The Supermassive Podcast - 9: The Power of Space Probes

Episode Date: September 25, 2020

Izzie Clarke and Dr Becky Smethurst travel through our solar system; where exactly have we sent probes and rovers? Plus, they speak with Professor Jane Greaves, the scientist behind that Venus discovery, and Robert Massey joins to chat about all things stargazing. With special thanks also to Professor Emma Bunce from the University of Leicester.   The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media Production by Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham

If you could send a rover somewhere in the solar system, where are you choosing? You would not be able to lose TIE fighters in the solar system's asteroid belt. The excitement around that mission was so infectious. We could actually study material formed in another star system. Hello, welcome to the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society, with me, science journalist Izzy Clark, and with astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst. This month we're exploring our solar system where exactly have we sent probes and rovers plus we're speaking with Professor Jane Greaves about that Venus discovery that we're all very excited about. Oh yeah I can't wait.

So with us is Robert Massey the deputy director of the royal astronomical society and i'm so jealous because you're actually in burlington house yeah i'm actually in burlington house for the first time since march and i suspect it might be the last time this year but we'll see it's a it's a strange feeling i mean the buildings much as you remember it but it's just very very quiet as were the streets of london getting here and the train getting here as well. I think there were about four people in my peak time carriage all the way from Bristol. So very, very quiet. I'm sure everyone is very glad to hear that Burlington House, at least, is still standing.

Our favourite building is still okay. It is still standing. On the topic of this month, when did we actually first send a probe to space? It depends how you define it, but you could argue that even Sputnik 1, the very first satellite, was a probe of space. As soon as you put something in Earth orbit, you were sending something into an environment that we hadn't done before. And of course, very quickly, the Russians and the Americans were then doing things like exploring the Van Allen belts around the Earth. Within two years, a year and a half of Sputnik launching the Russians had sent a probe towards

the moon and within three years they'd actually crashed something into the moon and then taken pictures of the far side so it accelerated really quickly I guess because scientists are opportunistic and they could see these launches and they think well let's use these things as best we can. And why is it that we don't send humans generally? Well, I think it's just so hard, isn't it? It's expensive. It's pretty dangerous, actually. I mean, even sending people into low Earth orbit, you know, you've had the two tragedies of two space shuttle disasters.

You wouldn't, I don't think, I always say to people, I don't think you'd get onto a civil aircraft with the odds of it not, you know, of it crashing that you would that we accept with space travel, you know, probably one in 50, one in 100 chance that you might die when you look at the historic odds over the years. And that's not brilliant. So really at the moment,

it's still something you need very highly trained people for. And if you want to send people, say, beyond the Earth to the Moon or let alone Mars, you're going to have to set quite a high level of risk. And that makes for a much more expensive, much more cautious mission. Yeah, I think it always is. Cost is in money and cost to human life as well. It's just not worth it, is it? Let's just send all the robots in. Cheers, Robert. We'll catch up with you later in the show for some more stargazing.

Now, every planet in our solar system, as well as the sun and the moon, have been visited by space probes. But there's still so much that we don't know. Space agencies pile up probes with different capabilities to explore the worlds around us. But how do they work? I've been speaking to President of the Royal Astronomical Society, Professor Emma Bunce, who is also Head of School and Professor of Planetary Plasma Physics at the University of Leicester. She started by telling me about her favourite mission. If I was going to pick one as my favourite, I think I probably would go back in time a little bit and pick Voyager, just because of the influence that it's had on me personally. I was quite young when Voyager was moving through the solar system, visiting different planets.

And what stands out in my mind was a flyby of Neptune when I was about 14. And that sort of really influenced me actually to get interested in science and wanting to become a scientist. But also sort of subsequently having then become a space scientist, I still look at that mission in complete awe and wonder with the fact that it was launched early in the 1970s and is still working. It's absolutely incredible. And it's a real testament to our ability to explore and our hunger for exploration. I think actually that was the sort of real the need to

