EVSN - After Hours: Doing Big Science With Light Tools & Guest Dr. Danny Jacobs

Welcome to After Hours

0:00It's the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, coming in 3, 2, 1.

0:30Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's edition of After Hours. This is CosmoQuest's laid-back interview show where we talk to artists, to authors, to scientists about the creative and amazing things that they are creating to help us see the universe around us in a different light. And today, we mean that light quite literally. I am joined by Arizona State University Professor Danny Jacobs, who actually went to university with a friend of the show, Nicole Gallucci, and along with her was part of introducing radio astronomy to public outreach.

1:14And today, he's introducing students to satellite control. Welcome, Danny. It is so awesome to have you here with us. Thanks, Pam. Good to be here.

Introduction to Radio Astronomy

1:26So, I'd like to start with radio astronomy. This is the lesser-talked-about side of the wavelength spectrum, where we're used to thinking of radio towers for radio stations. And I think when you say radio astronomy, it's fairly universal that people think of the Jodie Foster picture of her with the headphones. But radio astronomy takes a whole lot more forms than the VLA. Can you introduce us to the 411 on radio astronomy?

1:59The wavelength range of light that we have access to is enormous. There's everything from gamma rays all the way down to radio waves. All that matters is that you have a receiver that can tune into the right wavelength, right? And every kind of thing in the universe does different stuff at different wavelengths, and some of those things are only happening at those wavelengths. So, if you want to tune into them, you need a receiver that works there. What people normally call radio is actually huge.

2:30Our eye is sensitive to a tiny fraction of wavelengths, just a few percent difference, a factor of a couple, maybe. And so, if you're building an optical telescope, it only has to work over a few narrow range of wavelengths. But radio can extend everything from sub-millimeter, so human hair or wider, all the way to kilometers of wavelength. It's enormous. And there's all kinds of cool stuff you can see. You can see all the way back to the big, almost to the Big Bang. The cosmic microwave background is visible as an infrared signal of radio.

3:04But every galaxy is visible in all kinds of different radio wavelengths. You can see molecules. You can see atoms and things like that. But there's also kind of more wild stuff like masers and things like that. So, it's a really rich astronomy. It's also one of the youngest astronomies. Yes. So, we're still, like, learning a lot. I think the first radio astronomy was done just after World War II with old radar receivers.

3:34People actually started to do a little bit before the war and so kind of knew that it was going to happen. And there was all this cool equipment to use. And it really took off. So, we're in our, like, third or fourth generation, depending on how you count academic careers of people trying to figure out how to make cool use of radio astronomy. And famous things that people may have heard of. One of the first, like, strongest pieces of evidence for dark matter came from using a spectral line and seeing the Doppler shift of our galaxy that rotates.

4:05And it goes way faster than it ought to. It must be orbiting a lot more mass than we can see with our eyes or with any other telescope, for that matter. But all kinds of other cool stuff. Stuff that's happening right now that people may have heard about. A big one a couple of years ago was something called the Event Horizon Telescope. Yes. That was cool. Yeah. And it's still cool. It's still going on. They're still taking new data. We've seen two now. And so, two black holes, basically, imaged in the – you can't see a black hole with anything.

4:37But you can see, you know, where it's not. And there's a big – There's a gas swirling around it. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And it's – and I don't know if people remember Interstellar, which had, like, an extremely accurate simulation of what that would look like. And it's weird. It's super weird. Kind of goes – you can see behind the black hole because the light is bending around it. So, it just looks like – kind of looks like a, I don't know, Mario Kart level or something where it kind of goes up and around and back down.

5:08And what's really cool – So much other cool stuff. Yeah. And one of my favorite facts about radio astronomy is it was Grota Riba who, in 1944, put together a catalog of the radio sky, a contour map of the radio sky, using a backyard radio dish. This was not a PhD researcher. This was not a university technician. This was a guy who worked in radio engineering, radio stations, things like that, who pointed a radio dish upwards, planted gorgeous shrubs around it.

5:49I can figure is that's the only way he could get his wife to agree to it, and did this amazing catalog that when he submitted it for publication, they actually sent University of Chicago faculty to go look at his system to convince them that it was real. And so, our first major map came from someone who was a volunteer scientist in a lot of ways, and even though radio was really pioneered by an amateur astronomer, today, still, the majority of amateur astronomy is not done in the radio.

6:30And you've worked on finding ways to change that, at least in a small part.

Building Cheap Radio Telescopes

6:35So, can you tell us about what you've been working on since you were a baby young astronomer to bring radio to the masses? The cool thing about radio is that you can do it in the daytime. So, it makes for a pretty chill hobby.

6:55There's nothing like freezing your butt off at 3 a.m. kind of thing like most astronomers, amateur or professional, have to do. So, yeah, this has been a sort of, I won't say holy grail because we've actually found it many times, but a thing that a lot of people that get into radio want to do is to bring the radio astronomy aspect to the amateur world or to just hobbyists and students and stuff like that. And there have been really cool examples in history, probably the most famous one that people maybe of a previous generation, if they were into hobbyist stuff, might remember, was a kit that came out of some research labs that used dish network dishes and anything you could, and everything that you could buy off the shelf and just from your corner radio chat.

