Future Missions and Habitable Worlds

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Hello, welcome to the supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, science journalist Izzy Clark, and astrophysicist, Mrs. Dr. Becky Smithers. Congratulations! Thank you. Thank you. Yes, I got married like 10 days ago and I'm still on a high. But today it's all about the next generation of space telescopes. Ooh, I think we say it a lot, but I feel like we're living in a really exciting time for astronomy in terms of observational astronom y, there seems to be so many ambitious missions and observatories on the horizon. Yeah, definitely. And I I mean maybe everyone says this through whatever you know, if you live through like Hubble launching, you're like, oh, this seems like it's a great time, so ambitious and things. And we know JWST was a great time and so ambitious. But it does feel like we're coming to the end of the lifetime or have already come to the end of a lifetime of like the first generation of space telescopes. And now we're thinking, okay, that was great, but what can we do better? And what do we need to still answer, you know, the remaining science questions? And that's where a lot of the missions from ESA and NASA are coming from at the minute. And it does just feel like there's one this year, and then there's like a few next year and then there's a few in the 2030s. And then oh we've got those to look forward to in the late 2030s and early 40s. It just feels like the roadmap at the minute for space telescopes is just it's a journey I want to go on. Yeah, we've we're being spoiled and I'm here for it. Okay . And Dr. Robert Massey, the deputy Director of the Royal Astronom ical Society is obviously here as well. So this episode is about that next generation of space telescopes. But can you give us a whistle stop tour of the space telescopes that has shaped our understanding of the universe so far No, it's impossible. There are simply so many. I think there are literally dozens of telescopes that have been launched into space if you if you look at all the different waveplanes they've covered. So this started properly about sixty years ago with the first Soviet satellite that was uh sent up in nineteen sixty-five to detect cosmic rays, Proton 1, or something like that. But you could also argue that we had kind of space telescopes even as long ago as the nineteen forties when we had sounding rockets that albeit only very briefly would fire detectors above the atmosphere and did things like find X rays from the sun. So I guess when that happened people realised there was a real advantage in looking for the wavelengths that don't reach the ground. So X-rays, gamma rays, a lot of ultraviolet, mid-infrared light, none of that gets through the Earth's atmosphere. So as a result, it's a really good idea to put things in space to try and detect them. And it would have been really odd, I guess, imagining that stars and and galaxies even things like black holes would not be emitting across the whole of the spectrum. So there was a real drive to get things into space as a result. And you look at things like X-ray telescopes that went from sort of detecting very blocky areas of emission on the sky to producing really precise maps. And I remember when Chandra was launched in the late nineteen nineties and XMM Newton and suddenly you had these really exquisite images of objects comparable to the ones you get from telescopes on the ground and And so astronomers could do comparable maps. You know, they could sit there and they could say, this is what this object looks like in X rays, this is what it's like in infrared, this is what it's like invisible eye, and all of that stuff became possible with space observatories. And then of course, the reason that, you know, I guess the telescopes that most of us are familiar with in space, the most famous one for many years, perhaps not the case now, was the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been operating since 1990. So and 1993 after it was fixed, because when it was initially launched, the mirror was the wrong shape. And the idea for that dates right back to the nineteen twenties with Hermann von Oberth, who was a rocket uh pioneer, and Lyman Spitzer in the 1940s, who worked for NASA and took it more seriously and saw it to completion. And it's you know, Hubble really did define the zeitgeist of astronomical imaging for a long time. So all these things that people have these amazing pictures of planets, galax It is funny like how you say in the Zeitgeist though, like if people picture space , they even picture stars looking like they do with the Hubble Space Telescope. Like the very specific like pattern that you get of the how the light bleeds from a very bright object, like that four-pointed sort of diffraction sp ike is what people think of when they think of a star now, right? Exactly. Because of the shape of Hubble. It's Hubble signature, and it's what our mental images are like think of a picture of space, and that's what you go to and it's only because it's what we've seen. So thank you, Hubble. I mean Yeah, but also thank you to like the team at Space Telescope who were like, what colour when we colour these images, do we colour them? You know, like the blue wavelength that we detect through a filter has to be colored a specific shade of blue in the images. So, so much of how we visualize space as well is down to those decisions as well, as not just what would look good, but what is human readable and what like people who are colourblind could also interpret, and all those kind of things. Like I get goose bumps. I think also there was a real effort to make those images very publicly available. You know, the enormous number of things, the Hubble Heritage Project, as well, where they said, well, what what did the would these galaxies look like if you turned up the brightness and kept the colour real? You know, in practice, if you were close to a big galaxy, it would still look quite faint, the surface brightness, but but they took that, and I think that's what captured people's imagin ation. So making Saturn, for example, look like it does, you know, that was a really inspired thing to do. Even when they'd understood that you know that wasn't necessarily what you do to maximise scientific content, sometimes it was good to have a public image as well. But then of course we've now got JWST, the James Weber Space Telescope, you know, amazing uh mid infrared images, looking inside nebulae, clouds of gas and gas, looking at the earliest galaxies in the universe and getting spectra of climates around other stars. And what was it? Three hundred and forty four single points of failure it overcame? Oh And then Yeah, exactly. The nerves. And then you could talk about Euclid, you know, galaxy serving galaxies over the third of the sky or Kepler that discovered thousands of exoplanets, but there is not time. So I'll stop there. See so exciting. I'm now wondering if you know how like you can tell the difference between a millennial and a Gen Z by asking them to pretend that they're on the phone and to see what they do. Like do they do they hold out thumb and little finger or do they just like hold a claw to their ear? It would be like, draw a star. And it'll be like, do you draw the Hubble diffraction spike or do you draw the JWST diffraction spike? And you'd be able to tell how old people are or Speaking up the yeah, yeah. Points of light. Points of light. See, I mean but even that just getting onto JWST Euclid, that's it's so exciting. But I can we take it back a bit because what can space telescopes do that ground-based telescopes can't? The the clear the main thing they can do. Well there's two things, right? One is they can detect wavelength that don't reach the ground. So it's good for us that gamma rays, hard ultraviolet, doesn't reach the ground. It's bad for us to have that radiation come from space , X-rays, exactly. And infrared is blocked as well. So, or a lot of infrared anyway. So one thing you do by putting a telescope in space is you have unfettered access to those