The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Deep Space Network

Episode Date: December 17, 2022

Brian Cox and Robin Ince visit Canberra for the first of 4 special episodes recorded in Australia. This week they visit the amazing Canberra Deep Space Communication Centre where scientists communicate with, and track the 200 or so spacecraft that are currently exploring our vast solar system and even beyond. They are joined by Astrophysicists Mark Cheung and Alan Duffy, Nobel prize winner Brian Schmidt and comedian Alice Fraser as they track legendary space craft like Voyager, still sending back messages from deep in space some 40 plus years after it first launched. They discover how despite these incredible missions we still don't know what 97% of our universe is made of, and how so many of these explorations are vital to our understanding of one very important planet - our own.Producer: Caroline Steel Executiver Producer: Alexandra Feachem

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. Welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage. And for the first time ever, we are recording our show in Australia. And not only is this the first time ever that we're recording in Australia, but this is the first time ever that we are recording somewhere that is electromagnetically sheltered.

Which actually does increase the chances that you can't hear this episode and that we weren't able to record it. So if you're listening to the episode that goes out on Saturdays, this will be 43 minutes of silence. If you're listening to the repeat, it's only 28 minutes of silence. Today we're at the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex. Managed by CSIRO and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that we visited earlier in the series, CDSCC is one of the three sites around the world,

the others being Madrid and Goldstone in the Mojave Desert, which provide 24-hour access to our deep space probes. We'll be exploring the technology that enables communication with spacecraft far beyond Earth and the discoveries those radio signals have enabled. The last transmissions of Cassini as it plunged into Saturn, the Hubble Space Telescope and the newly operational JWST, the Mars rovers and, of course, the Voyager spacecraft, our most distant explorers.

To help us explore and understand deep space, today's panel includes a Nobel Prize winner, an astrophysicist, a gargler, and someone who works down a mine. And they are... I'm Mark Chong. I'm an astrophysicist at CSIRO, Australia's National Science Foundation. We're very proud to be operating on behalf of NASA JPL CDSEC, and we have a huge CDSEC crowd in the audience today, so a shout out to you all. The thing that worries me the most about noise from space is radio noise from the sun. Why? Because when there's a radio noise from the sun, it probably means that our communications with the deep space satellites might be impacted. It might mean that we don't get all the great BBC programs. But personally, more important for me is that as a solar physicist, when the sun is very, very loud in radio, it probably means that there are solar storms and it might spew out magnetized plasma that might travel thousands of kilometers

per second and then impact us and cause havoc with space weather. All right. I'm Alan Duffy. I'm a professor of astrophysics at Swinburne University of Technology. And I also sometimes go down to the bottom of mines to try to find dark matter. The sound that would worry me the most from space would be if I would hear things. We'll only get better. We'll only get better. Because it means aliens have received that signal via radio waves from top of the pops back in the day and have understood that our entire communication language is based on DREAM, and that is a terrifying future for all of us.

I want to thank you for that, Alan, because you've just earned me one pence. No, I checked. I checked. He did it under 10 seconds. You don't get any copyright on that. Well done. Very scientific. And by the way, this is not Australia's Got Talent in case anyone tuned in slightly late. I'm Alice Fraser. I do words in the form of comedy and writing

and rhetoric of all kinds and the noise from space that would worry me the most would be laughter at a joke I didn't remember telling. That or a countdown. I'm Brian Schmidt. I am a cosmologist. I'm also the vice chancellor and president of the Australian National University. And the sound from space that would worry me the most would be a earth shattering boom. Probably because something's about to hit us that we didn't knock out of the way. And this is our panel.

What I loved there, Mark, was when you said, I'm going to do a big shout-out to CDSCC, and then just silence came back. And that's kind of, to me, that was like working for SETI, for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. We wait and we wait.

I give a shout-out to the... Nothing's come back again. Well, for some of the signals, it takes one and a half days round trip, so just wait. That's great. Let's start off, Alice, with... When you first approach it, I mean, have you been here before? Can I ask that?

