The Supermassive Podcast - 31: Life on Mars - LIVE from Standon Calling

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

The Supermassive team dust off their wellies and peg down their tents for Standon Calling. And to celebrate 10 years of NASA's Curiosity rover landing on Mars, Izzie and Dr Becky are asking the question everyone at the festival wants answered... Is there life on Mars? With special thanks to Dr Robert Massey, David Rothery, Professor of Planetary Geosciences at the Open University, and Alice Armstrong from Agile Rabbit. Pre-order our book, The Year In Space, out October 2022: https://geni.us/jNcrw The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media Production, by Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham.

Hello, Izzy here. Before we head off on a trip to Mars via standard and calling, I need to make a correction. A week after we recorded this, the plan to send a UK assembled rover called Fetch to Mars were binned. So there's a part of this show that very quickly went out of date. However, a sample return mission will still go ahead, but it will be replaced by two American drones. It will make more sense later, but for what it's worth, I think we should call them Fred and George. Anyway, enjoy the show. If Mars did have water flowing on it in the past, where did it all go? You can say, well, are we alone in the universe?

Let's be truly honest here, Robert. What is so special about Mars? Hello and welcome to the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society, live from Stand and Calling. With me, science journalist Izzy Clark. And me, astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smedhurst. This is a little bit different, to be honest, than what we normally do. We're usually either in the very, you know, quiet of the Royal Astronomical Society library

or more likely in the pandemic, just in our spare rooms with a microphone under a blanket trying to make some sort of studio. But this, this is amazing. It's so chill. Everyone's sat on the grass. We've even got dogs in the audience this is the this is great we could learn a lot from this from our like podcast recordings we're also dangerously close to um the pims bar yeah i could get dangerously also dangerous is

that i've decided to wear white jeans today at a festival which is potentially a bad choice but surprisingly that is actually not what we're here to talk about today it's been 10 years since the curiosity rover dramatically landed on mars so this month we're chatting about looking for life on the red planet does it exist and could we possibly find it and it's not the super massive podcast without deputy director of the royal astronomical society dr robert massey he's gonna get used to that so for anyone who doesn't know what is the royal astronomical well we are a big astronomy society with the second biggest one in the world we're based in london but we represent people all over the UK who are surprisingly astronomers and also people like our guest,

the geophysicists, people who look and understand planets, including the Earth and the rest of the universe. So that's pretty much what we do. So let's be truly honest here, Robert. What is so special about Mars? Well, it's like, yeah, it's amazing, right? Mars, Mars, Mars. Who doesn't like Mars? But it's frustrating. It's intriguing at the same time. So if you've ever tried to look at it with a telescope, you'll know it's really quite small. Half the size of the Earth. It's quite a long way away most of the time.

But every so often, every couple of years, and even better, every 15, 17 years or so, it's really close to the Earth. And when that happens, you get this dramatic view. And you look at it and you think, wow, this is a planet. We can imagine going there, these big deserts strewn with rocks you know in the 19th century people seriously wondering if there were canals and channels on the surface you know all that stuff and obviously the question we're talking about today is their life and you know 100 years ago there was speculation about was there really advanced life that might you know come and attack

us but we know that's not the case so i can definitely say that for anybody in the audience today no worries about martians we promise but yeah it's a really intriguing world so if you ever get a chance to look at it through a telescope and later this year is really good for that do take it and there's some really important little robots on uh so we probably need to talk about right right? We do need to talk about the robots. So the Curiosity rover is the one that we're, you know, it's almost the anniversary of. It landed in 2012 and then it was joined by another rover,

Perseverance, last year, February 2021. And there have actually been others before that as well. And there's also a Chinese one driving around the surface. So there are lots of remote controlled cars, for want of a better word, driving around Mars. Okay, so I really want to get into this with both of you so becky paint us a picture just how big are these rovers you know what what do they look like yeah i mean well they're about the size of a small car to give you an idea like i picture a mini okay like i just picture a mini driving around

the surface of mars right and i mean they don't really look like a car though they're sort of like some out of black mirror or like wall-e right this you know that little robot i honestly think that they look like the cousin of wall-e for anyone who's seen it just think wall-e and then upgrade it they're so i mean really if we're going to describe it it's a big box that contains all the science instruments and the electronics to keep it going and everything like that and then you've got these big old wheels on it and then essentially robot arms that do everything from take images to rock samples to drilling things to laser ranging to spectroscopy whatever it is you've got everything but the kitchen sink on a martian rover because you know you've got to be able to do anything you can once it gets up there and the scary thing is

