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[TomT]

Jurgen & all!
Please click on attached file to download the radio program, that I removed the commercials from.  Here is what JerryW gave as suggested topics for the show:
On 7/12/2020 12:01 AM, Jerry wrote:
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> Monday, July 13
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> If you’ve got a clear view to the south, try finding M24, also known as the Sagittarius Star Cloud, near the plane of the Milky Way tonight. It’s located just above the bow of Sagittarius the Archer and covers about 1.5°. Discovered in 1764, this gauzy grouping of stars is visible to the naked eye under good conditions, with detail more easily made out using binoculars or a small telescope. Despite its name, the Star Cloud is not actually a cloud, a galaxy, a nebula, or even a star cluster — it’s really a gap in the dark, dusty plane of the Milky Way where there is simply less dust present, letting us see all the way to the distant Sagittarius spiral arm. Imagers will likely spot the red-hued emission nebula IC 1284, which lies nearby, in wider shots.
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> Tuesday, July 14
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> Jupiter reaches opposition at 4 A.M. EDT. At that time, the gas giant will sit 385 million miles (619 million km) from Earth and will appear nearly overhead at midnight. You can catch it this morning in the southwestern sky, blazing at magnitude –2.8 in the constellation Sagittarius. Its disk spans 48" and at the time of opposition, all four of its Galilean moons will be on display. But act fast — by 4:17 A.M. EDT, Europa will disappear behind the planet’s western limb. It won’t reappear before sunrise.
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>    6.8° east of Jupiter is magnitude 0.1 Saturn, on its way to its own opposition early next week. Its disk currently spans 18" and its rings stretch nearly 42" east-west. The nearly 3,000-mile-wide (4,800 km) Cassini Division is on full display.
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>    The Moon passes 4° south of Uranus at 8 A.M. EDT. You can catch the magnitude 5.8 ice giant easily with binoculars or a small scope in the predawn hours. It currently lies in Aries, roughly halfway along an invisible line drawn between the bright stars Hamal and Menkar. An hour before sunrise, Earth’s satellite has already approached to within 10.8° of the planet, lying directly east of the ice giant.
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>    Today also marks the 55th anniversary of Mariner 4’s flyby of Mars — the first successful Red Planet flyby ever achieved. It is the 5th anniversary of New Horizons’ flyby of Pluto, also the first of its kind.
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>    Pluto reaches opposition tomorrow afternoon, so keep scrolling to find out how to observe it.
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> Wednesday, July 15
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> Pluto reaches opposition at 3 P.M. EDT. The tiny world shines at magnitude 14.3 and is 3.07 billion miles (4.95 billion km) from Earth. Nestled close to Jupiter and Saturn in the sky, Pluto is visible all night, with the best viewing later in the evening and early into tomorrow morning, when it’s highest above the horizon.
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>    To find it, center bright Jupiter in your scope — you can’t miss it. Pluto is about 1.8° east-southeast of the gas giant, with a disk less than an arcsecond across. If you can spot it visually, it will simply appear as a dim, dull “star.” Imaging through larger scopes with even a simple digital camera should help reveal it.
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>    The New Horizons flyby, now five years ago, revolutionized our understanding of the dwarf planet. Although the spacecraft’s brief visit is long over, its data is still revealing new details, including the possibility that Pluto formed “hot” through collisions, rather than through “cold” material slowly building up over time in the outer solar system.
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> Thursday, July 16
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> C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) should now be readily visible in the evening sky, soaring nearly 15° high in the northwest an hour after sunset. It will remain well above the horizon for those at northern latitudes for the next few hours. To get the best seeing, or atmospheric steadiness — which diminishes toward the horizon — you’ll want to observe as soon as darkness begins to fall. The comet has left Auriga and is now in Lynx; tonight, it’s about 26° west (below) the easily identifiable cup of the Big Dipper as the asterism sits sideways in the sky with its handle pointing upward early in the evening.
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> Friday, July 17
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> The Moon passes 3° north of Venus at 3 A.M. EDT. Two hours later, most observers should be able to catch the pair about 10° above the horizon, with Venus hanging between and just below our Moon and the bright star Aldebaran in Taurus the Bull. The waning Moon is a mere 12-percent-lit crescent; Venus has it slightly beat, now a 33-percent-lit crescent. Just northwest of the planet is the loose open Hyades star cluster, which spans roughly 5.5°.
