Life on White Mars, and a new space

13:36Mark McCaughrean:Now, you talked about Mars. What about the moon as a, you know, this is going to be the next step, isn't it, of having these sorts of bases on the moon? And I guess the big difference is there isn't any air on the moon. But other than that, it's not dissimilar, particularly the isolation and the inability to get back really quickly.

13:57Richard Hollingham:Yeah, I think there was a paper published that said the summer seasons for these Antarctic research stations. So when you do have the ability to leave, but not straight away, are very comparable to maybe a moon mission. So it would take days to get home instead of not being able to leave at all. And I think the way that the station is built and how it's run and what kind of life support systems you have, like our water recycling, those are really good trials to see how we could maybe live on the moon and have a base permanently.

14:28Sue Nelson:Now, when you're outside and you're looking up at the Milky Way and seeing the aurora, do you ever consider becoming an astronaut yourself, particularly since two ESA Reserve astronauts have spent time in Concordia like you have?

14:48Richard Hollingham:Yeah, I mean, it's really, really inspiring that those two astronauts have been here and, you know, spent time in the same laboratory, sat at the same table and eaten meals. Do I think I've got what it takes? I don't know. I've survived 10 months and I'm still working and I'm still OK. So if I make it through, I would definitely consider it.

15:08Sue Nelson:Excellent. So you could follow McGann Christian then. Yes.

15:12Mark McCaughrean:And what are your feelings about living on the moon or Mars? I mean, have you changed your mind about that? Or do you think that's doable?

15:19Richard Hollingham:I think it's doable. I mean, if you could just put politics and money aside and just concentrate on the science, it would be the most amazing thing to go to Mars. But we do have a lot going on on Earth as well. And space agencies don't have unlimited funds. So we have to be realistic. but I do hope it happens in the coming decades. I think the astronauts that we have now definitely going to go to the moon. They might even go to Mars. In my head, that's what I used to dream about as a kid. Like seeing that on the news would be super exciting.

15:50Sue Nelson:Dr Nina Purvis at White Mars, Concordia Station in Antarctica. Fortunately, they're somewhere a little closer to home if you want to get an idea of what it's like to go into space. And that's the Science Museum in London. Nice link. Thank you. The museum closed its space section earlier this year to remodel the popular exhibition. Some things remain, like the original Apollo 10 capsule and the spacesuit worn by the first British astronaut, Helen Sharman, while others are either no longer on display or are completely new to visitors.

16:27Mark McCaughrean:Very much like influencers, before it opened to the public, we went along to inspect the new gallery. We began by talking to Abby McKinnon, the lead curator of the exhibition, about how she decided which pieces stayed in and what went.

16:44Richard Hollingham:It's always a difficult decision to decide which objects you're going to put on display, but we've tried to go for the real gems of the collection and also thinking about real authentic objects. So this is a gallery full of real objects, objects that have been to space and back again, objects that have been used to to test processes, develop new technologies. And so they're all very genuine objects.

17:08Mark McCaughrean:And that's the key to it, really, isn't it? You've got these, you've got the Apollo 10 capsule, you've got the Soyuz that Tim Peake flew to space, but with the parachute as well. You've got the engineering model of BepiColombo, you've got the engineering model of Prospero, the UK's first launched satellite. So it's object heavy.

17:28Richard Hollingham:Yes, it definitely is. We're definitely leaning into the objects. objects telling incredible stories that we haven't told in the museum before.

17:37Sue Nelson:Like what?

17:37Richard Hollingham:For example, we have an Apollo fuel cell. This is an unflown fuel cell, but it is a genuine fuel cell, which would have flown on the service module. We talk a bit about Apollo 13 and the disaster when the oxygen tank exploded and three out of the four fuel cells failed. We show visitors where that fuel cell would have been on the service module and also talk about how they got the astronauts back home again.

18:01Sue Nelson:You've also got Neil Armstrong's headset. Now, did you have that before? Because I don't recall seeing that.

18:08Richard Hollingham:Yes, we do have Neil Armstrong's headset on display. It was on display before, but in and amongst so many amazing objects in the previous gallery, it could have been missed. But now it has a place of pride in this new gallery. It is the headset that Neil Armstrong wore in the command module for the Apollo 11 mission.

18:29Mark McCaughrean:That's extraordinary to have those sorts of things here and weirdly you had the Apollo capsule before in the museum but it was sort of lost in another gallery it wasn't even in the space gallery it felt like you walked past it

18:41Richard Hollingham:to get to the cafe yeah yeah we are thrilled to be able to have the Apollo 10 command module back with the rest of the space collection and critically right next to the Soyuz descent module the first time a Soyuz and an Apollo command module have ever been displayed next to each other

18:59Sue Nelson:And I think what's interesting about that is having them side by side, it is astonishing to see how small the Soyuz is. I thought, oh, only one person can get in there and then realise, no, no, hold on, three. Three adult men sitting in that Soyuz. I mean, there must be shoulders crammed together and very claustrophobic.

19:23Richard Hollingham:astrophobic yes absolutely and i think with our kind of new display you can really see very well into the window visitors can imagine how cramped that must have been for the astronauts i think too the apollo command module remember that's where they lived for a number of days until they returned to earth whereas soyuz at least they did get to get out and stretch their legs in the international

19:46Mark McCaughrean:space station that is something that i noticed you haven't got here is i couldn't see any mention though of the International Space Station? Was that a deliberate decision?

19:56Richard Hollingham:We do mention it briefly when looking at the Soyuz descent module and thinking about Tim and also we have a little biography of Tim Peake and we talk a bit about the International Space Station and the kind of the experiments that he did up there but yes I mean we are continuing to collect lots of objects here at the museum around space technology and the International Space Station is definitely going to be a big focus of ours for the coming years.

20:18Sue Nelson:I couldn't see a mention of the UK Space agency either. Is it there and I've just missed it? I mean I saw references to ESA and NASA and obviously different British companies like Space Forge, MagDrive and Spire but I didn't see UK Space Agency.