is you know everyone pictures it as like someone in NASA that's just like, you know, with a joystick like this way and then this way and then this way. But in reality, you know, they send it this huge, big, long list of commands that they want any rover to do and then send it on its way because it takes that instruction, that light that's carrying that signal time to get to Mars. Yeah. An hour or so. And then finally, you know, the rover can do what it's controlled. And basically you send that off and go oh everything's okay um and so robert let's let's look at curiosity here so what can it do you know and how does curiosity work well well curiosity one of the aims of curiosity was to see if there was evidence of past life on mars you know one of the running themes that we want to understand and it it's looking for building blocks, things like carbon compounds, the

signatures of life in rocks, and trying to understand how those rocks formed. And it landed in a place, Gale Crater, that we think is an ancient lake bed. So an ancient lake bed, obviously, if there was once water, is the kind of prime place to look for ancient life. But what I like about it is the zappy stuff, actually. It looks at targets, it can blast them with a laser and analyze the vapor which sounds can you imagine you're sitting there in mission control and you say fire the laser you'd be like yeah if you're designing this you're gonna be like yeah laser yeah let's put laser exactly and it also has a weather station and it also has a hand lens as well so you imagine a rover with a magnifying glass just to look at things to see if they're worth investigating a bit further and it drills out samples and it's like like uh perseverance it's got a lab on board

so it can analyze them and put them through the lab and see what the rocks are made of yeah and i think that's what's important here is that it is literally a laboratory on wheels as you say making like it has to be able to do so many things us humans can't go in and you know meddle and if it breaks yeah there's really not that much we can do so becky we've had a decade of exploration and more yeah yeah and more full curiosity that is so that is a decent amount of time so what have we learned what has curiosity shown us has mars really been this sort of rusty dusty barren land yeah i mean that's how we picture mars right as you picture it a bit like a desert with a load of rocks and stuff like that but in reality we don't think mars has been like that because you've always had this inkling that

there either is water on mars or there has been water on mars in the past and that's come from the fact you know you can see ice caps on Mars, which is exciting. You can just about make them out sort of through a small telescope and stuff as well. You know, we've seen from satellite imagery, things that look like canyons and riverbeds and stuff like that, the same things you would see on Earth, but obviously dried up and dusty looking.

So the idea with Curiosity was that it would land somewhere that it could probe like what's happened in the past on mars or what's there at the minute so it landed in gale crater as robert said which is quite a low altitude like if mars had a sea level okay you know it would be lower than sea level so if there had been water on mars at some point it would have filled this crater that curiosity landed on and so the idea was for curiosity to then sort of say okay well is there water on mars one thing that it did find was almost like gravel in this crater right little crystals and some gravel that had been brought down essentially but i think was a river that used to flow on mars because the thing was it wasn't just like you know generic lumps of rock

they were rounded slightly they've been eroded by water that was flowing as it deposited down it was like river wash you know as it runs stuff down from the mountains so that was a really exciting find it was kind of like the first direct evidence we had that water used to flow on mars we kind of just suspected it you know before then so now what it's doing is you know not just looking for water but also what we call bio signatures yeah so signatures that life either does exist but much more likely used to exist on mars right but yeah so it's it's a bit different from what we see today it's very dusty but it's still a planet that's been shaped by water in the same way that earth is a planet that's

shaped by water as well so the question i guess is you know if mars did have water flowing on it in the past where did it all go and it ties into this idea of what made it so dusty as well and we think the reason that mars is so different from earth today and doesn't still have water flowing on it is because it doesn't have a magnetic field right so earth has a magnetic field right has a north pole and a south pole that all our compasses point to and so without a magnetic field it's not got this like protective barrier around it that protects it from very high energy radiation from the sun and so that barrage over the years onto mars essentially stripped it of all of its thick atmosphere like what earth, giving it a very thin atmosphere,

meant all the water, essentially lost into space. That's our best guess of why Mars looks the way it does today. Okay, and we will be talking about life on Mars a bit later with another guest as well. And so, Robert, so for the last 18 months, we've had a second rover, Perseverance. So how is that different from curiosity so

perseverance or percy and there is a theme here which uh becky will doubtless mention is a lot more advanced and actually launched in 2020 you know lots of things were on hold in 2020 let's face it but it went ahead it got there and it's driving around another dried up lake bed called jezero crater so the same not the same kind of place but you know there are similarities another place where they might want some in water so it's a good place to look for signs of life. And it looks like there's a river delta there as well. So water might have flown along there. And what it's doing, which is, you know, it's doing the same drilling and collecting samples, but there's two other things that are really good about it. One is it's collecting those samples

and leaving them in tubes on the martian surface ready for a mission in a few years time which we'll talk about a bit to return them to earth and it's also it's also got this fantastic device called ingenuity or ginny you may know where we're going with this that is a little mini helicopter so there is a helicopter flying around the surface of mars now that was there as a test thing because can we fly helicopters on Mars? The answer is obviously yes. And yes, and we want to. Yeah, exactly. And it's very good for mission selfies as well.