send that mission because of the planetary alignment and it was sort of quickly put together and and yet it's still going yeah it's been hugely important so what are the advantages of say using probes in space and say, rather than space telescopes? It's a good question. I think that remote sensing, so using a telescope, is incredibly useful and continues to be so. But there is a huge advantage in actually going there. It completely changes your view, quite literally. So if you think about imaging, visible imaging, if you send an imager on a probe actually into orbit around that planet, you just get a much closer view and you start to see detail in images. So you can sort of imagine that zooming in and learning so much more about, let's say,

the surface geology of a particular planet or moon that you might be interested in. But it's also really important because you can do other things that you just cannot do remotely. And so a good example of that would be, for example, measuring the magnetic field of a planet. So in order to do that, you really do have to go get up close and personal, ideally get as close as possible, as close as you dare. And you've had a brilliant career in studying our solar system. So we've had Cassini looking at Saturn, BepiColombo's en route to Mercury, and there are some really exciting missions going on with Jupiter as well. So can we start with the Juno mission? What is that exactly? What's it trying to understand and find out?

Yes, so it's a spinning spacecraft with the three arms that are the solar panels which power the spacecraft. So it's a sort of very unique design. It's a very attractive looking spacecraft, actually. Someone said to me that they thought it looked like the claw in Toy Story when you see it come down. I can't get that out of my head. Yeah, so it's a very interesting spacecraft design. And obviously, its design is wholly around the fact that it is a solar panel mission to Jupiter, which is the first of its kind. The spacecraft then has instruments around the body of the spacecraft and different elements of the instruments are able to look at Jupiter and to probe into the atmosphere to look for the composition of the atmosphere, for example,

so how much water there is, how much of other elements like ammonia there are in the atmosphere. So trying to understand that composition of the atmosphere is incredibly important because that enables us to understand this structure because it's very hard to work out what that is without making specific measurements like that and it's not just Jupiter that is really interesting it's also home to lots of moons as well and that's the next big thing This is what you're working on as well. So this project is JUICE, Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer. So what can you tell us about that? So Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer was devised. And as you say, I am involved in that mission. I was lucky enough to be part of the team that wrote the science case for the proposal to ESA.

The mission was designed and devised to sort of address the next big questions about the Jupiter system. But as you say, it also has lots of moons as well. And four of them are really famous, the Galilean moons, and they are significant moons, the sort of planet size moons. And one of them, which is the focus of the JUICE mission is Ganymede and Ganymede is actually bigger than the planet Mercury. So the previous mission Galileo that was a NASA mission in the 1990s that gave us the first glimpse of the importance of these Galilean moons and so we learned from that mission sort of in a nutshell that it was quite likely that there are global subsurface oceans underneath the icy crusts of Europa, Ganymede and possibly Callisto. And the reason for that is because of the way that those moons orbit around Jupiter and the gravitational interaction between Jupiter and the moons themselves actually change the surface of the moons.

It flexes the surface of the moon, sort of tidal interactions. And that is thought to be able to keep the interior warm and allow oceans to potentially exist. And so clearly that's a very exciting prospect. That's a very exciting prospect. One of the things we're very keen to understand is where water can exist in liquid form, because we know that that's a vital part of the picture on planet Earth. So the JUICE mission is designed to go to address that question of habitability by sending the first spacecraft, which will go into orbit around Ganymede, which is the moon that the mission is focused on.

What can you actually fit to a probe and onto a probe? How many experiments are all going on at once? Is there a limit? That's a really fantastic question, because to some extent, it sort of depends on how much money you've got, I suppose. Most things come back to money. But actually, we are limited, of course, by what we can launch into space. And so you're limited by your launcher. So those sort of set some of the parameters that we typically are facing. And of course, if you're launching onto a trajectory to take you into the outer solar system, you tend to need to launch quite a lot of fuel. And so a surprising amount of the mass at launch is actually propellant. For a spacecraft

that might come in at about five tonnes at launch, about 100 kilograms of that would be scientific payload. But my experience of planetary missions, big missions like Cassini, like JUICE, is that you may have something like 10 or 11 or 12 individual instruments on board making up that maybe 100 to 200 kilograms of payload. But those vary from mission to mission. And for you, what would you like to see in the future? Where do you think we should be looking? So we've done a huge amount of exploration in terms of planetary science, which is very exciting. And I've sort of hinted at the fact that I think something like JUICE

is the next logical step in order to understand the Galilean moons better. So we're going to be able to focus on Ganymede. So we've gone from Galileo's first observations through to a dedicated mission to go into orbit around Ganymede. And then the next logical step might be once we have gathered the knowledge that we will learn from that mission, our next step is likely to want to go back and land on the surface of Ganymede. So that's one thing. So landing on the surfaces of, say, moons in the outer solar system, incredibly challenging, but would be absolutely fantastic. Game-changing in terms of what we could understand. Professor Emma Bunce from the University of Leicester.