wavelengths. You can see the whole of the spectrum, provided you have the telescopes and to detect it. And the other thing you can do is to escape the crud of the Earth's atmosphere. So we build telescopes high on mountains to be above as much of that as we can on Hawaii or in the Atacama Desert in Chile, these high and dry sites where the air is really stable, but even better than that is being above the atmosphere. So that is maybe 10 times as expensive. Putting JWST in orbit is you know, many, many times as expensive as even building the European Lgear Tescelope, or the extremely large telescope as it called, as it's called now. But if you get it right, then the only limitation is your optics. And so you can you can escape all those things that anybody looking through a telescope on the ground is familiar, all that blurring clouds as well., Frankie You know, you're you're not gonna get clouds and rain in space. That's a really big plus. And that's why we do it. Do you think that's what they like put on the like the nineteen seventies pitch for Hubble? Well you don't get clouds and rain in space. Sold Now if you've listened to this podcast for a while, you'll have heard us get rather excited about a space telescope that is launching later this year. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which NASA says will settle essential questions in the areas of dark energy, exoplanets, and infrared astrophysics. So how will it do that? I spoke with scientist Dr. Tom Barclay from the Roman Space Telescope team. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which we call Roman, is NASA's next flagship observatory. And flagship means the biggest things we do at NASA. The idea is that we are taking the next step in our knowledge of the universe. And so we have done these with telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope or the James Webb Space Telescope. Next up is the Roman Space Telescope. Launching this year, August 30th is our plan. But fall of this year is when we're expected to go up. And our goal is to survey the sky very fast and very efficiently and in a way that's never been done before. And so how is Roman going to do that exactly? So we have a large telescope, we're about the size of a school bus. If you look at us, we don't look all that different from the Hubble Space Telescope. With a similar size mirror, we collect light at similar wavelengths to Hubble, visible and in the infrared. But what we do that these previous generations telescopes don't do is that we can look a lot of the sky all at once, and we can move from one patch of the sky to the next patch of the sky very, very efficiently. That is, we can slew the telescope and we can stop on a dime and take images. And so that means that if we're talking about looking at large areas of the sky, we're about a thousand times faster at doing that than than the Hubble Space Telescope. So there isn't just that we're a bit better . We're designed to do this. This is our primary goal. We're a survey telescope. What a survey is, is you want to look at a lot of the sky, you want to look at a lot of objects, and you want to determine how common they are and how frequent they are. Yeah, and so what's on board? How does Roman do that? And what is it about that that takes, as you said, our knowledge to that next level? We're equipped with two instruments. Our primary wide field instrument is the one I'm kind of focusing on here. Our wide field instrument goal is to look in the infrared. It's the biggest infrared camera we've ever built. We have 18 detectors to survey survey this guy here. What we're doing is is looking at huge numbers of objects and also looking for rare objects. By looking at large parts of the sky very, very deep with extremely crisp image quality, you can both find huge numbers of objects like millions of galaxies, billions of stars, but you can also find extremely rare things that are happening, such as things we call microlensing events. It's just so exciting knowing what the possibilities are with Roman. What has it taken to get to this point? Why do we need a telescope like this? Yeah, and so we don't do these things lightly. We've done a lot of work with previous telescopes looking at uh large portions of the sky, but when we're trying to do big statistics, we are just simply limited by how much of the sky we can look at and how quick we can look and how deeply we can look. We want to understand, you know, the past, the present and the future of our universe, but to do that we need huge statistics. And by having relatively narrow fields of view, such as we've had on say Hubble and and and Web, there are more snapshot surveys rather than big, big kind of panoramas. We're limited on those statistics. Those observatories are extremely powerful and extremely useful and can do amazing things, but we're designed to do something different. And so just how big are those surveys? The amount of sky that we look at in a single snapshot is about a hundred times bigger than Hubble. But because we can survey efficiently, we're gonna be doing some of our surveys that look at five to ten percent of all the sky. We're going to be doing a survey of our our own galaxy that within a a month of observations create the biggest astronomical catalogue ever created . Oh my gosh. I mean that is kind of nuts. That's insane. Yeah, we're in a different space here in terms of data and it's truly vast. Every day we're bringing down to the ground about one and a half terabytes of data. Wow. So more than uh more than I don't know, my laptop's hard drive has every single day from from relativ farely away, a million miles away from Earth. And then we're processing that data almost straight away, making that data available to all the scientists in the world who want access to this data and allow them to do their science. And obviously once you do your science, this data volume balloons, in just two weeks of using Roman, our data archive will be bigger than the entire Hubble thirty year data archive. That's that's how much data we're collecting. Yikes. And I think the fact that you're, you know, from the gates saying gonna tackle areas of, you know, dark energy, exoplanets and infrared astrophysics, it's like, okay, they are not messing around with this. For you, what are you most excited about with all of this? So, my science background is exoplanets. I previously worked on the Kepler Space Telescope. What Kepler was able to do is teach us that there are more planets in our galaxy than there are stars. Most stars have a planet. But what we don't know, and where we kind of stopped in our kind of knowledge gain, is really understanding what the frequency of planets is like in orbits beyond Earth, right? Um if you think what ke what Kepler and and other sp other projects have done is teach us the frequency of planets out out to about the orbit of Earth around other stars. What we don't know is beyond that. And if you think about our own solar system, what defines our solar system other than the sun really is the giant planets, Jupiter. Our whole system is is defined from the very early days by by Jupiter. We think we got a lot of our water on Earth because of Jupiter, right? Jupiter had this huge effect on the early solar system. If we want to understand planets, perhaps planets and habitable zones around other stars, we both have to understand those planets, but also the environment they're in. And that is learning about the frequency of giant planets, the w what are things like out out there in the kind of colder regions? And Roman one of its key projects is to understand the frequency of planets like like Jupiter on Jupiter-like orbits. Really fill in this gap that we have in our understanding of what other planetary systems are like. For me, that that within a relatively short amount of time we're going from really little understanding of of that part of exoplanet parameter space to just answering that question and being able to to know the answer. And then another big scientific goal is to understand the evolution of our universe. So can you tell us more about that? This