Solar flare shuts down radio

0:00 Speaker 1 Willis. Today is Steve Tates, otherwise known as doctor Sky, and he’s with us every Sunday to give us a little bit of mystery, a little bit of expanding our minds to what’s up in the sky. Doctor Kates, Oh, Steve, what’s going on this week?

0:17 Speaker 2 Well, good morning, John, Happy Sunday to you and the listeners. Want to start off if we can by talking about an event that I hope many of the listeners of this particular show, The Cat’s Round Table, will take advantage of what’s that. We’re now at the peak of the Percied meteor shower. It actually peaked earlier this morning on Sunday,

0:34 but don’t let that spool you observers with Claire Skies John. Tonight and for the next few nights, if you look into the northeast sky after midnight to sunrise, they get to see some of this, as we like to call it commentary dust a meteor shower from a famous comment called comic Swift tuttele John, I can’t think of a

0:54 more fascinating thing to involve not only friends and family, but even individuals, just to see the beauty of nature, These beautiful meteors that come through the sky. You may get to see in dark skies upwards of fifty an hours.

1:07 Speaker 3 So don’t miss it. It’s really an exciting way to start off.

1:10 Speaker 1 Is it good across the United States?

1:13 Speaker 2 All over the world? John, And actually that’s a great question. You can see this wherever. This particular radio show is booming loud and clear all across the nation, and I’m sure wat John, even out into the cosmos. Seriously, this is an event that if you have dark skies that timeframe from midnight to sunrise northeast. It comes from a

1:30 constellation called Perseus, that’s the namesake of the shower. But I’ve watched it, John, like maybe many for forty years, and I can tell you it’s this year is great because you know why, there’s no moon out, so hopefully dark skies will give you the best view as we want open up people’s minds on things that they probably

1:50 didn’t know about.

1:51 Speaker 1 Well, wow, that I look forward to going downstairs tonight and looking out in the sky and forward to it. I hope we don’t have any too many clouds.

2:03 Speaker 2 What else is doing well? John? We talked about SpaceX and their starship. This is obviously the most powerful rocket in the world. They just tested their booster rocket called this particular B nine Booster nine, and they fired up for about three seconds. There are thirty three Raptor engines.

2:20 This is sitting on the new and improved test stand, and they shut it down because four of those Raptor engines failed to ignite properly. So Elon and his team have to go back and do another iteration of the Raptor engines. And these are engines John, that are you know, primarily you know, fueled by liquid oxygen and liquid methane.

2:39 Speaker 3 Great tex.

2:39 Speaker 1 How many engines on that spaceship.

2:42 Speaker 2 There’s thirty three Raptor motors or engines on the bottom of that massive booster.

2:47 Speaker 1 And I mean, I think it sounds to me if I was trying to get a thirty three out of thirty three to work. My god, I mean, what’s the chances. I mean, the chances of one failing is.

3:04 Speaker 2 Big, absolutely, And they had a problem on their April twentieth launch when they obviously saw the rocket go up, some of those rockets didn’t fire properly or stay lit. And not to get overly ten Togo, but some of those rocket motors, John have to do what they called gimbling.

3:20 In other words, if you look at the rocket motor and you see the cone, some of them stay stationary, but some of them have a pitch angle on them. And all this has to work, so they’re going to do some more research. They’re doing iteration three, meaning raptor engine number three, and hopefully that gets them.

3:37 Speaker 3 Off the ground.

3:37 Speaker 2 But they also had something else interesting. They’re new and improved water deluge system. I should say new and improved. They never had it before. Last time, the rocket motors blew up most of the launch stand. Now they’re flooding it with water, and job, what do you get? You get less pressure, but you get a lot of steam.

