Why scientists launched two little robots to the moon

Two tiny transforming robots landed on the moon! These baseball-sized bots accompanied Japan's first successful lunar lander. They rolled out of SLIM as balls and transformed into a rover. The bots cracked down the middle to reveal a little camera in the center. The halves then acted as spinning wheels that helped them waddle, bounce and roll over hard terrain as they explored. In this roundup of space news, we also get into the latest turn about how much the universe is expanding and the Earthly analogs NASA astronauts are using to prepare for the forthcoming Artemis mission. Interested in more space science? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. It includes perks like bonus episodes, early access, archive access, curated playlists and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:18Regina Barber?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:23Regina Barber?

  Hey, Short Wavers, Regina Barber here, and it's time for my favorite monthly episode, our space news segment, Spacing Out with Gina. We're here today with my space buddy, my partner in spacing out crime, all things considered, host Scott Detrow. Welcome back to the show, Scott.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  I'm excited to be here. Since we last taped, I now have a giant picture of the moon at my desk, and I love it.

• 0:46Regina Barber?

  You do? I've seen it.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  It's big.

• 0:49Regina Barber?

  And joining us today, Scott, is our producer, Burley McCoy. Burley, welcome to your first Spacing Out with Gina.

• 0:55Speaker 03

  Hey, Gina. Hey, Scott. I'm excited to be here. It sounds like my jam. I'm a big nerd.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  I'm excited. I am excited. You're here, welcome.

• 1:02Regina Barber?

  She is a big nerd because she's the other, like, PhD scientist on Short Wave, so she's going to feel right at home in our nerd space, I think.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  You know?

• 1:10Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  I'll just represent all the non-PhD holders out there and do my best.

• 1:16Regina Barber?

  I have a question for both of you, though.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:18Regina Barber?

  Have you seen any of the Transformer movies?

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:22Regina Barber?

  I haven't seen any of them.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 1:25Regina Barber?

  Have you, Burley?

• 1:26Speaker 03

  Oh, I've definitely seen some, and they were cool at the time, but like, I think they're kind of forgettable. I don't know.

• 1:32Regina Barber?

  It's true.

• 1:33Speaker 03

  No hate mail, please.

• 1:33Regina Barber?

  It's true, but, you know, just to link all of this together, our first story in this segment is about Transformers on the moon. But I'm going to pop your bubble a little, Scott. It's not about Optimus Prime.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  Womp, womp.

• 1:47Regina Barber?

  They're very different.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  But hopefully equally as cool.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Are they still robots in disguise?

• 1:51Regina Barber?

  Yes, they still shape-shift.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Oh, OK. I'll take that.

• 1:54Regina Barber?

  But they're really small. They're really cute. They're round little guys about the size of a baseball. Essentially, they rolled out of this moon lander, and each half of the sphere moves outward, kind of expanding, revealing this cute little camera in the center, and the halves are now spinning wheels.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  OK, that's even better than a transformer. So it's like, like it's like a little car that rolls around then?

• 2:15Regina Barber?

  Yeah, sort of. But they kind of waddle because they can kind of waddle over hard terrain and navigate. They navigate on their own, and this was a test for future explorations.

• 2:24Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, waddling around. This reminds me of my toddler a little bit. Yeah, like always exploring, always expanding. Which brings me to our next topic, the expansion of the universe.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm just gonna applaud that really smooth transition. Congratulations.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  What's the latest, though, on the expanding universe?

• 2:42Speaker 03

  So there's some drama in the astronomy world about how our universe is expanding. Some scientists are debating this right now. And the stakes of that debate? Just the fate of the universe, though most astronomers are still on one side of the debate.

• 2:56Regina Barber?

  Right, like me.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  And we're gonna talk about Artemis 2 and Artemis 3, which now has a crew.

• 3:01Regina Barber?

  Yep, that's right, Scott. So today on the show, we go from the moon to the farthest reaches of the cosmos and back. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 3:19Speaker 04

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• 4:38Speaker 03

  Okay, Scott Burley, I'm gonna start with these little cute autonomous robots that, you know, strolled on the moon.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  I got a bunch of questions. Let's just start with why, though, why they were on the moon. You said it was for testing?

• 4:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, they were part of the first successful Japanese lunar mission that landed on the moon a couple of years ago. And there's a new study out last week in the journal Science Robotics analyzing how these little guys performed up there on the lunar surface.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Other than kind of waddling around and seeming like Wally characters, what was their scientific job?

• 5:09Speaker 03

  So they took a lot of pictures of the moon's surface and of the lander. They're basically scouting out the terrain ahead of bigger rovers and going places they can't. And Scott, just to underline this, they're really small. They only weigh about a half a pound, and that's huge for space travel, right? The lighter something is, the easier and cheaper it is to put up into space. And I talked to Roger Weens, a planetary scientist who didn't work on this program, and he was thoroughly impressed. He said that the redundancy was a huge benefit to these devices.

• 5:38Speaker 05

  These are not expensive devices. You can have several of them, and if one or two fails, then you still have others.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  One other thing, though, I'm thinking about the fact that the moon has 1/6 of the Earth's gravity. So does that affect how they move around?

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Totally, yeah. These little guys actually kind of bounce, though. So it's another reason why they're super cool. They're designed for low gravity so they can explore other places like Mars or even asteroids. Here's Roger again.