20:35Richard Hollingham:Yeah we I mean we've had huge support from the UK Space Agency in developing this gallery and developing our collection. A lot of these UK companies have received funding from the UK Space Agency so the fact that the UK Space Agency isn't explicitly mentioned is for no reason in particular we are celebrating these UK companies startups who are doing some amazing technological developments and really leading the way in quite a lot of areas of space.

21:01Mark McCaughrean:So you mentioned that there'll be other collections or you're collecting more things so it's the idea that this grows a bit because there is empty space here you could make this bigger.

21:11Richard Hollingham:Yeah so we don't have any concrete plans at the moment but absolutely space is a real focus of the museum moving forward and we are absolutely continuing to collect as we do as a museum in all of our different disciplines so yeah I think you can probably expect to see a few more space objects appearing over the coming years.

21:28Sue Nelson:See that would be my one complaint there's not enough of it it just feels too tiny compared to the other one I know the other one was like going into your loft and having like way too much stuff all crammed in but the shop takes up about a third of the space and there's an area where people can sit. My, being a purist, I'm like, get rid of that stuff. I'll put another rocket in because you've got the cone of Black Arrow, but you haven't got, you used to have Black Arrow itself above you. Yeah, I feel you could have more.

22:00Richard Hollingham:I hear you, I hear you. One thing that we're really excited about with this new gallery, we've given objects space to breathe, which I think they've been wanting, I would say, for the last three plus decades. Being able to see so many objects in and around, having all glass cases, which really allows you to see through. We are really trying to celebrate these objects that we do have on display, showing them at their best and giving our visitors a kind of new perspective on them.

22:24Sue Nelson:So that people like me can actually see Neil Armstrong's headset.

22:30Mark McCaughrean:Well, I mean, what's happened to the old space? So you had the old gallery, which you sort of walked through into the, we're kind of at the end of the museum now, and it was a bit of a black hole. What's happening to that? What's the plan for the future? the long-term ambition.

22:44Richard Hollingham:There's a new gallery that's going into that space called the Tomorrow Gallery and all the objects from the old exploring space gallery that aren't on display here in our new one are going into storage at the Science and Innovation Park out in Wiltshire where many of them will be accessible for tours out there so if people are interested in and seeing them they can book onto a tour in the Hocking building. Additionally you can find all of the objects online as well.

23:09Sue Nelson:Mercury is the solar system's smallest planet and the closest to the sun. It's also the quickest to orbit the sun, travelling at 47 kilometres. I'm Libby Jackson, I'm Head of Space at the Science Museum.

23:22Mark McCaughrean:Head of Space, I mean that's a cool job, we'll come on to that in just a second. We've got this amazing Yuri Gagarin statue here, sort of looking to the stars. I've seen many like that in Moscow. It's the narrative of the whole Soviet and Russian space programme. Beyond that, looking into this space, you've got the parachute from Tim Peake Soyuz, the actual Soyuz, Apollo 10 in the far distance, BepiColombo. You've also got Prospero. It's objects. Is that the focus of it? The best objects you've got?

23:55Sue Nelson:Exactly that. We wanted to really bring our best, our favourite space objects and put them in a gallery that makes them sing and talk to the public and you can see them and you can walk around them and engage with them and be inspired by them to see that space is real. It's something that people do. We have people stories in there so you understand the people behind all these amazing objects. We hope our visitors see that space is something that belongs to them, is a part of them, that is something that they can be a part of. we've spoken to the curator this is your new job congratulations by the way moving from the UK space agency so what was your stamp on this I joined the museum six months ago when the development for the gallery was very well understood nothing nothing it's really I want to take no credit for this at all it has been the work of a wonderful wonderful team here I have been engaged with it and I am very proud of it and all the work that they have done but it's absolutely nothing to do with me.

25:02Mark McCaughrean:Okay then, Head of Space, what is that, what is that, yeah it is the best, it is the best title, what does that mean, what will that involve?

25:12Sue Nelson:This gallery is just the start of our ambitions and I have joined the museum because we know that space is synonymous with the Science Museum. People come to the Science Museum, they want to see our space collection, and we want to grow that. We want to make sure that we have amazing visitor activities. We have ambitions to collect more objects. Space is something that is happening to us now. We're seeing the retirement of the International Space Station in the coming years. We will see astronauts return to the moon. We're looking ahead to Mars. Space is something that we all rely on every single day and to collect objects that tell those stories and then display them to grow our visitor offer.

25:53Sue Nelson:It's what I'm here to do, to catalyze, to work with the teams, to really make sure that space inspires people. My journey through space started at the Science Museum. I remember 40 years ago seeing Apollo 10 and starting to learn that space was a place you could work in and start to see myself in that. I want to make sure that we continue to do that for future generations so that the little people who visit this gallery today will go on and have their own careers in the space sector.

26:23Mark McCaughrean:Well you mentioned Apollo 10 you know it's extraordinary that there is an Apollo capsule a flown Apollo capsule outside the US and it was always kind of hidden before it was in this gallery behind us which has sort of great objects from the from the history of science but you could easily just walk past it it was displayed quite low you've raised it up it's better lit you must be really proud to have that front and center really really proud you walk

26:52Sue Nelson:down here and the two objects that greet you side by side are Apollo 10 and Tim Peake Soyuz capsule two capsules that actually around the world have never those two capsules have never been displayed side by side together and it's wonderful that you can see how technology evolves and the two different ways of people getting to space. I remember Apollo 10 right back when being in our original space gallery and then 20 years or so ago it joined an amazing array of objects in making the modern world to have it back in a space gallery where it connects with this beautiful vista from Apollo 17 with the Apollo fuel cell that tells the story of Apollo 13.

27:29Sue Nelson:There's so many stories there to get excited by. I'm grinning staring at it now. You mentioned inspiring young people and I noticed that you know at the far end you you're highlighting quite a few UK companies and there's a story about a 16 year old apprentice I quite like that and there's also a reference to Margaret Hamilton and Catherine Johnson by the Apollo 10 capsule and it's funny you know you only joined six months ago but if I hadn't known that I would have thought oh that's Libby there put the role of women first and foremost which is a new slant on things and Helen Charman's

28:06Mark McCaughrean:And Helen Charman is doing the... And her commentary as well.

