Episode Transcript
[00:00:08] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Great Exchanges. Great Exchanges is a collaboration between Portobello Radio and Imperial College London. Ahead of the Great Exhibition Road Festival on June 7th and 8th, we bring together research scientists and members of the community with an interest in the subject to discuss issues that make a difference to people's everyday lives.
In this edition, we're going to be talking about space.
The Times the other day reported that Gen Z are seeing stars thanks to their new obsession with astronomy. Apparently, young constellation hunters turned TikTok into space talk and the astronomy hashtag was used more than 540,000 times.
Sales of telescopes and binoculars are up by over 1000% week on week.
So what's it all about? I am here with Dr. Philippa Mason from Imperial College London. Welcome.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: And with Ben Thorpe Barnes, who is an amateur astronomer. Welcome.
[00:01:09] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Have you, Philippa, you have had a stall, a stand at the Exhibition Road Festival for a couple of years now. Tell us what you're going to be doing this year.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: This year we're focusing on rocky worlds and we have a kind of arts and, arts and science fusion event.
And so the, the tagline the beauty of planetary science or the beauty in planetary science. So we have, we have kids drawing bits of other planets on the ground with chalk and we ran it last year, it was fantastic. We have rocks and beautiful images of other worlds and we just want to engage people and introduce the idea of the possibility of careers in space science or in space engineering even now I'm.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: Very lucky in a way because I was brought up in the 60s and it's when the race for the moon was on. Kennedy's bold ambition and we were all obsessed with science. In fact, I remember being woken up by my parents to watch the moon landing on the BBC to a soundtrack. Incentive. Pink Floyd playing live in the studio.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: Cool.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Ben, you are part of the Gen Z who are now seeing stars. What sparked your interest?
[00:02:23] Speaker C: I think, you know, similar to you, I was sort of lucky growing up with parents that are very interested in science and more importantly, keeping me informed.
And as a kid we used to go down to the coast where you get those clear skies and pretty much every night we just spent staring up at the stars, looking at just a dot shining down, you thinking, surely there has to be something else out there. We, you know, we're not alone on this little blue marble. So it's sort of been a lifelong passion of looking up and just wonder.
[00:02:50] Speaker A: And then you took, took that to university with you.
[00:02:54] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So all throughout my sort of School life. I've been interested in science and then when the time came, I was sort of lucky enough to go to Queen Mary to do astro physics.
I won't lie. A big part of the enticement with my mum bragging about the fact that her friend was taught by Patrick Moore, who obviously led the sky at night. And that just immediately was like, okay, yes, I need to, I need to go there. It's pretty much one of the only universities in London that do an astrophysics course specifically, rather than just sort of physics and other things. So it's just a real opportunity to essentially hone in on that wonder of the other world rather than just at home next door.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: Wow, Philippe, you didn't start as an astrophysicist.
[00:03:35] Speaker B: No, I didn't. I started on the, on the Earth as a geologist. I fell in love with volcanoes and dinosaurs, and there weren't really any opportunities in planetary science or space at the time. I wanted to be an astronaut briefly, so. But I had to get a job and Earth science is what grabbed me. And then I discovered satellite imaging, remote sensing of the Earth. And that was kind of the next best thing because the satellites are in space. And so now for me, I'm also using satellite images of other planets. So I'm applying my geological skills from Earth to other planets to understand them.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: And any particular planets or Venus is my passion.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: But I'm also interested in Mars and many other rocky worlds. Mainly the rocky ones rather than the gaseous ones.
[00:04:19] Speaker A: Right. And Mars and Venus are the two rocky worlds that will feature in. Indeed in the festival.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: In the festival. Yeah. We're focusing on those two because largely because of the personnel in my department is very focused on Mars and Venus. We have other specialists looking at meteorites and other things, but Mars and Venus are large in our department.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: Ben, how do you view the world? I mean, Philippa is looking through telescopes on satellites. What are you looking through again?