7:51Those were so amazing for being able to do amateur radio or electronics or, I miss RadioShock. I miss it. Yeah, it is long lamented. So, you could go and buy all this stuff and listen to and do things like, you know, see the sun and the sun bursts in the radio, and that's really neat to watch. But RadioShock is no more, sadly. And also, radio technology has really moved on.

8:21And these days, you can, what used to be a collection of boxes that were kind of fiddly and annoying is now just basically the size of a thumb drive. Right. And you can just plug it right into your computer, and most everybody has, like, a functional laptop or something. And if you don't, you can get a Raspberry Pi. So, a few of us came up with a way of, we were wondering, can we build, like, a kit radio telescope for, let's say, our original goal was under $100.

8:54With inflation, it's now under $200. But that was the goal. And it turned out the hardest part was the dish. You know, you can buy, like, you don't need much. Yeah. Like, a dish network dish. But people don't have satellite TV anymore. Not like they do. And it used to be. Yeah. It used to be really easy to find and not so much anymore. You can do it with, like, Wi-Fi antenna. Some people, or people, you know, some people have, like, a kind of, like, I call them a barbecue grill style.

9:26But, like, it's just, you know, like a ladder. But those even aren't so easy to find because our, like, our Wi-Fi and our wireless internet has just gotten so ubiquitous and good that there's just towers everywhere. And anyway, so nobody has that kind of equipment anymore. So we have to make our own. That's what this thing is. I don't know if you can see this behind me, but I can bring it over here. Yeah. And I can change how the screen is laid. I'll just bring it right where my face is here. That works. This is a horn. A horn made of cardboard.

9:59Now, cardboard is not, it's transparent to radio. But tinfoil isn't. So you can make a perfectly good, you point this end, point the big end at the sky and plug your radio in down here. And you have a radio telescope. You can get a decent amount of cardboard at any, like, out back of any Best Buy or anything basically for free. And the plans are on the internet. So, and you can kind of fiddle around with it and try different things. I had a student try to make a spherical one one time, which was a disaster.

10:32And you can also use house foam, the kind of, like, insulation that you put around a house. Yeah. Yeah. The shiny stuff. The shiny stuff. Exactly. And it works, that works really well, too. So you can use anything, really. You know, this one uses cardboard, tinfoil, and then where the little connector goes, you have to order that on Amazon. But you need a piece of metal. And we like to use a soup can lid. It's a nice thick piece of metal that everyone has laying around. And what I love about this is when we're trying to look at things in astronomy, what we worry about is how big the wavelength of the light is.

11:11So the light that we see with our eyeballs is measured at strand of hair sizes. The light that is used in your microwave to heat food because it vibrates water molecules, it's bigger than that. You can actually put a grid of marshmallows in a microwave you do not like, not rotating, just hanging out there, and nuke them, stop it as soon as they start to get too gooey. And you can see the pattern of the microwaves in the marshmallows.

11:45Again, only do this with a microwave you do not like. And essentially, radio waves are anything bigger than a millimeter. And so these are big waves, and you can catch them with anything smaller than the wavelength. So screen mesh, chicken wire, all these things get used at different scales for different wavelengths of radio light.

12:18When we're worried about things like the Atacama millimeter array, there we want to have a perfect surface because we're looking at millimeter wavelengths. But the bigger the wavelength, the chunkier the stuff you can use to build a light-collecting dish. And so tinfoil works, and depending on what you're looking at, you can even use screen. It's kind of simple and straightforward. Nylon screen doesn't work. It has to be the old-school Hertz to work with metal stuff.

12:49Yep, it does. And generally speaking, think of it like a net, right? Like you want the size of the hole in whatever it is to be smaller than the wavelength. That's hitting it. So we're using this to look at a particular wavelength, which is really super interesting.

Mapping Hydrogen and Dark Matter

13:08It is atomic hydrogen, so just one proton and one electron. It is the most common element in the universe, and one of the only couple that were created in the Big Bang is really ubiquitous in the galaxy. And it has all the usual, like, optical and infrared and UV lines that people may have heard of or seen in a demo where you look at a spectrometer, at a lamp. That red open sign is hydrogen. That's right. But in the radio, there are also lines, and most spectral lines are really, like, if you tune across them, as you go to frequency or wavelength, they'll kind of go up and back down and kind of raw.

13:55Yeah. Because the atoms are all moving around, and also the actual, like, atomic physics of the energy transition broadens them as well. But if you have really, like, diffuse hydrogen, and you look at it at some of the radio lines, they're basically perfectly, like, all at one frequency. And the cool thing about that is that means if you know the actual frequency, you can measure the Doppler shift. Oh, cool. Just, you know, like, as it comes towards you, it blue shifts, and as it goes away, it red shifts.

14:27And on a spectrometer, which is just showing you the power as a function of wavelength, it'll just move. So if you look and you say, okay, it's here, you can actually change the x-axis to blossom. So you, hydrogen has a bunch of lines, but the one that is most interesting is the 21-centimeter line, which means the wavelength is 21 centimeters long. And it's basically almost exactly 21 centimeters. There's no broadening or anything. And so, and the physics of why it happens is also super weird.

15:03But the result is that it emits, a hydrogen atom will emit one of these photons every so often. But the thing that drives me nuts about it is that the decay time of the line that makes the photon is longer than the age of the universe. Right, and this is where probabilities matter, because you can say something has a half-life of 10 days, but that doesn't mean you have to wait 10 days to see it decay.