is really where the various space telescopes and their own unique capabilities come into play. So Web looks really deep. It looks at some of the oldest galaxies. It looks the furthest back in time. So that gives us this kind of key data points. Roman, by having this larger field of view, can look at huge numbers of objects at this more intermediate range of times and distances throughout our universe. And these data points are giving us this understanding of how our universe is changing and evolving through time. Because distance and time uh you can equate the two, we're filling in this gap and starting to understand the complexities. There's a real possibility that Roman provides the data that tells us our standard model of dark matter and dark energy evolution of of the universe is very, very wrong. That's a key, a key measurement we can make. How important is it that Roman works along the James Webb Space Telescope? Can you tell us more about that collaboration? I mean, NASA has this fleet of astrophysics observatories, and they're all designed to work collaboratively together. We are a smaller telescope than James Webb, but we have this big field of view. James Webb does the really deep dives, it looks back into the furthest back in time you can go. It looks at the very, very red objects, the very very faint objects, but it looks at a very small patch of the sky. Whereas we look at all of the sky all at once. One of the things that allows us to do is we can survey all the sky, we can collect a s l small number of very interesting objects, be it extremely faint galaxies, you know, the highest redshift galaxies out there. We can find the candidates and then then James Webb can spend the time studying them in great detail and taking them deep, precise measurements. But there are there are gonna be many, many ways that we do this. We're finding these objects, we're finding these statistics, and then James Webb's gonna do the deep dive. One of the things I'm most excited about, Roman, is giving us opportunities to find things that we didn't expect to see. Thank you to Tom Barclay from NASA. We love Tom. Yeah. Also, every time I just say we're gonna speak with NASA. I mean, I get it for the European Space Agency as well, but just speaking with space agencies in general, I'm like, tell me what you're doing, tell me everything now. Anyway. So obviously Roman is a massive thing. We're very excited for it. And then just a few years ago, we still had that excitement for the launch of JWST with this six point five meter primary mirror, you know, orig ami folded into a rocket and launched out. But we actually haven't done a web check-in for a while. So Becky, um what have been some of the latest discoveries? Ooh, it's been smashing all the records, Jade West T, it feels like. It seems like we get like a new most distant galaxy known every few months at the minute. Like it's just constantly giving it to us. M O M Z14 is currently the galaxy that uh holds that title. It's at a red shift, so its light has been stretched by a factor of fourteen point four four, which means uh the light has been travelling for thirteen point four billion years before we detected it. So we're seeing the galaxy as it was when the universe was just two hundred and eighty million years ol d. And that's really exciting because it's right in the window of like the 100 to 300 million year time frame when we think the first stars were born. So we're really with JWST, we're getting to that like first stars, first galax ies, those those promises that we heard all in the run-up to the launch in in 2021. So yeah, it's very exciting. Also last year as well, I remember in December there was um the announcement of the most distant supernova that was ever detected. And that was spotted with James Webb as well. And it came with like a gamma ray burst and all sorts. And that was at about I think it was 13 billion light years away. And again, super exciting because if you see a supernova, that means that material's been thrown out into the universe so you can see like what stars were made of back then. And again, you're getting back to this like first generation of stars that formed in the universe. And of course, we've still got all the exoplan et discoveries coming thick and fast as well, from weird planets that we we don't even know where to put them. They seem to be in their own category now. And then also, you know, atmospheric detections as well.' Thsere still arguments raging about whether there's been a detection of dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere of the exoplanet K218B. Why is that specifically something that's exciting? Yeah, so dimethyl sulfide on Earth is only produced by bacterial life or by us in industry. I mean it could be that it points to life in the atmosphere or it could be unknown chemistry. Either way, you're gonna have some excited scientists somewhere, right? You're gonna have some excited chemists, or you're gonna have some excited astrobiologists. New things are happening. Yeah, there's arguments either way, but there's also arguments about whether that detection is even real or not, because doing this is incredibly difficult. Like you say, you know, like, oh, it's the tiny amount of starlight that passes through the planet's atmosphere, and then you isolated it, and ta-da, there's a fingerprint of molecules in the atmosphere left on it. Except isolating that tiny bit of light is incredibly difficult. The signal is incredibly weak. If your atmosphere isn't very thick, so really we only get the strongest signal from like big, thick Jupiters . Um, not like the you know, getting towards Earth and mini Neptune-sized planets that we'd really want to do this with. Um and also, you know, a molecule might leave its fingerprint on the light, but it might also blend with another molecule's fingerprint, which is all degenerate and different. So it's very difficult to do. Um, which is why you know people have been struggling. I think a lot of people are waiting for like the Trappist uh one data for a long time. This system of seven planets. They're all sort of like Earth-ish size. They're all rocky planets we think, but if they've got incredibly thin atmospheres, then this I think is just what's taking the teams so long to analyze the data because there just could be not even just nothing there, but no signal there or just signal buried in noise that's very difficult to to pull out. So I'm hoping there'll still be something soon because I feel like they've just been every year of JWST. They're like, Can you just give us another few observations so we can just keep adding to the signal that we have? Um Yeah. Well, we'll be hearing more about like how we detect atmospheres and exoplanets But can can we come back to your area of research? Because how can the partnership of Webb and Roman push that forward as well. You study black holes, obviously. Oh, definitely. I'm so excited for this because I mean Roman is doing a wide infrared survey as part of one of its things. So usually with a telescope, it's either like, is it just a workhorse that's doing a survey, you know, kind of like Ruben and Euclid and things like this, where it's just kind of like I'm gonna observe this bit of the sky and then this and post-stamp it all up and just slowly build up a big picture. Or people are applying full time to do their specific science on it. Roman is a bit of a blend of the two, which is very exciting. So the infrared survey is great because it'll have a big field of view, which means it can cover a large area really quickly and help you build up a map of where all the galaxies are very quickly and also the properties that you can observe with Roman versus any other telescope. So you can build up large samples and identify galaxies, especially that have these active supermassive black holes that I'm interested in. The ones that are growing, right? So the material spiraling inwards towards them, you know, is glowing because it's so hot. You can't always see that because of dust, but if you look in the infrared, you can see through the dust. So Roman with