So they take lots of pictures of the rover with this helicopter. Good science. So it's about the weight of two bags of sugar, but that's the really nice feature of it too. Yeah, and we've got Percy and we've got Ginny. So that's two of the Weasleys on Mars. And you know that mission that we mentioned

that we said, you know, it was going to bring back the samples that Perseverance had collected and left on the surface. I want to call that rendezvous. Yeah.

And then we can call it Ron and then we get another Weasley on the surface of Mars. Yeah, we can make that happen between us collectively. Are we having a swing? We've got support from these guys. They'll back us up

if we put some survey out there or something so what have we learned you know perseverance percy's going around collecting all of these samples dropping them on the surface yeah is there more to it than that big question right i mean it's only been there nine months so it's you know it's not fulfilled all of its mission goals and everything yet a lot of that's been exploration but you know there is still a lot that it's found so again some of the rocks that it's found in this crater jezero crater at the end of what we think is a river delta essentially big boulders not just gravel this time you know that must have been really

fast water flow to deposit those but also that they found you know when they they drill into the rock and sort of it poofs up some of the rock as well and they look at the composition of it they found that it's igneous one igneous rock is it's formed by lava volcanoes right so that was that interesting you know sort of hinting to the past volcanic activity on mars which might explain olympus mons which is the biggest mountain in the solar system as well it's uh 25 kilometers high 16 miles okay Okay, okay. Just to give you context, Everest is 8.8 kilometers, and this is 25 kilometers. Like, it's ridiculously tall. But, and again,

all these sort of rocks that it found, these little gravel and crystals, whatever, these crystals they found, they were all eroded as well. Again, suggesting water has flown on Mars in the past,

just like Curiosity found. But it's also found organics that was the correct response what does that mean so obviously organics was kind of you think life organic essentially means it's the chemistry definition of organic it means something you know that's maybe carbon based it can be formed by life but it can also be formed by like a non-biological process as well okay so curiosity found organics perseverance has found yet more organics but it is a nice little hint that well the you know the ingredients are there you know at least that you know that life could use so that's exciting but these rock samples that perseverance taking that we hopefully will bring back should give us more idea of what

these actually are what's actually there and we're gonna probably have to wait 10 years or so before we know anything about that this is astronomy right you have to be patient and it drives me insane it's like long time for humans short time for the history of time so robert you know there's been a change of plans for the future of march and exploration but what is actually next for studying Mars? Well, you're right. There's a change of plans because we were going to see a European rover called ExoMars heading to Mars. And unfortunately, that was going to be launched

on a Russian launcher, which isn't happening now because of the war in Ukraine. And it was delayed by COVID initially anyway. So that's really uncertain. But the big thing to look forward to, I think, is that Fetch rover or an alternative plan. There's other things under discussion. You mean Ron?

Ron. Ron the rover. Not Fetch. Not Fetch. We're going to call it Ron the rover from now on. So that will be something really to look forward to, perhaps by 2028 or so as a mooted launch date, or something similar that can get them to a spacecraft, which will be the first time ever taking off from the surface of Mars and getting them back to Earth. It will be incredibly ambitious. It's a brilliant thing

to be trying. And, you know, we really want to see it working. Now, you also think, should we send people there? Will they go there? Well, I think maybe someday. But the big problem, it's not just dangerous, which it is. But if we go there, we're taking our bugs with us, right? So we don't want to take COVID to Mars, mars right bad enough stomping around the country in the world so trying to keep people from bringing their bugs to mars is a big problem so if you think there's even the slimmest chance of life there then really you know people should probably in my view stay away for the time being okay but that that is the question that we want to know is, is there life on Mars? Yeah. So to answer that, please welcome Professor David Rothery,

Professor of Planetary Geosciences at The Open University. Also, can we say like, sporting a volcano top, which I have so much time for. Amazing. So, David, million million pound question is there life on mars well we just don't know yeah well okay i guess that's what i'm for the day we don't know though but do we have some idea some inkling like what's your sort of you know you've you're the person that's got the inside scoop. As we've already said, there are plenty of signs that there was liquid water in the past. So there has been flowing water. And that is obviously at the right temperature for life to exist.