[00:04:49] Speaker C: I'm sort of a similar realm, but just very much smaller, I'd imagine. So I'm pretty much at. With just an amateur telescope. It's a mirror 8 inches in diameter across. And that essentially allows you to, you know, view the planets as not little kind of dim dots of light in the sky, but as an actual detailed, you know, I mean, when we're looking at Venus, if you're very lucky with good conditions, you can sort of see, you know, a hazy cloud like effect over it. And it does change each time you look at Venus. So you are seeing atmospheric changes of another planet with your own eye, which for me is just insane. And it's, you know, to know that we're able to sort of send things close to it. Because, I mean, fairly famously, Venus is sort of known as the planet of Hell. It is hellish conditions, extremely high temperature, and from my memory, Russia have tried to send landers down to the surface of it, which lasted, I think, two and a half to three hours before it just completely gave up. So it's a real interesting world to see, sort of where Earth could evolve to and perhaps, you know, where, you know, building stepping stones of life have come from.
[00:05:58] Speaker A: So can you see the rocky landscape?
[00:06:01] Speaker C: The rocky landscape we can't see at all. So when we're looking at it, we are essentially just looking at usually a.
An eclipse sort of shape, but it's pretty much just a cloudy haze that you're looking at. There's no real detail or features. So unlike Mars, what you're looking at, which has no real atmosphere, you can see sort of geological features. If you're lucky enough, you can see Olympus Mons, which is the largest mountain on it. You can see that with a telescope from your back garden. But the actual land details of Venus, just completely obscured by the. By the hellish atmosphere that it has.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: So, Philippa, how do your telescopes see through that haze and pick out the geological features?
[00:06:42] Speaker B: So when we use satellite images, we. We can exploit other wavelengths of light, other parts of the spectrum, to tell us different things about the surface. So on Earth, we do that across the whole of the spectrum, from UV through to infrared, and it tells us about the chemistry of the materials that are on the surface. So that's one thing we can do. But Venus is a bit of a problem because of this beautiful, cloudy, pearly appearance. The clouds are so dense, the ordinary visible light can't penetrate to the surface of Venus. So that's why we have to use a longer wavelength of energy. We use an imaging technique called radar.
And the wavelengths are quite long, about 9, 10 centimeters in length. And they're long enough to go straight through the clouds and image the surface. That's the only way we can see the surface of Venus is using radar images.
[00:07:33] Speaker A: Is that the same radar that we use to see which aircraft are coming into Heathrow Airport?
[00:07:39] Speaker B: In principle, yes. It's a sounding technique, it's an active sensing technique. So you send a pulse in a direction and you receive a signal back. Like an echo, Right?
[00:07:49] Speaker A: Like a bat.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: Like a bat, yeah, exactly right. It's a bit like sonar or lidar, and you measure the Intensity of the return. And if you do that over an area, like with a kind of scanner, you build up an image of echoes and that tells you about the shape of the surface. So radar is very special. It tells us about the texture and the topography and the scattering properties of the surface. So just not like an optical image, not like a, not like a photograph, but, but we can use it in a similar way.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: So it. Does it produce something, something that isn't an actual photograph, but nevertheless a visual representation?
[00:08:26] Speaker B: That's correct, yeah. It's like an, it's an image, but it's not a photograph. It's not what we would see with our eyes.
[00:08:31] Speaker A: You are part of quite an interesting expedition. Tell us a bit about that.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. So I'm lucky enough to be on the science team of the, of Europe's next mission to Venus, which is called Envision.
It's actually the kind of brainchild of a friend of mine, and it's amazing that Europe and America are now spending lots of money in achieving it. And it's a multinational, multidisciplinary effort to understand Venus as a system from the interior to the surface to the clouds and how the whole thing works.
So in a similar way that on Earth, we understand how the geology and the climate are related to, we trying to understand Venus in a similar kind of way, to understand it as a system.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: Venus is often been described as the hellish planet.
Has Venus suffered from the kind of climate change that we may be. Well, we are embarking upon here on Earth?
[00:09:29] Speaker B: Well, that's one of the big questions we have about it. Yes, almost certainly a runaway greenhouse effect is that's the accepted wisdom as that's what's happened. What we don't know is if it ever had a wet past, it may have been dry from a very early time, or it may have been wet and lost all that water to space because of this greenhouse effect. And we don't really know the answer to that question yet. It's a possibility.
But on the assumption that in the past, when the sun was not quite so hot as it is now, Venus potentially was, you know, was in a habitable zone. So if there was water, if water was ever able to precipitate there, it may have remained there for some time before it got super hot, but we don't really know.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: Ben, you. When you're in the back garden and you're looking up at Venus and the beauty of the, of the atmosphere, are you mulling over some of these more, these deeper questions about the planet or you just enjoying it for the splendor of the skies?