28:09Sue Nelson:We want to make sure that science and space is something that everybody understands and feels a part of. And so it is really important for us to tell a diverse range of stories because people do think of space as being a male-dominated place and they think of the astronauts. And for the history of it, the names are there. Yuri Gagarin, Neil Armstrong, Tim Peake. To balance that so that little girls can also see that they are a part of it is a really important thing to me, but space is for absolutely everybody.

28:39Mark McCaughrean:How important is it to you to tell the story of Britain in space, as this is the Science Museum in London? And obviously you've got the Smithsonian in Washington, which is going to tell the story of the US in space. You've got the museums in Moscow that are going to tell the Soviet and Russian story, their story of space.

28:58Sue Nelson:We have wonderful objects that do tell the story of UK, from MagDrive to Spaceforge, Astroscale. There will be many more. We're talking to the space sector daily because I want to make sure that the UK story is known and understood. And we have international visitors here. We are an international museum and we will tell international stories too. But for the schoolchildren who come here every week, for them to understand that it's not just NASA and it's not just astronauts, that there are companies across the UK who are building amazing pieces of satellites, of missions to Mars, to Venus, to Mercury, that they can be a part of that.

29:41Sue Nelson:That's really important for me and it's why we wanted to make sure that we had UK companies in the gallery. Now, my one complaint, it was way too small. I want more. Will your ambition be to treble this so that head of space, you take over a lot more space? I mean, you could fill the ground floor, couldn't you? We are collecting for new objects. We're really excited to display those. And this is just the start of our ambitions. Yeah, that's what I want to hear. Thank you. We want more space. Libby Jackson and Abby McKinnon from London's Science Museum. Plus, you heard the voice of British astronaut Helen Sharman in the middle there, as she's the narrator for one of the space displays.

30:26Sue Nelson:Now, what we didn't mention there was one thing that had been removed, the Lunar Lander model, a mock-up, but it was so good because it was so big, it really made you go, wait, what?

30:38Mark McCaughrean:It was originally at the heart of the old gallery. Before we come on to what we think about the new gallery, the old gallery was problematic because it was very dark. It was a bit of a mishmash. I have to say, I love the people at the Science Museum. I love what they're trying to do. but the one word I would describe it as underwhelmed I would say you come in and I sort of looked and thought is this it it's kind of at the end of this big room massive room part of which is a is like a restaurant and cafe there's the IMAX area where you buy your tickets and there's a gift shop and space it's like stuck at the end these the exhibits they've got are beautiful they're beautifully displayed.

31:20Mark McCaughrean:It's fantastic to see the Apollo 10 capsule next to the Soyuz.

31:23Sue Nelson:It needs four times the size. I honestly think it needs four times the size.

31:28Mark McCaughrean:Well, they've got four times the amount of stuff. I've seen some of the stuff they've got in store. What I think really bothered me about it, there were no stories there. There was barely a mention of the International Space Station. Surely they got something. I mean, there's British involvement on the International Space Station. UK was one of the signatories of the space station. There's so much British space history. If they're going to do British space history, that wasn't there, that wasn't in context.

31:51Sue Nelson:They were saying, weren't they, that it was about what's in space now, what's the future. You know, there were some stories about companies, as we mentioned in the interview, and a few little references to specific people. But there was a lot, I felt, for instance, the space shuttle, there is an enormous amount that can be told from the British point of view and the space station, obviously, because British engineers were involved. A lot of British companies were involved. They've contributed so much, like to astronaut backpacks, for instance. There's a huge array. So I was disappointed. I was really disappointed because I wanted more.

32:33Sue Nelson:It's a sort of compliment to what they've got, but it's a backhanded compliment because I liked what they'd done and I liked more of it the longer I went around because you suddenly realize oh this is really nicely displayed and the fact that as I said in the interview I have been to that museum on and off for 30 odd years or so and I've never noticed

32:56Mark McCaughrean:the Neil Armstrong yeah I was thinking that was brilliant yeah that shows you how much clutter

33:02Sue Nelson:was in there but I was disappointed because the size when you see it the first thing you do is go if you're as familiar as we are with that section you go because it feels just oh it's tiny in a

33:19Mark McCaughrean:corner of a room it's like an afterthought of the museum and that's also because it's the back it

33:23Sue Nelson:used to be sort of part the way through i mean admittedly it did feel like you're going through a corridor the last one because it was sort of narrow narrow and long but now you go through that and we entered it for the press section we actually entered it from the reverse from the in a centre. So if you were actually going the normal way, it would literally be right at the back in a corner.

33:44Mark McCaughrean:I mean, we should say, you know, the Science Museum in London is free. Yeah, it's great. And you get to see, you know, inside the Soyuz capsule, which is fantastic.

33:51Sue Nelson:And the Soyuz next to Apollo is worth seeing. Yeah. And with the parachute,

33:55Mark McCaughrean:all the things we talked about in those interviews. But I have to say, I was during those interviews, I was trying to be nice. I was trying not to share my true feelings about it because, yeah,

34:06Sue Nelson:underwhelmed and we weren't the only one we hasten to add no of the number of um journalists that were there well and we're all you know we're all space fans we we just wanted more more more more and i know we have the space center in leicester yeah which is brilliant and has got better and better as the years go on i think in terms of its displays and its exhibits and what they've got there we know the science museum has all this amazing stuff maybe they should get rid of the agriculture section no the agriculture is important get rid of the cafe you know no there are sections up there in the science museum i just think get rid of that and put the space in but we are biased rich we are biased we want more space we do and i know i said that at the end but we do we need more space we want more space i mean they did hint there that this is you know going to be expanded yeah that's what what will happen because for a capital a major cultural capital in europe

35:12Mark McCaughrean:we need a lot more in there but you know go along go for yourself it's free you know priorities as

35:17Sue Nelson:well i would cut down on some tools agricultural tools i'll probably probably get jeremy clarkson on my case now well absolutely yeah farming is very very popular yeah and i i will say though Although, you know, criticising why is there a shop, the shop was great. And in fact, I'm actually wearing my, can you see if I lift my headphones, my rocket earrings. Yeah. They're really nice. Yeah. I ended up with like a notebook, some earrings.

