, he was very canny in how he put it together because it worked. It got into Explorer 1. Now, that wasn't the only experiment. Explorer also had micrometeoroid experiments, thermal experiments. So it had a number of experiments to take care of. What did it look like exactly? And what were the main aims for this mission?

Okay, well, it looked like a cylinder with a conical tip. And, you know, it had tiny little antennae and everything and it was striped. The instruments themselves were inside the conical tip and the cylindrical part. James Van Allen's Geiger counter was in there. And they could measure the magnetic fields of the Earth by tracking the cosmic rays. And that's what they wanted to do. There had been theories that the Earth had trapped radiation around it ever since the beginning of the century. And Van Allen wanted to observe them.

Explorer got into orbit around the Earth in sort of a, you might call it a looping orbit. It wasn't circular, so it was an ellipse. But that was good, because what they wanted to do was measure varying charges with height, because he wanted to get it structured. So what did they find? So it started recording, and all of a sudden, it wasn't recording that many cosmic ray events. And they knew that there had to be a lot of cosmic ray activity, but they weren't getting it. What, of course, they turned out to realize was that their instruments were saturated. The Geiger counter takes only a certain amount of cosmic rays, and it can get drowned. And in which case it said, you know, I'm off duty. And basically, it said, you know, I'm off duty. And basically, that's what happened on the first round. And that was a very educated guess by, you know, the whole team, because those fields had to be there.

Those belts had to be there, but they just didn't know the shape of them. And that's what they're trying to learn. So that wasn't the answer that they were expecting at all then, to have almost nothing detected in a way from XOR1. So how did we actually find out that these radiation belts did exist then, if the first answer we got was that there was no cosmic rays there? Oh, he had plenty of these payloads ready to go. His colleagues were extremely good at putting these things together and taking them to the jet propulsion laboratory, putting

them in the payloads. There were several ways to change the sensitivity and to broaden the sensitivity of the Geiger counters. One was to shield them so that only the highest energies got through, because that would still give them the count. There were various ways of doing it. Explorer 2 didn't make orbit, but then they were ready for Explorer 3. And Explorer 3 was launched two months later, and it had the modified equipment. They recorded a broad range of energies as the looping orbit changed, and it reached some 2,700 kilometers, which detected high-energy radiation of the innermost belt. It gave a clear picture that there is a trapped belt of radiation up there that fit the predictions of theorists for quite some time.

And that was a major discovery. Nice. You know, Orion and now Van Allen, they both got belts named after them. Oh, that's right. That's right. We used to ask, one question I did ask Van Allen was, do you have a Van Allen belt? And he's a very, very charming guy. And he just sort of said, well, that's for me to know. I love that. So how important was the launches of the Explorer satellites in terms of, you know, how we explore space today and sort of the legacy of it as well. You mentioned like Sputnik didn't have scientific instruments on board, but these did. How important was that to sort of set the scene almost for space exploration for the rest of the 20th century,

into the 21st century? Now, why is a satellite important? A sounding rocket or balloons, they're only good for a few minutes or a few hours. But you want to be able to have a sustained platform where you can watch or detect how things change over days and months of time. Dynamics Observatory that has been monitoring the sun continuously, giving us an amazingly high resolution image of solar activity. And the reason, you know, that's all linked. So it's an extremely important part of our existence and keeping track of it and determining what kind of solar energy can affect it. Boy, that is a full-time job. solar energy can affect it, boy, that is a full-time job. This is the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, astrophysicist Dr. Becky Snethurst, and with science journalist Izzy Clark.

