What's Inside Uranus // Dragonfly Launch Secured // Best JWST Image of 2024

dragonfly is taking a falcon heavy to Titan what's inside Uranus Russia's cargo ship delivers a stinky smell to the station and testing robots to go under the ice on Europa all this and more in this week's space bites I know it sounds like some kind of dream but in 2028 NASA's Titan dragonfly is going to launch for Titan a nuclear powered helicopter is going to be going to Titan it's going to fly around it's going to sample different sites on Titan and try to understand the habitability of a moon that is orbiting around Saturn go

ahead pinch yourself you're not dreaming this is actually happening it's not actually a nuclear-powered helicopter it's a radioisotope thermoelectric generator powered octocopter but still I'm going to keep calling it a nuclear powered helicopter and this week NASA announced that they have chosen the Rocket Ride to Titan the winner is SpaceX is going to be a falcon heavy rocket and NASA announced they're paying SpaceX 256 million which is a fixed price contract for the flight as well as all of the additional services to send dragonfly to Titan the exciting part is that the launch is planned

for 2028 the launch Windows between July 5th and July 28th the bad part is that it won't arrive at Titan until 2034 but you can be patient right what's inside Uranus and Neptune Uranus and Neptune are classified as ice giants and they're not actually made of ice they're made of the kinds of stuff that we would consider to be ice if it was here on Earth in a very cold temperature but in fact they are under this enormous temperature and pressure which crushes down things like gas and Ice into bizarre flavors and versions and so

originally it was thought that you would have like this outer atmospheric the cloud tops of Uranus and Neptune and then beneath that you would have this sort of mushy mix of water ice and ammonia and methane and other chemicals and then eventually you get down to some kind of solid core at the middle this is very similar to the possible composition of planets like Jupiter and Saturn but one of the Weird Mysteries about Uranus and Neptune is that they don't have these giant planetary magnetic fields in the same way that earth does that Jupiter does

and that Saturn does with Earth the planetary magnetic field is caused by this Dynamo of liquid iron at the core of the planet with Jupiter and Saturn it's believed that the pressure has mashed hydrogen down into this metallic form that also creates this internal Dynamo on these planets but we don't see this on Uranus and Neptune it's this sort of patchy spotty magnetic field around the planet so new paper proposes that in fact the interior of Uranus and Neptune are more layered so what you've got is you've got that outer Cloud top layer then you've

got this dense atmosphere and then instead of having this sort of mix of water and methane and ammonia the pressure has squeezed out some of the elements out of those chemicals and put them into a more compact layer further down and so around the core you got this outer layer of pretty much pure water ice Mash under immense pressure and then You' got this deeper layer of hot High Press carbon nitrogen and hydrogen and then inside that you've got this more solid core the researchers ran simulations and found that this kind of an interior structure

on the ice giants matches the kind of magnetic field that was discovered by the Voyager 2 space when it did its flyby of the Two Worlds Europa Clipper continues to deploy its instruments the Europa Clipper was launched on October 14th just a little over month ago and at the time that I'm recording this it's about 20 million kilomet away from Earth and shortly after launch it deployed these gigantic solar arrays and then began to deploy its various science instruments first up was the magnetometer boom and this is going to be used to measure the magnetic

field at Europa and try to understand the interior structure th this is very similar to the story that we just talked about then it deployed its radar instrument and this is one of the most exciting instruments on board your Roba Clipper because this is what's going to be peering down through the ice to try and map out where the water ends where the ice begins and if there are pockets of water underneath the surface it still has another seven instruments to go which will continue to deploy between December and January and then in March 2025

it will do its flyby of Mars and this is the perfect time to test out all of these science experiments can they measure the magnetic field at Mars can they map the surface with the radar instrument so there's a lot of really interesting tests they can do and then it's going to fall back into the solar system and go do a gravitational assist of Earth and once again it will be able to test all of these instruments on Earth as a test Planet maybe it will discover that planet Earth is inhabited and then it will