There may have been conditions for life to begin on Mars as well. So it's the easiest place to get to, to look for signs of past life. Yeah. So we know that the conditions for life maybe once were right and we've mentioned this idea of bio signatures and things like this so what exactly are we looking for? Well you've mentioned organic molecules already there's an instrument called Sherlock on Percy as I have to call it which will get look close at rock samples for ultraviolet fluorescent signatures of organic molecules, which, as you said, can be produced by life, but they can be produced by non-life processes as well.

But we want to see if they're in the right place. The thing about Percy is it's going to a delta where a river has discharged into this empty crater where there used to be a lake bed. So it's the right place to go and look for where there might have been things living maybe three billion years ago. But Mars has changed a lot since then, losing the atmosphere because there's no magnetic field and not enough gravity to hold onto all the air as well. So water at the surface now will just turn to vapour straight away. That's a tricky thing. You haven't got surface liquid water on Mars at the moment. So it's not a place to look for flourishing life at the moment. Okay. So when we talk about life, are we talking about life that did exist or does exist, dare I say?

Are we looking for something that could potentially form animals, plants, that sort of thing? We're thinking single-celled life. If there is life on Mars today, it will be microbes, very simple organisms living inside rocks or below ground where there's a little bit of ice just beginning to melt and they can munch on the chemical energy and survive. In the past, there could have been a more flourishing biosphere, possibly multicellular, maybe plants using photosynthesis.

That's not the kind of thing that would be very easy on Mars today. But if life ever did get started on Mars, it may well have clung on. A question I get asked a lot, and I'm really interested in your take on this, is why does it matter if there's life on Mars? There's two ways to look at that. You can say, well, are we alone in the universe? Is Earth the only place with life? It's the only place we know at the moment that there is life. But did life start anywhere else? We know that there are more planets than stars in our galaxy.

So that is 10 to the 10? Yeah, something like that. Planets of which one in 100 hundred might be habitable the right conditions for life that's still an enormous number of planets that could support life if you took it there if you took microbes there the question is did it start in these places independently we've got no data on that at all now if we go to mars and find some life that doesn't quite answer the question because we don't know that it started independently on Mars because we have on Earth meteorites that have been knocked off

Mars and fallen to Earth and some must have gone the other way as well. So over the past four and a half billion years, Earth and Mars have been exchanging bodily fluids, if you will, and if there's life on one, it may have come from the other we could be martians we could or we could have sent earthlings boats to live on mars so that won't prove that life is common in the universe if we find it on mars as well as earth unless we can demonstrate a separate genesis no relationship between life what do you think would be more interesting that it if life if we found life on mars that it looked the same as life on earth or that it looked completely different oh big question i think if it looked completely different we'd be thinking it started independently on mars therefore if it starts

independently on earth and on mars hey look at all these habitable planets elsewhere in the galaxy surely life has started on some of those but while we've only got one piece of evidence one place where life has started yeah um then we're still in the dark and i think that's a really big question there's so many planets that could have life do any of them have life well this is what i wanted to know because is mars really our best bet within our solar system to find life or you know should we start looking oh shush just context becky is obsessed with saturn and at every opportunity we'll try and talk about saturn it's the best planet you can't yeah no shush i don't mind that i i love saturn well i love saturn's moons

mars is the easiest place to go to to look for life right okay but it's not the likeliest place to find life if you can get there if you ask me okay because there are moons of both Saturn and Jupiter which are icy on the outside rocky on the inside and in between the ice and the rock there is liquid water now there's no sunlight there it's pitch black but if the rock is heated by tidal processes, as we think it is, you can have water drawn into the rock, heating up, coming out, charged with chemicals. It's like black smoke events on the floor of the Earth's oceans. Life can survive there. So inside Enceladus at Saturn or Europa at Jupiter,

those are places where life could be comparatively flourishing much more than it is on Mars today. Yeah, and so can I, I know you've got a question, Peggy, but I just want to jump in here. Why is it, why are we so obsessed with water when we're having this conversation about life, whether that is on Mars or on other planets or other worlds, you know, it always comes back to water. The only life that we know of requires water as a solvent your body is

what is it 90 percent water so is mine as well i'm not being insulting but we need water life requires water to live it needs a solvent for biological processes to go on water is a liquid made of the two most the first and second most common elements in the universe, hydrogen and oxygen. I think helium might be the second. No, it's the second. Say helium is second. Is oxygen the third or fourth?

