S8 Ep914: Bob Zimmerman explains that the Psyche probe successfully completed a Mars flyby. Meanwhile, reanalyzed data suggests Europa may lack water plumes, contradicting previous theories about the moon's potential for life. (8/16)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 23 May 2026
⏱️ 5 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchel with my good colleague, Bob Zimmerman. |
| 0:18.6 | We're going exploring. |
| 0:20.0 | The probe's name is Psyche. |
| 0:21.7 | Outbound for where, Bob? It's outbound for this asteroid psyche. The asteroid is a metal asteroid. |
| 0:29.0 | We've never gotten a close look at one of those. I mean, there's enough metal in Psyche to, |
| 0:34.5 | that's more than we've mined on Earth on the whole history of the human race. But we don't know much about them. And so it's on its way. It's going to get there in 29. But to get there, it had to do a bunch of flybys. It did, it did a flyby of Mars a few years ago. It did a flyby of Earth. And this past week, it did its last flyby of Mars. Flew past around 3,000 miles, I think. |
| 0:56.8 | I have a great picture it took of the South Pole of Mars on Behind the Black. |
| 1:03.1 | The pictures it took of Mars are kind of cool. |
| 1:05.8 | They're not really scientifically groundbreaking in any way. |
| 1:09.3 | What they do do is prove the camera and the spacecraft's |
| 1:12.4 | pointing capabilities are working as expected. And that's the important thing. So it's on |
| 1:17.7 | its way now to Psyche. And in 29, we're going to get our first good look at a metal asteroid |
| 1:22.5 | on, and that's a big deal. There's another probe outbound for Europa, but this is unusual information. Where did |
| 1:28.6 | they get the statistics from, Bob? Is that Hubble? All right. So, yes, the Hubble Space, |
| 1:33.8 | using the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists, reanalyzed data. Now, they had thought from |
| 1:41.2 | that data, and from other data as well, that the cracks that they see on Europa's surface had plumes of water vapor coming out of it. |
| 1:51.3 | Well, these scientists look at the Hubble data and reanalyzed it and they say, well, you know, we're not so sure about that. |
| 1:57.7 | Instead, it might be nothing more than statistical noise in the data. There might not be any |
| 2:02.7 | plumes of water coming out of Europa. Now, we got two spacecraft heading to Europe to Jupiter, |
| 2:08.6 | Europa Clipper and Juice. Juice will look at all the icy moons of Jupiter, including Europa. |
| 2:14.5 | Europa Clipper is going to try to look mostly at Europa to try to answer |
| 2:18.4 | this question. They're on their way. They'll be there in the next few years, and we'll get a |
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