35:42Mark McCaughrean:But there's a huge cafe which is also going to add to the noise there.

35:45Sue Nelson:Yeah. I did wonder about that because obviously we there before it had opened, press preview, nobody in the cafe. Well, we all know when you're at the cafe, that's the time when you, you know, rattle sauces and cutlery and chat. How audible will Helen Sharman be above that background? Although they do look at the acoustics of these things.

36:07Mark McCaughrean:I think there were a lot of missed opportunities for video content, for more content in there, more things there, more stories in there.

36:16Sue Nelson:There's a lot in that science museum. It is brilliant. Cut some of the other stuff. Please.

36:25Mark McCaughrean:Anyway, on that note, this is Space Boffins. We're in partnership with The Naked Scientist. you can reach us on facebook instagram and via x we might even respond you can email us podcast at spaceboffins.com or do please send us a card we haven't had a card this month a little bit disappointed on our listeners so yeah we do need one

36:48Sue Nelson:ESA's former senior scientific advisor for science and exploration mark corcoran has often appeared on our podcast and he now has a couple of new titles adjunct astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, and author. His book is called 111 Places in Space That You Must Not Miss. So naturally, we wanted to take a look and both of us loved it. So yet another excuse to get Mark back on the podcast.

37:21Nina Purvis:It's actually part of a series of travel guides that's been published for many years by a German publisher called Emmons for Larg in Cologne. And so they have many books. So 111 places in Edinburgh that you must not miss, 111 places in Budapest. The origin of how the book came about was that one of the editors at Emmons, she was sitting on an airplane and she saw the film Hidden Figures, which is, of course, about the involvement of women in the Apollo program, which is not talked about very much to begin with. So she watched that film and she thought, well, you know, that'd be fun to do one of the books in our series about space rather than about just a destination on Earth.

37:59Nina Purvis:And luckily she knew, went to college with a fellow called Bert Ulrich. And Bert was until very recently, the head of branding and partnerships at NASA. In the end, I was asked through Bert, who's a personal friend, whether I would be willing to take the book on. And to begin with, I thought I was only writing half of it. And I ended up writing all of it.

38:22Mark McCaughrean:111 places. How many spreadsheets did you go through? How many lists did you go through to come up with those particular 111?

38:32Nina Purvis:Well, yes. So one very big spreadsheet. In a way, the image is as important as the text in the book. I shouldn't say that because of course, in many cases, the images were created by other people, whereas the text is all mine. But obviously, in my mind, I had a good number of destinations which had to be in there, you know Jupiter the Orion Nebula but there were many places where I thought well let's try to go outside of the obvious and in part that's what the book series is supposed to be it's not supposed to be go to the usual places the Leaning Tower of Pisa and so on go to places in Pisa which you might not see in another travel guide so at least to some extent I tried to keep the destinations a little bit unusual and that meant looking for good pictures we had a bit of an interesting tussle occasionally with the publishers because their photo editor was not used at all to dealing with space images.

39:23Nina Purvis:And so they would come and say, well, all the images have to be 300 dpi JPEGs. And I say, well, JPEGs reduce the quality, fine. But in some cases, our images have much more resolution, the space images and 300 dpi on a paperback size or much less. And it was the ones with much less where they said, well, that particular picture of an exoplanet orbiting around a nearby star isn't good enough quality for our book and i'm saying yes but it's the only one you've got the same way the very famous picture of the m87 black hole made by the event horizon telescope you know they looked at that and they said well that's just very fuzzy isn't it and i'm just saying well let me explain to you how hard it was to make and the fact it's a picture of a black hole yes exactly but i mean you know but that's in a way that culture clash if that's what you want to call it, illustrated something that I was trying, that was a nice thing about the book project was that it's not for the usual everybody's in the know space book audience, I think.

40:19Nina Purvis:These books are appearing on the shelves next to 111 places in Tokyo that you must not miss. And hopefully people will look at that who might not normally go over to the science shelves.

40:29Sue Nelson:I must admit, that's what I liked about it. And I really have enjoyed sort of dropping into it, because you can just pick it up, read a page, look at one picture, put it back down again, pick it up, read another one. But you know, you don't have to go one, two, three, four, five, seven, eight. And I didn't. It is sort of random. Like you say, it's got your sort of, you must seize, you must go places in space. Here are a few of my favourites and you'll know why when I mentioned one of them was very early on, actually. Number two, and I'm hoping pronouncing it correctly, Arakoth. And that's because it looked like Comet 67P.

41:07Nina Purvis:Indeed. I was talking to somebody just over the weekend, I've just come back from Spain, where I was giving a talk about the Rosetta mission, more than 10 years after the landing now. And people asked that question, you know, what can we learn from the shape of Comet 67P? And Arakoth mirrors that it has two rather separate looking lumps on Arakoth. One's kind of quite flat and pancake like and the other one's more round, the smaller lobe. And on 67P, the two lobes look quite different as well. So that commonality suggests that indeed these objects form out of two objects which bump into each other quite slowly and then coalesce.

41:44Nina Purvis:And we had all sorts of people during the Rosetta mission saying, no, it's just one object that's been eroded. And when I say people, I mean, typically retired engineers who should be doing other things. These two are not the only two. There are many such of these contact objects now where you see two things bumping together, which is fascinating that you don't always have to have things colliding at high speed and blowing each other up. That can happen too.

42:06Mark McCaughrean:You should just say what Arakoth is and where it's found.

42:10Nina Purvis:Arakoth is a Kuiper Belt object, and it's the first one to have been visited. It was the target that the New Horizons probe was pointed towards after it had gone past Pluto and Charon. And they, Pluto and Charon themselves, you could argue are actually prototype very large Kuiper belt objects. But Arrokoth was known as just a point of light in the deep sky far beyond the edge of what most people call the classical solar system with the planets. But the solar system extends well beyond that and has this belt of icy objects far from the sun. And Arrokoth actually has got a red color on it as well.

42:46Nina Purvis:And that red is quite common in the outer solar system and in certain parts in the inner solar system. And that's complex organic material called tolins, which coat the surface. So it's not just ice and rock. There are also organic materials out there far out in space, far beyond Pluto, as I say.