[00:10:25] Speaker C: Admittedly, it's a bit of both. I mean I've, you know, I'm fortunate enough to have gone to university to study physics, so it's, there are always those questions.
I think for me Jupiter is quite a popular one to look at, which is a gaseous planet. But then you see the moons that come across it and there's a moon on Jupiter where its volcanic activity is driven by the fact that it's, it's quite literally being pulled apart and squished back together by Jupiter as it passes through.
You know, pretty much the same effect that causes our tides on Earth where if the moon was much stronger, it wouldn't just be be water that's going in and out, it would be land as well that's following and IO has that and it's, you know, every time you're looking for it you wonder.
Earth is our planet. We, it's the only one that we truly understand. But there's so many different sort of starting steps for what could be different areas of life. And it's just interesting to kind of think about how things may have evolved differently there. You know, what sort of conditions are completely different there. If you know, could any life on Earth exist in any sort of way over there? And it's the more you look into it, you know, you find deep, deep, deep sea creatures that live by hydrothermal vents that we think there could be similarities to, you know, underneath oceans of ice, crossed planets. And it's yeah, ever ending questions basically of just is there something else out there? And it's, you kind of have to hone it in and just. No, no, get the picture.
You know, we'll remember what we're actually here for. The questions can come later on, but it's constant, constant wonder of just what is out there.
[00:11:59] Speaker A: Do you record images through your telescope?
[00:12:01] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. So I do all imaging sort of. You take the photos and then softwares can stack them together so that you can get the best out of the details and see what's there.
Naturally being on the surface of the Earth, we have to think about our own atmosphere and how that can affect the image imaging. So when we're trying to take pictures of smaller objects in the sky, like Venus for example, details are a lot harder to extract, which is why it's important to actually go to planets that we want to find out a lot more about so that we can see things close up. You know, a lot of the time it would be like trying to picture a football match on the moon. And that's pretty much what scientists are trying to do when we're trying to learn about other planets. It's just unfathomably difficult to try and imagine, but they're somehow doing it and do you share.
[00:12:49] Speaker A: Are you part of an astronomy club? Do you share these images with other people or.
[00:12:55] Speaker C: I share them online. You know, I've got my Instagram, my Facebook and things like that. But admittedly, I'm not part of any astronomy club yet. I should probably look into that. I know there are a lot of other amateur astronomers in London that I should connect to, so 100%.
[00:13:10] Speaker A: Philippa, do you still take great pleasure in the skies? I mean, it's your. It's now you're nine to five.
[00:13:16] Speaker B: Yeah, of course I do, yes. It's what makes me wake up every day and look forward to going to work. It's. I'm lucky. You know, we're all lucky. I think that we love what we do. Not everybody has that privilege, but yeah, of course. And you know, we. One of the things I think that catches people in, grabs them, youngsters into science is beauty, is it is attract. You see something, you think, wow, that's fascinating, or that's incredible. That's beautiful, whatever, you know, and wanting to understand more about it. I think that's what, what gets you in, I think something like that often.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: And do amateur astronomers like Ben ever feed in to the knowledge that we have?
[00:13:55] Speaker B: Oh, I think, absolutely. I think there's a whole many schemes of citizen science and many, many discoveries are made. Biometers and. Yeah, absolutely. I'm not lucky enough to make one myself, but I'm sure, yeah, absolutely.
[00:14:07] Speaker C: Well, that's, you know, there's a. There's a big sort of area of the amateur astronomy community that sort of focuses just on hunting asteroids and things like that. Obviously, funding is a big problem in science, especially at the moment. So it's sort of, you know, we have to rely on just people with the interest of it. I know there's a load of solar imaging processes as well, where you can just download the data and they essentially ask you look through this and can you see the sort of signatures of data that they can then, you know, in turn, I think we're sort of using it to try and help with AI. It's one of the benefits of it, where we can analyze ridiculous amounts of data much faster than any human could realistically do it, which sort of allows us to focus on the creative elements of Science where asking the right questions whilst the data is being handled by, you know, computer and things like that.
[00:14:55] Speaker B: So often you might see something that's unusual and you don't necessarily know, you can't necessarily explain it. But so I've seen this, please investigate this, you know, and something will come out of it.
