podcast Archives - AstrotalkUK

Episode 125: Britian’s Greatest Pilot Captain Eric “Winkle” Brown

By Gurbir Dated: September 4, 2025 Leave a Comment

**Captain Eric “Winkle” Brown. January 2011**

You may have seen the BBC documentary Britain’s Greatest Pilot. Yes, he was an outstanding pilot, but there was much more to him than just that. I published extracts from an interview with Captain Eric Brown in April 2011. This extended version (over an hour) has not been published before .. until now.

In 2011 I visited Captain Eric Winkle Brown to record an interview on his one-to-one meeting with Yuri Gagarin on 13th July 1961 at the Admiralty in London. This was the day after Gagarin visited Manchester. After that discussion, the interview continued. Captain Brown spoke of his fond memories of a German WW1 pilot, Ernst Udet, who encouraged him to fly. During the war, he excelled as a test pilot and went on to become the chief test pilot at Farnborough.

After WW2, using his fluent German language skills, he interrogated Hermann Goering, Hanna Reitsch and Wernher von Braun. He spoke of a mission to Germany immediately after the war to acquire German aviation technology. Following a secret UK/USA deal, Britain passed its research on supersonic aviation to the USA and cancelled the Miles M.52 program. Had this deal not gone ahead, Eric Brown would have been the first to break the sound barrier in 1946; instead, Chuck Yeager claimed that record in 1947. He recalls that and many other stories in the interview recorded in his home in January 2011.

Episode 124: Exploring the Stellar Neighbourhood. The Toliman Space Telescope

By Gurbir Dated: June 25, 2025 Leave a Comment

Toliman Space Telescope. Credit Toliman.Space

Just as the Moon was the first stepping stone for our interplanetary exploration, our nearest star, the Alpha Centauri System, will inevitably become our stepping stone for our Interstellar Journey. That is in the distance. A new mission, The Toliman Space Telescope, is launching soon will target the Alpha-Centauri System from Earth orbit.

In summary

The Toliman mission is a fairly innovative space mission primarily designed to survey our stellar neighbourhood for Earth-equivalent planets. Its main research target is to point its telescope towards the Alpha Centauri system to search for planets, specifically hoping to find Earth-sized equivalents in the habitable zone around the two main stars, Alpha Centauri A and B.

Toliman is unique for several reasons. The 12 cm diameter telescope is the only scientific instrument built on a low-budget 16U CubeSat, using off-the-shelf components as much as possible and employing commercial ground stations.

It will use three unique innovations to attain high-precision measurements 1. a Diffractive Pupil Optical Mask 2. High-Precision Tip-Tilt System with fine-steering or fine-pointing the telescope to achieve the required 1-2 arcsecond pointing accuracy and reduce jitter. A novel AI-powered software, called dLux, running on a custom computer onboard the satellite, will preprocess data before it is downlinked.

It has multiple countries involved in development and partnership including the University of Sydney (Australia), Breakthrough Initiatives, University of Leiden (Netherlands), Carling Japan (Japan), SETI Institute (California, USA), Spar Blue (Australia), Leaf Space (Italy – ground stations), Durosad (Bulgaria and France – space bus), AOS (Connecticut, USA – telescope), Lights Optical (UK – secondary mirror), and a team member in New Zealand. Cooperation is also starting with JPL (USA).

During the Breakthrough Discuss conference in April in Oxford, I learnt a little about the Toliman Space Telescope.

Episode 122. Are we alone and the Breakthrough Initiatives

By Gurbir Dated: April 29, 2025 Leave a Comment

For almost 70 years, astronomers have been listening to radio signals from beyond the Solar System, searching for “techno-signatures.” Data collected has increased many folds. Innovative technologies of digital signal processing and artificial intelligence analyse the data in ways never done before. Still, no clear, unambiguous techno or biosignatures have been detected.

You may have heard the announcement about an exoplanet (K2-18b) capable of supporting life, 124 light-years away. The data appears promising, but it is far from definitive.

A two-day Breakthrough Discuss conference held on 23rd and 24th April 2025 in Oxford England, took stock of the latest developments through three main sessions: “Forms of Non-Terrestrial Life”, “The Nature of Consciousness and Intelligence”, and “Detecting Life As We Do Not Know It”.

Breakthough Discuss was overseen by the Chairman of the Breakthrough Foundation, in this interview Dr Pete Worden. A former Brigadier. General, astrophysicist, professor and director of NASA Ames Research Centre talks about

– How and when he became involved with the Breakthrough Initiatives and current status of each
– His reflections on this year’s Breakthrough Discuss
– His interest in astronomy as a child
– What happened to his astronaut application to NASA
– His distant familial connection with his namesake – Al Worden Apollo 15 Command Module Pilot
– His assessment on where we are with the the search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence

Recordings of Breakthrough Discuss presentations are available on the YouTube channel

Episode 121 – Failed stars or successful planets?

By Gurbir Dated: April 17, 2025 Leave a Comment

This episode was recorded at the Mount Teide Observatory with Jerry Zhang, a final year PhD student under the supervision of Professor Eduardo L Martín and Dr Nicolas Lodieu at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. This class of object had been predicted for a long time but was first detected in 1995 from an observation conducted at the Mount Teide Observatory by a team of observers, including Jerry’s supervisor, Eduardo L Martín.

Jerry’s research focuses on Brown Dwarfs. Astronomical objects are somewhere in between stars and planets. Typically, their size is that of Jupiter, around 150,000km and a mass of between 15 and 70 times that of Jupiter. With such low mass (less than 0.08 of our sun), they can never reach the temperature or pressure in their cores necessary for nuclear fusion. They can never shine like our sun. They remain dim and small (brown and dwarf) throughout their lifetime.

Jerry’s most recent publication, arising from his Phd research, records the first detection of methane in an extreme metal-poor T dwarf.