I've never been here before. I've come to Canberra before as a Sydney girl. But looking, when you arrive here, I mean, to me, there is a real kind of sensation of excitement to see this incredible human technology. You know, we're going through just rural Australia and suddenly... So you're driving through the countryside, it's that very familiar green,

that deep grey-green of the Australian trees. You see creeks going past at the moment, quite flooded, brown water over those beautiful kind of golden rocks. And then you do the call ahead to see which roads en route are flooded or on fire. And then you come round this corner and you start to see these incredible white constructions. They look sort of like oil rigs, but they're coming out of the ground and they're facing space.

And you realise that they're these dishes, just little cups of the universe collecting information. It's just such a suddenly awe-inspiring feeling. It's beautiful because we can see dish 43 at the moment out of the window, which is a huge white structure. And at the moment, I notice it's just contacted Voyager 2 as we speak, which is a wonderful thing for me because I remember that spacecraft being launched in 1977. And I wondered, Mark, because that spacecraft is, to say it's a long way away is an understatement. But could you describe exactly what that dish is doing now? So the dish 43, which is the 70-meter dish, it's so big because it needs to be extremely sensitive

to the faint signals from deep space, by deep space. We mean, for example, all the satellites that are far away enough to be outside of the realm of the Earth and the Moon, but also as far as even outside the solar system. And Voyager is outside our solar system. It is 20 billion kilometers away. And when I said that some round trip signals take one and a half days, that said it's, for example, Voyager 2. It takes 18 hours to send a command up. It takes 18 hours to get some feedback from the probe.

That's still faster than when you work with some morons. But Voyager is far from that. It is one of our crowning achievements, a satellite that can work for decades and decades and still work very well and discover and let us know where the solar system ends, where the interstellar medium is. And the dish here is collecting all these very very faint beeps at uh bits or the order of bits or tens of bits per second so it's whispering slowly at us um but it's telling us uh

you know nuggets of gold as it's doing so it's worth just digging into that that technological achievement as you said 18 hours it doesn't sound like much travel time, but at 300,000 kilometres a second, it's a lot of travel time. It's a lot of travel time. And also just a few bits. I mean, Alan, what is Voyager 2 doing now? Because what is in those, as you said, tens of bits per second, which is slow even by dial-up modem standards, right?

And if anyone can remember that, well, it's Radio 4. Everybody can remember that. Yes, everybody that's listening knows what I mean. But what information is coming back from Voyager 2? So Voyager 2 is able, and it's worth bearing in mind, Voyager 2, venerable spacecraft going since 1977. It's a nuclear-powered battery on board. And that battery is inevitably slowly degrading, running out of power. So one by one, the instruments have shut off. So the cameras, those beautiful pictures we saw of the distant giants, all of that's now turned off and gone. There's nothing really to take pictures of either. But what it has left on are the local measurements, the magnetic field,

local measurements, the magnetic field, the energetic particles, electrons and the like that are out in the outer regions of now beyond the solar system. That in situ measurement, so the measurement of so-called empty space itself reveals it's nothing of the sort. It is now passed into the interstellar medium. This is the tenuous gas that lies between the stars. A million Kelvin temperatures, a few electrons per cubic meter. I mean, just so close to being a vacuum. And yet it very much is still filled with stuff and stuff that has astrophysical implications. But unless you can get there and you can measure that directly, you don't know for sure. And one of the astounding revelations from

the Voyager missions, and both one and two have now gone through what is called the boundary of our solar system, they left that bubble that surrounds the sun where its magnetic field, its solar wind, can dominate over the interstellar medium. And now they truly are in deep space. And they've reached that deep space at different times. And modern research is now showing, and I mean this literally just in the last few weeks, papers have come out revealing that there's something weird going on at the edge of our solar system, that the bubble that our sun produces as it interacts, as it pushes back against the interstellar medium, is moving, moving far more quickly than we could have imagined.