head out to the Jupiter system to finally arrive at its destination of Europa now it's not going to be going into orbit around Europa it's going to be going to orbit around Jupiter but it's going to make 49 flybys of Europa each time passing down into the more radiation Zone around Jupiter do a quick flyby take a bunch of tests then go back out and then do this all over again and so by 2030 we will be seeing new images and data coming from Europa thanks to Clipper and speaking of Europa let's say that we

do find out where the water ends where the ice begins what would it take to be able to get down down under the ice on Europa we've talked quite a bit about how you would bore down through the ice with some kind of nuclear tipped drill but then what right you get all the way down through the ice down to the ocean how do you explore this to search for life so NASA shared some information about some prototype swimming robots that they're developing now These are 3D printed and they have two propellers and then they

have fins that allow them to maneuver around under the water so you can imagine you have this probe melt down through the ice it would reach the layer where the water begins and it would have some kind of hatch that would open and then these small swimming robots would be deployed they would explore away from the probe and then they would gather material and information and they would bring it back and then it could be relayed back up to the surface now the actual ones that will probably go to Europa will be about a third

the size of the prototypes that they're testing but it just shows the plans to explore Europa are already being thought of today a baby planet found astronomers have found one of the youngest planets that they've ever seen it's only 3 million years old and when you compare the age of the Earth 4.5 billion years old that's a really young planet planet is designated TI D ye e1b tidy 1B um and it was discovered using the transit method it takes about 9 days to go around its star and it's probably classified in the sub Neptune or

super Earth category now this age of 3 million years years is quite surprising when you consider that the previous record was in the sort of 10 million year old range and the problem is is that when you have a newly forming planetary system you have this disc of gas and dust that is around the star and the planets are forming within that disc and so they're obscured from our view but with tidy 1B the planet is orbiting off-kilter from the protoplanetary dis that is around the star and so it's not surrounded by these clouds of

gas and dust and so Astron were able to see it millions of years earlier than they would if they had to wait for the star to fully clear out all of the material around it to reveal its planets now how did it get on this strange off-kilter orbit we don't know but here it is enjoy a baby Planet every week we do a vote on our Channel where we ask you what you thought was the best story of the week and the winner this week was the first close-up images of a star in another galaxy

thanks to everybody who voted now if you want to participate in voting for this week's episode we'll put the poll in the community tab within about 24 hours of when we release this video of course the best chance to see it is to subscribe to our Channel click on the notifications Bell and if you want to watch our videos without ads you can always watch them for free over on patreon how long will it take to fly China's new cargo shuttle the Chinese are working on new ways to get to the Chinese space station and

they recently unveiled their new cargo ship it's called how long and this means dragon in Chinese the spacecraft has a wingspan of about 10 m which is similar in size to the Space Shuttle but it's a lot shorter and stubbier now obviously this looks like spacecraft you've probably seen before it looks a bit like the space shuttle looks a bit like the Dreamchaser it looks a bit like the X-37B and fundamentally it's the same thing which is that it can be launched on a rocket and then it will return through the atmosphere it'll be able

to Glide to a landing and we got some interesting pictures of what it's going to look like when it's attached to the space station sort of turned towards the sun it has solar panels that will extend out allowed it to power itself while the astronauts are taking Cargo in and out and then it can detach and return to Earth this is functionality that the current International Space Station doesn't have there's no way to bring large cargo back from the International Space Station you either bring home crew Dragon cargo dragon or things burn up in the

atmosphere like this is what the Dreamchaser should eventually solve when it's starting to provide cargo to the station so the Chinese understand that this is probably a pretty good idea as well a Russian cargo ship delivers a stinky smell to the station so when the latest Russian progress cargo ship docked at the International Space Station when the cosmonauts opened up the progress spacecraft they noticed a really bad smell and they noticed droplets of some mystery liquid inside the progress capsule they closed it right away and then continued to monitor the air quality on board the