a doing an infrared survey will be incredibly powerful to just kind of be like, here's where they all are. Some of them were hiding and things like that. And then once you know where they all are, you can then do all the detailed follow-up that you want to do to answer all the specific questions you have. And that could either be with Roman itself in optical or in infrared, you know, in the same way that we use, for example, the Hubble Space Telescope now, or with JWST for infrared follow- up and specifically for JWST for the IFU on board. Love IFUs. It's called an integral field unit, right? Essentially, it's um basically, you know how we we can either get an image of something or we do what's called a spectra where we take the light from something and we split it into its rainbow and we get a trace of how much light at each wavelength is coming from an object. We can do that but at every single pixel in an image with an IFU. So it's either a spectra at every pixel or an image at every wavelength, and it's just like all of the information. You're just like, shut the front door, this is too much. Like what? So it's an incredibly powerful tool. And the fact that JWST has that is very i it is great, right? Because you can get things like um velocities from IFU so you can see how things are moving, as well as knowing what stuff is made out of um and how energetic things are. So when it comes to black holes, moving energetic things, right? Understanding how it's affecting the galaxy around it, it's it's a complete game changer. But JWST is such a narrow field of view, it doesn't do discovery very well, except for oh here's an image we took and here's the most distant thing that we can see in it, you know. Um it doesn't do that sort of like find all the things across the whole sky, which is where Roman and also the likes of Euclid and Ruben and you know, things like that are going to come in as well. Yeah. And I think this also just goes to show like, you know, when Hubble launched in the nineties to where we are now with with JWST, how technology has really pushed that and how much information we can get is frankly mind blowing. Also information we can get from space as well. Like like the bandwidth. Y you know when you try and download a large file on your computer, how long it takes. Can you imagine trying to do that from space with the deep space network . You know, back you know, 30 years ago, that would have been, you know, a very slow process. So the fact that we can do this with a survey telescope that do like a big workhorse that's just constantly imaging is incredible . Now, more people than ever can bring in their bill for a better deal at Verizon. Got ATNT or T Mobile? 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Even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See Capital One.com slash bank capital One A member FDIC So in the grand scheme of space, studying planets outside of our solar system, what we call exoplanets, is a rather new field. The first exoplanets really discovered in the mid-90s, and there are a fleet of new space telescopes that are now pushing our understanding of them. Ariel, short for atmospheric remote sensing, infrared, exoplanet, large survey, is a mission from the European Space Agency that is looking at the atmospheres from planets light years away. I spoke with Dr. Chris Pearson, head of astrophysics at Raoul Space in the UK, who are overseeing the assembly and testing of the mission's instruments and equipment? Ariel is a kind of medium-sized space mission. It's not massive. It's a it's a mirror that's about one meter across, and it's a spacecraft that's going to be launched around the end of the decade with the European Space Agency. Ariel is going to look at the atmospheres of alien planets, what we call exoplanets, and find out what these atmospheres are actually made of? I always think studying exoplanets is fascinating and bizarre because how can you study the atmospheres of planets that are so far away, they're in totally different solar systems. So how does that work and what is so special about other exoplanets that you know we can't understand from looking at our own solar system? Yeah, so that's right. I mean, exoplanets are planets going around other stars, so they've got their own suns, they're tens of light years away, so they're completely unreachable by spacecraft. So we have to use uh space telescopes to look at them. We've discovered around 6,000 exoplanets to date, but what we haven't done much of is actually look at what they're made of, and this is what Ariel is going to do by observing a planet as it passes in front of its own star. So as the planet passes in front of its own star we call it a transit that starlight will actually pass through that thin layer of the atmosphere surrounding that exoplanet and as that starlight passes through the atmosphere of the planet, we can actually use that starlight almost as a fingerprinting system to see what chemicals are available in the atmospheres of these exoplanets and find out their composition. Oh it's so cool. So you have six thousand exoplanets to choose from. How do you choose which ones you want to look at and which ones you want to understand, you know, th this fingerprint and their chemical composition? We're going to look at about a thousand of these exoplanets in general. So it's a fair, you know, it's a fair portion of exoplanets that have been discovered. And what makes Ariov different from, for example, what the James Webb telescope is doing, James Webb is fantastic. It's only looking at a few of these exoplanets. So, like the low-hanging fruit, as it were. What we're going to do is we're going to take a complete census. So, we're not going to look at you know one particular type of exoplan et we're gonna try and cover um everything from these big gas giant Jupiter type exoplanets down to some of the um the the rocky planets that we see uh in the universe around us and so how does it work? How is Ariel going to do this ? On board, it's got its its little telescope, it's one meter telescope that collects the light from the exoplanets, and that light is fed down to some special detectors inside the payload of the spacecraft. In particular, we've got a spectrometer called Ayers, and the spectrometer will split the light from the stars that we receive and the planets we receive into its composite colours in the same way as a prism breaks the normal light into the colours of the rainbow. By doing that, by looking at this spectrum, we can actually identify particular chemicals like hydrogen or helium, carbon dioxide and even water in the atmospheres of these planets. And it's that spectrograph, it's kind of like that fingerprint scanner, right? It's the thing that looks at this light and it tells us what is in there to help us understand what's going on in each of these exoplanets. But it's a really interesting time for exoplanet research because Ariel is not the only space telescope that we've got or that's in development that's looking at exoplanets, right? So tell us more about how this is part of like a much bigger step forward in studying exoplanets . So we have to remember that exoplanets is a really, really young field, right? It's really taken off in the two thousands where we've had this um fleet of spacecraft that have been launched, uh things like uh the NASA Kepler mission that was launched in 2009, Kiops, which is a European mission launched in 2019, another NASA one test in 2018, and then we're looking forward to Plateau, which is a European mission, launched uh January next year at the moment, I think. But all of these telescopes, they're discovering new planets. So they're adding to the tally or the number of exoplanets that we have discovered. What makes Ariel different is that we're not going to discover new planets. We're going to take the planets that have been provided to us by these fantastic missions that have come before and we're going to actually do the chemistry on the atmospheres of these planets. So we slot into um this kind of framework in terms of like doing the science rather than