Now, I think it's so interesting how different generations are defined or inspired by the missions of their time. Obviously, for Emma, that's been Voyager, which actually gave us so many firsts. It's so remarkable. Yeah, I mean, I only remember hearing about Voyager. It did its last major planet fire by Neptune in 1989. You know, I wasn't even born then, so it doesn't really define sort of my childhood my growing up but i guess you can really sum up voyager one and two as like the missions of the first and the farthest as well right it was the first to discover the new moons of various different planets it discovered 11 moons of uranus that's incredible and obviously it was the first to even visit

uranus and neptune in the first place first to discover volcanoes in the solar system on Io and oceans on Europa. And, you know, now they've been the first to leave the solar system too. So just an incredible legacy for just one mission. So is there a mission for you, Becky, that really stands out and inspired you, you know, to go down that route of physics and astronomy? I mean, it's got to be the cassini mission to saturn oh obviously i know i'm so predictable but i mean this is why saturn is my favorite planet though everyone always takes the meccanomy for that but cassini really did just give us this incredible view of saturn especially this hexagon shaped storm at the north pole that was actually first spotted in the pictures from the voyager flyby as

well you know it was a mystery for so many years and then we've got these incredible it's actually like a time lapse of the clouds moving on the poles and they're just mesmerizing if you see them and it really allowed researchers to figure out that this hexagon shape had been set up by standing waves interacting in the atmosphere of Saturn and then of course we had the moons of Saturn as well it was the first time we'd really seen them in incredible detail you know we found Mimas that look like the Death Star moon you know then we had liquid methane oceans and rivers on Titan being like a massive highlight for me and of course just watching those changes in the ring system of Saturn as well over the you know 13 years that Cassini was in orbit around it you

know we even saw maybe the formation of a new moon in the rings of Saturn like in real time like what is not to love about the Cassini version to Saturn yeah okay you've you've put off a good argument though I'll give you that I think for me one that really stands out for me is Rosetta I was in my final year of university doing my physics masters and you see Philae land on the comet 67p and you're just like how have you done that like the excitement around that mission was so infectious like the fact that they landed on this ridiculously tiny object and you could just see so much excitement from all of the effort that they'd put in as well. And obviously this year we've also had Comet NEOWY. So that for me was also just the fact that was really cool.

And we'll always remember that. So when we think of comets, Becky, how helpful are they? And what can we really learn from studying them yeah so comets are like rubble left over from sort of the formation of the solar system if you want to think about it that way you know you know one man's trash kind of thing this pile of things yeah but they're really the building blocks of the solar system right so there are some theories that even suggest that they could have brought the first water to earth as well because comets when we study them they have a lot of water ice and it's that that gets melted when it gets closer to the sun as well and we see it in that sort of little atmosphere that forms around

them that gives us that nice little tail that's so pretty to see in the sky but by studying comets we can we can really learn about the conditions in the early solar system and what role they played in the evolution of the solar system too so rosetta for example spotted glycine in the early solar system and what role they played in the evolution of the solar system too so rosetta for example spotted glycine in the atmosphere of comet 67p and that's the simplest amino acid that is right and amino acids are the building blocks for proteins and other structures that form life so it really cemented this idea that maybe even comets didn't just bring water to earth but they could have even brought the sort of seeds the raw materials that earth needed life. So it really cemented this idea that maybe even comets didn't just bring water to Earth, but they could have even brought the sort of seeds, the raw materials that Earth needed