15:39It just means that after 10 days, half of it will be gone. Things can randomly do whatever they feel like. And there is so much hydrogen out there that some of that random hydrogen is going to be like, I don't have the patience for this nonsense. And it allows us to see hydrogen that is essentially bored, because this only happens where it's low temperature, low density, the atoms aren't interacting with each other, hydrogen hanging out going, hmm, all right, nothing to do.

16:15And because it's so unmolested by the rest of the universe, we get to see these transitions. Oh, and because there's so much of it. Yes, you have to have those. If you're looking at a crowd of bajoulians of atoms, and if just a few of them do it, you see it all the time.

16:34The other thing that's just wild about it is that the wavelength is this big. You have the smallest atom. It's 12 on centimeters. You have the smallest atom, and it's just this wave comes wiggling out of it somehow. It doesn't make sense, but it happens. It's just such a low energy transition. And that's the thing that we have to remember, is energy and wavelength are related. Size and wavelength are not, except when you're trying to collect the light.

17:06And you need to have something that's at least 21 centimeters to do a good job resolving this light. Yeah, and this thing is only like two wavelengths across, maybe two and a half. And it still works pretty well.

17:22There's just so much light. So our Milky Way is full of hydrogen, and it's mostly in the plane. So if you were to look at the sky with radial eyes, you would see a Milky Way, just like you do with your eyes, except there's no dust lanes. It's all just there. And it would have, but the colors would be wild because some of it's coming and some of it's going. And so there's all this sort of Doppler shift structure to it. And with this thing, if you map enough points, if you just point it along the plane of the galaxy and you record the highest velocity that you see, just hard to calculate, and then you plot it, you can make a rotation curve.

18:03And rotation curves tell us about the distribution of stuff exerting gravity. So the rate at which anything goes on in orbit only asks how much stuff is inside where I am towards the center of mass. So in our solar system, the sun's hanging out with most of the mass. And so we can mostly ignore all the planets, the space rocks, the icy bits, and only focus on the amount of mass tied up in the sun.

18:36In our galaxy, even though the supermassive black hole in the core is pretty impressive, all the other gas and stars and stuff actually has to be accounted for when you're calculating the rate at which things should be orbiting. And when we count up everything that emits light, no matter what wavelength it is, it turns out that isn't enough stuff to explain the orbits we're seeing.

19:09And so it was this kind of a mapping of orbits that allowed us to figure out there's stuff we're not seeing. And that was a radio discovery. Now, your students can actually repeat that radio discovery with a device potentially made of pizza boxes. Yeah, anyone can. And, you know, it's like, you know, $50 worth of parts on Amazon and some pizza boxes. And it's remarkably, I mean, it's not trivial.

19:41It's still like a kind of a hacker project, but it's fun and you can do it in the daytime. That's very cool. And there's a lot of other cool stuff you can do to, like, once you do that and you're like, okay, oh, I proved the existence in a dark manner. Now what can I do?

Interferometers and Global Arrays

19:59You can, you can, another fun thing you can do is if you make two of them, you can make an interferometer, which is, which lets you measure the size of the sun without looking at it. So, so an interferometer is a system where you're able to, in this case, I'm guessing using wires, move the system so that both horns, both receivers are receiving light from the sun at the same time.

20:32And, and you can say to yourself, hey, it does, I don't have to do any funky stuff. They can both just look at the sun. The sun's right there. But one of the keys to this is you want the same wavelength of light to be hitting both dishes at the same time. So, you can, in radio, adjust the distance of the two objects by either recording and then combining in software and shifting things back and forth. Or, uh, you actually just use different length wires between the dishes and, and the receiver.

21:08And that works too, which is kind of my favorite thing. Um, the VLA used horns that, that they're actually like just transporting the light and, and it worked. Old school analog worked. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They had a huge cable bank of different lengths and, uh, had to change them out as they'd steer around because, you know, if you point this way, there's a huge delay between these two. But if you point straight up, there's no delay. And anyway, it's, uh, it's now, now we all, we just do it in, uh, in the computer.

21:41Computers are faster than cables and a lot less heavy to carry around. And that's a, that's a fun one. And this lets you do things like use dishes on opposite sides of the world and mail hard drives to do your data reduction. And, and, and one of my first jobs was, was actually before hard drives were, were mailable objects, uh, and magnetic tapes were what was getting mailed. I worked at a place called Haystack Observatory in Westford, Mass. As a high school kid, cause I was a nerd and finding how to align the data from multiple sites was something they had the computers there to do.

22:20And everyone always cursed a few, I shall not name them, telescopes around the planet that had bad clocks because you'd try and line things up using the timestamps and it wouldn't work. So you'd have to like slide things back and forth back before technology was really good at this. Um, yeah, there's a famous, there's a famous story about, um, let's see, it must've been in the seventies, uh, uh, an attempt at a long baseline interferometry between, uh, I think it was between Green Bank and West Virginia and somewhere in Russia.

22:57And, um, they, um, they, uh, had to carry the, hand carry the clock standard, um, from Green Bank over to Russia. And I think I, I don't remember how the story goes exactly, but I have this memory of like, for some reason I, I think it was hidden in a cake. But, uh, so the, the Rutan 600, uh, I think was the telescope that was involved in that. It's a massive system that has one of the funkiest designs I've ever seen.