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>    Today also marks the 45th anniversary of the Apollo-Soyuz link-up in Earth orbit, the first international space mission. Three American astronauts aboard an Apollo capsule and two Soviet cosmonauts in a Soyuz spacecraft launched hours apart from the U.S. and Kazakhstan on July 15, 1975. Two days later, on the 17th, the craft rendezvoused; the spacecraft hard docked at 12:12 P.M. EDT and about three hours later, at 3:17 P.M. EDT, the crews met.
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> SpaceX to launch unmanned mining probe onto the  asteroid Pysche in 2022. The potential revenue stream of asteroid mining offers SpaceX another financial pipeline that may potentially fund scientific research outside of core, publicly viewed operations. Revenue from space mining operations could quickly surpass the high revenue projections of Starlink. Collectively, it’s all about operational independence (to the extent possible).
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>    ASTEROID experts at NASA have begun building a spaceship to explore the metal-rich Asteroid Psyche, potentially worth more than $10,000 quadrillion.
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>    There are so many valuable metals buried within the asteroid, it could make every single person on Earth a billionaire if it were returned to the planet. US-based space agency NASA has started building the unmanned probe that will fly to the metal-rich asteroid Psyche, launching on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in August 2022.
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> This month a cosmic visitor is gracing the skies. A comet swept past the sun on July 3, and it has since become visible to the naked eye. The rare opportunity to glimpse the chunk of ancient ice from the outer solar system should continue next week, when astronomers hope it will become even brighter.
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>    Scientists using the Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) space telescope first spotted the comet as it hurtled toward the sun on March 27. Informally dubbed NEOWISE after the telescope but officially labeled C/2020 F3, the comet gradually brightened as sunlight and solar wind caused it to release gases and form a tail. In early June it reached the far side of the sun, as seen from Earth. The resulting glare prevented astronomers from observing the comet for several weeks. By late June, however, it swam back into the optics of another space telescope, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Its fate was still unclear, however: Would Comet NEOWISE brighten or fade?
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>    On July 3 observers watched closely as the comet began the most perilous part of its journey: its nearest approach to the sun, which brought it within 44 million kilometers of our star. The intense light and heat from such close proximity tends to make comets disintegrate and disappear from the night sky. Earlier this year, such breakups befell two other comets, ATLAS and SWAN, that astronomers had hoped would light up Earth’s skies. But NEOWISE survived and emerged brighter than before to dazzle stargazers—provided they know where to look. Now, for the next few days at least, residents of the Northern Hemisphere can greet the passing visitor at dawn.
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>    “For many people in the Northern Hemisphere, especially if you’re closer to the midlatitudes, [the comet] should be visible an hour before sunrise, very low in the northeastern sky,” says Kerry-Ann Lecky Hepburn, a meteorologist and astrophotographer who captured an image of Comet NEOWISE over Toronto. “Right now it’s located in the constellation Auriga.” She recommends finding the comet’s exact spot using specialized smartphone apps with interactive maps of the constellations. Although already visible to the naked eye, the object is still faint, and binoculars would offer a better view.
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>    Starting around July 12, Comet NEOWISE will be visible in the evening as well, Lecky Hepburn says. About an hour after sunset, it will appear near the northwestern horizon. As the month progresses, it will rise higher in the sky, moving from the constellation Lynx toward the Big Dipper. On July 22 the comet will reach its closest point to Earth—a distance of 103 million kilometers—before continuing its cosmic flight. Whether it will still be visible to unaided eyes by then is uncertain, however.
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>    ‘Comets are like cats,” says Franck Marchis, an astronomer at the SETI Institute. “They are unpredictable.” If Comet NEOWISE’s outgassing exhausts its reserves of icy material, its bright tail could dissipate, effectively removing the object from view. On the other extreme, ongoing heating from the sun could cause the comet to disintegrate in a bright outburst, potentially resulting in a highly visible “great comet” of historic significance. This possibility would be “a spectacular event and a great show for the earthlings,” Marchis says. But “personally, I recommend walking up early and going to see it now, while we know it’s here.”