So even a spacecraft as old as Voyager is still making groundbreaking discoveries because there's just no substitute for sending your experiment to where the action is. And just to pin down that technological achievement, so I've seen a full-scale model of Voyager, and it's about the size of a car, pretty much. So in terms of that signal getting back over those billions of kilometers, how powerful is that transmitter?

And how precise do we have to be in targeting the position in that spacecraft? Because I can see that dish now pointing pretty much vertically upwards from here in Canberra at this point. So how does that work? The 70-meter dish at CDSCC here is one of the most sensitive radio dishes out there. If you want to know the answer to how many watts of power that it sends out, I am going to delegate this question to someone in the audience. Now, we set up a special microphone because we have an audience of experts. So anyone who would like to answer that question, we've got Glenn on the green mic i think glenn do you have you got something so to give you a sense of this size of the signal we're currently receiving through the big dish it's currently at 3.90 times 10 to the minus 22

kilowatts so think of a signal 22 billion times weaker than the power of a tiny watch battery that's i mean it's incredible if you're listening you're listening and you're not here to see these things, they look sort of quite industrial. The scale of them is huge and sort of made up of what looks almost like shipping containers at the base, and then it goes up into this incredibly refined instrument that's collecting this tiny, tiny data. You know, from Voyager, the boomer of spaceships,

it's astonishing that it's still sending back new information, which for a boomer is impressive, and secondly, talking quietly. Brian, why is the Deep Space Network here in Australia, why is that critical? Yeah, so one of the things you need to do is remember that the Earth is round. And if you have three deep space stations around Earth, and there are three, you can have a view of every part of the sky pretty much 24-7. So they are put around. I think one of the great things about the network here in Australia is because Australia has been at the forefront of radio astronomy, CSIRO has been able to help develop the most sensitive instruments that can go through and cut through the noise of space in a way that has been at the leading edge.

And so the group of stations here typically have the most sensitivity of any of the networks. So it's a place where being on the edge of that technological advance with the Parkes Radio Telescope, the beginning of radio astronomy in Sydney just after World War II, that technology flows into here. Mark, the other spacecraft, I'm just watching what Canberra is communicating with. How are you watching it? By the way, can you explain how you're able to do this? Because you've been very excited by this for the last few days. Well, for the listeners at home, you can always go to eyes.nasa.gov. And what you'll see there are the three stations. We've talked about Madrid, Goldstone, and Canberra.

And you can see in real time what the antennas, which spacecraft the antennas are talking to. And at the moment, Canberra is talking to the Parker Solar Probe, which I know is your area of research. So what is the Parker Solar Probe? Where is it? And what data are we receiving back from it now? So the Parker Solar Probe is a NASA mission with a wonderful suite of instruments.

And its mission is to touch the atmosphere of the sun. So what does that mean? Well, the sun, of course, we're familiar with what we see with our eyes or the appropriate eyewear. It's very bright, so don't look at the sun directly, but it gives us all this light in the visible. But it turns out that if you are able to look at the sun in other wavelengths of light, like radio, like x-rays, there's a whole lot of activity above the surface. And that's what is called the solar corona. It's millions of degrees hot. And by virtue of it being very, very hot,

it also keeps on expanding because there's this pressure that comes with hot plasma. And this hot plasma expands and becomes the solar wind and this solar wind extends pressure across the solar system. One of the unexplored places in our solar system, I mean, we know Mars actually better than the solar corona in that sense. We've never had a probe that would go into the solar corona. So NASA commissioned a solar probe and it's named Parker Solar Probe.