43:02Sue Nelson:And in terms of, you know, you were mentioning about the image size of certain photos. I was really surprised by the image of dust devils on Mars because they're just so bizarre. I don't know why I'd just not seen them before, because it almost looks like a cross between like a worm and some seaweed underwater.

43:25Nina Purvis:Yeah, so these dust devils are, in a way, if you go back to the film The Martian, there was a big storm, a big dust storm. That's on a much larger scale. And of course, that was part of the jeopardy about why the spacecraft had to fly off and leave Mark Watney behind. The atmospheric pressure on Mars is only one percent of what it is on Earth. And in fact, those dust storms are not dangerous in that regard at all. And these much smaller dust devils, so little tornadoes, if you like, which are common in the places in the deserts on Earth, like Arizona, where I used to live. You would see these things passing along, raising dust into the air.

43:58Nina Purvis:And the rovers on the surface of Mars have seen these dust devils fly by. There are some very nice little movies of them. But if you look from above, you can see that a whole region where the winds sort of conspire to keep making these dust devils every day can make these beautiful black tracks on the surface where it clears away the surface dust and exposes what's underneath. Then the next year that will all get reset and start again. So they're interesting scientifically because they actually will tell you about how the wind's flowing across that area as well.

44:28Mark McCaughrean:tell me about number 26 the north polar hexagon on saturn i never knew this this is amazing

44:37Sue Nelson:funny that was one of my notes i mean it's a gorgeous picture there's a hexagon in the north polar well i knew there was a hexagon i didn't know i wasn't i didn't know

44:48Nina Purvis:what caused it until i read your blurb yeah so tell us about this there's sort of the trick of the book is this idea that you could go on trips to all these places. You're having your mind, Mark. Exactly. And I think, you know, the idea of talking about it as a real travel guide where you literally can go to that museum. There are some places in the solar system, of course, where people have already been, like the space station and the moon. And conceivably, we could go and have a look at Saturn. So sort of the idea is that if you approach in the ecliptic plane, so the sort of plane that the Earth and the planets orbit in, you get to Saturn, you'll see these lovely bands of storms going around at the equator, just like on Jupiter.

45:28Nina Purvis:But if you were to go up and look at the North Pole, there's this huge hexagon. That is a dynamic effect to do with the way the winds interact on a rotating body. But the fact that it turns out to be a regular polygon is what's remarkable. But that is actually understood in terms of sort of the fluid density and how fast these winds are blowing. And you can kind of get, if you like, an interference effect where the wavelength of the material moving slightly south and slightly north is linked to the radius of the planet and so on. And you end up with this very large structure, which it's nearly 30 ,000 kilometers across.

46:06Nina Purvis:So this is much larger than the Earth, which is 13 ,000 kilometers across. And right at the very center of that is a giant, effectively, hurricane itself, which is about 9 ,000 kilometers across. And the winds in that are moving at 600 kilometers an hour. So all these things, these superlatives, is what you get when you take yourself away from being on one little planet, 150 million kilometres from the sun. There's so much more that the solar system holds to go and explore.

46:33Sue Nelson:And I think this is why the book works for me, is that it's more than just a collection of unusual or very pretty, when it comes to nebula or galaxy, sort of pictures. That definitely is enhanced and, I think, made by the text. And funnily enough, the bits that made me go, wow, were often more in the text. And in some, which, yeah, so I don't give these compliments freely or very often. So I honestly, I really enjoyed it. But there was one case where I felt it was a lovely mix of both. And that was number 63. I have to give them by numbers. It was the OMC1 explosion. And you refer to it as like cosmic shrapnel.

47:17Sue Nelson:and you see this sort of orange sort of glow, almost like a firework extending fingers out. And then you said, and if you look at the end, you can see some green. And then I looked at the photo again, and I'd not really noticed the little tips of green. And it's things like that where the text really enhances what you're seeing, because it makes you look at the photo and then look again, and then look carefully, and then see that photo with new eyes.

47:44Nina Purvis:Yeah, I think the, you know, going back to the sort of the structure of the book, it's very formulaic in a way, you know, each chapter of the 111 is one page of text, one picture. And at the bottom of the picture, there's also in the travel guide sense, there's, you have this, you know, how do you get there? Which bus do you have to take to get to this museum? And so I had to figure out how I would say that about the places in space. And there's a bonus destination for everywhere. you might go to the Andromeda galaxy, but there'll be somewhere nearby that you can visit as well. In the same sense, you'll come out and go to a nice green shop.

48:17Nina Purvis:So in that sense, there was sort of a degree of discipline that you needed, because you needed to try to explain what was going on in each picture in just 300 words. The other aspect, which is interesting, is that the book is ordered alphabetically, at least in three sections. There's the solar system, the Milky Way, and then deep space. But within each section, it's alphabetical. So it goes back to this thing you said about dipping into the book and reading one thing. I mean, the nice way of putting it is it's perfect for the low attention span culture that we have. The other slightly more scatological way is it's the perfect toilet book.

48:50Nina Purvis:You can just go and look at a chapter every morning. I thought about, you know, can we issue a toilet roll holder with the book as well as a little bonus? But no, the thing you mentioned about the OMC1 explosion, this is also an incredibly current piece of scientific research. I've been looking at this for many years. And the image in the book is from the JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope. And when we went to image that a couple of years ago, we discovered that, yes, the red, which is glowing hydrogen gas, turns into green, which is iron of all things, but in a gas form. That was known. But at the very end, we discovered that there's a little bit of red beyond where the iron is.

49:26Nina Purvis:And that's we don't understand that. It's hydrogen, we think. But it shouldn't be there. The shock which is making this gas glow is it expands rapidly at hundreds of kilometers a second, not per hour, hundreds of kilometers per second away from the explosion, which only took place 500 years ago as well, which seems remarkable that things happen in space on that timescale. So what I tried to get into the book as well as much as possible was something which was relevant that where astronomers don't know what's going on or come back later, or we might have found out the answer to that rather than presenting in a kind of textbook way.