doing the discovery. And what surprises me about Ariel is that this mirror that's collecting this information actually isn't that big in the grand scheme of things, so how can it take all of that light from that is coming from such a distance to find something as detailed as a chemical signal of an exoplanet. But this for looking at these exoplanets, they're all relatively close, astronomically speaking. So it's not about having a big mirror. What's important for Ariel is actually um having a stable environment because when we're looking at the chemicals in the atmospheres of these planets, we don't want to mistake them for things like atmospheric contamination on the earth or even wobbles in our instruments, for example, that may actually mimic the the chemicals that we're looking for in the in the atmospheres of these planets. So it's not about size and mirror, it's about stability of the instruments for Ariel. Okay . So what's the current status of the mission? We've just actually complet ed a very important phase in the mission. We've just finished testing literally last week, what we call theed structural model of Ariel at Raoul Space. Now, the structural model tells us that everything we're building fits together properly, but we've also done some testing in our national satellite test facil ity. That includes things like acoustic testing where the satellite is blasted with low frequency bass from these loud speakers and amplifiers to simulate some of the viol ent conditions of launch. Similarly, we put it on a big shaker table, which again shakes the satellite, which again simulates the launch. And also we've done things, what we call center of mass testing. So again, it sounds quite simple, but we have to understand how the mass and the weight is distributed around the spacecraft so it doesn't go rolling off uncontrollably. So we need to know how this spacecraft is going to move in space as well. So all these tests have been happening at the moment. We've literally just finished it. We're now ready to move on to the next step, which is going to be to include more of the the engineering, the electronics onto the spacecraft in the next version of the model? Gosh, there's so many different parts that you have to test and test and try again and make sure that it all comes together. Once it gets to launch and it's out there, for you, what are those big questions that when it comes to exoplanets that you really want to understand? Sure. So once we've launched, we enter the operations phase, and that's actually what I'm involved in with uh with Arial. So my team is developing some of the data analysis software that's actually going to process the data from Ariel once it's launched. So what we're hoping to do is to understand this whole family of exoplanets. They come in all different shapes and sizes, for example, um you know some some are a Jupiter-sized object, some are more Earth-like, some are like Neptune. And what we're finding is that the planets that have been discovered, we don't necessarily have parall els or similar planets in our own solar system. Yeah we have gas giants like Jupiter but these live quite a long way away from our sun we're discovering these hot Jupiters that whiz around their parent stars , some of them in less than a day, so their year actually lasts less than less than an earth day. So, you know, like this is like Christmas coming once every 18 hours on these planets. So there's some truly truly, weird objects out there, and Ariel is built to understand what they're made of and how they can exist in the in the environments that they they they are . And this episode is looking at the next generation as well. So not only do we have Ariel and how that's partnering with all of these other space telescopes looking at exoplanets, there's also the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which is another thing in the future. So can you tell us about that as well and how is that pushing this field of research? What the Habitable Worlds Observatory is going to do, and this is a telescope that's going to be launched in the mid to late 2040s , right? So a long time away. It's going to have a much larger mirror, probably at least six to eight meters in diameter. And this is actually going to directly image something like twenty-five Earth type worlds that live in the habitable zones, so you know where liquid water is and therefore life may exist around their parent stars. So it's it's an absolute monster. It's not going to do so many planets, but it's going to do this small number of Earth type worlds and try and find, for example, the signatures of possible life on these planets around their their parent star s. Thank you to Chris Pearson from RaoulSpace. This is the Supermassive Podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, astrophysicist Dr. Becky Sadhurst and science journalist Izzy Clark. And I wanna bring back Space Book Club. So much and then we've all just been busy, and then I was like, hang on, I haven't asked you guys what you've been reading. So what you've been reading is Oh my god, I never go first. Okay, well there you go. Um so I've been reading Radio Universe by Dr. Emma Chapman. Um I love Emma. Yeah, we've had her on the show before. I think when she had her other book, was it First Lights? It's this book which is like a love letter to radio astronomy. There's not many who would write that . I know, exactly. There's a lot of people in astronomy, they're like radio astronomy, it's so stupid stupid units and it's really annoying and doesn't act like a normal telescope with beam size and not telescope size. Any Emma would write that book. Emma would write that book. It's so good because it's so accessible and it takes you through obviously Emma's sort of experience of becoming a radio astronomer, but also the big kind of turning points and the big questions that radio astronomy can help us understand. And I just think if anyone kind of feels a bit unsure about the radio spectrum, everybody, it's a really good starting point. And it's just like, yeah, that lovely mixture of storytelling and science. So yeah, big recommend for that one. Well I have a book just like that as well. Um so I was very lucky to I got to read a little preview of a book coming soon. Because I get set these things now and I'm like, yay, this is about life. Um, I got to read a preview of Katherine Haban's new book, who is the astronomer royal for Scotland. Oh, she's she's written a book called She is great, yeah. She's written a book called How to Design a Universe, The Science of real and virtual worlds. It's not out until September 2026. So you will have to be patient for this when I tell you it was great. I absolutely loved it. It again did that really cool blend of like science and storytelling, but really especially from sort of Catherine's perspective of like her experience within the field as well and how she came across various different topics. And I just really enjoyed it. It's so immersive and joyful. Like it's, you know, it's the kind of way that I think I would have loved to have been taught this way back when, you know, because it just yeah. I love it. Yeah, nice. We'll have to wait until September. Okay . And Robert , what about you? Yeah, I should say about she Emma's just been elected to the Council of the RAS and uh Catherine we're working with really heavily on fighting the astronomy cuts, but that's a little aside. So and she is I don't know how she has the time to do all that she does, actually. She's quite a strong . Um, but yeah, I've got two classics, which I hope is okay, because I was thinking about books I've read a lot recently, and they're two things that are really helpful for people that want to find things in the sky. One is called Turn Left at Orion, which is by Guy Consom Magno, who is the Vat the head of the Vatican Observatory. You know, most of us didn't realize the Vatican Observatory, but it's really nicely accessible, you know. And then a very similar vein, Hidden Treasures by Stephen James O'Meira, who's an amazingly talented amateur astronomer who just sees stuff. You