[00:15:04] Speaker C: So you know how you do your radar imaging of other planets. So obviously Venus, extremely, extremely dense atmosphere. Could that have sort of knock on or not knock on effects, but could that have benefits to us in imaging areas that don't have human populations? So wildfires are quite a big problem? Well, yes, we're able to see through thick clouds.
[00:15:25] Speaker B: So yeah, the simple answer, a very short answer because it's a very long one, but the simple answer is yes.
And there are, you know, some 2,000 or so what we call Earth observing satellites orbiting the Earth every day, collecting data to help us understand our planet as a system. Looking at the cloud tops, looking at the ocean surface, the temperature of the oceans, vegetation and the geology in the rocks, and monitoring for earthquakes. And yes, and some of those are radar imaging satellites that penetrate through the cloud. So they have this wonderful all weather, day and night imaging capability. So the most optical satellites need the sun. And we, we measure the light that's bouncing off the Earth and is split into different wavelengths and it tells us about materials, you know, what are they made of, water, vegetation, chlorophyll, rocks, minerals, blah, all of that. But the radar satellite can be operated independently of the sun because it's an active sensing system. So it becomes an amazing tool for observing all kinds of natural environmental phenomena. Right. So we take all of that technology and we can use it elsewhere. So on Venus the, the benefit is to go to be able to see through the clouds and we image the surface and we get a measure of the topography, etc. But what we're also interested in is what the materials of the surface are made of. And there are, there are actually what we call a few atmospheric windows in the Venus atmosphere where sunlight can penetrate through. We have atmospheric windows on Earth, but they're much broader and the, so some light does penetrate through the clouds and hit the surface and we can use those, there are six of them wavelengths to tell us something very simple about what the rocks are made of. What kinds of rocks are they? Are they like volcanic rocks that come out from the mantle, very primitive? Or are they more evolved rocks, a bit like what we see in our mountains and volcanoes? And that's how we're going to tell about a Bit more about the chemistry of the interior and whether Venus may have had water in the past.
[00:17:32] Speaker A: When the mission, the Envision mission arrives, well, how close is it going to get to Venus and will you be able to penetrate the atmosphere with more normal.
[00:17:46] Speaker B: No. The answer is no. So, so these observations I'm talking about are made by a sensor, a series of sensor sensors on an orbiting spacecraft. So it's going round the planet, the planet is revolving gently underneath and the spacecraft just goes like a bicycle in a tube. It sits inside this inner tube pointing down at the surface, routinely collecting data. And the planet turns. This is what we do on Earth as well. And it collects images in a strip. Okay.
And over a period of three years, we collect quite a lot of data.
We're not going to image the entire planet. That's quite tricky for another reason.
But we collect a series of images, maybe multiple images from the same place. So we're looking for change detection. Have there been new volcanic eruptions for instance?
But we still have this problem of the atmosphere. So we can't use an ordinary optical camera to see through. What we always see is the tops of the clouds. But what's amazing about that is about if you, if you sort of, if you're in a, in a space, if you're in a high altitude aircraft about 50 km above the surface of Venus, pressures and temperatures be like a summer's day here. So you could theoretically sit outside on your flight deck, you know, and you just see beautiful cloud tops. It's a bit toxic, but the temperatures and pressures are acceptable.
A bit like Earth. And as you descend, it becomes more and more hellish, that it becomes denser and denser and denser and hotter and hotter and that the ground surface is a, be a bit like a shallow sea that's about a kilometer deep and twice the temperature of your domestic oven. So it's a, you know, it's a nasty place, but it's more like a liquid at the low levels of the atmosphere than it is a gas.
So what we, what I think is happening is it's more like an ocean current that's kind of washing around the surface and, and sediments are moving around and chemical reactions are happening and all kinds of weird things are happening.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Well, you won't be on board.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: No, sadly that's a one way trip.
[00:19:42] Speaker A: The craft is going up there, the craft will stay round, round for three years and, and then will become space junk.
[00:19:48] Speaker B: It will become space. It will eventually descend into the planet and, and yeah, it burn up to a degree and in the atmosphere. But we get at least three years of data.
And that the telemetry, this, the transmission of the data from the spacecraft to Earth is, Is an issue because Venus has an elliptical orbit. So sometimes it's quite close and other times it's 120 million kilometers away. So we have to store data when Venus is far away and transmit data when it gets close to Earth. And that limits the amount of data we can actually transmit back in the time of the mission. So all these things have to be balanced by this amazing team of engineers at the European Space Agency.