49:59Nina Purvis:This is how the universe is. It's not how science is. We're still investigating the universe. So hopefully I captured that in the book a little bit, as well as some of the historical aspects as well, going back to who thought what about when. And there's this little story about Phobos and Asaph Hall, who discovered Phobos, but only because his wife, who had been his previous teacher at university, pushed him to keep looking for moons around Mars. But when he found it, and she was doing the calculations, he was doing the observations, she actually then refused to work for him anymore because he wouldn't pay her a man's wage for doing that job hopefully a nice mix of kind of stories and culture but also very current science fair enough he said hastily yes i assume you two are being paid the same amount we better have be or

50:46Sue Nelson:now you start with apollo 12 you finish with the tarantula nebula whose name i can never understand because I cannot for the life of me see any resemblance to spider's legs in that image at all. And I've tried several times.

51:03Nina Purvis:Apollo 12 is an interesting one, though, because I was dragged up on that a little, you know, in other discussions I've had. Why Apollo 12 and why not Apollo 11? Partly too obvious. And again, this idea, go to places that aren't necessarily the obvious places.

51:17Sue Nelson:You know, I was mentioning before about it makes you look at the photo and then look twice and then look again because I felt the same why have you got this and then when I read it and started looking carefully where you said look at the shadow look at that shadow top right hand corner look carefully and you can see the trails it then actually becomes a much more interesting photo

51:37Nina Purvis:than it at first appears yeah and you know so you've got these lovely photographs from from orbit of the Apollo missions and if you get them just the right time where the sun is setting from that location, you can get the long shadow show the spacecraft. But that one also shows Surveyor 3, which had landed a couple of years earlier. And so there's a kind of meta topic there as well, which is that as we're now approaching the point, hopefully in the next few years, where humans travel back to the moon again, what do you do about places which have, you know, they're essentially archaeological sites, Apollo 11, all the Apollo missions?

52:10Nina Purvis:Do you just let people go there randomly and, you know, kick all the famous footprints? Do we need to put rules in place which keep people away? You know, if people are going on private missions there, let's say not tomorrow, but in 10 years, 20 years, what are the rules? I think that's a very important aspect as well with respect to, you know, what we next do in space. The same is true arguably of Mars. Should we send humans to Mars before we know whether there's actually life on Mars, because we might end up killing it, for example. But the irony of that story with Apollo 12 is that the Apollo astronauts that went there actually had been tasked with ripping a piece off Surveyor 3 and bringing it home so that NASA engineers could study what long-term exposure to the lunar surface had done to the bits of metal.

52:55Nina Purvis:Yeah, there's a little bit of irony in there.

52:57Mark McCaughrean:That was Mark McCorquan and his new book. It's called 111 Places in Space That You Must Not Miss. It is really good. It is great. And by the way, Mark mentioned humanity's return to the moon. It was recently announced that the launch date for Artemis 2 has been brought forward a few months to as early as February 2026. Well, that is not going to happen. I would put any money on that. The pilot for that mission is Victor Glover. You can hear that addition in our back catalogue, our extensive back catalogue. Victor's interview is great. He was somewhat unfiltered as NASA astronauts go, I thought.

53:32Mark McCaughrean:It's in our May, sorry, I didn't get to that bit. May 2024 edition of Space Muffins podcast.

53:37Sue Nelson:Yeah, it is very good. I listened to it again after the announcement was made and I was laughing at it because it's very funny as well. He was great. Yeah, really good. Good man. Well, as most of us know, satellites are great. We can phone a scientist in Antarctica almost as easily as if she was down the road. But as listeners will also know, these satellites are part of a growing problem.

54:02Mark McCaughrean:Already this year, more than 200 satellites have been launched into orbit and it is getting crowded. In fact, a growing amount of stuff up there is just rubbish. Junk, or as the space industry prefers to say, debris. The UK Space Agency supporting efforts to clean up space and at the recent UK Space Conference in Manchester, there were a growing number of companies whose aim is to tidy up. I'm Andrew Fiola from Astroscale UK and I'm the commercial director here, so responsible for all of our business development and marketing. Just give me the sell, if you like, of what you are trying to do. We're developing technology that is intended to help do a couple of things.

54:45Mark McCaughrean:One is clean up space where we have a real problem, but also really kickstart that ability to have sort of a circular economy in space, being able to not just throw away single-use items like coffee cups, being able to do more in space. And that's both on a commercial side as well as actually defending the infrastructure that we have up there. Give us a sense then of the scale of the problem, because obviously you've studied this in quite some depth. We think of space really as being this infinite space up above in the heavens and everything sort of happening in a great ballet. But much closer to Earth in what we call low Earth orbit, it is much more like the M25 on a bad day.

55:30Mark McCaughrean:And what we need to do is enable that area where the vast majority of our Earth observation, our communications, technology for satellites is happening. We need to be able to make sure that that can continue to operate safely. It really is about keeping the superhighway lanes clear. But there's millions of objects that are sort of floating around up there that aren't controlled, that have the ability to run into the controlled things. And even the controlled things, we're launching thousands of them over the course of the next 10 years, up to perhaps even 100 ,000 or more new objects, while others are still coming down.

56:16Mark McCaughrean:So you can see that there's this growing congestion that makes it harder and harder to operate safely up there. When things go wrong, things can go badly wrong. A small piece of debris the size of your fist, when it's traveling at 7 kilometers a second, has the kind of energy of a hand grenade. If you're driving on the M25 and a hand grenade hits your car, this is a bad day at the office. It's the same up in space. I don't want to belittle what you're doing and the ambition of what you're doing, but it strikes me it's almost like a space rubbish service, a garbage service, if you like. So, yeah, I'm glad you asked that question that way, and I don't take it as belittling at all.

56:58Mark McCaughrean:You know, in many ways, the technology, well, in every way, the technology that we are developing is very challenging, very difficult, very sophisticated. So we look at what we're doing as a bit of crawl, walk, run. And yes, we are building a capability to remove objects from space. Hey, roadside assistance, if you have a breakdown, we can remove you so you don't create more debris. But ultimately, it's all about the ability to operate spacecraft in a very agile way in space, being able to approach and in some instances dock with, operate in very close proximity with other spacecraft without creating a problem, being able to do that safely and securely.