know, he um famously before the Voyager missions, he saw spokes in Saturn's rings before they were discovered by Voyager 1. And they're both great guides ' theycause fight they tell you what things actually look like. They tell you how to find them. So I think if you're one of those people that's just picking up a pair of binoculars trying to find your way around the sky, or you've got a bigger telescope, or even in some cases you're just looking for things with your eye, that it's just a really nice way to find things. They cover the whole sky as well, northern and southern hemisphere, in case you've got you know listeners on the southern hemisphere this time. So I c I can strongly recommend them as those sort of really intuitive classic guides for finding things. Oh, that's nice. That sounds good 'cause I feel like a lot of stuff when it's covered in the news of like something's happening or find this in the sky, it's often comes with so much height. Exactly. So it's really nice if it's sort of just very down to earth, like this is what you'll see, is safe and it yeah exactly. There's sometimes these things will be smudges, but they're a smudge twenty million light years away. You know, that's that's the price for paying. Yeah. It's a smudge. Be nice to us, smudge. I think maybe Haze is a better word, I've decided. Sludge is a bit, yeah, it does sound a bit like it's an oversight. And and and actually to go back, like I got to interview Emma at a book event for her. So I was interviewing her about her book to a nice audience at uh Waterstones in London. And someone asked a question that I thought was really good, and I'd love to get your thoughts on this. Then they said, What books would you recommend for someone who is just getting into astronomy? And it kind of stumped me. So I'm really putting you on the spot by just now passing this over. The problem is it's all I think about is the book that I had when I was a kid with this like all these fact files and I I'd have to look up like who wrote it because it was just called space and it was just it was the most beautiful illustrations on each page of like here's one for every planet, here's one for what stars are galaxies are, black holds. I'll tell you what's a r actually one that's I think is really great for that is Will Gator's book to the universe, um, which is just beautiful watercolours, but talks about every page as like a massive, you know, part of our night sky. So whether that's galaxies, black holes, and then it dives into the planets, um on some space telescopes as well. Like it's just a really nice book. It's aimed at kids, but I actually hadn't thought of that actually. So mine was uh I think mine was maybe a a not exactly a coffee table book, it was possibly aimed at kids. But I do have a coffee table book. There's the the book called Cosmos by DK, which I did the forward for a few years back. That's an excellent book because that is is very much a coffee table book. It looks fantastic. It's got images from all the space telescopes. It's accessible for kids, if they just want to look at the images and read a few of the captions, but it's also accessible for adults because it's got more of an explanation of how the images were obtained, what the images are showing as well. It just looks fabulous. It's got a great cover as well that just looks absolut ely great on a coffee table. Well fingers crossed that one person is listening and now I can finally answer this question. And I think I'd guess I I'd go with like, you know, there are really nice stargazing guides that come out each year just telling you simply what's around. You can obviously find this stuff online. You can use upside solarium and so on. But there is still something quite good, I think, about a short two or three pages telling you the highlights of the month, you know, the way that we try to do each month. But I I still think it's a really good thing. What is that bright thing in the sky? Oh, that's Venus, you know, that's Jupiter. This is just learning those basic things and find you know, again, finding that sort of intuitive feel for the sky. I mean there are, you know, there are loads of other books. I was just as we were talking about this, I was just looking left on my bookshelf and thinking, I've got rid of a lot of my beginners' books, but there are there are I mean my my friend Anton Van Plue wrote Simple Stargazing some years ago. That's pretty good. Um you know, depends where you want to go really. Th'eres books on relativity, on the moon, on the you know, uh on exploring the deep universe, all of those things. And I think it's just it's just diving in really. You just have to go for it and think what subject do I really want to find out more about? Because there are there are lots and lots of books on this stuff . Yeah. Well, speaking of diving in, shall we get onto some listener questions about space telescopes? Let's do it. I think my cat Pip might join us at some point 'cause she's absolutely yelling outside the door . Pip, tell us what you think. Come on, answer some answer some listening questions. Okay, Becky Fiona 12 on Instagram asks: Are there any telescopes being built for launch after the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope? Yeah, yeah. I mean, um you've got to remember Roman is the big NASA flagship mission. So this is why you will hear a lot about it. You know, if you're thinking about big NASA missions, it's gonna be Hubble Web Roman, right? Is the roadmap, right? But then after that, the next step along the roadmap is in the really long term, I'm talking like the 2040s, is the Habitable Worlds Observatory, HWO, which you might have heard Chris mentioned before. Um, this has got one of those IFUs, you know, the integral field unit that takes a a spectra every single pixel in the image or an image everywhere however you want to think about it. And its mission will be to directly image Earth like planets and Earth like planet systems in orbit around stars. And the reason that you would want an IFU to do that is then you can also get um information about their atmospheres as well, like you don't have to wait for the planet to pass in front of its star so that starlight passes through the atmosphere and you detect that tiny signal, you should be able to get it through like reflected light off the planet from taking a direct image. Um we massively need to like develop the contrast technology to do this, like because you know these bonnets are tens of billions of times fainter than their stars, right? So we need to be able to get down to that kind of level of sensitivity um in in a telescope. So that's a long way away. In the meantime, NASA will be launching um its near-Earth object surveyor in I think that's September 2027, so next year. That's going to search for hazardous asteroids using infrared light. So the big thing about asteroids is to spot them, you have to see the reflected sunlight off them. But what if they're really like dark? What if their surface is made from material that doesn't reflect a lot of sunlight? Or if they're really small, you're not going to be able to detect them very easily. So using infrared up in space means that you can detect sort of like their their natural infrared glow. And so you can hopefully detect any that are hiding somewhere from us. Um because there are like less asteroids than we'd necessarily expect from models. So we think this is this is why. And just yeah, it helps with the tracking and the, you know, the Earth not being in danger from something, thanks. And then for ESA , um, uh in the n in the near term for ESA, you've got Ariel, yes, but you've also got Esa's Plato mission, which is set to launch in January 2027. That's also an exoplanet mission. It's going to search for again Earth-like planets around sun-like stars. Uh this time it'll do it by transit. So waiting for the planet to pass in front of its star. Um it's specifically going to focus on sun like stars and dwarf stars like that are smaller than the sun and try and look at them for really long periods of time because previous missions that have done