Month: December 2023

Episode 62 of Stories from Space – Living on Saturn’s Moons – is now Live!

Episode 62 of Stories from Space – Living on Saturn’s Moons – is now Live!

This week, as part of my continuing series, The Great Migration: Settling the Solar System, we took a look at Saturn and its system of moons. With the right technology, know-how, and the right kind of advancements, humanity could someday settle on Saturn’s largest satellites! Much like Jupiter’s icy moons, these satellites are icy bodies, many of which have interior oceans that could harbor life!

Another thing they have in common is their abundant resources, which include water, volatile elements, silicate minerals, metals, hydrogen, and helium-3. But whereas Jupiter has three satellites that could be settled (Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto), Saturn has six – Titan, Rhea, Tethys, Dione, Enceladus, and Mimas. And unlike Jupiter, Saturn has a mild radiation environment that makes harvesting hydrogen and helium-3 from its atmosphere easier and its larger satellites more habitable.

As famed aerospace engineer, science communicator, and space exploration advocate Robert Zubrin has said (many times), Saturn could become the “Persian Gulf of the Solar System,” providing the fuel for nuclear propulsion and fusion reactors across the Solar System. Take a listen to learn more!

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Talking About Trauma

Talking About Trauma

I’ve been holding back on publishing this post for months now. But with the holidays here, a time for family, love, and reflection, I felt it was time. Four months ago, my darling wife Carla suffered a stroke and has been recovering in the hospital. The experience has left us all permanently changed and has forever altered my perceptions of various things.

I used to think I had lived a cushy life characterized by privilege and good fortune, which I was not particularly proud of. But since this happened, I feel I’ve come to learn a lot about the “real world” and the kinds of things that are possible. So here are my thoughts on the experience…

Continue reading “Talking About Trauma” →

Episode 61 of Stories from Space – A Mars Sample Return Mission – is Now Live!

Episode 61 of Stories from Space – A Mars Sample Return Mission – is Now Live!

This week’s episode is focused on the upcoming Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, a joint NASA-ESA venture to send a robotic mission to Mars to collect the Perseverance samples. This will constitute the first sample-return mission from Mars, something that scientists have been planning for decades. In 2028, the mission will launch and is expected to return the samples to Earth no sooner than 2033. Unfortunately, due to recent budget cuts, the mission may be delayed or scaled back significantly.

Meanwhile, China is planning its own sample-return mission as part of the Tianwen-3 mission. This mission will launch in 2028 but is scheduled to return by July 2031. As we enter the new Space Race, it is clear that the brass ring is the Red Planet! But regardless of who secures samples from Mars and returns them to Earth first, the scientific returns will be immeasurable. Much like the Moon rocks returned by the Apollo astronauts, scientists will be able to study these samples for generations using the most cutting-edge instruments available.

These studies could finally answer questions that have remained unresolved since the days of the Viking missions. Was there ever life on Mars? Is there life there today (and where can it be found)? When did it go from being a warmer, wetter environment to the freezing, desiccated world we see today? Check out the episode to learn more:

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Episode 60 of Stories from Space – The Dark Universe – is now Live!

Episode 60 of Stories from Space – The Dark Universe – is now Live!

This week was a bit of a treat for me personally since I got to delve into something really astrophysical and theoretical! To break it down, in 1916, Einstein placed the finishing touches on his Theory of General Relativity (GR), which explained how gravity alters the curvature of spacetime, matter and energy are equivalent, and time and space are one. His theory was confirmed almost immediately, but by the 1950s and 60s, astronomers finally had the telescopes they needed to really test GR!

Ah, but there was a snag! When observing massive galaxies, astronomers noticed that their rotational curves suggested there was a lot more mass out there than what they could see. This led to the speculation that the Universe was filled with a mysterious invisible mass (“Dark Matter”) that interacted with “normal matter” only through gravity. The existence of this mass was needed for GR to be correct, which had been confirmed nine ways from Sunday by this point.

In the 1990s, the Hubble Space Telescope provided the most breathtaking and deep images of the cosmos. The primary mission of this observatory was to test Hubble’s Law – i.e., that the Universe is in a state of expansion. When looking back through space and time upwards of 10 billion light-years (or more), astronomers hit another snag. Essentially, the rate at which the cosmos was expanding (the Hubble Metric) was speeding up over time!

This led to speculation that Einstein’s theory about a force that “held back gravity” – the Cosmological Constant, which he described as the “biggest blunder of his career” – was actually correct. This unknown force, “Dark Energy,” became another mysterious phenomenon scientists needed to include in their cosmological models. To this day, neither has been confirmed directly. But next-generation telescopes are coming that could resolve this mystery.

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