to sort of kickstart life as well. And then also comet 67B had this weird rubber duck shape. Do you remember? Like it had that strange shape. And then when New Horizons flew past Ultima Tool, we saw that little snowman shape as well. And both of those missions really sort of redefined how we think things formed in the solar system you know we used to think it was very violent collisions between these little bits of rubble but actually now we think they're much more sort of like gentle sort of coming together of these sort of building blocks um and instead of it being a very violent collision they're very gentle and that's how we form these strange rubber duck and snowmen shapes and eventually by doing more and more of those you build up planets essentially uh if you wait long enough and i think those kind of missions you know we would never know that by looking at comets or

asteroids just from the ground with telescopes or even with space telescopes as well you really need to get real up close to be able to spot that kind of detail i also saw actually in the last day or so that it's been revealed that 67p has its own aurora and it's the first time that we have actually ever seen this before on a comet wow i hadn't heard that news that's amazing yeah it's literally just come out i'm just like well this is interesting it's a giant rubber duck well in the shape of going through space got its own aurora like yeah okay that's um i'm i'm into it that's so interesting that is so so interesting god i love science recent news from the royal astronomical society has taken the world by storm. A possible marker of life has been spotted on Venus. This rare molecule

is called phosphine and it was found in the clouds of Venus, very high in the upper atmosphere. And the explanations for this range from unknown chemistry, unknown geological processes like volcanoes going on on the surface, or possibly life, microbes in Venus's atmosphere. We spoke to Professor Jane Greaves from Cardiff University, team leader for the discovery. Great to have you back, Jane. Now, Izzy spoke to you back in June when we spoke about, you know, looking for alien life. And listening back, you even dropped hints about this discovery I don't know how you kept this secret for so long I think yeah we were trying not to drop too many hints but um maybe it's not obvious that we we'd kind of known we had this for a while we've just been trying to

prepare a paper for publication to be as clear as possible so the sort of stunning impact time was a little bit earlier on. How did you first feel like what were your first thoughts when you saw you know this detection of phosphine and what that could mean? I was absolutely stunned because I'd been fiddling away with the spectra we got first for months and months and thinking oh there's really nothing there but that's not so surprising. And then I guess the final bit of data processing dropped into place and the line was there that we were looking for. And I was just wandering around completely stunned. I bet. So can you start from the beginning? What exactly is phosphine and why is it an indicator for potential life? So phosphine is a really simple molecule it's

basically like the ammonia molecule which is a nitrogen and three hydrogens but if you took the nitrogen atom out and put a phosphorus atom in instead you'd get phosphine so it's really simple and it's really toxic to large life forms like us for example but it is produced on earth by anaerobic bacteria so that's single-celled life I believe living in oxygen-free conditions it's not even entirely understood why they put out this gas but it might just be a waste product or something but it's very much associated with this simple form of life and it's not produced on earth by anything else unless we make it industrially so it has been suggested that as a biosignature it's quite distinctive if you looked on another planet and found this gas there might

also be simple forms of life living there as well so how were you actually able to make this discovery so it turned out um i'm a bit unusual perhaps in being an astrobiologist but also an astronomer radio astronomer that works particularly short radio wavelengths about a millimeter and i'm very familiar with a telescope called james cart maxwell telescope in hawaii which is ideal for this and i just thought this would be a really neat little project no one's ever really checked this biosphere on venus idea so well maybe they'll give us like a few hours of telescope time that doesn't mess anybody about and we could just have a look and phosphine has this signature it absorbs light at a very specific wavelength to do with the rotation of the molecule not easily confused with anything else and so i presented it to the telescope and said you know even if we

could have like eight hours of time or something we could have a decent look at this so that was what happened and they said okay go ahead and their staff basically helped out and for short programs you no longer travel anymore to the telescope so they did it for us and it all went from there but that was back in like 2017 right so how how did we go from 2017 to sort of announcing it in 2020 so we got the data in the summer of 2017 and they were really complicated and we all thought I think there was nothing there. And eventually I got offered some, a little bit of money by Cambridge University just for like to support me there, to do some research projects at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University with their scientists. And just because I was sitting around doing all sorts of things I kind of wanted to do in a little bit of time here and there I had another look at the Venus data and realized there was something there and then we got in a bigger team and we thought well we