23:29Instead of building the entire dish, like they did down at Arecibo, like they did in China with the fast radio dish, um, they just built like the top 15 feet of it. And so they found a massive plane, uh, out in, uh, the, the Southern part of the Soviet Union near the Caucasus mountains. Um, and they, they just built a circle that was 600 meters wide with just the top part of the dish, just the top.

24:04And, and it worked. It was all they needed. Um, it wasn't. It was a circular big ear. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It was quite clever. Um, and what was interesting is they built it driving distance from the six meter telescope up on top of one of the mountains in the Caucasus. So you could drive from the six meter to the 600 meter. And that just amuses me in retrospect. Yeah. Yeah. There was one very similar to that in, um, at Ohio state, uh, roughly around the same time. That was just a, uh, square reflector to a horn.

24:38Yeah. Um, and I think the other interesting common thing between those two is that, um, they both had, um, are, so, so the, the big ear is famous for having the, the, the, the wow signal. Yeah. Um, which is just a very large number, which we see now all the time because it's something, uh, in space. Yeah. But, um, so did the Bertrand 600. They had a wow signal too.

Software Defined Radio Setup

25:05Now we have a question coming in from the audience. Ark to tooth, Ark to tooth asks, uh, so to do this, I would need to have software defined radio. How good does it need to be? Will any do? Any will do. We use, uh, we use the absolute cheapest one. You can get, uh, the, uh, um, uh, RTL SDR, which is basically just the thumb drives size. It, it's, um, made from a old, um, made from a TV tuner chip.

25:39Okay. That's it. And we, we, we, we, we also have a, um, um, uh, a program that you can run to, to capture the data. Um, and that's, there's also a, um, like a image for a, a Raspberry Pi. So, um, if you don't want to take, if you don't have a laptop or it's, uh, it's running from the horrible windows thing or something and you, and you can't make it work and just get yourself a Raspberry Pi, uh, and flash our image on there.

26:13So you don't have to install anything. It just works. And the only annoying thing is, is there aren't that many good, like portable monitors for Pi. So that's the thing we're still kind of working on. We have a lot less than ideal monitors. Some of them are very noisy in the radio, which is the biggest challenge. That's terrible. At least like the ASIS and stuff, portable monitors are, are getting more numerous in design. So hopefully they'll come up with a solution. I, I think we're already better than we were a couple of years ago.

26:43Yes, definitely. Now, what hasn't gotten better in the past few years is, uh, the weight of tripods. Um, these horns are, are pretty big and I can imagine going out there and just like hand steering them like a bazooka to look at the sun, to, to look at Jupiter. Um, but that's not the most accurate way. And while you can see Jupiter during the day, if you're really skilled and know exactly how

27:14to find it, um, that's not an easy thing to do. So, so how are you generally pointing, finding things using these giant cardboard devices? Well, the good, the good news is that the field of view, like the, the, the size that your point of the thing on the, that you're averaging on this over on the sky is enormous. It's like 20, 30 degrees. So you don't, you don't need to be very accurate. So that, that's like three fists across the sky.

27:45Yeah, it's, it's more than that. I mean, it's, it's just make a, make a goal, like a football goal sign and you're doing it. So, um, well, you, you just kind of need to know roughly where you want to point and then don't forget to write it down. Yes. That's what makes it science. That's what makes it science. So we, uh, the software comes with a, like some note-taking and logging stuff in it. So you can, well, we, I mean, it's always an afterthought. Russ, because, um, because a lot of times we go and do workshops in places and so we

28:16don't haul around equipment. We just make it when we get there. And so we grab whatever. So sometimes it's just a table that we can lean against. Um, um, I was, um, at one event and I had a table and I just thought, kind of log.

28:33Um, uh, so some colleagues have, um, got, they, they had a, uh, astronomy, they were doing their thing like at their department and they had an astronomy lab set up and they had these, a whole bunch of these, um, fairly like low, like cheap tripods. Yeah. And they were designed to, they had this, like a slot that you could slide the telescope into and just lock it off. And so it was easy to take apart. And so they just designed, uh, uh, uh, like an adapter, basically a plate with the, with

29:04the slot, that thing that would fit into that slot. And then they just connected it. They just like basically like taped it to the, of the horn. And then it could just, cause they're so light. Uh, uh, even the cheapest tripod, astronomy tripod anyway, is designed for something that's heavier than this. So your big, your big enemy here is wind and, and people walking into it because they're not the most durable thing. And wind is why so many astronomy tripods weigh so much. Yes.

29:35Yeah. Yes. And you don't want your big expensive telescope to think open. Yeah. Yeah. Usually what happens here is, um, they just blow over and you just pick them back up. That's true. Now I, I have a, a special skill. I am very good at setting things on fire, uh, with sunlight. Um, I know the sun gives off radio, especially right now during solar max. Is this something where you need to worry about fire?