[00:20:29] Speaker C: Does that mean that there are essentially data blank spots? So as you're waiting, is that like when Venus passes behind the sun?
[00:20:37] Speaker B: That's not able to. That's also an issue. Yet there's. You have a transmission black spot. Yeah.
But simply in terms of the distance, the. Because the, the speed and the ability to.
Of transmission is a. Is an issue. Can. Data compression is also something that has to be considered.
So the volume of data, whilst tiny compared to the volume that we collect on Earth every day, you know, is. It's substantial when you're transmitting over long distances. And you've only got these windows where you can do that.
So the budget, the spacecraft power budget and data budget is quite, quite challenging.
[00:21:16] Speaker A: One of the great things about Venus is it's one of the easiest things to see in the sky because it's so bright and comes out quite early. I think one of the problems particularly, I imagine for an amateur astronomer like yourself, is light pollution, particularly in London. How do you deal with that? Do you end up going off to the north of Scotland for your summer holidays every year?
[00:21:38] Speaker C: Well, this is, this is a very, very good point that sort of amateur astronomers are trying to raise, especially with the sort of switching of a lot of street lights with. We're sort of changing what lights. We're using an increase in satellites. I think we all have heard about the Starlink satellites going up. They're not the only company that have a constellation and they do affect images, you know, if you're taking long exposure images which are important for seeing things, I mean, not necessarily on the rocky planetary side, but in the deep space thing. So if we want to, for example, if we wanted to discover about rocky planets in other solar systems, we're very limited by what we can see, you know, on down at the planet. So we have to go into space and light pollution is one of the big kicks.
So for amateur astronomers, we can buy filters. You know, they're, they're they're out there, but they're expensive and they don't allow you to see the planet as you actually need to see it. So you're limiting yourself to three wavelengths, whereas as Philippa was saying earlier, actual useful data comes from the entire broad spectrum of wavelengths so that we can see what different chemicals are going on, which different reactions are going on. If we limit ourselves to our three, we're not going to be able to see any of that, unfortunately. So, yeah, for useful imaging of long distance objects, you need to leave the city, you need to go to kind of dark spots, but within the city you can do planetary photography and things like that. But asteroid detection, things like that become very, very difficult because of the faintness of those objects and light pollution just over washes them.
[00:23:13] Speaker A: Coming back to the festival, the, your rocky landscapes, you're looking at Venus, you're looking at Mars, which is your favorite.
[00:23:23] Speaker B: I have to say Earth really, because, you know, that's where we are existing in this cosmos.
But yeah, Venus I find really compelling because it is, it's a huge conundrum and people often ask about life and you know, we have these incredible images of Mars.
And as a geologist, I can see these images from the rovers and I, and imagine being on, in the ground doing field work like I do on Earth, and I can liken what I've seen to what I see in those images. And that's how, what they're, they're looking for life and evidence of life and evidence of what we know there's been water there. And I, I, what I really like is images like that. I mean, it's like I'm not going to get them, but there are some from the early Russian missions. They were the first, actually the first images of the planet surface, another planet surface. And they're amazing. These kind of, they're photographs, simple photographs of a landscape. And that's, I find that amazing because we just don't know what it's like. And so Earth first, Venus second.
[00:24:22] Speaker A: So if you were standing on Venus, Philippa, what would you see?
[00:24:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it depends where, like Earth. It depends where you're, where you are. Right. If you're, if you're at the lowest levels in these plains, they're a bit like the bottoms of our oceans. They're fast, they seem quite flat, covered in lavas, basalt lavas.
And I think, you know, it would be very extensive landscape, but the sky is so thick you wouldn't see very far. But some of those images from the early lander missions show like a scree slope, a bouldery boulder covered soil covered landscape. And the rocks are clearly not lavas. You know, as a geologist, trained geologist, I can see that those rocks are actually something bit different, a bit more like what we call sedimentary rocks. So they formed in a slightly different way and they're clearly the rocks have tumbled down the slope. So I can be like standing in, you know, in North Wales looking down a scree slope.
If you take away all the vegetation and the rain, you know, you see a lot of rocks that run tumbling down the street slope. So, so they've quite find those quite compelling.
