Fraser Cain

In this week's questions show, I answer if techno optimism is blinding us to the challenges of spaceflight, why there aren't spacecraft at all the planets right now, could the Great Attractor be dark matter? And more...

It’s amazing to think there are telescopes up in space, right now, directing their gaze at distant objects for hours, days and even weeks. Providing a point of view so stable and accurate that we can learn details about galaxies, exoplanets and more.

And then, when the time is up, the spacecraft can shift its gaze in another direction. All without the use of fuel.

It’s all thanks to the technology of reaction wheels and gyroscopes. Let’s talk about how they work, how they’re different, and how their failure has ended missions in the past.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Telescope launched back in April, 2018. After a few months of testing, it was ready to begin mapping the southern sky, searching for planets orbiting stars relatively nearby.

We’re just over a year into the mission now, and on July 18th, TESS has shifted its attention to the Northern Hemisphere, continuing the hunt for planets in the northern skies.

As part of this shift, NASA has announced a handful of fascinating new planets turned up by TESS, including a couple of worlds in categories which have never been seen before.

In this week's questions show, I answer a question about solar sails, what geologists might learn from lunar rocks, if Earth could survive inside Jupiter, could gas giants be closer to the Sun, and more.

When we look outward into space, we’re looking backwards in time. That’s because light moves, at the speed of light. It takes time for the light to reach us.

But it gets even stranger than that. Light can be absorbed, reflected, and re-emitted by gas and dust, giving us a second look.

They’re called light echoes, and allow astronomers another way to understand the Universe around us.

There are few places in the Solar System which are as fascinating as Saturn’s moon Titan. It’s a world with a thicker atmosphere than Earth. Where it’s so cold that it rains ammonia, forming lakes, rivers and seas. Where water ice forms mountains.

Like Europa and Encleadus, Titan could have an interior ocean of liquid water too, a place where there might be life.

Titan’s got layers, and fortunately, there’s an awesome new mission in the works to explore it: the Titan Dragonfly mission.

In this week's questions show, I explain how long it'll take for space junk to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, would it be possible to put advertising in space, and why panspermia is appealing as a hypothesis.

As NASA prepares to return to the Moon by 2024 as part of its Artemis program, the agency is focusing its efforts on exploring the Moon’s polar regions. These are areas of the Moon which seem to have a lot of water mixed in with the regolith.

Some of these craters are permanently in shadow, and might still have large quantities of water, that’s accessible to human and robotic explorers. This is a critical resource, and the Moon might be just the place to help humanity as it pushes out to explore the rest of the Solar System.

But it might also be an illusion. We really won’t know until we look up close.

Where you can travel in space depends on how much propellant you’ve got on board your rocket and how efficiently you can use it. But there’s a source of free propellant right here in the Solar System - the Sun - which is streaming out photons in all directions. You just need to catch them.

And right now, the Planetary Society’s new LightSail 2 spacecraft is testing out just how well it’ll work.

In this week's QA, I tackle constant acceleration. Do we have anything that can accelerate at 1G for long periods of time? Why are there different sized stars? And do the heavier elements come from supernovae or colliding neutron stars?

On October 19th, 2017 astronomers detected the first interstellar asteroid (or maybe comet) passing through the Solar System: Oumuamua. It had a brief encounter with the inner Solar System and then hurtled back out into interstellar space.

Once astronomers noticed it, they directed the world’s telescopes on the object, but it was too far away to reveal anything more than a faint dot.

Until now, we’ve only been able to study objects in our own Solar System. We have no idea what the rest of the Milky Way is like.

But we were too late to catch it, no spacecraft was ready to make a quick intercept.

Well, scientists aren’t going to make that mistake again. The European Space Agency announced their plans to build a comet interceptor. A spacecraft that will lurk out at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, waiting for a long-period comet or interstellar object to pounce on, and give us the first close up view ever.

People are always worried that alien civilizations will detect the transmissions from our old radio shows and television broadcasts, and send in the invasion fleet. But the reality is that life itself has been broadcasting the existence of life on Earth for 500 million years.

Blame it on the plants.

In addition to filling the atmosphere with oxygen, plants give off a very specific wavelength visible in infrared radiation. It’s the kind of signal that other civilizations could search for as they’re scanning the galaxy.

It’s what we’ll be looking for too.

But don’t just blame the plants. Other forms of life have been giving off signals too, signals we can search for as we discover new exoplanets and wonder if they have life there.

In this week's QA, I answer why space telescopes aren't a waste of taxpayer resources, if ground-based space telescopes will become obsolete, and whether it makes sense to crash phobos into Mars.

This past weekend Skylias moderated a debated between John Michael Godier and Fraser Cain over their Fermi paradox theories. If there are aliens where are they? The Fermi paradox theory asks where are the alien civilizations in the galaxy? And in the universe. If they exist. Where are the extraterrestrials?

In this week's questions show, I explain how astronomers know what the Milky Way looks like, what would happen in a catastrophic impact on the International Space Station, and who is the team who works with me on Universe Today?

The Solar System is a really big place, and it takes forever to travel from world to world with traditional chemical rockets. But one technique, developed back in the 1960s might provide a way to dramatically shorten our travel times: nuclear rockets.

Of course, launching a rocket powered by radioactive material has its own risks as well. Should we attempt it?