30:05No, because it doesn't focus the light in the same way. Um, it, it only focuses the radio light, but it's out of focus for the, for like optical where, where the, the, the fiery part is. And, and so, um, the only real thing you have to worry about is like, Oh, like, Oh, your computer's overheating in the sun. Yeah. And this thing gets, I don't, uh, I'm in Phoenix. It is a thousand degrees outside. So I don't observe during the daytime right now, but that was because I would go on fire and not because of, you could probably point this thing right at the sun out here and it

30:35would be fine. So that, that, that is amazing to hear. I, yeah. One, one thing that I challenge you to set on fire, you know, you know, um, so one of my favorite things to do with systems like this is to set them side to side with one of our little robotic friends. So like a sea star, a unistellar and have them point at the thing that's super cool. So, uh, this is where you have Jupiter looking during the day and then that is a cheating

31:08way. You also have things like you can put sky safari on your software, on your cell phone. You can put Stellarium on your cell phone. Yeah. I use a program called star map 3d, but I mean, it's like literally just this thing. If you, if you have a program that you can just do the AR thing where you hold up your phone and look to where to see where stuff is, just make sure the time is set properly and location, but, um, it, that's all you need. Usually it's, it's, um, it's even like, you don't even need to do that. Like, um, what usually you fire up Stellarium before you go out or when you're out of

31:40here with your laptop and just like, look where the galaxy is and then kind of just get like, I need, I need to go low, medium or high and then a compass direction. And that, that's all you need. That, that is so cool. Now you, you, you've opened up the sky for so many people in radio, but we live in a world that's changing to this crazy new space economy where the sky is full of satellites.

32:10I, I did not fully appreciate how much things have changed in Intel. I was trying to use Stellarium to look some stuff up and Stellarium was swarming with satellites. That was not something I was expecting. Um, last time I tried to look at a meteor shower, the satellites outnumbered both the meteors and the fireflies. Um, so we, to do what we're going to be doing in the future, need to get above the clouds

32:42and, and you're helping kids get on the path to being part of tomorrow's science from space. Can, can you talk about your little can sat of delight or I guess it's a suitcase sat.

Student Satellites and CubeSats

32:56Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, well, um, so there's a couple of things that are going on. Yeah. So, so people are, um, taking advantage of, of, of space, uh, and, you know, low earth orbit, um, is getting more crowded and, um, but that because, uh, we've, as a society progressed to the point where it's not just governments and their contractors, um, building really

33:29big, expensive things that, that they could go to space. Uh, there's just an endless number of startups and then if, and then mostly it's coming from a few big, uh, but they're commercial companies that are selling us here on earth services based on, um, uh, think what they can do is get the space relatively cheaply. And so that it opens up the possibilities. So, um, there's more interest than ever by students and getting into that business. And, um, it's, it's, uh, in some ways, um, gotten a little bit easier to engage as a student,

34:06but in that some other way is not. So the one constant is hands-on experience makes all the difference if you're going out and looking for a job and, um, there's really no substitute for just actually building something that goes to space. So, um, here at ASU, we have, um, a couple of ways that students do that. There are a lot of students here and so there's, um, a lot of different kind of things you can do. Um, but, um, we have a, uh, CubeSat lab.

34:39A CubeSat is just a, it's just a sort of, um, brand name or for a satellite that is 10 centimeters on a side or units thereof. It's more geometry than a brand. Um, we, we actually have an interview earlier with Robert Sprouls, who's, who's the CEO of ExoLaunch. So you can go find that on our YouTube channel. Those of you out there watching. And, and we talk about how it's like 10 centimeters multiplied. So you have different units of size satellites and companies like ExoLaunch launch these suckers.

35:14Yep. That's right. Um, so, uh, and there are other, um, form factors that are Cubes. Anyway, the, the, this is an easy way for students to get involved in. That's actually how why CubeSats were invented back in the day was, um, was to, if you standardized the form factor, it makes it cheaper and easier and to the point where, um, a student team could potentially build their own thing in a college sort of timeframe. Yeah. Not just a 10 years or, or whatever. Um, nowadays it's, uh, these small form factor things are commercially viable and scientifically

35:51viable for doing, um, uh, I don't know, real things and where you actually care about the result. Whereas a student project, the most important thing is the education. If it works, it's, that's less important. So, um, what we're doing here is trying to blend those two things together and, um, get, get the students trained with hands-on stuff to the point where they're able to help the researchers and, uh, other, um, professionals build science grade mission.

36:24Right. And that's, that's tricky because there's a lot of learning that has to happen and learning usually means some failure. Uh, and the, the, the CubeSat lab, which we call the interplanetary lab, um, brings a lot of, uh, student clubs, uh, and, and other kinds of just students, free agents, uh, into, uh, a fairly large, well-equipped space lab that, um, where they can build their own projects, fail, get experience.

36:54And then once they're trained up, get involved in, in, um, in like pro grade stuff happening at the university, which the, the one that we're currently, uh, engaged in is, uh, is a space telescope that we're operating, that we build at our operating. And, and what wavelength does that telescope work in?

The SPARKS Ultraviolet Mission

37:11That's working in the ultraviolet. It's a mission called SPARKS, um, which is, uh, looking at the near ultraviolet and far ultraviolet, which just means two slightly different wavelengths. Um, we're looking at, it's, it's a, it's more, it's a targeted experiment. It's, it's basically could have been an observing program on Hubble. And in fact, it, it was, um, but with the, with the goal of staring for a lot longer than anybody would in their right minds allow us, uh, to do with Hubble at M dwarf stars, because

37:43that is interesting for exoplanet weeks. What, what I really love about this is because of that relationship between wavelength size and the needed light collecting area to resolve something well, you need your, your big old cardboard device just to get two wavelengths of that 21 centimeter light. Ultraviolet is bluer than blue. This is the stuff just beyond what we can see with our eyeballs. It's the stuff that causes, uh, sunburns at, at the wavelengths to get through the atmosphere.