don't want to publish this exciting but not absolutely secure thing so then we started looking for more telescope time and that you know took a long time basically. for more telescope time and that you know took a long time basically so the question i have jane is that we see phosphine on the gas giants you know jupiter saturn uranus neptune so how come phosphine on there is not considered sort of necessarily a biosignature whereas on venus it is yeah so it's perfectly natural for jupiter and sat Saturn particularly to have it so most of the chemical routes to making phosphine they require energy to drive them so it doesn't happen naturally but if you think about the deep atmospheres of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn it's actually very hot so there's energy available and that can drive the reaction and there's also very abundant

hydrogen the atmosphere is almost entirely hydrogen so that just forces the reaction. And there's also very abundant hydrogen. The atmosphere is almost entirely hydrogen. So that just forces the reaction in a natural way. Whereas if you think about the surface of the Earth or the similar temperature in the high clouds of Venus, we're certainly not surrounded by hydrogen. It's a major component of the atmosphere and it's not particularly hot. So there's nothing to make the reaction happen.

It does require some kind of driving force. And life is one of those. You really only get life where you have an energy gradient. there's nothing to make the reaction happen it does require some kind of driving force and you know life is one of those you really only get life where you have an energy gradient so something is processing raw materials and energy and doing something useful to itself and producing waste products so that's the kind of situation where you get a biosignature gas like phosphine but you must have considered sort of all the other options as well before sort of publishing this paper with all possible signs of life as well. So what were some of the things that you considered?

Yes. So this was almost the longest part of the process. So everything that we know about the atmosphere and surface of Venus kind of came into play. Some of that we have a lot of misinformation. When it's hot enough at the surface of your planet to melt the lander, your time to get the information out is a bit limited. And that's literally the case here. So we try and consider everything planetary. So in the context of Venus, it's got a sort of rocky surface. There may be some volcanoes, some active volcanoes. So you've got bits of grit blowing around in the wind.

You've got gases being pumped out in volcanic eruptions, that kind of thing. And then you've got this very thick hot atmosphere so there's a lot of chemistry chemical reactions possibly going on in that and as you go higher up the sunlight is really affecting the atmosphere and you've got all kinds of other chemicals that can be produced from that and we found none of that in a kind of like a static chemistry could really work you just don't make phosphine then we considered whether there's some unusual sort of like a static chemistry could really work you just don't make phosphine then we considered whether there's some unusual sort of injection source a chemistry injection process going on which the volcanoes could be one but we also thought maybe there's meteors coming into

the atmosphere or lightning in these thick nasty clouds and so something is energetically driving the process of making phosphine and we in the computer calculations you can make tiny bits of tiny amounts of phosphine by these methods but some of them are like milligrams per planet per year is it a unit we we came up with really not very good roots you'll have to name that unit something ridiculous as well jane yeah we'll get our listeners just to make some suggestions but and now i think we may know the answer to this but what's next jane because as we've briefly mentioned venus is pretty hostile so is there any chance of a mission there or sending a probe there i think there is and that's one of the things I'm personally very excited about so we are carrying on using telescopes as far as the pandemic allows

obviously safety of staff is an absolute priority but we can carry on monitoring Venus from where we are but if somebody can send a small space probe I think compared to the 1980s technology that got the landers there we have so many new materials and computer control and so on so there's some quite viable looking ideas so a balloon a dirigible could it possibly float in the clouds of venus and explore and take samples and so on and you know mission duration for that might be months you know if that wasn't possible in the short term we could send another descent probe you know that could have a these days higher rated data transfer back to us probably so even something again that could only spend minutes before it was crushed or fried

or whatever could get us a lot of information about chemical sampling of the atmosphere back i think because we know so little yeah all right well i guess i have one last question for you jane and that is what is your money on like are you willing to put money on the fact that this is life on venus that we've detected it you probably think i'm richer than i actually am it's really hard to say because i've suddenly realized how very ignorant i am about chemistry and biology so on because we weren't expecting to have to learn all these skills to interpret our data as astronomers so i'm kind of reluctant to put money on anything so somebody comes along and says there's some you know perfectly viable chemical process in venus atmosphere that would

