Is that it?

Yeah, that's exactly right.

There's this program that's called SETI, or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and what they do is they use massive radio telescopes around the world to essentially listen to star systems to see if we see any, or hear, rather, any radio leakage, because- Uh, like many people who are listening to this, they might be listening to it on FM or a, um, a different type of frequency.

I know we use digital a lot in this day and age, but we still have, you know, our radio broadcasts, and that leaks away from our planet.

And the interesting thing is we assume that any intelligent life would also need to communicate with radio waves.

And so this, these telescopes look for that.

And so far they thought they had scanned just shy of three hundred thousand stars.

Mm

Has this been done before? Have we ever launched a mission to push something further back up into space?

Not quite like this.

This really is a once-in-a-lifetime, Hail Mary effort to save this telescope.

And so for context, we have all of these different things in orbit around the Earth.

Some are satellites, some are telescopes, some are different assets that we rely on every day.

But one tricky thing when you've got something in orbit is that often it doesn't stay in orbit.

They tend to decay and they can fall back to the ground.

Do you have a sense of what the chances are of success at this point?

[laughs]

Well, actually, he was sort of, 'cause he was so bored and they had him locked up, he's like, "Oh, like, can I just at least get a deck of cards to, you know, practice some tricks?"

Why, why would they use Taco Bell? Just for fun? What happened?

I remember it being a strange thing that there was, like, a, a box of fast food, like, so prominently in the Instagram carousel, and I'm pretty sure it was Taco Bell.

Do you have a sense of what the chances are of success at this point?

Oh, I don't.

I think, uh, we're very reserved.

I think when it comes to space, especially in the space industry, we, we know it's really difficult, and anything you can do is innovative and, and clever, but the chances of success might be low.

Uh, I, I hope that we've got a good chance, a fighting chance, 'cause this really is a test bed for not only could we save Swift, this incredible asset, but if it works, could we use this Link spacecraft, a similar type of design, to save other assets, say the Hubble Space Telescope, other satellites that are important, Earth observation satellites? If we prove that this works and it's relatively low cost, you know, tens of millions of dollars, not billions of dollars, to save an asset, maybe it's worth it.

Maybe we'll see it happen again and again.

If they manage to succeed on this Swift Observatory rescue mission, Sarah, what would you like to see the telescope still accomplish in its next few years?

I have many, many answers for that.

Do you have a sense of what the chances are of success at this point? [laughs]

Oh, I don't.

I think, uh, we're very reserved.

I think when it comes to space, especially in the space industry, we, we know it's really difficult, and anything you can do is innovative and, and clever, but the chances of success might be low.

Uh, I, I hope that we've got a good chance, a fighting chance, 'cause this really is a test bed for not only could we save Swift, this incredible asset, but if it works, could we use this Link spacecraft, a similar type of design, to save other assets, say, the Hubble Space Telescope, other satellites that are important, Earth observation satellites? If we prove that this works and it's relatively low cost, you know, tens of millions of dollars, not billions of dollars to save an asset, maybe it's worth it.

Maybe we'll see it happen again and again.

If they manage to succeed on this Swift Observatory rescue mission, Sarah, what would you like to see the telescope still accomplish in its next few years?

I have many, many answers for that.

Do we know anything about, uh, the impact, and is there any information that's been released so far?

Yeah, we do, and I'm one of those scientists who is excited 'cause even though it's a big accident, it always gives us more data to, to understand the surface of the moon a little bit better.

And so the, the best information we have right now has come from a telescope in South America from the European Southern Observatory, and what they were able to do was to look at this part of the moon with a spectrum.

So they're able to split up the light and then analyze what is in that light, so to say whether something is made out of certain elements.

And what we see from them is that they detected sodium and lithium during the impact.

And so the sodium has come from the actual regolith, the dust on the moon itself being kicked up as the impact happened, and the lithium is from that rocket body.

And so that's all we know at the moment.

I, I guess it makes sense that that's still there, but yeah, is that something that could happen? We could lose some of these really important historical sites?

lands and giant gantries sort of grab it as it comes down.

Yes.

It's called the chopsticks is what SpaceX called them.

You can imagine giant metal arms help capture this rocket.

And so the test wasn't perfect, but it was pretty close.

The fact that it was able to survive reentry, slow itself down slow enough that it's able to do a gentle touchdown onto the It wasn't exactly the launch pad, but it was quite nearby.

It was quite a big success and it's a very welcome success because although there's a lot to unpack when it comes to space exploration and the private companies that help us, but realistically, unfortunately, we rely on private companies.

Why wouldn't it work anyway? What was the concern?

They're quite big.

They are quite big.

These ones, I don't know if they've released the size of these ones, but I would not be surprised if they are almost a metre in diameter.

They're quite large, probably most likely from a lower stage of a rocket body.

Now, the Australian Space Agency has said that they think they've identified which rocket body fuselage it might have come from, yet to announce which one that is.

But you can imagine that.

This is part of a rocket that had done a launch, but hasn't made it to orbit.

I thought Mars had oceans of water once.

Mm-hmm

... and we rely on space telescopes like this one to find them.

Uh, and it's, it's really fundamental to a lot of our research, and so we're not willing to give it up just yet.

It was launched in 2004, but we believe it's got a few more years' life left.

But the problem is, as our Earth goes through, uh, periods of fluctuations with where our atmosphere puffs up and puffs down, depending on how much solar activity there is, uh, things that are in orbit around us tend to decay in their orbit and slowly fall back to the Earth, and that's something we want to try and avoid.

And that's why they've, um, put together this kind of extreme-

Mm.

But, uh, what happened was when it disconnected from that rocket body to then enter the lunar orbit to then land on the Moon, that rocket body was just in orbit around the Moon, and it has been for multiple years now, or for about a year or so now.

But basically China, the Soviets and, well, Russia and China and the US are in something of a race to do this, aren't they? Yes.

Yeah, even South Korea is interested in having a lunar base.

So it is a hot place off the earth is lunar bases.

And I think I agree with your healthy scepticism of, like, what is the timeline that we'll actually see this? The US is very gung-ho at the moment of hopefully by the 2030s we have a semi-permanent residence in lunar.

But it is questionable.

But the whole idea behind some recent – kind of sentiments that are coming out from the world is that we are diving further into space than we've ever been before we've got rovers and probes and we're exploring all of these wonderful things and we're in we're inevitably going to want to bring samples back to earth that's like the holy grail of if we can bring a bit of mars back to earth how wonderful for science if we could bring a bit of europa's um uh water plumes back to earth and analyze them just fundamentally amazing science but maybe we should have a bit of a gatekeeper here where we don't just bring samples back to earth we potentially bring them to the lunar base to quarantine and do like a sub analysis on them before introducing anything scary back into our wonderful ecosystem that is planet earth

How do we even know about it?

So this stems from a new suite of simulations that astronomers have been running.

Tell me about, tell me about that.

Oh, it's incredible.

And so I, I'm very lucky I'm a scientist who gets to do all of these, these space science things for years now.

But this is the first time I'd actually seen it with my own eyes.

And what really your brain struggles to comprehend is when the rocket is, is launching off, you are obviously seeing it faster than the sound traveling towards you.

So for the first few seconds of that rocket launch, it is completely silent and you're watching this amazing rocket blast off into the air, and then you get hit with the sonic sound waves, and it lasts like that for a couple minutes.And then as the rocket is free-falling back to the Earth at exceptional speeds, I was literally gobsmacked with how fast the rocket body was falling back to the Earth before it landed, um, you hear two massive sonic booms as it enters the upper atmosphere and does its final burn stage.

And so it was just incredible.

Mm