And it's very common. It's very common. We can do it. What else have you got? You can make methane, you can make ammonia, but they're liquid over much narrower

ranges of temperature and they don't have quite the same versatile properties as water. So water's a really good solvent. If you want to go looking for so water is a really good solvent if you want to go looking for elephants you look in elephant country you want to go looking for life you look where there's liquid water doesn't mean there can't be life based on methane or ammonia but water's your best bet so that's what we're concentrating on

looking at and there are these watery liquid watery places in the soil system inside europa inside enceladus and not just inside Enceladus, it's venting the stuff to space through cracks. So you can fly through the plumes as a Cassini mission did and sample it. And it found so many chemical traces compatible with there being a biosphere down there. This is why Saturn's the best.

I'm just saying. Anyway, I have one question for you. If you were a betting man, David, what would you put your bet on? Would you say there is life on Mars? I'd say there was life in the past on Mars. Whether it's still there today, I think it'd be quite hard to extinguish all life completely.

So probably yes. If you force me to bet one way or the other. There we go. We've heard it first, guys. Yes. I want to put this to the audience. Audience, do we think there's life on Mars? Yeah, yeah.

Okay, well, we've already agreed. Hang on, hang on. We have to do this scientifically, isn't it? Who says no? Can I get a cheer for life on Mars? Yes, there's life on Mars. And can I get a cheer for, nah, there's no life on Mars. Yes, there's life on Mars. And can I get a cheer for, nah, there's no life on Mars.

Oh, and can I get a cheer for there was life on Mars once, but not anymore. Yeah, well, chicken news. So scientific. I think we've got that in the audience

as life on Mars. David, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks, David. Big hand for David. Woo! Right, so, this is Big hand for David. Woo! Right, so this is the moment

that we slightly prepared you for. We want to see if there's anyone here at Stand and Calling who has any questions for the team. Ideally about Mars,

but I think between us we can probably sort it out. We take anything spaced really. Oh, that hand shot up over there.

That is... Well, the next one I'm going to show you. That was like a flashback to me as a nine-year-old like i must ask a question hi i i read somewhere that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on the planet is that about right yeah i mean it's obviously everything of this is a guesstimate right because do you want to go count the number of grains of sand on the planet?

No, nobody does, right? So you do it as an estimate. You say, okay, let's take a bucket's worth of sand off a beach. How many grains of sand is in a bucket's worth of the beach? How many buckets worth is the entire beach? How many beaches are there on Earth? And you keep multiplying until you get a pretty massive number with many zeros at the end of it. In the same way, you can say, okay, our galaxy is the Milky Way. The sun is one star of a hundred billion stars,

and it's a fairly small-ish galaxy. It's a medium average, I guess. So you've got galaxies maybe with a trillion, tens of trillions of stars in them. and then you've got uncountable number of galaxies in the sky so in a patch of sky that is about five percent of the size of the full moon that is the darkest patch of sky we know of that has the least stuff in it there's five thousand galaxies wow so it's something like that's like one two million six hundred thousandth of the patch of the entire sky. So you can imagine like if you extrapolate that, again, you get a very huge number. You times that by the 10 trillion of stars you have in each galaxy and you get a number that even Brian Cox would probably stumble over. Millions and millions and millions and millions. Right. Like it would just keep going.

So when you estimate it in terms of order of magnitude, as in like, is it a million? Is it a billion? Is it a trillion? Is it a quadrillion? Is it a quint is it a billion is it a trillion is it a quadrillion is it a quintillion i'm trying to remember how far i can go up there you always end up with a higher number with number of stars in the universe than you do for grains of sand on earth yeah yeah it is we've got man showing here that is so mad I can totally agree yes that is mad anyone else anyone else got a question oh yeah in the chat

are there multiple universes so I'll answer that and then let Becky do it properly are there multiple are there multiple universes we a lot of people think so

yes and they might all be very very different so we might like we live on a very special planet where we can walk around and enjoy the sunshine

and drink pims and listen to things like this and all those things it might be that the universe we live in is very special and letting us do that too and all those other many many other universes that might just exist alongside our own could be completely different really hostile places so a lot of astronomers would agree with you and say yes. It's called the multiverse. The thing is, right, the maths says yes. But I'm a person that likes to look in a telescope and go, ooh, look, I can see that, there's evidence for that. Finding evidence for the fact that there's other universes gets really complicated.

Can you tell that they're there from the influence on our universe or not? And there are loads of ideas about how do you know how our universe is expanding maybe there's all these other universes around us that we're expanding into and they're contracting and then as they get too small they'll they'll start expanding and they'll start shrinking us we have no idea and it's a lot of people are trying to find hints that they might exist somewhere, this idea of multiple universes. We're not quite at like Marvel yet, but we'll let you know when we get there.

