Podcaster: Dr. Pamela Gay;
Title: Escape Velocity Space News – EVSN: The Book of Mars, Star Formation, & More
Organization: Cosmoquest
Link: http://dailyspace.org/
Description: From March 13, 2025.
Let’s take a fast-paced journey thru all that’s new in space and astronomy, including DESI takes a census of central black holes, star formation in clusters, and updates on Europa Clipper, along with a deep dive into Mars science, and tales from the launch pad.
Bio: Dr. Pamela Gay is a Senior Scientist at Planetary Science Institute and a Director of CosmoQuest.
Today’s sponsor: Big thanks to our Patreon supporters this month: Paul M. Sutter, Chris Nealen, Frank Frankovic, Frank Tippin, Jako Danar, Michael Freedman, Nik Whitehead, Rani Bush, Ron Diehl, Steven Emert, Brett Duane, Don Swartwout, Vladimir Bogdanov, Steven Kluth, Steve Nerlich, Phyllis Foster, Michael W, James K Wood, Katrina Ince, Cherry Wood.
Please consider sponsoring a day or two. Just click on the “Donate” button on the lower left side of this webpage, or contact us at signup@365daysofastronomy.org.
Please visit our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy
or you can consider to sponsor a day of our podcast : https://cosmoquest.org/x/365daysofastronomy/product/sponsor-an-episode-of-365-days-of-astronomy/
Transcript:
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Welcome to Escape Velocity Space News. I’m your host, Dr. Pamela Gay, and I am here to put science in your brain. I’m recording this on March 5th.
At this point in time, there is no new NASA administrator, and we continue to live in this weird, liminal space where the massive layoffs that have struck so many federal agencies are still somehow only touching the edges of space sciences. We’ve seen our cousins at USGS and NOAA face massive layoffs, restrictions on conference travel and what research they can present. So far, however, the promised layoffs have only hit at the Jet Propulsion Lab, and those all happened before.
And while grant slowdowns and cuts are happening, and there are delays in funding, space science is somehow still moving forward. As Eric will talk about more, we’ve seen Firefly Aerospace successfully land on the moon, and there have been mixed results from the launch of three moon-destined missions, Odin, Trailblazer, and Athena. Tomorrow, we may see another moon landing.
Or not. I’ll record a bonus scene before this goes live to let you know what happened. It all feels a bit too good to be true, and I’m afraid to pinch myself in case I wake up.
If you have helped make this happen by calling your congresspeople, thank you. If you want to help keep this continuing to happen, please call your congresspeople. Space exploration leads to unexpected breakthroughs, like the invention of Wi-Fi, and it gives us something to learn when we need the sky to no longer be our limit.
In this episode, we’re going to look so very far beyond Earth. We’re going to explore black holes across over a million galaxies, and look at star formation in the Milky Way and the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud. In our closer look, we’re going to explore Mars, and look at just how often rocks fall out of the red planet’s sky.
All this and more is coming to you right here, right now, on EVSN, a product of CosmoQuest, and supported through our patrons. Thank you. Back when I started astronomy in the 1990s, folks joked that a sample of six was big enough to do statistics.
In those early days of digital cameras and multimeter telescopes, it still took a night or more to observe a single galaxy. I bring this up because a recent press release casually failed to mention that a new publication using the Dark Energy Survey Instrument started with a sample of 1,385,177 galaxy spectra. And this is just galaxies from their early data release.
There are more galaxy spectra coming thanks to their ability to observe up to 5,000 galaxies at a time. Statistics in astronomy are a whole lot more interesting today. From this sample, a team of researchers went digging for information about the black holes in the centers of regular and dwarf galaxies.
After restricting themselves only to galaxies that met specific criteria, they had a sample of 410,757 line-emitting galaxies, including 114,496 dwarf galaxies. Until 2014, researchers weren’t even sure if dwarf galaxies had massive black holes in their centers. Not only did researchers find black holes in dwarf galaxies in this paper, but they also found active galactic nuclei in 2% of the dwarf galaxies.