And so this is what Parker Solar Probe does. It goes very close to the sun, goes into the corona, has these magnetic field instruments, has the particle instruments, similar to what the Voyager spacecrafts have have in order to measure all the properties in the solar corona and explain why is it that we have such a hot plasma there and why we have the solar wind and how this all ends up protecting the solar system from the interstellar medium. It's really interesting, isn't it? Because it's kind of coincidentally, as we speak, we're communicating with the spacecraft at the centre of the solar system

and the one on the furthest edge of the solar system. Brian, I wanted to ask about what you won the Nobel Prize for. Now, I was told this by, I'm going to call you Brian 1, by the way, and Brian Cox, Brian 2, because he's not got a Nobel Prize. B1, B2, yes. Yeah, he's got a CBE, but he's not got a Nobel Prize. So you're Brian 1 for today. Now, when he first told me about the work you's not got a Nobel Prize. B1, B2, yes. Yeah, he's got a CBE, but he's not got a Nobel Prize. So you're Brian 1 for today. When he first told me about the work you did that won the Nobel Prize,

he said instinctually you were like, I think this idea might be so mad that it's the end of my scientific career. So can you tell us a little bit about, first of all, that idea? All right. So when I moved to Australia at the end of 1994, my pitch to get a job was I was going to measure how fast the universe was expanding. And using the new technology, I was going to be able to look back in time by looking at further and further objects. So if I look at an object five billion light years away, it takes five billion years for the light to get here.

And so I could measure how fast the universe was expanding about now, and then look progressively back in time. And I was expecting the universe to be slowing down over time, because the universe is full of gravity, and gravity slows things down. So after three and a bit years, the team that I was part of got sort of the preliminary answer at the end of 1997. And by 1998, we could not make it go away. But what we saw was that the universe was expanding slower in the past and had sped up. So somehow, gravity or something was pushing the universe apart. Now, that's like anti-gravity. It's like flubber. It's not something where you hand in your assignment and say, oh, I've got the right answer here.

You're like, well, this is what I got. I hope you give me partial credit. And partial credit when you don't yet have a tenured job is usually time to go do a new job. So yeah, I was pretty scared. And in terms of, as Robin said, it's one of the great discoveries. You got the Nobel Prize for that discovery.

Can you give us some sense of why it is such an important discovery and why it was, well, you've explained why it was unexpected, but what the possible implications are? Well, it's quite, the reason I think it's an important discovery is it just doesn't really make sense. It's sort of an abomination. You have this perfect theory of general relativity that kind of does whatever you want. Now, it turns out that Einstein in 1917 said, I've got a little problem. It seems to make the universe dynamic. I don't like the universe being dynamic. I'm going to add something he called the cosmological constant to it. And that'll make it static, make the universe not be in motion. Now, that was later found out when the universe was in motion. What a stupid thing to do. But our discovery basically

said that Einstein's 1917 idea looked to be right. But the cosmological constant is akin to there being energy everywhere in space. It's a property of space. So there are arguments, philosophical arguments in cosmology. Is space a thing? Well, our discovery kind of says space is a thing. It has energy. And it's 70% of everything. So we discovered 70% of everything.

everything so we discovered 70 percent of everything and one of these crazy things that you do is I had to write a grant to do what what are you going to do next they said how are you going to build on your legacy and do more and I said I discovered 70 percent of the universe I'm never going to top that I'd actually like to to put a slight tweak to to Brian in a very self-serving manner has characterized as 70% of the universe that he has discovered 70% of the universe. I would postulate that in fact we have never known so little

about the universe thanks to Brian's discovery. You vastly multiplied human ignorance. How do you feel about that? Yeah, I mean, it's one of the interesting things. I've discovered something where I truly don't understand how the universe works.

So much so, I'm almost to the point of not knowing what to do next about it, which is kind of actually depressing. So you got the Nobel Prize for subtracting from the sum total of human knowledge. depressing. So you got the Nobel Prize for subtracting from the sum total of human knowledge. Well, I like to think that we didn't subtract from knowledge

is that we help refine just how little we knew and we used to think we knew a lot more than we do. But I think that's such an interesting thing about what science is because unlike the rest of the panel, I'm still really impressed by your work, Brian, one. But it is that boundaries I mean, it's what richard feimer used to talk about the boundaries

of our ignorance increase every day and actually a lot of what it seems to me the scientific endeavor about it is finding going it turns out we thought we knew actually we don't know but we have a new framework of how we don't know so it it's changing the framework of our ignorance. Yeah, we've come a long way from Zeus had a boner as an explanation. People aren't turning into swans nearly as much, are they? In a serious way, I think it's worthwhile thinking that there's a whole bunch of things we get wrong in science, but ultimately science does allow us to predict things and make advancements.

