Juno, Space debris, Fake tumours, Risky plants
BBC Inside Science
BBC
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 7 July 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Earlier this week, the US space agency successfully put a new probe in orbit around Jupiter. The Juno satellite, which left Earth five years ago, had to fire a rocket engine in a tricky and precise manoeuvre in order to brake and become ensnared by Jupiter's gravity. Fran Baganal is a mission scientist for Juno and tells Adam Rutherford what measurements Juno is now in position to make.
Space is full of junk left over from past space missions: from flecks of paint to used rockets, dead satellites, also debris from past collisions of space junk. This junk is speeding around the Earth at several thousand miles per hour. At those speeds even small pieces of rubbish just fractions of a millimetre across can damage communication satellites which are vital for the web, mobile phones, and satellite navigation on earth. The Surrey Space centre team are preparing to launch the world's first space litter-picking mission. The RemoveDebris team share their clean up designs with Adam.
Researchers have had success growing body parts like windpipes and ears in the laboratory for use in transplants. A group of scientists at Barts Cancer Institute in London are making own tumours; tissues we don't want. However, it is important to study how they grow, and co-opt other cells in the body. Reporter Anand Jagatia heads to their tissue lab to see what they've grown.
All animals take risky decisions all the time. The ability to assess the potential gain from the potential harm, and make the right choice, gives the animal an evolutionary advantage. A new study suggests that plants are capable of making similar calculations, despite not having brains. Alex Kacelnik at Oxford University is one of the scientists behind the experiment that suggests that pea plants are willing to gamble.
Presenter: Adam Rutherford
Producer: Adrian Washbourne.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello you this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first |
| 0:04.0 | broadcast on the 7th of July 2016 more information can be found at BBC. |
| 0:08.9 | co-dot-k. UK slash Radio 4. |
| 0:11.6 | Gambling plants this week, how peas play the lottery when times are hard. |
| 0:16.0 | We've got the scientists who are actually trying to grow fake tumors to find out how the real ones work. |
| 0:22.0 | And in a minute we'll be hearing about a project to scoop up and harpoon some of the junk, the extremely dangerous junk that is speeding around the earth, left over bits of dead satellites that are like lethal speeding bullets to active missions. |
| 0:37.0 | First we have to take care of some business. |
| 0:39.0 | So we prepared a contingency communications procedure and guess what? |
| 0:44.2 | We don't need that anymore. |
| 0:47.6 | Yes, NASA executed a perfect piece of precision choreography at about 20 past 5 on Tuesday morning. |
| 0:55.0 | Juno fired its British built engines for 2,102 seconds, |
| 1:00.0 | decelerated and entered Jupiter's orbit for what is to be our closest encounter with the |
| 1:05.4 | solar system's biggest planet. You know these are strange days for sure but unlike |
| 1:09.9 | Jupiter science is a rock and every so often we show that we can be a great people if we wish to be. |
| 1:16.8 | Anyway, BBC Science Correspondent Jonathan Amos is our man on the ground at Juno's mission control, |
| 1:21.5 | that's the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, and here he is |
| 1:24.8 | telling us what the atmosphere was like there as Juno was speeding towards this gas giant. |
| 1:30.9 | You saw people through the day acting in that very nervous, anxious way that they do. |
| 1:37.0 | You know, you can tell they, they make like conversation about nothing in particular because their mind is really deeply on something else and I think everybody |
| 1:46.1 | was highly confident that the orbit insertion would work but there was this nagging doubt you know |
| 1:51.6 | they the spacecraft was going somewhere that no spacecraft had ever been before, |
| 1:56.7 | you know, to make that close pass, to fly in just a few thousand kilometers above the cloud |
... |
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