And the black holes they were finding in galaxy cores ranged from supermassive black holes with masses over a million solar masses, down to intermediate-mass black holes as small as 25,000 times the mass of the sun. These smaller black holes are the most interesting to a lot of us. Altogether, they found nearly 300 intermediate-mass black hole candidates.
And to repeat myself, these are results from the early data release. There will be more data coming for years, and this sample is only going to go up and up over time. Ultimately, this will allow us to better understand both the relationship between a galaxy’s size and its central black hole size, as well as the formation history of supermassive black holes, which seem to grow both through the merger of stellar-mass black holes, as well as through the collapse of material directly into a black hole in the early universe.
I can’t wait to see where this research goes. Our modern, highly efficient cameras and massive telescopes allow us to not only do massive surveys, they also allow us to see specific objects in previously unimagined detail. The 4-meter Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope, or VISTA in Chile, recently completed a highly detailed mosaic of the RCW 38 star-forming region.
Just 5,500 light-years away, this system is less than a million years old. By studying its 2,000 young stars, we can gain new insights into how stars and their surrounding solar systems form. If you want to explore this image for yourself, check out the link on our website, EVSN.TV. With even larger telescopes, we can see more distant star clusters, such as the NGC 2040 Open Star Cluster. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 160,000 light-years away, this system is several million years old, and its most massive stars have already died, creating the system’s intricate structures with their explosions. As we look throughout the sky, we can find star clusters of myriad different ages that allow us to study stellar evolution the same way that class photos allow us to catch snapshots of development. All the stars in each cluster are roughly the same age, and they are all made of the same stuff, so generally the only difference comes in mass.
Perhaps the most imaged star-forming region is the Orion Nebula. Even the JWST has taken its own crack at observing this system, and that giant orbiting scope has shown that new things are still waiting to be discovered even in this familiar nebula. Specifically, they found a number of rogue planets seeming to move freely without orbiting any stars.
While there are ways to yeet planets from solar systems, new research finds that some of these planets are able to form where forming solar systems interact. This new research appears in Science Advances and is led by Dian Hongping with lead author Zhehou Fu. Using computer simulations, they were able to explain what the frequency of the planetary massed objects and how they so often appear in binary pairs.
They explain that in close encounters between two disks, which occur at velocities of 2-3 km per second, gravity can cause bridges of material to sprawl between the systems where it can then collapse into worlds. According to team researcher Lucia Mayer, this discovery partly reshapes how we view cosmic diversity. Planetary mass objects may represent a third class of objects born not from the raw material of star-forming clouds or via planet building processes, but rather from the gravitational chaos of disk collisions.
It doesn’t take a lot of telescope to make the number of visible stars radically increase. It even turns out that Europa Clipper with its several centimeter star tracker cameras can get in on the star observing game. The Clipper launched October 14, 2024 and flew past Mars on March 1 while traveling on toward Jupiter and its moon Europa.
Along the way, Clipper is checking several of its systems. At Mars, it used its thermal imager to take some test images. That was cool but not necessary.
Required for its mission are the Clipper’s star trackers, which are used to very precisely measure the Clipper’s orientation in space and make sure that it can keep its communications equipment properly oriented when it calls home. The images from its star trackers are less than spectacular. But I have to admit, for a small camera catching quick shots, they aren’t that shoddy.
Clipper will reach the Jupiter system in 2030. Before that, it will actually be swinging by Earth one more time in December 2026 to use our gravity to sling it out toward Jupiter. Sometimes in space, the most fuel efficient route requires returning to where you started.
After a break, we’ll be back with more Mars news. Talk of Mars has been seeping into just about every area of media, as rumors swirl that NASA’s current plans to return humans to the moon will be replaced with plans to fly directly to Mars. Given that we can’t currently keep people alive on Mars, I’m really hoping that doesn’t happen.
And I kind of like to walk through life making people read Kelly Clarkson’s and Zach Wienersmith’s book, A City of Mars. Sadly, you can’t actually make people read. But since you’re already here, I’m just going to say it out loud.