This month, we're getting to grips with the Van Allen belts. And the reason we're talking about this this month is that it's just one of the topics that was covered at the National Astronomy Meeting recently, otherwise known as NAMM. Now, Robert, for those that don't know, what is NAMM all about? Well, NAMM is the Royal Astronomical Society's annual meeting and annual with the exception of last year when we cancelled it for obvious reasons. Caveat 2020. Caveat 2020, absolutely. The exception of our bicentennial year brilliant timing but um it was going to be in bath uh we hoped to do it again in bath this year so we didn't obviously because it just wouldn't have been safe people wouldn't want it to come but we

have got 850 astronomers online all week and i've been really impressed i i've gone to the different sessions sat in many different plenaries and so on and really enjoyed it in a way that i i guess I didn't quite expect because I've seen so many online events, but it seems to be working really well. There's a nice buzz about it. There's a very lively Slack channel, and we've had a few social events as well. So it's a job well done by the team at Bath, I think, and by us, actually, if I should say that, and credit to my colleagues for helping with it as well. Yeah, Path's on the back all round i mean this seems like i'm on twitter all the time and i've just seen so many different talks going on so what has this week involved so far well there's some really nice highlights um one of them is uh that i particularly enjoy was

stephan alexander who's a theoretical physicist from new york and he gave a talk on linking music cosmology and quantum physics. He also did it while he was in the Caribbean, which I was quite impressed by. Made us all very jealous. Exactly. I'm not sure if it was a beach, but it looks suspiciously close to one. We had Victoria Caspi, who was talking about fast radio.

She's a Cavalier Prize winner. And we've had social events, like we had a concert of William Herschel's music. So it's all been really nice, actually. And there's also science stories coming out. You know, we've got a thing on micro mountains, on neutron stars, how a dust storm cooled down Martian weather, all these kinds of things.

There's a whole load of things, really. And although, you know, people listening to this, the conference will be over. It's really nice just going to have a look at the program. You can see some of the plenary talks, the big open ones we'll put on youtube so everybody can watch them i think i'll be nicking some uh future podcast i think there's definitely some guests those plenary talks were so good though and like there's such a nice relief almost from like the set the science sessions that you go to that are so relevant for what you do like i've

been to sessions on low surface brightness features around galaxies and i've been to sessions on using machine learning to identify various different things in astronomy and then you get to a plenary and you're just like ah like tell me like what's going on in fast radio but it's like you know this is not directly relevant i don't have to make you know hundreds of notes but I can just enjoy it for the cool science that it is. Yeah, absolutely. Becky, you're giving a talk too, aren't you? So what's that all about? Yeah, I'm giving a science talk at 5 p.m. on Friday.

So let's hope people are still stuck around. But it's all about my latest research. I submitted a paper the other day. So that was a very big occasion. Thank you. Yeah, it was all about um how black holes grow so for a long time um we thought that mergers of two galaxies are responsible sort of for the growth of both the galaxy and the galaxy's central supermassive black hole because

the properties correlate um but my collaborators and i have shown in the past that you can actually have huge supermassive black holes in galaxies that have never had a merger, right? They're like these pristine, beautiful spiral galaxies. And the question is how they grow. So this talk and this paper that I've got recently is trying to pin that down, right? Sort of working out, okay, well, how fast is the black hole growing and how much material is it outflowing from these central regions around the black hole too and that gives us sort of a lower limit on how much must be being driven into the black hole and the big surprise was that you know this could easily be achieved by non-merger processes within a galaxy and also that the outflows from these things as well were huge and and had speeds well in excess

of the uh of the um the escape velocity of the galaxy too which was was really exciting so i'm really looking forward to seeing people's reactions on friday for those who stick around what people think about the work yeah i it's fun to get to talk to my stuff on this i mean we never talk about my work i mean this is going to be music to your ears but i think we should probably do another episode on black holes i don't think we've done it justice so maybe that's for the future um but shall we get back to the van allen belts we've had a lot of questions as per so thank you to everyone that sent them in becky let's start with this one from chris fletcher he asks would the van allen radiation belts have been present in the early earth or did they develop as the planet matured that's a great

question um essentially it boils down to two things right how old is the earth's magnetic field is it the same age as the earth or is it younger and has the sun always been active as well because that's really what we need to know to determine like did the van allen belts exist so earth's magnetic field is thought to have been around for at least three and a half billion years you know it's about four and a half billion years right so there might be a billion year different there and we work that out because we can see its effects on like metallic minerals in rocks on earth right and and people are trying to pin this down because not only like does it tell us how long the van allen belts have been around but also it has huge implications for like on early Earth too, right?