never work on earth but you can see exactly how it will work on venus and phosphine will be a byproduct then you know i'll be a little bit disappointed but i mean that would be you know perfectly acceptable i suppose there's a long way to go with thinking about the ideas for life because there's just no similar niche for life on earth to survive life doesn't need to survive in an incredibly acid environment so nothing we have has developed that kind of protective mechanism. So that's really open to speculation, I think. Professor Jane Greaves from Cardiff University. This is the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society

with me, astrophysicist Dr Becky Sethers, and with science journalist Izzy Clark. This month, we're exploring the importance of probes and rovers in space. So Becky, if you could send a rover or probe somewhere in the solar system, where are you choosing? You've restricted me to the solar system. Fine. I know, I got you there. Okay, let's try and not be predictable. I would love send one to jupiter's four galilean moons right i'd love to explore them more in more detail and i know juno is going to do this but i'm just so excited by this volcanic world of io and then also you know whether there's maybe even liquid oceans under the sort of cross of like europa and ganymede and whether they could host

life as well just that entire prospect i think is so exciting they're such interesting worlds you know just because they're moons and not planets it's almost like we've we've sort of dismissed them a little bit as sort of places that we could go to and that there could be life and I'm just like no check out those they look incredible yeah absolutely like for me I know you know Saturn and Jupiter are pretty cool as far as the gas giants go but if we could have a dedicated mission to Neptune like please can someone just make that happen and if I can be really greedy then maybe Uranus as well but I think for now if I have to choose one I'm going with Neptune yeah to be fair I agree with that Neptune is just I mean it's the color isn't it you could just stare at it all day it's definitely I think it wins the award for prettiest colored planet in the solar system so I'd be

totally game on that point to give you all the money to send a probe to Neptune I'm obviously so predictable as well I'm just like it just looks nice like can we just go yeah thanks but as always we've had lots of questions sent our way this month so thank you to everyone that's done that do keep them coming um so becky let's let's send some of these your way remy micheletti asks when sending a mission to jupiter and beyond how do we make sure it doesn't get hit by the asteroid belt i think this is such a brilliant question so i mean the trajectories of missions are planned like very carefully and advanced you know taking into account the positions of all the known objects in the solar system the duration of the mission you know just to make sure that you know no

unwanted maybe gravitational encounters or slingshots happen but you have to remember that even though the asteroid belt does have a lot of sort of you know rubble in it space is really big right you just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is and so you know passing through the asteroid belt is actually fairly straightforward in fact i think if you were to pass through it you probably wouldn't even notice it so you know if you're picturing something like you know empire strikes back when they try and escape tie fighters through the asteroid field it's not going to be like that you would not be able to lose tie fighters in the solar system's asteroid belt okay good to know space psycho asks could we try and catch amuamua with a probe to find out what it is now kind of love this odd visitor to our solar system so can we start from

the basics becky? What is this? Yeah, so Oumuamua was an object that was detected back in 2017. And at first it was thought to just be, you know, you know, the average run of the mill comet or asteroid. But people quickly realised that from its movement around the sun, like it must have come from outside of the solar system. So it was this rogue piece of rubble that was sort of roaming through interstellar space, got sort of captured a little bit by the sun's gravity and just sort of had a slingshot around it. Now it's too faint to see now with even space telescopes,

but we know where it is. So technically we could send a probe after it, but we'd have to be able to catch up to it because it's traveling at something like 85,000 miles per hour, right? As opposed to if you compare that to Voyager's speed out of the solar system at 34,000 miles per hour right as opposed to if you compare that to voyager's speed out of the solar system at 34 000 miles an hour there's almost double the speeds that we can we can get sort of probes to but you know if we could do that there is actually an initiative called

project lyra which is trying to develop the tech that we would need to do that but it's obviously a long way off yet but hopefully we'll be prepared if this happens again hopefully but i guess the question is why would we want to send a probe well we could actually study material formed in another star system and we could ask questions like you know is it like our own you know is it formed in the same way does it have a similar chemical makeup and then we could ask how is interstellar space you know in the increased radiation it would have felt traveling through interstellar space affected it as well myriad of questions so much you could learn from sending a probe to something like a mua mua. I guess, can I change my answer to the previous question now? Because

I think I want to send a probe to a mua mua now. Yeah, okay, we'll allow that because I would love to know. And isn't it quite an odd shape? They think it looks like a sort of cigar shape. So yeah, the reflected light that we got from it was crazy. It was so flickery in its brightness. And the best way that we could come up with to describe this is if it was cigar shaped and it was just tumbling through space, essentially. It had no rotation axis like the Earth does.