Sending humans to Mars this decade is just a bad idea. But the robots, the robots we’re sending are doing awesome. And I’d encourage every space agency to keep populating Mars with four or more wheeled science friends.
Every couple of years, our orbit and Mars orbit line up just right to make fuel efficient flights to Mars possible. The next two windows are in November, December 2026, and December 2028 into January 2029. While NASA doesn’t have anything slated for either launch window, Japan, India, and the European Union, as well as a commercial collaboration, are all gearing up to go.
And scientists can look forward to moon exploration, Mars moon exploration, that is, with JAXA’s Martian Moons Exploration Craft, a new orbiter covered in instruments to look at everything from dust particles to radio waves is also going to be on its way, as well as the much-delayed launch of the Rosalind Franklin lander. And while we wait for our digital collaborators to take flight, their cousins that are already at the Red Planet are sending us back information that describes a world that was once wetter than previously thought. That means life could have had even better opportunities to evolve than previously thought.
To understand Mars, researchers use every tool at their disposal to understand its surface, including its color. Nicknamed the Red Planet because it literally appears burnt orange in the sky, Mars is the color of rust, and it has long been recognized that the red came from some sort of iron-rich mineral. Until recently, the mineral hematite had been considered the primary source of this color.
Hematite is an iron oxide mineral, Fe2O3, which means it contains iron and oxygen. It is known to form in wet conditions, but can form without water. The existence of hematite as small nodules in images from the Opportunity rover was one of our first clear signs that Mars may once have had liquid water.
With the discovery of these pebbles, which were nicknamed blueberries, it was an easy leap to assume that Mars’ red color comes from hematite dust and sand. But you know what they say about assumptions. 20 years after the discovery of those berry-looking rocks, researchers have realized Mars’ color is likely due to a mineral literally made with water, ferrihydrite, which is made of five Fe2O3 molecules and nine water molecules.
Researchers at Brown University very carefully studied how light reflects off of grains of a variety of dusts and determined that the dust on Mars better matches ferrihydrite than hematite. And this change in mineral requires Mars to have had a water-rich history. It isn’t a perfect match.
Mars dust is certain to be a mix of things. But this appears to be the dominant mineral giving the red planet its burnt orange color. This work appears in the journal Nature Communications and is led by Adamus Valentinus.
It sometimes feels like every new piece of data gives us more evidence for Mars having a wet past. In a completely different study, researchers using data from China’s Xurong rover have uncovered the shoreline of an ancient Martian beach. From May 2021 to May 2022, this rover traveled nearly two kilometers along what appears to be an ancient shoreline.
Along the way, the rover used its onboard ground-penetrating radar to map the layers of hidden soils. They were able to figure out that a sloping shoreline, complete with sand that appears to have been rippled by waves, exists beneath that surface. Because the ancient beach is essentially sealed beneath subsequent layers of sediments, the shoreline is completely preserved.
As researcher Ben-Jane Cardenas puts it, it’s always a challenge to know how the last 3.5 billion years of erosion on Mars might have altered or completely erased evidence of an ocean. But not with these deposits. This is a very unique data set.
End quote. These results appear in proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with first author Zhen-Hu Li, and they are consistent with recent work by the Mars Curiosity Lander, which found fossilized ripples in an ancient lakebed, indicating waves stirred an ancient lake in Gale Crater. While ancient Mars may have been warm and wet, modern Mars is a desert wasteland.
That doesn’t mean the water is gone, however. It just means it’s gone from Mars’ surface. Researchers believe that a lot of Mars’ water has seeped into the world’s regolith, which is a fancy word for soil.
According to a new paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research Planets, Mars’ regolith varies greatly from place to place, and these variations mean some areas of Mars are better able to absorb and retain water than others. According to the Tohoku University press release on this research, quote, like a sponge, highly absorptive regolith in Mars’ mid and low latitudes retain substantial amounts of absorbed water. Some of this water, the findings showed, remains on the surface of the regolith as stable absorbed water, end quote.