57:49Mark McCaughrean:So the first step is sort of capturing pieces of debris and removing them. But it's really about that step towards being able to do in-orbit servicing, being able to help to secure other assets that might be in orbit, really just building that capability that we see in science fiction movies. People are obviously prepared to pay for that because you are offering a service, but you've also got to have that will by governments, by companies to pay to clear up low Earth orbit. Absolutely. And there's a growing recognition both from countries as well as companies that in order for them to continue to be able to operate safely and securely in space, there's a business case that requires them to do something.

58:40Mark McCaughrean:There's many different ways to mitigate the issue of space debris. We provide one way to do that. But I think at the end of the day, space is an area where we've typically just sort of thrown stuff up there, not really thought about the consequences of doing that. Today, you would never put an oil rig in the North Sea. You would never build a new nuclear generation facility without the business case also including decommissioning at end of life. So this is a very natural progression. The technology hasn't existed previously. The regulations still don't exist to incentivize that behavior. But all of that's starting to converge.

59:24Mark McCaughrean:And ELSA-M, that's your new mission, what will that do? Because that's, I suppose, a stepping stone, isn't it, to a full deployment of your servicing in space? Exactly. So ELSA-M is a spacecraft that we're building. It's a public-private partnership with the European Space Agency, ESA, with the UK Space Agency, and UTLSAT OneWeb. And what we are doing is building a spacecraft at our offices in Harwell, just near Oxford. And that spacecraft will go up into orbit and it will capture, it will dock with a OneWeb satellite and remove that from orbit. This is something that's never been done by two commercial companies before.

1:00:11Mark McCaughrean:So it is groundbreaking in many ways. And I probably minimize the, oh, we're going to launch this spacecraft and go dock with that other spacecraft. The spacecraft that we're going to dock with is prepared to be captured, but it is not an active spacecraft. So we have to go, we have to figure out how to match our orbit with that spacecraft that, again, let's not forget, is traveling literally faster than a speeding bullet. do that safely and then bring it down to a lower orbit and release it so that it can de-orbit safely. This is incredibly challenging and that spacecraft is under construction today.

1:00:53Mark McCaughrean:We're putting the propulsion system on board. The clean room is full of kit. It's super exciting what we're doing. It's all happening in the UK. It's really special. Andrew Fiola from Astroscale UK. Well next I spoke to space engineer Nicholas Crozard and Rory Holmes, UK Managing Director of ClearSpace. ClearSpace is entirely an in-orbit service company. So this is what we are completely focused on. This is what we get up in the morning to do. So in-orbit servicing is the concept now that we can go and interact with other objects in orbit after we've launched them. In the past, we couldn't, right?

1:01:31Mark McCaughrean:We would press the big red button, we'd launch the satellite, and then we couldn't physically touch it again. So if it broke down, if it ran out of fuel, if it needed upgrading, you're kind of stuck. You couldn't do any of that. But we're getting to the point now where we can. And we're building the core technology to allow you to do that. So core technology in robotics, in sensing, all the things you need to go grab something, upgrade it, repair it, refuel it, all those exciting new opportunities that are in front of us. What's interesting about your developments and what you're working on, you said grab it.

1:02:02Mark McCaughrean:You're not relying on the satellite that you're visiting in orbit, having a particular docking plate or anything. You've got these robotic arms and you are going to grab objects. Yeah, absolutely. We don't want to box ourselves in just satellites that are prepared for servicing. We want to be able to go after the wider fleet out there. So, yes, you might know us for the giant space claw we have on the front of our satellite, a bit James Bond-like, I must admit. and we have other robotic capture systems as well but we want to be able to go and service any satellite that needs it. And what are the missions right now that you're developing?

1:02:41Mark McCaughrean:We're really lucky that we've got a lot of support from the European Space Agency and the UK Space Agency. We have three missions running in parallel. Two of them are focused on space debris removal. What happens to all the space junk, these satellites, these rockets when they get to the end of life and are just discarded. We're building missions that will go and grab bits of space junk and can pull them out of orbit to remove that risk and that trash from orbit for future generations. The other one we're building is a life extension mission. So a satellite that's running low on fuel, we go there and we grab onto it, we support it, we help that satellite extend its life and extend that revenue stream for the operator and the owner of that satellite.

1:03:19Mark McCaughrean:Nicholas, he makes it sound so easy. I'm guessing it's not. Yeah, we have some discussions, Rory and I, on a regular basis. it does take a fair amount of effort for sure we need to develop the system more or less from the ground up we obviously rely a lot on partners and supply chain but there's a lot of engineering that comes into making those missions possible a lot of ground testing we have developed this capture system as Rory described it but we obviously have to build different models from a breadboard model to a more advanced model which is very representative of what will end up being flying and we do some testing on the ground many of them very regularly to demonstrate that we are on the right track that the systems are performing as we are expecting them to fundamentally be very confident that when the time will come to launch and operate those systems will be working as they should let's say you identify an object in orbit you've got to match its orbit you've got to go alongside it you've got to open your arms of the spacecraft grab it and then do what you want to it whether that's servicing or pulling it out of orbit that's a lot to do and yes and the way you describe it is perfect we break the problem in small chunks if you look at the overall mission just as it is it's overwhelming but But breaking it in small chunks is perfect because then you can focus, okay, what are the systems, what are the equipment I need to achieve that small part of the mission and then move on to the next one.

1:04:56Mark McCaughrean:We're also using exciting facilities like a dark room where you have robots moving and representing what will happen in orbit with our spacecraft and the spacecraft that we want to service to demonstrate to ourselves that everything will be right. hi my name is jacob gear i'm the managing director of orbit fab in uk and europe and you come armed with a prop which is i don't know it kind of looks like a an octagonal almost like a socket but with two sockets in the middle but you could imagine this mounted into a wall something like that oh yes so this is a rafty that stands for rapidly attachable fluid transfer interface It's raftery for sure.