Because if you don't have that protective shield of magnetic field, the magnetosphere, right, then early life could have been exposed to huge amounts of radiation. So is that a bad thing? Or did that actually trigger maybe some sort of mutations as well? This is why people really want to figure this out. And we think the sun has been active for its entire main sequence lifetime of that four and a half billion years, right? So really it boils down to, you know, how long has the magnetic field been around for? So it could be that they've been around the entirety of the earth. It could be the

first billion years of life on earth, perhaps there wasn't any of these Van Allen belts. We just don't know. We don't have an accurate enough time scale on the magnetic field we're really relying on the geologists for that so come on geologists yeah fair enough okay well thanks for answering that one um timo on twitter asks robert would the van allen belts forbid space stations in geostationary orbit, similar to Star Trek, due to their radiation. I like the idea of a geostationary space station, but I think it would be a problem if the Van Allen belts encompassed geostationary orbits. Then you probably don't want to put a space station with people there.

It's not like it would be, I think, I mean, could you do it? Sure, and you could protect the people inside, but then you're going to have to have additional layers of protection you don't with stations in low Earth orbit. And when I think about people say going to do things like spacewalks and so on, you're going to be exposing them unnecessarily to additional radiation too. So it doesn't seem like a brilliant location, which I agree from a science fiction perspective is a great shame

because it would be a fantastic view. But what can you do? It's just intriguing, isn't it? I guess before the space age, although there had been speculation, we didn't know these things existed. And I don't think science fiction authors, for example, would have thought about it. Although the Van Anbel's discovery did prompt some really bad science

fiction in the early 60s, as I recall, daily Earth call fires. It's not a great film. I apologise to any fans out there. I'm constantly apologizing to sci-fi fans it's like we're gonna take your favorite episodes or films and ruin them with keep us out of cinemas okay becky ben famshed wants to know is there any link between the van allen belts and the South Atlantic anomaly? We've talked about this before, but remind us what the South Atlantic anomaly is.

Yeah, I mean, first of all, there is a link. So this is an area over the South Atlantic in sort of the middle of South America, where the magnetic field of Earth is weaker than expected. That's what the South Atlantic anomaly is and it we think it's caused by the inner von allen belt right which sort of dips down there much lower to sort of a lower altitude above uh the surface of the earth about 200 kilometers so think of it as like i don't know like a lump on the inside of the inner onion layer i guess right as it was pushing down into the atmosphere um and it is a bit of a big deal. You know, 200 kilometers above the Earth's surface

is starting to get to places where you don't really want the Van Allen belts. For example, the ISS orbits at 400 kilometers above the surface. So the ISS has extra shielding to protect the astronauts and the instrumentations on board when it passes through the south atlantic anomaly and also uh the hubble space telescope for example doesn't take any observations as it passes through

the south atlantic anomaly region so the hubble space telescope is in orbit but it's in sort of like a spirograph orbit right so it sort of wends its way around the earth and it's not always passing through that region but when it does they don't take any observations um because you just end up with like cosmic ray particles all over your images and that would not be good right um there's also reports of like standard laptops on the space shuttle just like going kaput they went through the south atlantic anomaly as well so it's a it's a big deal and also one thing I find fascinating is that on the ISS, you know, it's got all this shielding, but astronauts also have still described these reports

of sort of seeing like shooting stars, like actually in their vision, you know, sort of like that idea of like seeing stars and seeing light, but they actually see sort of like shooting stars through their vision, which could be radiation sort of like hitting their optic nerve or interacting with their optic nerve in some way and it's sort of like these ghost light that's not really there.