And while we make mistakes along the way, science is the thing that underpins kind of everything that works on Earth today. So yes, it has this beautiful ignorance. And what I love about it, in a world where everyone is so sure that they are right. Science is all about showing how you're wrong and making progress that way. And I love that. I like to think of your discovery as like someone discovering water. Oh, 70% of everything. And imagine now you're a fish in water. Suddenly you discover water, and then you tell other fish,

oh, we're in water. That's a big revelation. And actually, Alan, Robin at the start mentioned, so you also work down mines, looking for the other. So as you said, 70% of the universe. That's an understatement. There's another 25%, and we don't know what that is either. And you're looking for the rest of it.

That's right, that's right. So I'm setting my ambitions slightly lower than Brian. I'm only trying to do 25% of the universe, and that is dark matter. So there we can see through the motion of the remaining 5% that is the universe, the motion of the stars, the clouds of gas, pulled by the gravity of an unseen partner. And we infer then the presence of huge amounts of extra material, extra gravity, that we can't see with our telescopes,

so it's dark matter. But that's about the sum total of our knowledge. We know where it is, we know how much there is, we just don't know what it is. So one way that you can try to learn about it is to build a detector that is sensitive to, we hope, the collisions of these dark matter particles slamming into it. And there's a little flash of light from one of the crystals in the detector to reveal that presence. The problem with the detector is that it will flash when struck by anything, including radiation from space.

We heard about the material coming from the sun, the solar wind. There's a whole lot of other radiation, high-energy radiation coming from the sun, and indeed exploding stars feeding black holes, you name it. They're collectively called cosmic rays. They would hit our detector and blind it to the very occasional collision of a dark matter particle. So one way to get around that is to take your detector a kilometer underground into, in this instance, an active gold mine in Stoll, Victoria. And that kilometer of rock will act to block those particles' radiation from space.

And the dark matter, which is very much ghost-like, able to travel through solid walls, solid, in fact, the entire Earth, it will pass through that kilometre of rock, hit the detector causing a flash of light from a crystal in the dark at the bottom of an active gold mine. And it is absolutely as wonderfully mad as it sounds. And it will be the first dark matter detector in the Southern Hemisphere and hopefully will be coming online in the next few months.

So you think that surprises people people non-scientists i think we think so much of what is discussed in kind of cosmological conversations is out there rather than everywhere and that includes here yeah that's right i mean the dark matter is in the room right now in fact we are traveling through it there is a cloud of dark matter whose gravity is responsible for the Milky Way being here. And much like if you've got a still day, there's no wind, individual particles of air, of course, are moving around at great speeds, but there's no sensation of a wind.

But if you then drive through that and you put your hand out the car window, you can feel the wind rushing against your hand, but that's your motion through it. And in the same way, we have this cloud of dark matter, individual particles doing whatever they're doing, great speeds, but not really any bulk motion, except our sun is going around the Milky Way. And it's like the car going through the air. We have this sun traveling through the cloud of dark matter, so we get this rush of dark matter towards us.

That's our motion through it. And that's the signal that we're trying to see, that this dark matter is rushing through us. And occasionally, and I mean this, perhaps a few dark matter particles may have collided with the nucleus, the center of an atom, in one of the audience's bodies in the time we've been recording. Maybe, if nature's kind.