1:05:40Mark McCaughrean:The octagonal bit on the outside is a grapple interface. So in space, you can come and grab onto it and dock with it. The two eyes or the holes in there are fueling lines. So behind it, there are two different valves, fueling valves, which means that you can fuel your satellite in space if you want to. So the idea is this would be fitted to a satellite and you can come up and refuel it? Yeah, very much so. So the two lines inside it replace the fill and drain valves, which are on any satellite. They are used right now to fuel it on the ground at the rocket launch site before it launches. And once you've fueled it on the ground, you cap them off, you never touch them again.

1:06:17Mark McCaughrean:Our innovation is to say, don't do that. Just add this interface around it, change a bit of your fuel lines. And all of a sudden, you now have a refuelable satellite rather than a single-use satellite, just by changing the valve that you use on the outside. Now, this isn't the only one out there, because other people are looking at this, because it makes sense, doesn't it? You've got a satellite up there. Why let it die and have to launch another one? Why not just keep it up there? Yeah, you get a lot of civil demand or commercial demand for life extension. So they want their satellite to last for longer so they don't have to replace it as much, particularly in geostationary orbit.

1:06:53Mark McCaughrean:And then you get a lot of defence demand now because they want to be able to manoeuvre their satellites far more to do various different jobs or to defend themselves. And to do that, they need fuel. and getting fuel into space is an expensive business. So if they can refuel their satellites when they need it, that adds a whole different element to how the military can operate in orbit. It does seem crazy because if you think of the analogy on Earth, it's like you fill the car with petrol, you send it off, it runs out of petrol, you abandon the car. I mean, that's what we're doing at the moment with satellites.

1:07:24Mark McCaughrean:That's exactly what it is. Single-use cars, single-use satellites. It makes no sense. I'm sure at some point in the past there was a Ford model, which was a one-off use car, and they said this is barmy now because of the technological change and getting to orbit the decreasing launch costs we can now do the things in orbit to refuel satellites and we think it's only a matter of time until that becomes the norm for any satellite in any orbit so are you looking here at a whole sort of refueling infrastructure because you know you've got to persuade a company to put this on their satellite then you've got to provide the fuel truck or the or the fueling stations that whole infrastructure that we have on earth if i'm not stretching the whole car thing to analogy too far yeah that's right so the customer has a rafty on their satellite that's all they need to do it's like the fuel cap on a car we're then designing the nozzle like the thing you put into your car so the active side as we call it and that'll have a shuttle that goes up and docks with you and and puts that nozzle in so that will be done by robotics autonomously and then a network of depots and shuttles starting first in the geostationary orbit because that's quite a predictable and customer heavy environment to actually enable basically an in-space logistics chain to supply people with fuel when and where they need it.

1:08:35Mark McCaughrean:One of the questions for us is what type of fuel? So there's a current market for hydrazine, so chemical propulsion, particularly in the military, but in Europe we see electric propulsion, so xenon is the most common fuel type, the gas there, and supplying gas is a bit different than supplying liquid, so we need to redesign our valve slightly and we've done that recently with support from the UK Space Agency. We'll be launching it next year on a mission called Schilling named after the World War II hero Beatrice Schilling who not many people will have heard of but is big in the world of valves and she redesigned the Spitfire carburetor to enable fuel to flow and stop in a different way so it could dive at a much steeper rate than the Messerschmitts it was fighting.

1:09:15Mark McCaughrean:You've got to bring up fuel from earth you've got to have your depots you've got to have your refueling spacecraft it's got to successfully dock and it's got to refuel there's a lot to think about here i guess there's also safety concerns as well when you're dealing with tanks of fuel in in space yes that's right so the customer just puts the raft on their satellite that's simple for them the complex part of it which is the shuttle that delivers the fuel that's what we're doing now our innovation is to make that as simple as we can and we're working with partners across Europe and the US and wider actually to look at how we do the rendezvous proximity operations how we get up close and personal with a satellite and dock with it how we do the fuel transfer the sorts of shielding that a depot that might be in orbit for 10 or 15 years needs to have how we make sure that the satellites communicate with each other that's the complexity which we're working on now with the European Space agency.

1:10:11Mark McCaughrean:ESA have just funded us with a new project called Radical to look at how we adapt telecoms operators, so a big prime, to adapt their mission to be refuelled and how we change their platform, so the satellite, physical satellite itself, to be refuelled with this interface too. So they're starting to see what this could do commercially and supporting us to do that with real life customers too. Jacob Gear from Orbit Fab. I do like Jacob. He used to be at the UK

1:10:37Sue Nelson:space agency oh right i was a big fan of andrew actually the asterisk scale well i like them all

1:10:43Mark McCaughrean:i like let's just be clear i like rory as well we like them all but i think and nicholas andrew's

1:10:49Sue Nelson:um you know even even your torturous car analogies rich um his his one on about the one on the m25

1:10:58Mark McCaughrean:was in my defense i was very tired by that point i was in my defense i was very very drunk i was i worked so hard at the UK Space Conference. I did so many interviews, as you have doubtless heard, on Space Poppins over the last couple of months. It was really good, though. And it is an area where the UK is genuinely leading on. I mean, if all these missions happen, it's a whole new space economy, really. It's really interesting.

1:11:24Sue Nelson:Yeah, it is. There's a lot of nice, interesting stuff. Love the interview with Nina. There's a book that I actually do think space fans, you should go and buy it.

1:11:32Mark McCaughrean:Yeah, this would be a really genuinely good stocking filler. Absolutely.

1:11:37Sue Nelson:And do go along and see the new redone science exhibition at the Science Museum. And if you disagree with us, we'd love to hear from you. Yeah, we'd really like some opinions on it

1:11:49Mark McCaughrean:because we're quite possibly wrong.

1:11:51Sue Nelson:But we're not.

1:11:53Mark McCaughrean:And that is Space Muffins. Do get in touch via social media, email, post, whatever. We'll be back next month-ish. thanks to Tom, Tom Kern, for helping us with production on this episode. Blame him.

1:12:07Sue Nelson:Oh, no. Actually, Tom, say hi. Hello, this is Tom. Yeah, there we go. Yeah.

1:12:12Mark McCaughrean:Thanks for listening.