I just find that fascinating. That was the Apollo astronauts reported that as well, I think, actually flashes when they were on the moon and that was the explanation that was given, you know, that you just, the things you simply don't experience on Earth. And Robert, this last one from Andy D says, what are your thoughts on creating an artificial radiation shielding device for other planets such as Mars?

Well, you need a magnetosphere, don't you? So to protect the whole planet would, I suppose, mean restarting the Martian magnetic field, which would be probably beyond anything we can imagine. But sci-fi authors are going to say, I'm absolutely sure they've thought about this and i'm going to be nice now because one of the star trek things obviously is this deflector shield and a friend of mine ruth bamford at rutherford appleton space so in the uk she works on these mini magnetospheres this idea of protecting spacecraft which i guess you could

also apply to places like bases on the moon and mars and so on by generating a magnetic field around them so if you're traveling particularly from the earth to mars you could have the shield around you to protect the spacecraft from the worst charged particles so it's so it there's there's a germ of an idea there actually the idea of shielding radiation through something you can switch on like that is being thought about that feels so future tech to me like i've never heard of that before and i'm like what that's amazing i'm also picturing like serious conversations going on in like you know like uh like houston to to whatever command of a spacecraft and it's like have you turned on your mini magnetosphere i just the idea of just calling it a mini magnetosphere just sounds so like childish in my brain but I love it it sounds like an ice cream to me like a mini milk

a mini milky way anyway um if you want to send in any questions then do so you can email podcast at ras.ac.uk or tweet at royal astro sockck. And every month we put a call out on Twitter. So just keep an eye out for that and just pop into the comments. So, Robert, what are some of the things that we can see in the night sky this month? Well, there's stuff starting to come into view as we approach the later bit of the summer. And two of our favourite planets will start to be more visible. Saturn is at opposition on the 2nd of August. Opposition just means it's opposite the sun in the sky. It's perfectly lit. It's perfectly lit,

exactly. It's due south at 1am, I guess, local time in the UK because we're on summertime. Still not very high, actually. We have to wait a few years before it gets to be really well placed. But if you haven't seen it and you see this steady quite bright yellow dot in the southern sky um late at night then you're probably looking at saturn fairly low down get your telescope out get a pair of binoculars out you'll see a sort of dot it'll be obvious it's a planet small telescope it might be quite shaky because it's so low but you should be able to see the rings and then a few weeks later we've got jupiter at opposition on the 20th of august and it'll be a bit higher up. It's a bit further up in the sky from the UK.

It'll be really, really obvious as well. Now, there is a story about a Scottish police officer who thought it was a drone following her along as she was driving. I love this story. It's not unknown. People do it with Venus as well because they see this incredibly bright thing in the sky. And, of course, they're so far away that as you drive along in a straight line, it looks like it's just tracking you along,

passes the trees and all those kinds of things. So it should be reasonably forgiving about it. But if you're driving and there's a bright light low in the sky, it's probably not a drone or a UFO. It's probably Jupiter. And if you've got a pair of binoculars, take a look at it

because you'll see this bright disc and the four moons, the four major satellites around it and you'll also if you've got a telescope you can pick out details like the weather systems the belts and clouds and spots and so on it is a bit low down so it might be a bit shimmery but it's well worth a look and on the morning of the 12th of august we've got the percy of meteor shower which is an annual event it's brilliant. It's always nice because it's in the summer and doesn't, to an extent, matter how many you see.

I think you can take a drink. You can lie out in your back garden on a deck chair at midnight. And, you know, if it's warm enough, you know, you just ignore the stares from your neighbors and look up at the sky and enjoy it. And you might see, if you're in a dark place, place 30 50 40 50 meteors an hour um there's also a thin crescent moon and the advantage of that is it will set early so the moonlight won't interfere with it so if you're lucky enough to be in the countryside perhaps if you're on holiday camping

as so many of us are this year then that's a nice thing to look out for and it's not just the 12th again is it it's like you know that's just the peak yeah it's over a few weeks i mean it's it's reasonably sharply peaked so if you're looking out you know the 11th 12th 13th that's the time to do it but you're right if it's cloudy on the 12th it's not a bad idea to look the following night too and another thing that listeners might have seen if they were in the right place at the right time or just popped onto an online stream is a few billionaires taking to the skies this month. What do we think of the Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin flights? Well, who wants to go first?