this, it's been fairly what we call short cadence. So you you detect planets that say pass in front of their star every month rather than once a year, like Earth wood from like over the sun from somebody else's perspective. So that's what its real focus is. Then for Esa, I'm very excited, about the advanced telescope for high energy astrophysics, or Athena, as we're all referring to it as . That's an X-ray telescope and it's set to launch in the early 2030s. I'm very excited about that as a as a black hole person because material spiraling around black holes glows in X-rays. So yay! Black hole detections with Athena. Uh studying stuff uh with with X-ray telescopes, which you know, we have a few X ray telescopes. We've got Chandra, XMM Newton, you could maybe throw Swift in there as well. A lot of that though is is outdated technology, the 9,0 thes 2000s, um, so Athena is going to revolutionize that side of things. And then if we're thinking really, really long term, I don't even know if this class is a telescope, but we've got the Lisa mission from ESA as well, which is a gravitational wave detec tor in space. Um which again late 2030s, early 2040s. So I just have so many things to look forward to when it comes to big telescopes being built for Yona. There's l there's loads. Gosh, we'll have content for the next however many years. I know this is what I love about my colleagues. I'm like, will I ever run out of content? No, they just keep writing papers and building telescopes . Okay. And Robert, Samuel Hughes wants to know: is the future of large space telescopes going to be arrays of small cubes ats to reduce costs? And Chris O'Hare has also emailed us with a similar question and has also requested a good day, mate, for me to try and pronounce. So I hope I'm so sorry. Robert Irwin in the room. I'm so sorry. Um, but also says, are there any avenues of science that are exploring the vastly miniature and high number of devices that could revolutionise science like Hubble and JWST. Well, Chris and Samuel, I'll do my best as ever with this one. So for for the list the benefit of listeners, CubeSats are very small satellites and they're typically say ten centimetres on a side and they have a mass of no more than two kilograms. That's the kind of definition of them. And incidentally, actually, there's some concern about deploying a lot of them because they're not necessarily going to re-enter the Earth as easily as others, you know, as that protocol about space debris comes into too. However, and of course they're also uh tiny compared with you know your behemoths like uh JWST and Hubble, huge things in comparison. Some have been deployed for astronomy already. So there was the Pix ap mission operated by the Paris Observatory that's looking at the star beta pictorius, trying to see planetary transit, so a small telescope and sensor. And there was actually a workshop dedicated to trying to find out how to do astronomy with them back at the American Astronomical Society in January 2020, you know, rather pressing year. And as far back as 2007, I remember our own national astronomy meeting considered this is not quite astronomy in that sense, the idea of nanonauts, millimeter size probes that would work in a swarm to explore Mars. So that has not happened, but it would be a would be a cool idea. And there's something about the word swarm though that stresses me out about like I know, I know, I know some sci fi . It does sound like you could get wrong, it does, doesn't it? Well hopefully not. Hopefully they're not too sentient. But but twenty twenty three Esa uh looked at seven ideas for CubeSat swarms and and one of them was for studying gamma ray bursts and one for solar activity. I don't know what the status of those is, but it clearly says people are thinking about it. Um even whether they're cheaper, I mean they they should be, because uh fundamentally I guess if you've got a small unit like this, then you know it implies that it should be easier to replace so that you should be able to roll out lots of these things. But I'm not sure how well developed these ideas yet are now. I haven't heard of anything since that 2023 report. So we will see. But it is a really interesting idea, I guess, that you could instead of building very, very large telescopes you put in space with all the the risks of that single point of failure or one of the single points of failure on the way that you deploy a large number of things instead. And then our producer has has pointed out that in the afterbirth of Artemis we should talk about also other sorts of space based astronomy. And he's mentioned doing astronomy from the moon, and so we're seeing more talk of that now. The idea of particularly of putting a big radio telescope on the far side. Because if you want to shield a telescope from terrestrial transmissions, then putting the moon in way of in the way of them is a pretty good way to do it. Um, if you can protect them So I'd just say space-based astronomy is not going away. It's doing many, many amazing things. It's here to stay. Yeah, that's one of the things that we're also concerned about the Artemis missions. Well not necessarily Artemis, but the long-ter gomals of building a lunar base. I'm like, where are you gonna put that big thing? Because I'd really rather us put a radio telescope in the fastest. Yeah, and I think also it's it's not I reckon lunar base people will, you know, that implies if it's a scientific base, they'll be more cognizant of this. I'd be worried about mines and that kind of thing. If people seriously started to exploit it commercially then then I'd be really concerned about managing the interference. I I yeah I would be I would be less concerned if it hadn't been for the whole, you know, oh, everyone in the space industry has friends and everyone wants to help out everybody. Oh, but by the way, we're gonna launch like 50 million. Millions satellites, yeah, into orbit around Earth and just never mind your ground based astronomy. You know, I'd be I'd be more optimistic if it hadn't been for that. So we'll I guess we'll just have to wait and see and see if you know, all those things where it comes back to space law again about who has rights to the moon and scientific rights to commercial, you know, like I I don't know. But isn't there talk of also l using moon craters as the dish for astronomy as well? You could. Absolutely, you could, yeah, in the same way as we did. I guess I I guess it's like looking at a natural bowl like the Arecibo telescope had in Puerto Rico. You know, you could do it around that structure. Um you do still have to work with gravity on the moon after all. It's only a sixth of what it is on Earth, but it does help if you've got those natural features. So yes, definitely . I mean any of these are really ambitious projects though. I mean I think like it's very hard to imagine posting astronauts there for long enough, individually at least to construct something like this. So is this where the robots start to do the work for us? I don't know, it sounds like but you know, this would be game changing in the sense that you could build it on a bigger scale if you could put it together and and if you can preserve that quiet environment, that radio quiet environment, that could be just incredible. Yeah. And Becky, our listeners know you well because we have another question here that says, Can you please tell us more about the Athena mission? Oh my gosh, yes . Always. Always. I mean, I just I'm so excited for it. It's set to launch uh twenty thirty four currently is the is the plan. Mm mm I'm in my slip as as with always with these things, but twenty thirty four is the the current target. Um and it's set for a five -year mission, but it's likely to go to more like 10 as well with all of these things. So it is an X-ray telescope, but the likes of which we've never had before. So it's gonna have two interchangeable instruments on it. So the telescope collecting the light will stay the same, but the instruments at the back recording the light will change. So it'll have what's known as the wide field imager. So as it says on