38:19Most of ultraviolet doesn't get through the atmosphere. So just imagine how bad it would be if our atmosphere was just a little bit different. And, and, and so you can have with this little tiny wavelength of light, a much smaller light collecting area that allows you to get really cool resolution. Um, it's, it's just fun to think about and such a clear demonstration of how wavelength and light collecting area matter in, in science.

38:50Mm-hmm. Yeah. So this is the, this is a model of it right, right here. It's, it's literally, this is, that's one-to-one. It's the mirror is, yeah. Oh yeah. It's, it's, the mirror is eight centimeters or eight ish centimeters. So it's tiny. It's like the, like a size of a target telescope, you know, like you buy it, um, a toy, but because it's in space, it is one of the most sensitive out there. It's a lot smaller than Hubble, uh, but it's still, uh, the equivalent on the ground, if

39:23you account for atmospheric attenuation, it'd be like a hundred meters or something crazy like that. And, and it's not always the size that matters. It's how long you can look. And there's so many of us that want to use Hubble. Uh, it, it's not in the cards for the majority of astronomers. That's right. And you're not going to be able to get day after day, week after week, month after month observations of one kind of target. But if you launch your own CubeSat for your research team and your students, you have day

39:59after day, week after week for however long our sun is kind enough to allow you to keep your satellite in orbit. And that's one of the unfortunate parts is these things do have a, a small life expectancy. How many months, years are you going to get out of your... So, so we were lucky with Sparks and, um, got a launch a little bit higher than, so height matters. Yes. Um, let's drag the higher up you are. The higher you go, the lesser in the atmosphere.

40:29Uh, the, so we had a satellite deployed, the previous one deployed from the, uh, space station, which is at about 400 some, 440 kilometers. Um, and it's down that low to be in the atmosphere to protect or to, and in the, uh, Earth's magnetic field to protect the astronauts. Right. Right. Um, but that also means you're in the soup. Yeah. And, um, and that one lasted, uh, deployed at solar max when the sun was constantly flaring causing the atmosphere to pop.

41:00The atmosphere is constantly changing, which increases the drag. It, it puffs it up. It makes it inflate. It kind of gets inflamed and puffy. Yeah. And, and then, and so then you're ramming through it and that satellite was supposed to last six months and ended up lasting six weeks. Oh God. This, yeah, that was, um, that was a sad month. Now, was this a yeeted spacecraft, a yeeted satellite? Cause what I love is some of the CANSATs, the astronauts literally just like chuck out the international space station. They have a gun.

41:31They have a gun that shoots it. Oh, they, they, because if they just, if they just, uh, you know, try to put a, uh, you know, a quarterback spin on it or something, um, if they got it wrong, it could come back around and land right where it started. So they gotta, they gotta get that angle just right. Uh, it's pretty fun to watch. So you can get up in the middle of the night or whenever they do it and watch live as they deploy it. It's pretty neat. Um, but anyway, the, um, the, the, this, the sparks is at, uh, 600 kilometers, which, um,

42:03has a much, many, many years. Yeah. You think we, you know, we're, we're looking for like 10 years. That. At that. It's, it's incredible how fast it drops off. Yeah. The atmosphere is so thin up there. And, and that's closer to a Hubble orbit, I believe. I think that's right. And, and we're reaching a point with our technology where hopefully in the next few weeks, we're going to find out if we have the ability to boost satellites or not. Um, the, the, the Spitzer space telescope, uh, had its life endangered by solar max as well.

42:38It's, it, uh, dealt with a lot more drag than anyone would have wished for. It was, uh, on schedule, unfortunately, to come back to earth in the next year, whether we wanted it to or not. And, um, in August of 2025, NASA commissioned two different companies to figure out how to rescue Spitzer. Uh, one of them came out with the link satellite that's, that was launched last week. And, uh, it is on a mission to sidle up to Spitzer, hug it, and boost it to hopefully being usable

43:15again. And right now it's not usable. So. Was it Spitzer or Swift? Swift. You're right. I said the wrong one. I'm sorry. They both begin with the letter S. They both, they both probably need a boost. They, well, Spitzer is quite dead. Um, Swift is quite functional, but can't be used right now because they're conserving all the power. Um, so Swift is what I meant to say. It's the, the little, uh, gamma ray detector that then follows up an x-ray and optical to identify the location. It spends a lot of its time doing, uh, targeted science as well.

43:47Um, so yeah, that brilliant motion. I hope that works. Yeah. Because there's a lot of Miller stuff I could use that too. Yeah. I think, I hope, hope, hope, uh, hope it works. I think, I think there's a good chance, even if they have a future, you know, it's not perfect. It's still a good chance for Hubble if we choose to do it. I think, I don't think, um, hopefully we're not just looking at the success or failure of the, of the Swift boost as like the only gate for Hubble.

44:18Right. It's, it's, it's lots of companies figuring out lots of different solutions. If we can get to the point that we can refuel missions on orbit, um, that would be a massive benefit to our atmosphere. Um, we don't fully understand what having so many missions burn up in the atmosphere is going to do. Uh, we know that solid rocket booster propellant is really bad for the atmosphere. We know that the amount of methane getting used is really bad for the environment.

44:54Um, there's so many reasons, uh, not the least being rare earth minerals where they're looking at having to open up new minds just to meet the demand, um, of, of the new space economy. If we can get it so that we can refuel and move things around in space and swap out components rather than bringing things down through the atmosphere and launching new things up, that hopefully puts our planet in a better long term position.