I thought it was really dramatic that the music has now just started on the main stage and it's like, are there multiple human universes? Any other questions? You've got one down the... Oh, we've got one over here. Oh, you're on here. Hiya.

Do we know if, it's a bit of a two-part question, if there's any water further down, down the core of Mars, and if Mars heated up anymore, could that start an ecosystem and start life again? Oh. Oh, do you mean if there's water

under the surface of Mars? Right, we brought on David to... Yeah, exactly. There's definitely ice and so on. So, yes. Ask David, then. Was that a question about water in the core of Mars? Yeah.

Probably not, but there's plenty of ice below ground. It's been detected by radar. There's still a lot of water on Mars that's frozen, but it's not in liquid form. And we can see some of the ice, right, the poles and in some of the craters. So there's definitely ice there. There's ice at the poles.

When a fresh crater is formed, and there are craters being formed all the time, small ones by small asteroids hitting the surface, they often expose white stuff, which lasts for a year or two before it disappears. So that's fresh ice being exposed. There's plenty of water below ground, but in the shallow subsurface, not deep within Mars. Having watched throughout my life the challenges of landing something on Mars and then the successes and failures, what are the challenges of landing on some of the moons of Saturn or Jupiter?

You said Mars doesn't have a magnetic field and stuff. So what are the challenges for landing Curiosity on? The late Colin Pillinger, who after all tried and managed to land a probe on Mars, it just didn't quite open all its panels, so it didn't quite work. He said landing a probe on Titan was easier because it had an atmosphere that was pretty dense. So parachutes slow things down nicely

and it landed well on the surface. But it depends on the moon, because if you went to, say, Io or somewhere, a volcanic moon in Jupiter, I think that would be a challenge, not just to land it, but to get it to keep working for very long in a hostile environment. So it really depends where you go. But if there's a really thick atmosphere, and it's not like Venus and ridiculously hot and dangerous,

where you get cooked and crushed at the same time, then, you know, then, yeah, it's uh mars is somewhere in the middle but things often go wrong because it's a long way from earth it's hard to do and the atmosphere is really thin so it's a difficult target the thing about titan as well is that we are sending a mission to titan there's like it's funded and everything it's called dragonfly and it's going to be like little ginny the the ingenuity the drone that we've sent to mars that was a proof of concept i actually don't know are they even going to try and land on Titan or are they just going to

fly to a certain altitude and then poof, off they go? The Titan mission, it's called Dragonfly, will land and take off and they're going to one of these areas of sand dunes that's made of hydrocarbon grains.

So it'll be a very interesting mission. So I think we have time for our final question from a very patient man right at the back. So we've seen the web photographs we've seen far back in time yeah almost the beginning of time i want to know what about the beginning oh well we've actually got a podcast about that exactly it's it's a really it's

a really uh good question i mean that the fundamental thing is you're not going to see light from stars and galaxies before those stars and galaxies form. So you then struggle to look back even further. But there are ideas about it, and I suspect, Becky, you'll pile in here. You can get perhaps radio signals from forming stars and galaxies. And very exotically, if you had really advanced observatories, you might be able to get things like gravitational waves or neutrino particles coming through. But it's really hard. You know, there is probably those first few seconds of the universe

we're probably only ever going to know about through simulations, through things like the Large Hadron Collider, trying to make them happen again. But they're not trying to create a new universe in Switzerland, I should say. It's just trying to simulate the conditions. Yeah. I mean, the one thing I like to point out to people

is people talk about the Big Bang Theory. And they talk about it as if it was the moment, the beginning. The Big Bang Theory is actually the entire evolution of the universe. How you go from something very dense to very under-dense and spread out with galaxies and stars all over it,

like we see today. That Big Bang Theory can tell you exactly what happened until nought point, and i'm not going to say them all because there's 37 zeros after that point and then a one seconds it can tell you up to that point but after that or before that should i say in terms of the age of the universe all our known physics breaks down and we haven't got a bloody clue. So I hope that kind of answered your question. So for anyone who hasn't heard the Supermassive podcast before,

we always end with some stargazing tips. So Robert, chief stargazer, what can Stand and Calling see in the night sky today? Well, at Stand and Calling, we need a whoop for Stand and Calling. Woo! Great, got that in.