Team member Takeshi Kuroda further explains, quote, the model could be used to study how water on Mars has changed and how it may have moved deeper underground near the planet’s mantle, end quote. Essentially, when we can one day dig into Mars’ surface, which the Rosalind Franklin rover will be able to do, we should find ice-rich soil within meters of the surface with even deeper reservoirs locking away water that once flowed as lakes and small oceans. But just like on Earth, how much moisture we find will vary from place to place.
While a lot of time is spent studying Mars’ ancient climate, some instruments are focused narrowly on Mars’ current conditions. One of those instruments was Mars’ InSight lander’s seismograph, designed to do one thing, measure Mars quakes on the red planet. This extremely sensitive instrument found signs that Mars just might still have some geologic activity.
Before researchers can say that for certain, however, all other possible sources of ground shaking need to be eliminated, including the shaking associated with falling space rocks. And we now know at least one quake was actually a falling space rock. In a pair of papers and geophysical research letters, researchers led by V.T. Beckle and Constantinius Charalambous were able to identify 123 new impact craters that occurred near InSight lander, potentially while it was operating. And they link 49 seismic events to these impacts, including the formation of a 21.5-meter crater near Cerberus Fossae. It had previously been thought that small impacts would vibrate through Mars’ surface but not create the mantle-penetrating seismic waves that InSight was able to see. The formation of this new crater, however, seems to indicate that meteoroids can quake Mars’ mantle.
This crater is linked to the high-frequency seismic event S0794A, which occurred in February 2021. As Charalambous puts it, quote, we used to think the energy detected from the vast majority of seismic events was stuck traveling within the Martian crust. This finding shows a deeper, faster path, call it a seismic highway, through the mantle allowing quakes to reach more distant regions of the planet, end quote.
Previously, Cerberus Fossae had been identified as a seismically active region because so many quakes were occurring there. This research raises the question, was this impact crater a one-off event or is there something about the geology that causes impacts there to show up in InSight’s data? Clearly, more Martian seismography is needed.
When that will happen, I can’t tell you. Also, this tells us Mars gets fairly significant craters on the regular. Rocks that our atmosphere would burn up to safe sizes are able to easily make it to Mars’ surface and make their marks.
This research found that the impact rate was 1.6 to 2.5 times higher than previously thought, with hundreds of impacts greater than 3.9 meters occurring every year. If humanity ever finds itself spreading across the red planet, asteroid impacts are going to be far more of a concern than I imagined, with at least one impact a year per Texas-sized area of Mars. So, more robots on Mars, more seismographs on Mars, and maybe keep the humans on Earth where our sky falls a whole lot less.
After the break, we’ll be back to look at this week’s Tales from the Launch Pad. Next up, I’m pleased to welcome on aerospace correspondent Eric Mattis for this week’s Tales from the Launch Pad. We are both recording this on Wednesday, March 5th, and tomorrow, Intuitive Machines is going to try and land on the moon while Ali works on editing this episode.
I’m going to record a quick coda to this episode once we know if they succeeded or once again failed. For now, hey Eric.
[Eric Mattis]
Hi Pamela. On February 8th, Rocket Lab launched the IoT for You and Me mission from their New Zealand spaceport. On board was the first set, hence the name, of Internet of Things satellite for French company CNES.
One more launch is planned. On February 18th, Rocket Lab launched the first satellite in Black Sky’s third-generation constellation on a mission named Fasten Your Space Belts. The new satellite can produce images with a resolution of 35 centimeters per pixel.
Five total satellites will be launched, all on electron rockets. On February 22nd, China launched the ChinaSat-10R satellite into orbit from the Xichang spaceport. ChinaSat-10R is a replacement for the ChinaSat-10 satellite, which was recently retired after 14 years in service.
It was launched on the Long March 3B. On February 26th, SpaceX launched the IM-2 rideshare mission on a Falcon 9 from Pad 39A in Florida. On board was the second Intuitive Machines Nova lunar lander and three rideshares, Odin from asteroid mining company Astroforge, Lunar Turbolaser from NASA, and a space tug with a commercial payload for geostationary orbit.