I was asked about this. Yeah, I was asked about this. And the presenter of one TV station said, dispel me of my cynicism. And I said, well, I can't quite do that. But it is space tourism. It is about very rich people paying for trips to space. However, I will say that what's nice about it,

I think, is that it's innovative engineering. You see different routes to go to high altitude. They haven't technically, they've reached space, but they haven't reached orbit yet. So you're not talking about a thing where you can get on one of these ships, even for a fortune, and actually fly to the space station. Although you might be able to do that with Elon Musk, because of course he's arguably won the billionaire space race by actually taking people to the space station. But one of the nice things about the Blue Origin flight, Jeff Bezos'

flight, was that he did take Wally Funk up there. And given that she was the overlooked woman astronaut in the Mercury 13, as all the women who trained for the US space program in the early 60s were. She was never admitted officially to the program. She never got to go to space. And I think it's great that at the age of 82, I think she's finally got to do it. So that's fantastic.

Well, the wonderful thing was she beat John Glenn's record, who was 77 when he went to space in 1998, to the oldest person in space. And in just a turn of poetic justice, John Glenn was one of the people who testified against women becoming astronauts back in the 60s. Ha ha!

So, yeah. Justice. It is justice. I mean, my thoughts on all this, I've had to come up with an optimistics view of looking at this to just keep myself from screaming into a pillow of what $28 million could have been spent on instead.

There's two things that I like to think of, right? We saw, we've sort of seen in history, right? Satellites go from the realm of government agencies into commercial tech, right? And we benefited from that through weather satellites and communications and GPS and all the stuff that came out of that. So, you know, maybe we can't call what will come from space tourism from billionaires in the future. And the other thing is, you know, astronauts describe that feeling of seeing the earth as a whole and looking down at the earth

from that height where you can see the curve of the earth you see it without borders and you see it hanging in space looking so fragile right and they get this perspective shift that just makes them want to protect the earth and i reckon if the people who are going up in virgin galactic and blue origin who are the people that can afford to drop 500 000 pounds on a eight minute flight to do that they're are the people that can afford to drop 500,000 pounds on an eight minute flight to do that. They're also the people that if they experience that perspective shift, they're actually going to have the money and therefore the influence and power to make change on earth that could actually be beneficial to society, whether that might be climate change or whatever it might be. And so that's might be climate change or whatever it might

be and so that's the way i'm looking at it i'm like these are the people that we need to to want to protect earth and want to spend their money in those ways so that's what i'm hoping for yeah keeping optimistic that's cross just to keep myself from not crying yeah cross all fingers and toes i but i think that's a really absolutely a valid point and you know things do need to change and just reflecting on Wally's experiences I'm just like well this was Wally Funk's flight in my opinion and they were all just passengers because she had trained so much and was I'm so glad that she got to go. And also it was a hugely proud moment for one of the co-directors of Boffin Media.

This is a Boffin Media production. Sue Nelson wrote this amazing book on Wally Funk's Race for Space as well. And so it was really nice to just see that this has finally happened for Wally as well. So, you know, some good news at the end of it all well I think that is it for this month next time we're going to explore active and fiery worlds so think moons like Io with you know 400 volcanoes no biggie it's actually my favorite moon I think you know if you're going to push me it has to be Io oh yeah I will get into this next yeah sure okay

of course tweet us if you try some astronomy at home or if there's a topic you'd like an entire episode on. It's at Royal Astro Sock on Twitter to request that or you can email your suggestions to podcast at ris.ac.uk and we'll try and cover them in a future episode. But until then, happy stargazing.