At Stand and Calling and other festivals over the summer. Whether you're staying up late, whether you're, you know, getting up early, stay up through the night if it's a beautiful, clear night tonight. If it is, you'll see the Milky Way arched overhead if you wait up late. Now, the inside view of our galaxy is spectacular and beautiful. It's even bright enough to be captured on your smartphone if you've got a new one. And later on, you might see these beautiful clouds in the north, high altitude clouds called noctilucent clouds, which just literally means they're lit up at night. That's something curious to see.

And if you're really late up, so into the small hours, you know, or you've got up very early, in my case, probably more late up is more realistic. late up is more realistic then you might see this planet parade where you can see uh in no particular order saturn yeah and then uh jupiter and v and mars and then finally venus which looks amazingly bright just hanging there in the dawn sky so if you see that please don't phone us and tell us you've seen a ufo it is a planet and it's a very very very beautiful one so you know really if it's clear tonight and you're camping here, go outside, have a look and enjoy the view. And they really are all in a line, the planets as well.

Which when you stop and think about it, you're like, oh, that's the flat bit of the solar system that all the planets go round in. That's why they're all in a line on the sky. And when you just sit and look at that, you're like, wow. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Well well thank you guys for answering those thank you everyone for your questions just to say we're actually launching a book in october and you are the only people that have an exclusive free sample

which you can find at the back of this tent it's like a an annual annuals it's like yeah the year in space yeah what's been happening in space this year yeah a lot and we've got a bit on the james m space telescope that we just sort of touched on a tiny little bit just then we teased you um and so thank you so much to our audience here live at stand and calling for the super massive podcast hello and welcome to the after party of the Supermarship Podcast. Well, that went rather well. That was amazing. What a crowd. They were great.

So nice. It's so nice to be back in a festival as well and just see people. I mean, I've only just got over seeing you guys in person and now we've got a live audience. I'm like, people, so nice to see. But we've got a live audience like people so nice to see but we got some we got some bonus content for our usual listeners oh yeah obviously everyone's piled in on twitter and it's been great so robert and becky i have some questions for you um becky take this one from edward reardon who asks in the book slash film The Martian, the main character plants potatoes on Mars using human manure and Martian soil. What problems might exist with that?

Is there a plant that might do better on Martian soil? I love this question. So yes, we think it is possible to grow potatoes and other plants in Martian soil. So experiments on Earth that have tried to recreate Martian soil equival experiments on earth that have tried to recreate like martian soil um equivalents essentially have managed to grow various different plants so for example did you know that heinz in association with the university in florida managed to grow tomatoes

in like martian soy soil you know as in like baked beans yeah exactly so they actually made like martian ketchup which i absolutely love. I want that. Yeah, I think Mark Watney would have wanted that in the film as well because he runs out of ketchup, doesn't he? But yeah, so the problem is with, you know, obviously growing, like, plants on Mars and stuff is there's a couple of benefits and there's a couple of cons, pros and cons, right?

So the pros is that actually Martian soil, we think, holds water better than, like, soil does, right? So the pros is that actually Martian soil, we think, holds water better than, like, earth soil does, right? It holds more water. So it contains all the minerals that you would need as well, except for nitrogen.

So all the gardeners listening will be like, ah, nitrogen, the classic NPK mix, right? So you do need a fertilizer for that, which is why Mark Watney uses poop

to do it, right? The problem is you wouldn't want to do that, which is why Marwutney uses poop to do it. The problem is you wouldn't want to do that on Earth with human manure, as our questioner so lovingly puts it. Yeah, that's a polite way of putting it. Yeah, exactly, because it has a lot of pathogens in it, which would be harmful to us if you grew vegetables that are grown out of human manure. But on Mars, you can dry freeze it with the frigid Martian atmosphere, so it's not a problem. The only other things to consider though is sunlight mars is further away from the sun so it actually gets about 40 i think it's 44 percent of the sunlight that earth gets you know like 60 or so less than what we do so

that could affect plant growth so you might need some grow lights which i think people have said you know in the film or the book in martin what he's botanist he was going to mars anyway to try and do these experiments he had grow lights which was how he was able to do it and then one of the issues is gravity martian gravity is less than it so you might think okay well that might help a plant trying to you know break up and grow up but then the roots are growing down so sometimes that helps in terms of gravity and helping roots grow down as well a lot of iss so international space station studies have shown in microgravity it's not that big of a deal. A plant can cope.

