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Barred Spiral Discoveries and Spirit’s Final Mission: A Cosmic Journey Unfolds

·28 min·1 clip

SPIRIT ran 16,000 orbits, downlinked 400 images, and tested HERMES in space.

The news starts far back. Stuart Garry points to Cosmos 74706, catalogued 11.5 billion light years away, as one of the earliest observed spiral galaxies with a stellar bar. Since the Milky Way has one too, the find gives astronomers another way to pin down when these bars first appeared. The segment keeps it tidy: the object, the label, then the part that makes scientists sit up a bit. Spirit brings the story back near Earth. The Australian satellite mission is treated less like a neat finale and more like a working test of industry, science, and engineering in orbit. The guest breaks out three aims. First, Spirit had to show Australia could design, fabricate, test, launch, and operate a competitive satellite. Second came the science. Hermes rode aboard to study gamma and x-ray transients, while the team measured instrument background and performance. Some results are still on the way. The guest says astronomical observations were made, and the data is being analyzed and prepared for publication. Third came the hardware. Spirit tested made-in-Australia systems, including a Stirling cycle cryocooler that kept Hermes stable on a very small satellite. Its onboard computing gets attention too. A graphics processing unit gave the mission room for artificial intelligence work, including autonomous image processing with limited mission control input. The cold open also notes that the International Space Station will stay in orbit for an additional two years.

As heard by us

A barred spiral discovery and a small satellite mission frame a clear look at how space science moves forward.

The episode opens with astronomers finding Cosmos 74706, one of the earliest known barred spiral galaxies, about 11.5 billion light years away and seen when the universe was only 2.3 billion years old.

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A barred spiral discovery, a Spirit mission wrap-up, and the engineering details that tie them together.

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