International Space Station a few days later NASA said that the air quality on the station was back down to normal levels now what was it we don't know now we know that the Russians have had some problems with coolant leakages on some of their hardware and so it could be something like that or could be some other problem so as soon as we find out what caused the stinky smell we'll let you know and finally I want to share some cool images and video with you first up this is an incredible image of the Sombrero

Galaxy by the James web Space Telescope this is a very famous Galaxy originally we saw a picture taken from the Hubble Space Telescope back in 200 in three and it was really a striking Galaxy very different from other galaxies that we've seen it's got this thick dust ring that is on the outskirts of the Galaxy and then this very bright Center but in the web view with infrared you can actually see through that dust and actually see the cloudlike structures of this outer ring and also you can see the central bright core of the Galaxy

and we know that there's a super massive black hole that is actively feeding down at the middle of this galaxy I'm going to say right now I think this is the best picture that Webb has taken all year but you tell me if you disagree next up we've got a picture of Jupiter seen in ultraviolet the picture was taken by Hubble and everything looks kind of blue because they wanted to really highlight how ultraviolet light is reflected or absorbed differently by Jupiter than visible light what is wrong wrong with you why are you blue now

that bright blue object that is the Great Red Spot great blue spot and so it is reflecting a lot of ultraviolet radiation but then the really interesting feature is down at the bottom of Jupiter you can see this large brown area this is a hazy area that is absorbing ultraviolet radiation why so one of the theories is that you've got these magnetic vortices that are operating around the poles of Jupiter maybe where the magnetic field lines are piercing through the surface of Jupiter and out into space and this is mixing up and causing this material

to be a lot more absorbent of ultraviolet so one interesting sort of side note which is that if you look at this picture of Jupiter it's sort of strange how much of the South Pole you can actually see and when I shared an image of this uh people were wondering how this was possible because Jupiter actually doesn't have much of an axial tilt compared to other planets in the solar system I actually talked to one of the scientists who worked on this and it turns out that the original images from Hubble were seen face on

but gives you a peak down to the bottom and then they're able to map these images onto a sphere and then to be able to examine it from different angles especially these parts that are of interest to them but it is a very cool alien looking picture of Jupiter and finally if you don't have a fireplace for the holidays and you still want to have a toasty glow in your house then why not run this 8 hour video that NASA just released it is the launch of the space launch system you're looking at four rs25

engines two solid rocket boosters delivering 39 Mega Newtons of thrust on an 8 hour loop that just goes on and on and on and with the audio from the launch so I think this is a very fitting fireplace to put on for the holidays I'm going to talk about some upcoming interviews that you can get involved in but first I'd like to thank our patrons thanks to Abe Kingston Adam Schaefer andream gross Barry Lake Roofing David Gilton and David matz Dennis libery Dustin cable James Clark Jeremy M Jim Burke Jordan young Josh Schultz Paul Robo

scior rec.org spiders swap. Steven kraki stepen fer Munley and Vlad shiin who support us at the master of the universe level and all of other supporters on patreon one of the fun things that we've been trying out is that I've been giving the free and paid members on patreon advanced notice of the upcoming interviews that I'm going to be doing and then you get to give me questions I will ask those questions of the people that I talk to and then I will play the answers when we do the interview so a couple of upcoming

interviews that I haven't put out the call for questions yet but I thought you should know about one is an interesting idea for an UltraViolet telescope that will follow on the Hubble Space Telescope it's called move or the mission to analyze the ultraviolet universe and it would carry on where the hobble Space Telescope wrapped up seeing the world in in the ultraviolet spectrum and another interview that I'm going to be doing and I'm pretty excited about this is people behind the scenes from NASA's Advanced composite solar sale system this is the big solar sale that

NASA launched and is now in the process of testing and I want to find out how it's going and I want you to find out how it's going so I will be posting on patreon asking for your questions to these two teams as well as other interviews that are coming up and then you can let me know and we will incorporate it into the interview just go to patreon.com universetoday to sign up all right we'll see you next week