And it was literally just imagine this giant cigar just like cartwheeling through space, essentially. And that's what we were observing. Don't mind me. What about you, Robert? Have have you got thoughts on this do you reckon it's possible yeah i mean in wama is a fantastically interesting object but there is actually a plan by the european space agency to develop a mission called comet interceptor and the aim of that is to be an opportunistic probe that sits there and if a comet is incoming comet is identified as coming in you know even a long period one coming from way outside the solar system or even an interstellar one that the

mission could then intercept it could basically anticipate where it was going to come in towards the sun and go after it so we won't catch umuamua but we might be able to catch something like that if it comes in again that's incredible and i've also just learned I've been saying it wrong. How do you say it, Robert? Oh, I think it's umuamua. Oh, so not umuamua. Yeah, I always had to look it up on the, you know, you always find pronunciation of, yeah, I had to look it up to get it right. Oh, well, you learn something new every day. I guess that would be the traditional Hawaiian pronunciation that we've all been butchering for the past three years. Exactly. Absolutely. Exactly. Yeah. My apologies. And for this next one, quite a few people have asked this in the context of Venus, but I think it actually holds for a lot of missions. So

do we risk sending microbial life when we send probes and rovers to space? Becky, do you want to start on that one? So it's worth pointing out here that probes are constructed in clean rooms and they're decontaminated. they're you know what we call biologically clean before they launch and we do that as meticulously as we can now you might think that okay fair enough we might miss a couple of microbes but that you know any hitchhiking bacteria you know wouldn't survive a journey through the vacuum of space but actually there was the tampopo mission led by jaxa which found that microbes left outside of the international space station actually did survive so in the words of jeff goldblum in jurassic park life finds a way and so i think this has lent a lot of support to the idea of what we call panspermia which is that life

exists everywhere in the universe and it's constantly transferred to other hospitable locations, you know, by asteroids, space dust, comets, whatever it is. So like Oumuamua, or however we're supposed to pronounce it, Oumuamua, I think it was. And so another thing that we could test, you know, if we did send a probe there,

is was there life on something like Oumuamua, it's like an interstellar visitor, or at least maybe the seeds for life like we're talking about before with amino acids so it's a very compelling idea and the thought that humans could be contributing perhaps unwittingly by sending out microbes and bacteria on probes i think is at least nicely circular if we only exist because of an interstellar asteroid or a natural probe if you will which brought the building blocks of life to Earth. I mean, I think it's definitely possible whether it actually happens. I don't know. What do you

reckon, Robert? That is a really, really good question. I mean, I think also there's the short-term survival, you know, even years, decades versus perhaps the millions of years that you'd probably need to get life going from, say, even one planet to another. I mean, two things come to mind. Firstly, there was an Israeli lunar. I mean, two things come to mind. Firstly, there was an Israeli lunar lander that crashed on the moon last year. It was carrying tardigrades that were dried out. And there is this thought that they probably have survived. Now, the moon is sterile.

And to get them to come back to life, these water bears, they're microscopic animals. You'd have to rehydrate them, put them in the Earth's atmosphere, and they might not come back to life even then. But does mean we have to take it really really seriously i mean you know we've been sending things to venus for example probably without that degree of sterilization so that the group jane's group looking at that were wondering whether or not you know that might have been an issue that you might have accidentally introduced life to the atmosphere with all their numbers they don't think they did that you know they just didn't think they could account for what they found but we do have to take it seriously now the worst thing would be

if we sent a mission to Mars accidentally contaminated it and then a follow-up mission found this life and we assumed it had come from Mars it's a it's a really serious thing also you know it might it might harm any indigenous life that's actually there so it's more more like much more likely I think to be a risk to alien life than the other way around yeah it's certainly something that we have to consider isn't it well thank you so much for that and if anyone listening has questions that they want to send in then do so you can tweet at Royal Astro Sock or email podcast at ras.ac.uk and we'll take a look. So Robert can you tell us some of the things that we can see in the night sky this month? Well, the autumn is a great time.