45:25It's, it's ridiculous to have your main base be down a well. Yeah. You know, like a gravity well is so expensive and dangerous to go down. Uh, you know, there's just so much energy and there is stuff in space, you know, uh, and at Delta V much less than going down to the surface. So it, it, it makes economic sense to just make stuff in space and we just have to, we just have to get over our, yeah. And just kind of like get, get over our, uh, thinking that it's hard and, and, and just

46:00get, yeah, get better at it because it's, it's the right way to, right way to go. Yeah. And, and if we can just get the chips, we can do so much more.

46:13Yeah. Yeah. Well, in-space manufacturing should be a lot easier, uh, you know, low, you can change gravity and then I'll do whatever, like high gravity, need low gravity.

46:25So what's next for you and your, your team?

Studying M Dwarf Star Flares

46:28Um, well, um, so we're, sparks is monitoring, um, M dwarfs, the, the, which are the most common kind of star in the galaxy. And if you were to pick a random planet orbiting a star would be orbiting an M dwarf. So the goal is to see a flare and you see many flares from these things. Um, they're going to be the brightest that they ever at any wavelength in the, in the UV where we're looking and, um, that will could, I mean, if we see stronger than more commonly

47:03that flares are stronger or more common than we expect, that could dramatically change what we think about the sort of number of habitable worlds out there could be more, could be less. To back up a little bit, M dwarfs are smaller than our sun to the point that we actually usually talk about them in Jupiter mass versus solar mass. So they're, uh, on the small side, a hundred ish, uh, Jupiter masses to several hundred Jupiter

47:35masses. Um, the Traffist system that so many people talk about because it has so many little planets in it. Uh, it has one of these little red dwarfs. These are cooler stars and for a planet to be habitable, they have to be closer where we define habitable as being at a place where if you were rotating like the earth, you'd have liquid water on your surface. Now the problem is because you have to snuggle in so close, um, they tend to quickly tidally

48:09lock their planets. So the planet is always pointed at the star the same way, which changes the thermodynamics, but that's a different story, a different episode, but small things are the most common no matter what you're looking at. Planet earth, small life, most common solar system, uh, small rocks, most common galaxy, small stars, most common. Um, and they have planets and multiple, but they also have angry childhoods.

48:41Um, when M dwarfs are baby stars, they give off massive, massive bursts of energy that can blast those planets. And there's also the question of, do they keep doing that? How long do they keep doing that? And so studies like this are going to tell us just how, um, to personify a star, just how angry and for how long, and does it ever truly stop these stars happen to be?

49:13Do you have any early results you can share?

49:16Well, we're still, um, learning to fly as a telescope. Fair. It's, um, uh, we, we have had our first light and many lights thereafter where we're able to do astronomy now. And, um, we've, um, we've been in our monitoring campaign for three months now. We're currently monitoring AU-MIC, which is, um, I don't know, kind of like low-key sandwich. Microscopium? Um, I think so, yeah.

49:47Okay. Um, and, um, it, because it's one of the closer, all of the stars we're looking at are really close, you know, a few parsecs, like, you know, under a hundred, I think. Um, but they're all really close. And, um, we're just kind of like making, we're working on getting more sensitive so we can see the smaller layers. So, um, currently just watching for that player. And the trouble is we have, we're still learning how to work the system and the students are

50:21learning how to drive the, um, the, do astronomy. And we have quite a lot of data still up there. We, we're getting, we get data kind of like patchy and we're kind of back, get backlogs and things. And so there's a lot of time data that we have now, but there's like gaps where it's still in space that we're kind of like, we want to know what the time. So that's, that's the, um, that's the, uh, uh, like things don't fill in like you'd expect. Like, uh, so we're, we're kind of waiting to find out.

50:51So you can only download when your spacecraft is over the right places on the planet. Correct. Yep. So that's what's going on. Um, we're using a dish, uh, in Antarctica. Okay. Which is super cool.

51:06Students are like too used to it, but I think it's like, and when in Svalbard, which is in the Northern of the sphere, we're in a polar orbit. Right. We go over these stations, like every 45 minutes, every half orbit, we're over something. It's super convenient. It's, it's just like everything working. Yeah. So yeah, that's, uh, the moon is super cool. We, we took a, um, that'll, that'll, that'll, that'll be out, uh, very soon. Um, it, that we, we looked at the moon. It turns out to just perfectly fill the aperture. Oh, that's cool.

51:36So, uh, it also saturates. So you get all this crazy stuff, but it looks neat.

Far Side Moon Telescopes

51:41We're feeling.

Far Side Moon Telescopes

51:42I mean, um, we're working on a lot more stuff where we're like, we're, we're, we're getting ready to try to propose for a, a big mission to do like a, like the community, uh, of radio astronomers is, uh, proposing, uh, that humans build a radio telescope on the far side of the moon, um, or, or in orbit somewhere doesn't work wherever we can make it work. But that, that would be like a, um, kind of like a Spitzer or Swift love or bigger.

52:11Um, uh, mission, but there's a lot of cool stuff you can see like Jupiter flaring, but in a, in another system. And the reason you want to do that on the far side isn't because it's dark because it is not, it gets just as much sunlight as the near side, but it doesn't see all of our television stations, all of our radio stations, all of our satellite internet connections. And so you have kind of the ultimate radio quiet zone on the far side of the moon.