[00:25:29] Speaker A: What color would everything be?
[00:25:31] Speaker B: That's a very good question.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: I mean our mind's eye, it's all red, right?
[00:25:34] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. I think everybody colors radar images, right, are black and white because they're just echoes. But people tend to make them displayed in a pretty orange color palette just to make them look more attractive. But it's difficult to know given that the atmosphere so dense we would just see this kind of cloudy, probably yellow, yellowy, slightly yellowy sky.
Basalt is black.
Wherever you look, basalt is black.
And when it's more weathered, it's kind of brown, crusty brown, and all the minerals start to come out.
So I expect unusual chemical reactions. So the surface may look dark, black, brown, reddish, who knows? I don't know. Basically.
[00:26:16] Speaker A: Is it likely to be full of rare earth metals?
[00:26:20] Speaker B: They'll be there, of course, because those elements are in the material that makes the planet. And all our rocky planets are made of essentially the same stuff. So they're there, but they're not. What, what's unique about Earth is those interesting juicy elements are concentrated in mineral deposits that are caused by or driven by plate tectonics. And that's the thing that we think is not happening on the Venus at the moment.
So I don't expect we would find the kind of mineral deposits that we find on Earth. But all the same elements are there.
[00:26:54] Speaker A: Ben, you know a hell of a lot about the skies, about astronomy. Do you have ambitions to, to work in that field going forward?
[00:27:06] Speaker C: Admittedly, yeah. I mean after, you know, finishing university, I kind of went for university during the course Covid times. So it's, you know, things were different, things changed.
And I've sort of recently over the last few months taken a break from that. But every clear night I get the telescope out and I'm just aching to get back into it. I, I, I miss, as silly as it sounds, I miss going through just loads of data trying to find something different because that's essentially what we're looking for, just something different that we can learn something new from. And it's, yeah, it's, it's a constant sort of grab of wanting to get back into it.
[00:27:40] Speaker A: So definitely, I mean that, that's the ambition of a true scientist, isn't it? Just looking for something out there, you know, at the moment we know that in America there's all sorts of tumult going, particularly indeed in the world of universities and science.
What is, what's the situation for funding? It's obviously not President Kennedy sending as much money as possible in space to be the first on the moon.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: So every space agency has a budget from the government.
East is the same, it has contributions from all the member states and thankfully, luckily the UK is still one of those.
NASA has a budget from the government and it's.
When I last heard they didn't know they hadn't been confirmed because everything's still in turmoil.
They have a lot of funding streams, space and exploration and also the Earth. Part of that is a very big part of what NASA does.
I don't know what's going to happen. I know they're all waiting and slightly nervously waiting to see what happens with their budgets, but some things will be cut, I'm sure. Certainly the budget for a science mission is tiny compared to many other things that we spend money on in science and in space.
And we tend to squeeze every last drop of data, of information out of the data that we collect.
So it's a very small investment that pays for people's time and engineering and development over many years.
So I don't know is the answer to the question. I'm not sure what's going to happen, but I know it's a problem and we are in huge sympathy with our colleagues in America at the moment.
[00:29:23] Speaker A: Britain is very well positioned in the world of space, is it not?
[00:29:28] Speaker B: It's pretty good, I think. I would say it probably punches above its weight. We have a great reputation for high precision engineering. We do these things really well. And there are lots of spin off companies in the UK that are building satellites, launching them. Part of this network of Earth observation satellites I was talking about. It's a growing thing. I'm the UK space agent agency wants, and the UK government wants to grow space as part of its contribution to the economy over the next 10 years. And it's, you know, it's working hard at that. So it's small compared to other countries probably, but it's growing.
[00:30:02] Speaker A: Well, it's great to meet people yourself, Ben. Young people with such a knowledge and interest.
And it's great to hear that astronomy is trending on tick tock.
[00:30:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I really like that.
[00:30:18] Speaker A: We look forward to seeing you all on June 7 and June 8 in Exhibition Road for the Great Exhibition Road Festival.
Thank you very much, Ben, for coming and sharing your wisdom. Thank you very much, Philippa.
[00:30:30] Speaker B: You're most welcome. Thank you for the invitation.
[00:30:32] Speaker A: You've been listening to Great exchanges which is a co production between Imperial College London and Portobello Radio.
See you next time, Portobello.
