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Episode 109 – The Antikythera Mechanism with Prof Xenophon Moussas

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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.

The three wooded calendaric machines in the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavik

The three calendaric machines, made of wooden gears, from around 1780 in the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavik. They are grandchildren of the Antikythera Mechanism. References to Cicero’s text to the Antikythera are available here.

Perhaps the most recent and informative video by published by mathematician Tony Freeth is available on Youtube. A paper published by several active researchers, including Tony Freeth, was published in Nature. Investigation continues today. Underwater research continues today at the shipwreck site. Press release from June 2022. This interview was recorded in July 2022 in Athens during Cospar 2022.

Athens-based Professor Xenophon Moussas has been mesmerised by it since childhood. As a mathematician and a space scientist, he has been involved in using leading technology to reveal its mysteries. He is available for presentations on the Antikythera Mechanism and can be contacted via email xmoussas AT gmail.com.

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Episode 108 – NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission

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The Europa Clipper mission, due for launch in 2024, will arrive and orbit Jupiter in 2030. The third spacecraft to do so after Galileo (in 1995) and Juno (in 2016). The Pioneer and Voyager missions were flybys. The primary objective, as the mission name suggests, is the investigation of Jupiter’s Moon, Europa. Called Europa-Clipper after the 19th-century merchant ships that shuttled between ports at the high-speed then available.

Europa-Clipper will orbit Jupiter, not Europa. This is one of Jupiter’s moons that shows strong evidence of a sub-surface water ocean. During its four-year mission lifetime it will flyby Europa dozens of times looking for conditions suitable for life.

Dr Steven Vance talks about the mission’s goals and current state of readiness. This was recorded in Athens during Cospar 2022. He was the scientific advisor to the 2013 film Europa Report.

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Episode 107 – SETI’s new tool – Technosignatures

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Episode 107 – Dr Hector Socas-Navarro

The Great Wall of China can be seen from space. Actually, it can’t but the idea that a civilisation could build something large on a planetary scale that could be detected from interstellar distances was articulated first by author Olaf Stapledon in 1937 and popularised by Freeman Dyson in the 1960s. Known today as a Dyson Sphere, it is a megastructure built by an alien intelligence that captures almost all the energy emitted by its star. In this episode, Dr Hector Socas-Navarro explains we humans are not there yet but the increasing density of the Earth’s geosynchronous orbit will become detectable in a couple of centuries.

So not yet a Dyson sphere but a ring or a belt, he calls the Clarke-Exobelt may allow alien civilisations to detect humanity’s presence over interstellar distances. In this episode, we discuss the opportunities for SETI to detect artificial structures like this at interstellar distances using the JWST and very large Earth-based telescopes coming online soon.

Links to the resources we discuss are on the episode webpage

Podcast – Museum of Science and the Cosmos of Tenerife
NASA Technosignatures: “Moderately advanced” technologies in transit. Youtube video
Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias
Museum of Tenerife

Scientific papers

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Episode 106 – ESA’s new science missions

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Pau McNamara

European Space Agency’s Dr Paul McNamara was studying low-frequency gravitational waves just before they were discovered in 2015. Now he is the astronomy and astrophysics coordinator for the European Space Agency. In this interview, recorded in Athens during Cospar2022, he speaks about some of the exciting science missions that ESA will be launching later this decade.

These missions include

  • Juice – JUpiter ICy moons Explorer
  • Euclid – To explore dark matter and dark energy
  • Plato – The next-generation planet-hunting mission
  • Ariel – A UK-led mission to explore the atmospheres of exoplanets

He also talks about ESA’s publicly available resources especially useful to science educators. Planetary Science Archive and ESA Sky. They are available to anyone, in or outside Europe and without charge. Links are available on this episode’s web page.

Dr Paul McNamara

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