the tin, we'll do wide field imaging. So it'll take images across a really big field of view on the sky, so big big pictures. Um but also the typical spectroscopy as well that you would normally expect from a telescope, right? You can take an image and you can split the light and record how much light each wavelength that you could s you detect. But then it's also got an IFU, an X-ray IFU, XIFU as people call them, where you're getting this spectrum at every pixel image at every X-ray wavelength. That is incredibly hard to do in X-ray. So it will be revolutionary, right, for an X-ray telescope, but also for just so many different areas of study as well. The resolution is incredible compared to what we've had previously as well. So it means we can do things like map temperatures and densities and chemical compositions and velocities of this hot X-ray emitting gas, whether that is, you know, across big extended objects like an entire galaxy cluster, or whether it is, you know, the the just the material spiral around a black hole, whether it's supermassive or otherwise. So it it it's so exciting that it's not just like you don't just get one specific bit of data, you get like, oh, here's what's going on over here and over here and over here, you know, and you can really map it out with these x-ray IFUs. And the big thing that people are very excited for, you know, outside of the black holes, obvious field that I'm excited for is this idea of whether it can detect what's known as missing matter. And I'm not talking about dark matter, I'm talking about missing normal matter that should be there. Um that we think the reason we can't detect it is because it is warm gas in intergalactic space. So very, very diffuse. You know, we think about space as being vacuum as empty, but th there's the odd molecule here and there, right? And we think that it's fairly warm gas. And if it's warm, we're not going to detect it through, you know, sort of like hydrogen emission in in radio and things like that. We're going to detect it through X-ray emission. But because it's so diffuse, it's really faint. So you need, you know, a decent telescope to be able to detect this and also be able to map out if it's there, you know, in this faint glowing X-rays. So hopefully Athena should be able to do that and hopefully be like, oh that's where all the missing normal matter is that you know is predicted to be there in the universe that we're just shy of at the minute. So very exciting. And I have to say IFUs are a whole new thing for me. Like now I'm like right. Now we now I've got some reading to do. Okay. Yeah. One of the first was on um the VLT in Chile. Or at least not one of the first, but like one of the ones that was very like it made waves when that sort of came online maybe like ten years ago. Um and I remember everybody wanted that data. Like everybody wanted their pet galaxy observed with this thing because it was like, here's what the v the stars' velocity are doing here. And the here's what this specific area of the galaxy is made of and like the just the data, like I I was about to say images, but they're not images. It's like actual data where we're like we've measured something in the spectra in this specific pixel and then we've coloured it because it's this value compared to this value over here. And even those things were pretty. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like people would be in talks being like, check out my data and we'd all be there like, oh so tremulous . Oh, so good. Okay. And Robert, Doc Sal wants to know what are the limitations when using telescopes in space, excluding the weight and size? Yeah, Doc Sal and those first things are exactly the things people think about. But I think the biggest challenge is if you exclude those is keeping them going, making them operate in that harsh environment, because maintaining a telescope in space is not going to be easy. You can do things like you can reboot the software systems with signals in the ground. And you can then they do things like they'll try and say turn a gyroscope or turn a reaction wheel to if it's behaving slightly clumpily to loosen it, that kind of things like they do with the rovers on Mars. But if the hardware does fail, then it can sometimes be really expensive to fix and sometimes completely impossible. And two examples are well, the first one is Hubble, where it launched in 1990 with a primary mirror of the wrong shape, so the telescope wouldn't focus properly. Very, very famous at the time. Lots of disgruntled taxpayer images effectively, you know, look, this is this is not good. We can get science out of it, but it's not working as it should. And it could have been a complete disaster. It would have been very difficult to get more money for any future telescopes, I think. But in nineteen ninety-three, the shuttle astronauts launched did an eleven day repair mission, not cheap. I mean each shuttle mission I think was anything between a few hundred million dollars and a billion dollars, but its astronauts installed a correcting optics system that worked insanely well and worked brilliantly for the following 33 years in counting. And we've come you know, many people have completely forgotten about the fact it didn't work well for the first three years. It's been going strong ever since. And then there were more service emissions, four more to upgrade its instruments and replace the gyroscopes that keep it pointing in the right direction. Now, JWST, on the other hand, can't be maintained at the moment by either astronauts or probably even robots, right? It's too far away. A million and a half kilometers away, so three times the distance from Earth that Artemis II managed. So we've never, ever sent people that far. And that's why you had that amazingly rigorous and cautious testing programme. You know, they spent years doing it. It's why the telescope was delayed in being launched. And if a critical physical system went wrong that, that would probably be it for the telescope. But you know, fingers crossed and right now it's doing a brilliant, brilliant job. So we just sit there and think, please keep working, please keep working. Yes. Please, please, please, please, please, please. Sounded like Sabrina Carpenter over here. Anyway. Thank you to everyone who sent us questions. Please keep them coming. Um, we've had some really great ones. So sorry that we couldn't get to all of them. But you can email podcasts at ras .ac.uk , find us on Instagram at supermassivepod , or join the supermassive club and post on the forum members. I'm gonna be asking you some questions soon 'cause I've got some tricks up my sleeve. But anyway. Interesting. Plus you never know if you do send in a question and it doesn't make the main episode, it might make the bonus episode as well. Exactly. Be surprised by the bonus episodes. So shall we finish with some stargazing? What should we look out for in June, Robert? The sunset. Exactly. Always sunset. Yeah. I mean it's northern hemisphere midsummer, at least in astronomical terms. So you know no matter what the weather's actually like. So with the solstice on the twenty first of June, it never gets properly dark in the UK. The nights are at their shortest. And that's because the sun isn't actually very far below the horizon, even at one o'clock in the morning, which because we're on summer time is the equivalent of midnight. Now, there are still always things to see though, right? You know, the summer triangle is now coming into view. So Deneb, Vega, and Outer , three lovely bright stars that delimit the the southern uh summer and autumn skies. And that's visible from ten, eleven o'clock at night. And if you're further south, where it is a bit darker because the sun is a bit lower below b below the horizon, then you can see the Milky Way running through them to o. And low down, you've got Scorpius with the bright red star Antares. And I always think that's quite nice. And again, further south, you see the whole of the Scorpion in the UK, you see the top bit of it. And not far from Vega, you've got targets like Hercules and the Keystone