3:55 But there’s also some other space news that we want to report. Yes, Virgin Galactic John flies its first tourists to the edge of space. So they had a successful launch this past week. And this is interesting because they’ve waited so long and one of the gentlemen on there bought his ticket a long time ago. He’s actually an

4:13 ex Olympian and he bought a ticket what eighteen years ago to get his opportunity to go to space. So we congratulate in a Virgin Glactic on doing that so much interesting stuff there. But when we talk John about the mystery of the week, here’s something really important that everybody should pay attention to. How do solar flares really

4:32 affect the Earth? And over the last few days we’ve had another large X flare. They rate them in this particular case one through seven or so, this is like a one point five. But over this solar cycle, this is the twentieth X ray flare that we’ve had so far.

4:48 So what happens these flares blast off the surface of the Sun eight minutes is how light travels from the Sun to the Earth. But think about what they do. This is quite interesting. Let’s go back to the great solar stofe March nineteen to forty. Well, what happened then?

5:03 A giant solar storm hit the Earth and this is incredible.

5:07 Speaker 3 Throughout all of.

5:08 Speaker 2 North America, particularly New England, the New York area and over by Chicago, the electric lines were induced with over eight hundred volts of electricity. So here we are on seventy seven talk radio WABC. And in those days, John, the actual broadcasters, like people are hearing us right now, their voices were garbled. The radio stations simply flipped around

5:32 and went off the air because these solar storms affect the upper ionosphere and where radio transmission, of course, you know, has to happen in a nearly perfect way. So we just have to let people know that we’re in the throes of cycle twenty five and that indeed could induce much more of these very powerful solar flares and solar storms.

5:53 Speaker 1 Wow, what else on any update? I understand the Mars helicopter, Uh spotted one of the rovers.

6:04 Speaker 3 Yes, John, You’re absolutely right.

6:06 Speaker 2 It’s fifty fourth flight and this little Ingenuity, it’s the little little drone that keeps on, you know, chugging along. It actually got up to about sixteen feet up the surface of Mars and in the background. People should check this out, you know, just Google to check your favorite space websites. You obviously see a picture of Perseverance sitting

6:25 there with a small shadow. So this is an amazing little device, this little rover and the helicopter on Mars. And what’s even more interesting about this, it actually came back to life, that is the ingenuity little helicopter after a period of time when because of the mountainous terrain that Perseverance is in right now it had communication difficulties.

6:47 So the scientists really deserve well, they deserve a special prize. In my mind, I think you would agree to be able to communicate with a little spacecraft. Now, Mars is about two hundred plus million miles away from the Earth, and it takes them twenty minutes or so for the light signal to get from Earth to Mars. So that’s

7:05 a complicated thing. And I don’t know about you, but people that I know that have drones, right John, some of them even can’t even fly them in their own backyard properly. Try that from here to the planet Mars.

7:16 Speaker 3 That’s bizarre.

7:17 Speaker 1 Yeah, you have to know when to zag and when to zag, and if it’s twenty minute today, I believe it’s going to be very hard to zag and zag at the rite period of time. Anything else tell us before Well, we go off into the sky on the Sunday morning.

7:35 Speaker 2 Well, John, again, thanks for having me. We talk about the live skies. I mentioned the meteor shower tonight and the next few nights northeast sky after midnight till dawn.

7:43 Speaker 3 Hopefully people get to see it.

7:45 Speaker 2 The planet Mercury is visible in the northwest sky as you look. Maybe a pair of binoculars might help, but it’s visible to the naked eye, the innermost planet. And then John, we get the planet Saturn, returning to our skies at the.

7:58 Speaker 3 End of August.

7:59 Speaker 2 This is a fascinating object to see. You need a telescope to see it, but you can see it rise with the naked eye. And what do we tell John, always mind people to always remember to keep their eyes to the skies. Check out our Doctor Sky experience proudly here on WABC radio dot com as we fill you

8:15 in on all these mysteries of the universe, to keep our minds open, and certainly to get away from some of the heat, not only in the world of politics, but also in the world of temperature, to enjoy the summer.

8:28 Speaker 3 And I hope everybody has that opportunity.

8:30 Speaker 1 Steve Tates otherwise, those Doctor Sky, thank you so much for expanding our minds and God bless you. Have a great rest of today.

8:40 Speaker 3 And have a good morning to you. John. Thank you