AstrotalkUK info@astrotalkuk.org
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- Science
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Weekly audio podcast by and predominantly amateur astronomers.
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Episode 112 – Brown Dwarfs, Dark Matter and Dark Energy
Euclid, a @esa science mission, will shed light on both dark matter and dark energy. It was launched in July 2023 and arrived in its L2 orbit a month later. It has just two instruments which will produce a high-resolution 3-D map of a third of the sky, stretching back 10 billion years during its initial 6-year operational lifetime.
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Episode 111 – Chandrayaan-3
Following the successful landing of @isro #Chandrayaan-3, Associate Project Director Kalpana Kalahasti was the first female to speak at the ISRO live stream event. As a seasoned engineer, Kalahasti contributed to numerous projects including SARAL in 2013. Here she talks about her journey with ISRO which began in 1999 as a radar engineer.
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Episode 110 – Humanity’s spiritual destiny and the 100 year starship
The 100 year starship project @100YSS aims to get humanity to develop the capability to travel to the stars in one hundred years time. It started in 2012 headed by Dr Mae Jemison the first woman of colour to fly in to space in STS 47 in 1992.
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Episode 109 – The Antikythera Mechanism with Prof Xenophon Moussas
I first came across the Antikythera Mechanism just over a decade ago. It is still the most incredible artefact from history. It is as out of place in our time as William Shakespeare using an Iphone or Vasco De Gama travelling in a speedboat.
The Antikythera Mechanism is a complex mechanical (clockwork) device that can determine the position of the planets and phases of the Moon and predict when solar and lunar eclipses will occur. Constructed about two thousand years ago, it was discovered in 1901. -
Episode 108 – NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission
The Clarke Exobelt is the name that Dr Hector Socas-Navarro has given to perhaps the largest structure humans have built. A collection of satellites in earth orbit (geosynchronous) 36,000 km radius. All circling the earth at the same speed in the same direction. The density of this orbit has been increasing since the 1960s but is not yet sufficiently dense for detection from interstellar distances. But in 200 years it may be. In the meantime, this concept works the other way around too. SETI researchers can search for these megastructures or Tecno Signatures to look for extraterrestrial intelligence
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Episode 107 – SETI’s new tool – Technosignatures
The Clarke Exobelt is the name that Dr Hector Socas-Navarro has given to perhaps the largest structure humans have built. A collection of satellites in earth orbit (geosynchronous) 36,000 km radius. All circling the earth at the same speed in the same direction. The density of this orbit has been increasing since the 1960s but is not yet sufficiently dense for detection from interstellar distances. But in 200 years it may be. In the meantime, this concept works the other way around too. SETI researchers can search for these megastructures or Tecno Signatures to look for extraterrestrial intelligence