The launch was successful. However, Odin never transmitted after separation, and Lunar Turbolaser had problems with its power generation system. Intuitive Machines provided updates on the lander after launch, with landing expected on March 6th.
It remains in excellent health, and overall the mission appears to be running much smoother to the first one, where a comedy of errors happened starting only hours after launch and continued right into landing, which was marginally successful. We’ll have an update on the IM-2 landing after it happens. On March 2nd, Firefly Airspace successfully landed their Blue Ghost lander on the lunar surface, the first commercial company to perform a fully successful lunar landing.
The lander subsequently activated its high data rate x-band antenna and started sending back images to Earth. Firefly also started operations on the nine NASA payloads that will operate on the lunar surface. The 10th observes lunar dust interactions with the landing engines thrust on descent.
Firefly expects the mission to last two weeks until lunar night and several hours after sunset. We’ll have updates on the payloads and the mission in general in future episodes. The launchpad of the week is Rocket Lab’s Buckle Your Space Belts.
I like the unconventional shape of the patch and the depiction of the rocket’s kickstage and satellite. It almost looks like it’s entering hyperspace with the streaks. The patch has five dots on the top, one of them solid and the others under an outline, showing this is mission 105.
We keep track of orbital launches by launch site, also called Spaceport. According to Rocket Launch Live, so far this year the United States has had 26 launches, China has eight launches, New Zealand has had two launches, India, Japan and Russia each have had one launch. This makes the total number of launches so far this year 39.
Of these 39 launches, there have been one failure, reminding us the space is hard.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Thanks Eric. Before we go, I want to share with you a paper that brought me joy. Researchers Louise Berval, Carolyn Heung and Adam Rees compared the plot used by Henrietta Lovett in 1912 to demonstrate the period luminosity relationship for Cepheid variables with a plot using modern data.
Her discovery that Cepheids that pulsate with the same period are all the same luminosity has allowed us to use them to measure distances for over 100 years. Basically, if we know how luminous something actually is, and we can measure how bright it appears, we can calculate how far away it is. And this is what your brain does instinctually when it tells you faint headlights are far away.
In comparing Lovett’s data, which was measured using photographic glass plates with data taken by the Ogle survey, they found similar amounts of scatter. While the data for individual stars has more noise from image to image, her ability to measure each star’s highs and lows weren’t all that different from what we see today. What differences do crop up in a detailed comparison between her results and the expected results can be explained with the non-linear way that glass plates recorded light, becoming less effective with brighter objects, and also from the difficulties caused by crowding of the stars in the small Magellanic cloud.
When I was in graduate school, I was told I needed to stop studying pulsating variable stars like Cepheids because they were no longer as scientifically interesting and would be solved before a few years had passed. Well, my PhD is more than old enough to drink, and a Nobel laureate, Adam Riess, is spending time continuing to study them as part of understanding how to measure problems as fundamental as the expansion of the universe. Folks, if a topic interests you, don’t let anyone tell you to set it aside because it isn’t interesting enough to other people.
It turns out we don’t have a good understanding of what problems will turn out to be really difficult to solve. So follow your passions. Anyways, this paper brought me joy, and I hope it has brought you a little bit of joy as well.
That’s it for now. Good night everyone, and remember to go out and look up. Oh, and please give this video a like and subscribe so the algorithm tells you and the world when new science is ready to be learned.
Hi, it’s now Saturday, March 8th. You know it’s a different day because my hair is down, my lighting is terrible, and I look grumpy. The reason I look grumpy is things did not go well Thursday. It was not a good day for US spaceflight at all.
So it was a good day for the Europeans. The second flight of the Ariane 6 launched without a hitch. Everything went exactly as it should.
It was super humorous because it launched straight into a cloud bank and they went straight to illustrations. They didn’t even try to send us video from the rocket. They just did their job, got it done, no fuss, perfect.