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>    After this encounter, astronomers expect Comet NEOWISE to bid farewell for quite some time. Its long, looping orbit around our star will next bring it back to Earth’s vicinity some 6,800 years from now.
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> July is the month of Mars.
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> Three missions are poised to launch toward the Red Planet this month, including NASA's car-sized Perseverance rover, which will hunt for signs of ancient Mars life and cache samples for future return to Earth.
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>    The action will start next week, if all goes according to plan. The United Arab Emirates' (UAE) first-ever interplanetary effort, the Hope Mars mission, also known as the Emirates Mars Mission, is scheduled to launch on July 14.
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>    The Hope orbiter will reach Mars in early 2021, then use three science instruments to study the Red Planet's atmosphere, weather and climate from above. The probe's observations should help researchers better understand Mars' long-ago transition from a relatively warm and wet world to the cold, desert planet we know today, mission team members have said. That transition was driven by the stripping of Mars' once-thick atmosphere by the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing from the sun.
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>    The Hope spacecraft was built by the UAE's Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center, in partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder, Arizona State University and the University of California Berkeley. And the project is breaking ground for more than just the UAE: Hope is the first planetary science mission led by an Arab-Islamic nation.
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>    China will follow with a landmark launch of its own a little more than a week after Hope takes flight. On July 23, China's first-ever fully homegrown Mars mission, known as Tianwen-1, is scheduled to lift off atop a Long March 5 rocket. (China put a piggyback orbiter called Yinghuo-1 aboard Russia's Mars mission Fobos-Grunt, which got stuck in Earth orbit shortly after its November 2011 launch.)
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>    Tianwen-1 is an ambitious project that consists of an orbiter, a lander and a 530-lb. (240 kilograms) rover that's the size of a small golf cart. Chinese officials have remained characteristically tight-lipped about the mission — they still haven't publicly announced a final landing site for the lander/rover pair, for example — but these robots' scientific gear suggests that Tianwen-1 will conduct a broad reconnaissance of the Martian environment.
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>    The orbiter sports six instruments, including a high-resolution camera, a magnetometer and a mineral spectrometer, which will allow mission team members to determine the composition of surface rocks. The rover also has six instruments, including a weather station, a magnetic field detector and a ground-penetrating radar, which could spot subsurface water ice down to a depth of about 330 feet (100 meters).
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>    If Tianwen-1 is successful, China will become just the third nation, after the Soviet Union and the United States, to land a spacecraft on Mars. And that epic touchdown may lead the way to even bigger things in the near future: Chinese space officials have voiced a desire to mount a Mars sample-return mission, which could perhaps launch as early as 2030.
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>    The United States and Europe also plan to bring pristine Red Planet material to Earth, and that project will really get up and running with Perseverance's launch. The 2,315-lb. (1,050 kg) rover, the centerpiece of NASA's $2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, is scheduled to lift off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on July 30 and land inside Mars' Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.
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>    Perseverance will use its seven onboard instruments to characterize the geology of Jezero and search for signs of ancient Mars life in the rocks of the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) crater, which hosted a lake and a river delta billions of years ago.
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>    The six-wheeled robot will also collect and cache several dozen samples from particularly promising study sites. This material will be recovered and brought to Earth, perhaps as early as 2031, in a campaign conducted by NASA and the European Space Agency. Scientists in labs around the world will then scrutinize the Mars material in great detail, looking for signs of life and clues about the planet's evolutionary history.
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>    Mars 2020 also aims to lay groundwork for crewed missions to the Red Planet, the first of which NASA wants to launch in the 2030s. For instance, like the Tianwen-1 rover, Perseverance is outfitted with ice-hunting ground-penetrating radar. And another of the NASA rover's instruments, the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE), will generate oxygen from the thin Martian atmosphere, which is 95% carbon dioxide by volume. ("ISRU" stands for "in situ resource utilization." NASA is big on acronyms, in case you hadn't noticed.)
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>    MOXIE isn't Mars 2020's only technology demonstration. A 4-lb. (1.8 kg) helicopter called Ingenuity will journey to the Red Planet on Perseverance's belly. After touchdown, Ingenuity will drop free and make a few short test flights in the Martian sky — the first-ever aerial exploration of a world beyond Earth.
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> Sent from my iPad