Alice, so we've just heard that we don't know what over 95% of the universe is. So my question is, is that a shock to you? Does it worry you? I mean, I find it inspiring, really. I always thought that dark matter was the thing you had to give a trigger warning for before you did a show this show may contain dark matter and now you're telling me that all

shows everywhere contain dark matter and I think that's a wonderful thing, look to be honest, the idea that human ignorance has expanded makes me feel more at home because I feel like I'm pretty ignorant about this stuff. I don't know about 95% of the universe,

so it's good to know that no one else does either on the principle that misery loves company. But, no, I love that about science, that it constantly uncovers its own ignorance. I think that's part of what growing up is you know as you get i mean as a civilization but also as an individual you go from not from not knowing very much and thinking you know a lot to realizing that you have no idea about anything um and that makes you a better person really but also pragmatically it doesn't

matter that 95 on a day-to-day basis i presume though i might get picked up you know if you break down and you go oh i knew it i've got dark matter in the carburettor but due to my lack of understanding dark matter in the carburettor i'll be unable i have to call some kind of specialist then brian schmidt comes in his frankly overpriced van to uh tell you but the you. So that's the interesting thing to me, I think, that sometimes philosophically it is beautiful to have that doubt and uncertainty. Mark, as we speak, I'm looking out over the telescopes, but also at a screen that says live tracking schedule.

And there are a huge number of spacecraft there. Could you just give us a very quick tour of perhaps the spacecraft that you find most interesting in the solar system? Because I think most people wouldn't know how many space probes we have out there that this station is communicating with on a daily basis. So the Deep Space Network, which consists of the Canberra site, as well as the site in Madrid, and the site at Goldstone in California, collectively, every day, track dozens of deep space missions. There are missions that are going through the sun's corona. There are missions outside of the solar system. There are missions that are around Mars, going to shoot some some asteroids just for the sake of it,

assuming that there was no little green man, you know, looking at the camera when it was being shot at. I think we can just clarify, it's not just for a laugh, was it? No, no, the DART mission, the idea of the DART mission is to see whether you can design a spacecraft to change the orbits of a heavenly body. And it worked remarkably well. So you need these experiments.

So there are dozens of these deep space missions. Many of them are from NASA. Some of them from the European Space Agency. There's also other international partners like the Japanese agency. Space Agency. There's also other international partners like the Japanese agency. And really, deep space exploration is an international collaboration exercise because there are so many science questions out there. Australia is much more interested in space. There are more and more opportunities for us, not just to be the data collector operating this communication, very valuable communication link with the deep space network, but also be involved in the space missions.

There's two questions, really. The first one is, of the spacecraft that are out there now, what do you find exciting? I know it's impossible to choose one but maybe give a couple and then we'll talk about future missions as well but first of all of the things that are up there at the moment well as an astronomer james webb space telescope kind of is uh light years ahead of everything else but things coming i i am really interested about being able to, for example, get a probe to Enceladus or Europa because you've got liquid water, you've got complex chemistry. That is a really interesting set of questions to ask of what's going on there and is there potentially life there. So those are

the ones I think I look forward to the future but no james webb space telescope is definitely uh my my favorite perhaps you could expand on that because that that is a mission that i think many people will be aware of now from the beautiful images that just started coming down yeah so that is a six and a half meter telescope in space i had two of my phd panel were asked by by NASA when I was still doing my PhD to kind of do the initial grand design. And they went out at a meeting in the United States and said, we are going to build a four-meter space telescope. And the person from NASA, the head of NASA, got up and said, you're wimps. We're going to build a 10-meter telescope. And everyone was like, we are? Anyway, it wasn't supposed to cost $10 billion, but we did build a six and a half meter. And can I say, I've been worried, how is it going to work?

Is it going to crash? And boy, it is working. It is absolutely delivering images far beyond what I think any of us actually thought it was going to do. So it's just the vehicle for discovery for the next decade. It allows us to look to the edge of the universe. It allows us to look into the atmospheres of planets. It allows us to look at everything in between. It is a beast for astronomers. See, that's why, Brian, when you at one point said to Mike, but we're not just doing it for fun, are we?

I would love it if that's actually going to say you've spent $10 billion on this, you've spent many, many years. Why have we done it? It's a laugh, isn't it? I mean, if that... And in some ways it is still... But it is part of the fun as well, isn't it? This is...