• 6:05Speaker 05

  These could go to small asteroids where hopping is extremely easy. In fact, you've got to make sure you don't hop out of orbit or something like that. So yeah, I can see these things going to a number of places. We'll have transformers on various planets and asteroids eventually.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Okay, this was a really fun start. We need to shift to something much more existential, though, for all of us, and that is our ever-expanding Universe. First of all, remind us what this debate has focused on over recent decades.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  OK, so Scott, almost 30 years ago astronomers discovered that our universe is not only expanding, but that expansion is speeding up. But in the last few years, a group of scientists shook up that understanding by claiming that the expansion isn't speeding up but slowing down. Now, a paper out last week in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society pushes back and says the old framework still stands, continuing the debate.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  So we're back to expanding.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Expanding and accelerating.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  OK, OK. So, given that we're back to that point of view, what do the expansion of the universe is slowing down folks say to that?

• 7:14Regina Barber?

  The group of scientists at Yonsei University in South Korea stands by their work. They already posted a rebuttal to this paper, and they say that the standard way astrophysicists measure universe expansion now is fundamentally flawed.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  So for the non-astrophysicists out there, remind us how you measure this.

• 7:31Regina Barber?

  I'm gonna let Burley do this.

• 7:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, so astronomers basically measure the brightness of a special type of exploding star, a supernova, and then correct for things like how long it explodes or how much dust is in the way.

• 7:43Regina Barber?

  And the South Korean team has said astronomers, we haven't been including the age of the star's home galaxy in those corrections. So the math is off. And when you include that, the final answer is that the expansion of the universe is slowing down, which would be a massive discovery if that were true.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  This is quite the big if true.

• 8:03Regina Barber?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  So, OK, so given all of that, though, what is the consensus among other astronomers?

• 8:09Speaker 03

  So the experts we spoke to were skeptical of the slowdown hypothesis. They say the community has been fine tuning the supernova method for almost 30 years, and there are other methods that point to the universe's expansion speeding up.

• 8:22Regina Barber?

  Yeah, we talked to Priam Vada Natarajan, an astrophysicist from Yale University, who wasn't involved in this work, and she's still skeptical, but she says these kind of debates are what strengthens science.

• 8:32Speaker 06

  Scientists by nature are skeptical, and even for an idea that has been validated and accepted. Right? If there is a new argument, we do take it seriously and we interrogate it.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  And it's a low stakes debate, right? Because it's only just like the fate of the universe. That that's.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, instead of everything eventually drifting far apart from each other and dying a cold death billions of years from now, the universe could simply implode, what astronomers call the big crunch. Sadly, none of us are going to be around to see that.

• 9:03Regina Barber?

  I'm team cold death.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Don't know which one I prefer.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  Hard, hard to choose, huh?

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, non-issue for me, I guess. Something that is happening in our time spans, though.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Our favorite NASA program, Artemis, we've got to talk about it.

• 9:17Regina Barber?

  Totally. The crew for the next mission, Artemis III, was just selected. And this is the mission that will do lots of maneuvers in space in low Earth orbit. Scott, you spoke with one of the newly selected astronauts, right?

• 9:30Speaker 02

  I did. The day he was selected, I talked with Andre Douglas. And one of the things he talked about was going on training missions. He was on the, he was on the backup crew for Artemis two.

• 9:39Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  And trained alongside them.

• 9:41Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  And one of the things they did was go to Iceland.

• 9:44Speaker 07

  We did a like 24 mile hike in two days in Iceland, just to go through a hard challenge of land navigation. As if we're, you know, learning how to be really good operators.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  And they do this, you know, as you know, because this mission is supposed to help prepare them for future lunar explorations. So they're looking for places on Earth that are kind of analogs of the moon, of lunar conditions.

• 10:08Regina Barber?

  Yeah, and it's also about geology, like the rocky terrain and the actual rock compositions are very similar between the moon and Iceland. Apollo astronauts actually trained in Iceland too way back when and said it was the closest thing they had seen to the moon's surface. Two NASA astronauts are going back there this July to train in Iceland.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  And this isn't just for lunar missions, right? They're actually NASA's, it's farther away, but, but, but they're trying to simulate Mars as well right now?

• 10:36Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so they've had astronaut hopefuls track around the lava beds in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park with big packs on their backs, doing geological fieldwork and dealing with very limited and very delayed communications from a simulated mission control. It's all a way to make sure our astronauts are super well-prepared when someday they are out in space doing the real thing.

• 10:59Regina Barber?

  And Scott, there is a simulated Mars mission happening right now at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. NASA has four researchers in this 3D-printed habitat doing experiments as if they're living on Mars. They went in last October, and they'll stay inside for a little over a year. And maybe, you know, we'll come back and talk about that when they emerge.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Sounds great. I think we need a spacing out field trip to Iceland, then.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  Let's do that.

• 11:26Regina Barber?

  Oh, my gosh. And then we can see the northern lights, too, which we've always talked about.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. OK, remote show in Iceland, done.

• 11:33Regina Barber?

  Scott Burley, thank you for spacing out with me. I had a great time.

• 11:38Speaker 03

  My mind definitely feels spacing after that.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  You know, contemplating the expansion of the universe will do that.

• 11:45Regina Barber?

  It will. I enjoy it. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend. It really helps our show. And hey, give us a follow on the NPR app or wherever you're listening from, so you'll never miss a new episode from us. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy and Kai McNamee. It was edited by Christopher Antalyata and our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Tyler Jones checked the facts. Robert Rodriguez, Ted Mebane, and Hannah Glavna were the audio engineers. I'm Burley McCoy.

• 12:17Regina Barber?

  And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR. See you Monday.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  I'm floating away.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  Accelerating or decelerating?

• 12:27Regina Barber?

  Oh, decelerating. He stopped.

• 12:29Speaker 00

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