The nights are drawing in, you know, mellow mists and fruitfulness and all that stuff that we like about autumn. But it also makes it a bit easier to go and look at the stars. Now, if you've been enthused by the Venus discovery, you can see that planet very, very easily. If you get up around six o'clock in the morning, not too early, not as bad as in the summer, look to the east and it'll be there like a beacon in the sky. And if you've got a small telescope, you'll see it's got a sort of 50% phase. It looks a bit like a half moon shape. You won't see much more with the average small telescope, but it might give you that degree of satisfaction to actually see it. But in the evening sky, the object that's becoming much more obvious now is Mars. And as we go further into the month, it'll be really, really unmistakable. It'll be high in

the east, sort of seven, eight o'clock in the evening, depending on when you're looking. And as we go through the month, it'll become, it'll be more obvious in the south, or if you just stay up later. Now, Mars is a brilliant red object with the eye, but it's quite frustrating to see very much with the average small telescope. I'm going to strongly recommend that you take a look if you have a telescope. And I was looking at it a few times already, and I can see this brilliant white polar cap and a few dark markings. It's really hard to see much more than that. I think what it tells you is that when we think about all the people that imagined canals there and artificial features, in a sense, I don't blame them because they were looking at something which

comes close to the Earth really quite rarely. It's quite hard to see a lot of detail on it you get these momentary glimpses when you see a lot more and that's the typical experience of looking at it but i do very much recommend people go and look at it 6th of october is when it's closer to the earth and it's so-called opposition which means it's on the other side of the earth and the sun in the middle of the month 13th october and it'll be very, very obvious after that, right into November. And we won't get as good a chance again for some years, actually. It'll be okay in a couple of years time.

And then, you know, maybe you have to wait about 15 years before it's as close again. So do take this chance if you can. Just for complete beginners who might not have any idea what they're looking for in terms of Mars, a good day to try and spot it is actually the 2nd of October

because it's going to be very, very close to a very bright moon on that day and so if you can find the moon and then the very bright reddish thing near it will be Mars and that should at least give you at least some confidence that you're like I'm definitely looking at what I think I'm looking at and that's really good advice and you could take a picture too actually it's you know it won't look like more than a star on a photograph but it but you'll definitely come out it's easily bright enough and it does stand out you're just like okay that is so obviously red that has to be my ask surely that's what it is yeah it's brilliant it's blazing i mean the brighter than the brighter object is the easier it is to see the color and if you you know pick up a pair of binoculars if that's all

you've got that color will be even more stark uh you know really good thing to see and apart from that the other things you can start to look for over october and there's a few meteor showers around there's the orionids shower in which the maximum is around the 21st of october but there's evidence that possible earlier peak the 17th to the 18th and there's also this suggestion that there's a kind of 12 year cycle with it and we might see a stronger shower this year so look out for that as well. So meteor showers are always fantastic if you have a dark sky and if you can get out of the city,

then your view will be much better. But other than that, just look out for the autumn stars. The square of Pegasus we mentioned is still there very obviously. You start to see some of the stars will associate with winter later in the night as well. And perhaps we can talk about that in a later programme.

Gosh, there's so much to see. Well, thanks, Robert. And that's it for this month. Next time, we'll be chatting about crude space exploration. Do we have an asteroid? Like, please, please tell me that you've worked your magic, Izzy, and you have an asteroid for me. I am trying to get you an astronaut, Becky.

I make no promises. Right, I tell you what, if you do get an asteroid for me, I am trying to get you an astronaut, Becky. I make no promises. Right. I tell you what, if you do get an astronaut for me, it'll be close to Halloween when we do the podcast, right? So I might break out the astronaut Halloween costume I wore when I was 11 to interview them. If you can get me an astronaut. Okay.

And if I can't get an astronaut for next month, I'm just going to keep trying until I can. I'll be like, this month. Is it this month? When will we get an astronaut? Is it this month? Is it this month? We will at some point finally talk to an astronaut anyway please tweet us if you try some astronomy at home it's at royal astro sock on twitter or

you can email your questions too to podcast at ras.ac.uk and we'll try to cover them in a future episode until then though happy stargazing