I know it's information and it's education and it's learning about ourselves, but we don't have to detach that from, in the end, it is the excitement, the joy, the fun of discovering. It is. Humans are discoverers. We're curious. And while it's easy to say, well, this is $10 billion wasted, throughout history, you can just go through and say by going and doing this creative discovery, we create all the other things that are useful that makes life go forward. And it is, you know, there's no winners or losers with Jane Wood Space Telescope. It's, you know, technology that the world can share. It's

something, whether or not you grow up in the middle of Africa, the middle of Australia, it is something to inspire you. And it's $10 billion. It's like an aircraft carrier. And it's a 40-year legacy. So it's actually pretty cheap. Yeah, it's impossible, isn't it, to imagine a world without Hubble? Those arguments, I remember, they were around when Hubble was very expensive, wasn't it? If you include the missions that were sent to service it, the space shuttle missions, arguably more expensive than the web. But can anyone imagine astronomy without the Hubble Space Telescope? Look, it was certainly the iconic images of my education. And I remember when the Hubble Ultra Deep Field was first revealed. And in fact, there's a giant screen in the back here where it was playing,

and I kind of got distracted looking at it all over again. But there is also technology spinoffs. And I just want to give a little example of that. With the Hubble Space Telescope, the image analysis software that makes those images just so beautiful and takes the raw data and turns it into images we see, that enhancement software is now used in breast cancer scans, mammograms. Those image enhancement tools have been built on those kinds of pipelines from Hubble. The example, one of the techniques that Brian would have used in his supernovae discovery

work that led to the realization of this vast ignorance of ours of the universe, the 70% of dark energy, that is a method known as a blink technique, right? You're literally looking at, you know, old school, you would have two, you know, your two eyes, you look at two images and blink between them, right? Or, you know, you're trying to see basically the difference. We do it a little bit more sophisticated than that, but still, it's a difference imaging. So the blink test or blink method, what has changed? Alex Cordenow and Jack White, back in my team a couple years ago, did that exact technique to enhance bushfire detection imagery from a JAXA spacecraft, Hybus L2, that looks at Australia. And you could use that astronomy technique that goes way back to before even B1 and use that to find bushfires earlier.

So just because something is a fundamental, curiosity-driven mission doesn't mean that you don't have extraordinary technological achievements that we all benefit from, that drive our economy, that make our lives healthier and indeed wealthier. But it still should be enough to say, because it's cool. Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah.

Alice, have you been keeping up with the images of JWST? I'm absolutely going to disagree on this front. I think, you know, yeah, sure, James Webb Space Telescope, amazing, astonishing. I'm the most excited about all these billionaire vanity projects because for too long has space been this, like, vast, inspiring, beautiful flowering of human technology and all this, like, you know, incredible idealism.

I want to see a narcissist trying to get money out of a satellite. Let's come on. Let's just, like, somebody drilling a moon that shouldn't be drilled. I want to see someone trying to monetise Mars. I want to see human selfishness in space. For too long, it's been these, like, beautiful, incredible achievements of humanity. I want to see, like, a knife fight in a geodome on the moon.

The first narcissist on the moon. Well, the good news is your ideal has arrived. I liked your face during that, but you didn't know how to react. No, I didn't. I might know some of them, and they might let me go into one of these space things. No, I don't. I wanted to ask Mark, actually, because we have run out of time,

but it doesn't matter, because time, as you know, is a construct. When we were at the Jet Propulsion Lab a few weeks ago, afterwards we were taken around, and we'd look at these places where they're building vehicles that are going to be on Mars. What are you hoping we will be detecting from space? What are you hoping that we will have begun to discover? What I would like, we would be able to to infer the properties of planets that are circling other stars to a degree of accuracy, not precision, and I distinguish that in a very specific way, that will really allow us to say, whoa, this planet really is a

habitable planet or not. So Alan, the same question is for you, because Brian, you mentioned the missions. You'd like to see these missions to the icy moons. And we actually saw in a previous Monkey Cage, actually, we saw or heard, discussed at JPL, the Europa Clipper mission, which is about to be launched. It's under construction at the moment. So Alan, for you, in terms of future missions,

