CiTR

Astrotalk Show Thursday March 4 2021

Perseverance

https://www.livescience.com/exomars-orbiter-spots-perseverance-mars.html

Space X SN 10 :Launch

https://www.livescience.com/spacex-starship-test-sn10.html

https://www.livescience.com/spacex-starship-test-sn10.html

Jap[anese Billionaire Dear Moon

https://www.livescience.com/yusaku-maezawa-dearmoon-contest-seeking-crewmembers.html

https://dearmoon.earth/

Fireball Over UK Skies

3 New Things on Mars. An United Arab Emirates spacecraft around Mars is testing the Martian Atmosphere for signs of life. The Chinese also have spacecraft around (on?) Mars. And Perseverance lands on Mars with a helicopter in tow. Travelling around Mars can be excrutiatingly slow. With a helicopter, NASA can now fly into craters and test more interesting places, without having to travel so slow. Fluctuations at the Planck level of space-time can give clues (or answers) to unifying Einstein's equations with Quantum Mechanics. At the Planck length, space-time is not smooth. The geometry of space-time can fluctuate and be unsmooth at the Planck level. An astronomer is examining a quasar that is 7 billion light years away. He is examining the light from this quasar, hoping it can give clues as to what is happening at the Planck scale. Different wavelengths of light from the quasar were found to arrive at the telescope with time delays, or at different times. Visible wavelengths of light arrived 5 seconds later than the gamma ray wavelengths. This showed that the speed of light in vacuum was not constant for all wavelengths. The discrepancy was thought to be due to a disturbance happening at the Planck scale (level). Or with the irregularity of space-time when with quantum foam fluctuations at the scale of the Planck length. (Cherenkov telescope). Photo-Electric Effect. White dwarfs have crushed corpses of planets in the atmospheres of these dead stars. 4 white dwarfs were studied and certain elements were found in their atmospheres, elements that were once thought to be in the crusts of planets that once orbited the stars before they blew themselves apart. Over billions of years, stars around the mass of the sun die and become white dwarfs. Over time, astronomers can examine the spectral fingerprints of the gases of elements in the atmospheres of these stars. From this, astronomers can tell if there were planets previously surrounding the stars before they died. Electrons in the Earth's upper atmosphere can be accelerated to close to the Speed of Light in the Van Allen Belts, only if the plasma density is high enough. And a Japanese billionaire wants to bring tourists with him on a voyage to outer space.