Again, it was the very second launch ever of the Ariane 6. Meanwhile, intuitive machines attempted to land on the moon. At this point, we don’t know exactly what happened.
They were about 250 meters off of where they meant to land. They ended up in a very dark crater and they fell over sideways. They did this in slow motion and all of the onboard ride shares, the rover, everything else that they were supposed to deploy all survived, was all sending back messages until they ran out of power about 24 hours later.
It’s dead. It’s very, very dead. It did send back one picture of the earth rising between its legs, which is not an image anyone wants to see, but it’s the one they chose to release.
Later, the very same day, Starship attempted to launch Starship 8 from Boca Chica and it took off. The heavy booster, they caught it. It was fine.
But Starship, almost at the exact same moment that it happened in the last flight, blew up, causing hundreds of airplanes to have to divert. There is terrifying video taken by a passenger of one of the airplanes that shows Starship outside the airplane, descending through the atmosphere at a similar altitude to the airplane, which is not the kind of thing you want to see. For roughly an hour, they had airplanes circling out over the ocean.
They closed all of the airports in Florida and no one could make it south down to the Bahamas, Turks, and Caicos. It’s unclear what’s going to happen, but right now a flight investigation is being demanded. I have to admit, I ate my feelings.
I then proceeded to rage clean my studio, which is why my lighting is currently so terrible. We will be fine. But it was a very bad day that reminded us space is hard.
I was hoping to also have information for you on the launch of SphereX and Punch. That launch just keeps getting delayed. It’s not due to SphereX or Punch.
It’s due to the rocket. Yeah. Someday, someone, somewhere, it will launch.
They will launch. And we will study our sun and more. But until then, go out, look up, enjoy the sky, and know that at some point we will get better at getting off of the planet Earth.
Bye-bye. This show is made possible by our absolutely amazing patrons at patreon.com slash CosmoQuestX. I’m overwhelmed at how many new names I have to read this month.
And if you want to join, donate $10 or more at patreon.com slash CosmoQuestX. Thank you to BuzzNash, David Troge, Gary William Berklow, Janelle, Jeffrey David Marasini, Joe Holstein, Lenore Horner, Time Lord Iroh, Ambious Andrea Segal, Greg Thorvald, Jeff Harris, Les Howard, Mark Sykes, Masa Herliu, Peter Richards, Semyon Torfason, William Fichner, Alan Gross, Bernard Schaffer, Bore Andro-Levsvall, Kami Rassian-Casnow, Doc Knappers, Don Mundes, Dustin Ralph, Gary Engelman, Glenn McDavid, Gordon Dewis, JustMeAndTheCat, Katrina Inkey, Kimberly Rieck, Michael Prochada, OnTheDiagonal, Patrick Young, Robert W. Farley, Sebastian Shiper, Sean Grossman, Simon Oliphant, TheRealFakeAdmin, and William Bridgman.
Thank you all. Thank you. So much.
[Speaker 3]
Escape Velocity Space News is executive produced and written by Dr. Pamela Gay. The This Week in Aerospace segment is written and researched by Eric Mattis, Gordon Dewis, and Dave Billard. Audio engineering is provided by Ali Pelfrey.
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. Patreon benefits include exclusive access to ad-free podcasts, full-length guest interviews, weekly video chats with our production team, and other bonus content. Like us? Please share us.
You never know whose life you can change by adding a little bit of science.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Planetary Science Institute. Audio post production by me, Richard Drumm, project management by Avivah Yamani, and hosting donated by libsyn.com. This content is released under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. Please share what you love but don’t sell what’s free.
This show is made possible thanks to the generous donations of people like you! Please consider supporting our show on Patreon.com/CosmoQuestX and get access to bonus content. Without your passion and contribution, we won’t be able to share the stories and inspire the worlds. We invite you to join our community of storytellers and share your voice with listeners worldwide.
As we wrap up today’s episode, we are looking forward to unravel more stories from the Universe. With every new discovery from ground-based and space-based observatories, and each milestone in space exploration, we come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place within it.
Until next time let the stars guide your curiosity!