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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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Episode 105 – Return to Titan – Dragonfly

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NASA’s Cassini-Huygens lander arrived at Titan on 14th January 2005. The first instrument to make contact with the surface of Titan was a penetrometer made by Ralph Lorenz. Since then he has gone on to write many books and work on several other projects.

Dr Ralph Lorenz

In this episode, he speaks about some of those projects, especially Dragonfly, a return mission to land on Titan. This mission, for which he is the mission architect, is like no other. It is not really a lander or rover but a quadcopter that will sample different regions near the landing site during its 3.3-year lifetime. Ralph talks about what we can expect from Dragonfly which launches in 2027 and arrives at Titan in 1934.

The documentary Destination Titan we refer to in this discussion is available here is available on Youtube here.

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Episode 104 – William Leitch. The forgotten Scottish Rocket Pioneer

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When it comes to the pioneers of rocketry, tradition has it that it was Tsilokosky, Goddard and Oberth. in this episode, author Rob Godwin talks about William Leitch from Scotland. Leitch was writing about the principles of rocket propulsion and space travel in 1861. Decades before Tsiolkovsy. Over the last few years, Rob has been researching Leitch’s story and published a book – William Leitch Presbyterian Scientist & The Concept of Rocket Space Flight 1854-1864

In this interview recorded via Zoom, Rob Godwin recalls how he came across Leitch’s work and the research activity that eventually led him to uncover this remarkable story.

The following 19th-century publications, that Rob refers to are now available online, and pdf versions can be downloaded. Links are available on the episode page

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