Right, okay, okay. But there might be some stress to plant cells in low gravity. Yeah. So until we actually try and grow plants or potatoes in Martian soil, I don't think we'll know how feasible it is necessarily in the long run and what the long-term damage or benefits would be. Yeah, and the International space station do loads of stuff into growing god knows what on the just like oh you have a little nursery on the international space station how lovely for

your mental well-being i just imagined so much crest there must be crests everywhere and robert's here too so robert marari B. Rosario wants to know, there's a Martian meteorite that fell to Earth. How did we know it's from Mars? Well, it turns out that it's not just one, but this is the benefit of having a Mars expert on the show, in the studio, or in the festival, is that there are perhaps 100 that we know about,

and presumably rather more. And the way we know it's from Mars, well, you look at the composition of it. So inside the meteorite are trapped bubbles of Martian atmosphere now I guess it really helps that we've sent probes to Mars that can sample that atmosphere first hand compare it with what you've got trapped inside these meteorites and lo and behold you know you've got a Martian meteorite

the other point that Dave was making was that if you have the rock shaped by the action of water then where else is it going to be, if it's, you know, where else is it going to be? If it's not from Earth, then where else is it going to be shaped by liquid water other than Mars? So, you know, some really, really nice fingerprints. So, you know, that's why I guess meteoriticists, that's said very deftly there, get so excited about samples like that. And actually, you know, we have them from the moon. We have them from some of the asteroids.

I think we think we have some from Venus. And to think about, you know, the other part of of this which is how did they get to the earth well the answer is that if some an even bigger rock hits mars and it probably makes a crater blasts off some material some of that material might be going enough to escape far enough to is fast enough even to escape mars completely end up in orbit around the sun and then over a period of time eventually end up on earth so that's how they get here and how other things arrive from other parts of the solar system now i guess thinking about this there might even be earth meteorites on mars hypothetically too and that's a that's a really interesting question which bit of earth ended up on mars who knows oh gosh i mean it's been quite a whirlwind of a day to be honest so

let's let's wrap things up with our usual what can people see in the night sky for august i mean i mean august is is a lovely time of year to go and look at the stars let's face it you know if you're going on a holiday it's brilliant i'm going on a holiday very soon and i'm looking forward to that myself but you know you go out it's not just sun beds it's not just exactly exactly and it's beautiful and warm you know and uh hopefully so if you're under a starry sky you can look up still that wonderful summer triangle and Milky Way arcing above the horizon. And if you go a bit further south, you get to see the best bit higher up as well because the centre of the galaxy in Sagittarius and Scorpius, that direction,

it's a little bit higher if you go down to the Mediterranean. And it's stunning. You know, if you don't have a telescope, if you have a small pair of binoculars, if that's all you've got, take it with you on your trip and enjoy the view and even if you're in the uk take them to your campsite you know take them along enjoy a dark night sky so specific things though in august you've got the maximum of the perceived meteor shower around the 12th full moon but that's extra bright extra big moon but if you look at it you might see some of the brighter ones in the early evening you get these so-called earth

grazers or after sunset when the debris is just skimming through the atmosphere so you might get a few very long trails but i probably wouldn't stay up till 3am to watch it uh and the other thing to mention in august is and i can't remember exactly which date, but towards the end of the month, I think it's the opposition of, ta-da, which planet, Becky? Saturn. It is the opposition. And it is on August 14th. There you go. I have it memorized.

And I bet that's on her phone. I bet that's on her phone. She's got little alarms there like, oh, my God, it's August 14th. Bing, bing, bing, Saturn. This is when it's opposite the sun in the sky, so it's basically the best time to see it all year. It will still be quite low down in the sky. I it's in uh capricornus way down and uh but you know from the uk it'll be the best for us all year from all over the world it's the best and it's high enough that you can get a pair of binoculars out enjoy the view or if you've got a small telescope you will

be able to see the ring system so do take a look because always a good sight and you know however much we mock becky for her obsession there's some justification in this it's always a good sight. And however much we mock Becky for her obsession, there's some justification in this. It's also rising a bit earlier than the rest of the planets now, right? I feel like the planet parade is really early morning and it was catching us out, but Saturn's sort of getting up, sort of midnight-ish. Yeah, if you're a party animal and you're out late, looking at my two presenters here.

Walking back from the pub. Yeah, exactly. Maybe, you know, you might look up and catch Saturn. As we do, as we do. Or after a hard night's clubbing, you go out and you see, there is Saturn and Jupiter and Venus and Mars. Oh, well, this has been such a fun recording. So thank you to everyone that sent in their questions.

And as always, just email us if you want to ask us something. It's podcast at ras.ac.uk. Or you can tweet us at Royal Astro Sock. And if you want to pre-order our book, The Year in Space 2023, then do. It's really good. It's a masterpiece, if I do say so myself. But as always, everybody, until next time, happy stargazing.