so we have the search for life on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. We have the search for life on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. We have the search for life or habitable zones around distant stars. What about you? I'm going to be very parochial here and hope that we will see the national space missions

that have just been announced for Australia, for spacecraft to be designed, built, operated by Australia, for Australia, to monitor our weather, marine environments, bushfire, you name it. So that's in the next decade, we hope to see four spacecraft created by our nascent space industry. I think there'll be a tremendous coming of age for this nation. We've had a rich legacy history in space. We're the third nation on Earth to build and launch our own spacecraft from our own territory, following the US and the

Soviet Union. It's a very important point, isn't it, that we tend to think of space flight as exploring other worlds, but a very large component is Earth observation and understanding our own planet. It's huge. So of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, essentially every single one of them requires space to fulfill, be it through the provision of communications, through Earth observation imagery, or relaying of other kinds of data products, the capture of Earth from space.

So that's, I think, one of the really fantastic ways that we can use everything that we learn and do through astronomy to better our own planet. Thank you. I think, Alan, your point about discovering ourselves is just such an important part where we have, as you were talking about the narcissists on Mars, this idea of terraforming Mars, where at the same time going, well, before we terraform Mars, let's try and stop deforming the Earth, and that might be a useful thing to, because rather than terraform, there's one that's really like

terraforming. If that's what it is, it's amazing, isn't it? So thank you very much to our panel, who were Brian Schmidt, Alice Fraser, Mark Chung, and Alan Duffy. We asked our audience a question as well. We wanted to know, what would you like to send into space beyond the orbit of Neptune? What have you got, Alice? Amy says, my statistics lecturer.

I wonder what the p-value would be. I've got a Twinkie and a cockroach to see if they really can survive anything anywhere Trevor just says myself sorry Jonathan says what would you like to send into space beyond the orbit of Neptune is Jeff Bezos or the English cricket team

you're frightened are you the English cricket team? Oh, you're frightened, are you, of English cricket? And we've had three different answers of my ex-wife and my ex-husband, and then one more ex-wife. So what we've discovered, obviously, is working in this world, it doesn't lead to a comfortable domestic existence, does it? I just want to note that the people in this room are as a general thing uh employed here and vastly intelligent so i want to leave this one anonymous they say a roll of toilet paper to get it closer to uranus we've found the level

so we're staying in australia for next week's show We're off to a vineyard in Adelaide for purely scientific reasons and research. And Brian Schmidt, would you like to come with us as well? I do. I hear the weather's going to be really good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, we've been promised it's going to be extremely sunny. So, yeah, looking forward to that. So join us for next week's Christmas party special, where you can find out if all of that kind of like, us for next week's Christmas party special where you can find out if all

of that kind of like, oh, the universe is wonderful, shiny things over there is, oh, falls apart once Brian has a drink. Oh, the universe is so cold and indifferent. Why won't it love me? Give us a hug, Jupiter.

So, see you next time. Bye. Bye. APPLAUSE Turn that nice again. Hello, I'm John Wilson and I'm here to tell you about my podcast series, This Cultural Life. In each episode, I ask leading artistic figures to reveal the most important people, events and cultural works that have had a profound impact on their own creativity. It was just so different. It was so away from everyone. It just blew my mind. I didn't know about this. I just was confronted by it. And to me, this was art, you know? I felt art. We didn't know we were going to be there for years. But I mean, I honestly would have shot that thing for five years. I didn't care.

People like Nicole Kidman, Goldie, Armando Iannucci, Jarvis Cocker, Hannah Gadsby, Tracey Emin, Paul McCartney and James Corden. It means a great deal to me, that show. You realise how extraordinarily uplifting it can be to share an experience with 1,500 people. The people whose work we love talking about the work that they love. Search for This Cultural Life on BBC Sounds. I'm very emotional now, thank you.