52:43It's radio dark.

52:46And, and, and so, um, and, and so, so when, when, when, um, and then when at night, when the sun, cause the sun is loud and the rain too, when that's down, it gets really quiet. Also, you have to worry about stuff like the solar wind blowing can cause sparks and things on the antennas. And so at, but at night you're in a wake, the solar wind just kind of blows by and, uh, that helps too. But we're also, it's really, really expensive to land on the moon. And also the regolith might do some weird stuff to the antennas.

53:19We're not sure about that. So another option would be just to, to fly, fly a bunch of antennas just pre-flying and a swarm. And that, that's cool too, because you could look in literally every direction at the same time. One of my favorite random things I've heard in a presentation that I was completely never expecting to hear in a presentation is a team at either the University of Tennessee or Tennessee state. And I'm really sorry that I can't remember which one or the name of the researcher. Um, they figured out that the right wavelength of microwave light will melt regolith.

53:57So you can literally drive along and use antenna to generate roads, generate dishes and alleviate some of the sharp pointy dust problems on the moon. And so there has been some thought that you can just like basically use microwave light to turn a crater into an antenna. And we're not there. That requires vast amounts of energy. We don't know how to generate effectively yet, but these are the dreams that scientists are

54:31currently having. And the CLPS program, which is becoming the moon-based program. So any mission that goes to the moon is now called a moon-based because that's not confusing. Um, it, these programs generally invite scientists to provide ride along instruments through a program called PRISM. Um, and, and, and so lots of researchers, I've been on a PRISM proposal that we're still waiting on, um, are, are looking for ways to take advantage of the commercial lunar missions

55:09to do federally funded science. So we have a, we have a, we have a PRISM proposal to, yep, that we're waiting on. And, uh, and then there's a, a two more that are from other, uh, competing teams all wanting to do radio stuff. Um, the other cool thing you can do with radio is, uh, ground penetrating radar. So we worked out a way of doing radio astronomy and ground penetrating radar for planetary stuff at the same time. That, and they only fund like two of these per, per session.

55:42So may our two proposals be the two, uh, mine is more crater related because crater is a kind of a thing I do. Um, this has been an amazing discussion.

Parting Words and Next Week

55:54I don't know how it's already been 59 minutes. Do you have any parting words for our audience? No, watch the skies. Watch the skies. I mean, really that, that is the best any of us can say. Where can people follow your work? Um, well, uh, the, let's see, um, if you Google, if you want to do the radio, um, astronomy project, um, Google like chart astronomy, uh, it'll, it'll come up. We have a, like a GitHub pages, uh, with all the directions and things there.

56:26My website is danielcjacobs.com. And I have a, I have my own DIY astronomy page there, which has a bunch of links to not just to this, but other things you can build. Um, there's a bunch of press releases and cool stuff about sparks, which is what we're working on now. And those are all just Googleable sparks, astronomy, sparks, cubesat. That's awesome. And, um, I don't, I don't, I don't do, uh, Instagram. And that's okay. That'd be email. Okay. I love getting email.

56:56All right. This, this has been absolutely amazing. And I, I, I, I will admit our house has, um, a cardboard infestation problem. I live in a small town. We shop on, uh, Amazon probably more than the environment would appreciate. And now I have a deep seated desire to confuse my neighbors by building a radio dish.

57:34Yeah. Go for it. It's, it, you'll, you'll, you'll, uh, you'll arts and crafts time. When you feel like wielding that hot glue gun, this is the thing to do. And yeah, yeah. Uh, astronomy really is for absolutely anyone. All right. So today is July 10th when we're recording this. Uh, our next episode is going to be July 17th. We will be recording at 2 PM Eastern, and we are going to be discussing, uh, international

58:10moon day, which is different from international observe the moon night, which is in September. Uh, day is UN sponsored, uh, observe the moon night is NASA sponsored. Um, really just look at the moon every day. Well, except when it's new and the two or three days around that, um, the moon is our constant companion traveling through the solar system and we're going to be talking about it next week. So thank you for joining us, Danny. This, this has been a lot of fun and I, I hope everyone out there found it inspirational

58:46the way I did. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for having me. This week.

Credits and Patron Thanks

58:52We would like to thank the following patrons. Ambius, Bore Andro Leveswald, Breck Young, Christopher L. Todd, Eric Lee, Gordon Dewis, Hannah Tackeray, James Bedian, Jason, Jill Holstein, Kimberly Rack, Mark Sykes, Mike Ailes, Patrick Young, Richard, Sandra Stanz, Semyon Torfesson, Time Lord Iroh, and William Fitcher.

59:29Escape Velocity Space News is executive produced and written by Dr. Pamela Gay. The This Week in Aerospace segment is written and researched by Eric Maddox and Dave Bullard. Audio engineering is provided by Allie Pelfry. Escape Velocity Space News is a production of the Planetary Science Institute, a 501c3 nonprofit dedicated to exploring our solar system and beyond. We are here thanks to the generous contributions of people like you. The best way you can support us is through patreon.com slash CosmoQuestX.

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1:01:32As we wrap up today's episode, we're looking forward to unraveling more stories from the universe. With every new discovery from ground-based and space-based observatories and each milestone and space exploration, we come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place within it. Until next time, let the stars guide your curiosity.