The Mars Helicopter, Ingenuity aims to make the first powered flight on another planet when it takes off on Mars. It has now landed and safely checked in with the rover. It should detach and fly within the first 30-60 days of the mission. I learned a lot getting to visit the drone right before it was mounted on the rover at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

How do you fly in 1% of Earth’s atmosphere:
Have large rotors (they are 1.2m in diameter) and spin them very fast, around 2500 RPM (5x the speed of a helicopter on Earth).

Plus the aircraft has to be light:
The Mars helicopter weighs in at 1.8kg or around the same as a laptop. Every piece had to be stripped down for weight. Instead of using aerogel for insulation, the craft makes use of CO2 gaps between components. Even aerogel was too heavy!

One of the major challenges is surviving the Martian night:
Temperatures plunge to -80C to -100C so two thirds of the craft’s power is actually used to keep its electronics warm. Only one third is used for flying. The estimated flight time is 90 seconds.

The craft can’t be driven remotely, it will have to fly autonomously, using its own sensor suite to determine how to fly. The round trip 20 minute delay with Earth means steering the craft from mission control would be impossible.

Huge Thanks to Patreon Supporters:
Philipp Volgger, Chris Vargas, Ron Neal, Alfred Wallace, Colin Bellmore, Michael Krugman, James Knight, Donal Botkin, Sam Lutfi, Mohammed Al Sahaf, Kevin Beavers, Chuck Lauer Vose, Bryan Baker, James Wong, kkm, Manuel Zürcher, Tige Thorman, Jasper Xin, Leah Howard, Daniel Milum, Mathias Göransson, Stan Presolski, Lyvann Ferrusca, Arjun Chakroborty, June Kang, Listen Money Matters, Pindex, Joar Wandborg, DALE HORNE, Parker Linn, Roberto Rezende

Jonny Hyman was a legend in editing, animation, filming, and sound design for this video.

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE
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Every astronomy textbook tells us that soon after the Big Bang, there was a period of exponentially accelerating expansion called cosmic inflation. In a tiny fraction of a second, inflationary expansion multiplied the size of the universe by a larger factor than in the following 13 and a half billion years of regular expansion. This story seems like a bit of a … stretch. Is there really any mechanism that could cause something like this to happen? What what we’re covering today – the real physics of cosmic inflation.

Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Matt O’Dowd
Graphics by Leonardo Scholzer
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Produced By: Kornhaber Brown

Dark Energy Playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsPUh22kYmNA6WUmOsEEi32zi_RdSUF4i

The Quantum Vacuum and Hawking Radiation Playlist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvgZqGxF3eo&list=PLsPUh22kYmNAHB1W2_Ka2F83sObdczwKr

Most cosmologists buy some variation of the inflation hypothesis. It seems to very neatly solve some of the biggest questions in cosmology. Those being: why is matter and energy so smoothly spread out across the entire observable universe? And why is the geometry of the universe so flat? Neither should be expected unless the universe expanded much more rapidly early on. We explored these problems in an earlier video – worth a look if you really want to get inflation. Another problem fixed by inflation is the absence of magnetic monopoles – strange particles predicted to have been produced in the early universe. We’ll come back to those another time.

Big Bang Supporters:

Anton Lifshits
David Nicklas
Fabrice Eap
Juan Benet
Justin Lloyd
Morgan Hough

Quasar Supporters:

Mark Heising
Mark Rosenthal
Tambe Barsbay
Vinnie Falco

Hypernova Supporters:
Chuck Zegar
Danton Spivey
Donal Botkin
Edmund Fokschaner
Hank S
John Hofmann
John R. Slavik
Jordan Young
Joseph Salomone
kkm
Mark Heising
Matthew
Matthew O’Connor
Syed Ansar

Gamma Ray Burst Supporters:

Adrien Hatch
Alexey Eromenko
Andreas Nautsch
Bradley Jenkins
Brandon Labonte
Carlo Mogavero
Daniel Lyons
David Behtala
DFaulk
Dustan Jones
Geoffrey Short
James Flowers
James Quintero
John Funai
John Pollock
Jonah
Jonathan Nesfeder
Joseph Dillman
Joseph Emison
Josh Thomas
Kevin Warne
Kyle Hofer
Malte Ubl
Mark Vasile
Nathan Hitchings
Nick Virtue
Paul Rose
Ryan Jones
Scott Gossett
Sigurd Ruud Frivik
Tim Jones
Tim Stephani
Tommy Mogensen
Yurii Konovaliuk
سلطان الخليفي

Electric cars are now ready to take over thanks to advances in battery technology and their inherent benefits: torque, handling, maintenance. This video was sponsored by BMW: https://www.bmwusa.com/

Full disclosure: I drive an #electric #car. I think electric cars are the future, not mainly because they’re better for the environment (which they are if you drive the car for any reasonable length of time) but because they are just better cars. The have better torque and acceleration, better handling, they’re more efficient, quieter, they don’t smell, they’re cheaper to run and best of all you never have to visit a gas station – this appeals to me. I never have to worry about being low on gas because every morning my car is charged and ready to go – just like my phone and laptop. And if you’re worried about range, don’t. Almost all trips can already be done in an electric car with modest battery pack. And fast chargers along the way make it possible to do longer road trips if necessary. You have to make rest stops anyway, just time them with the charging. And consider that battery tech is getting dramatically cheaper, smaller, lighter. All these reasons are why I see the #future of cars as electric.

Writing & Research
Derek Muller
Jonny Hyman
Matthew Shribman https://ve42.co/sciencebath

Editing, Animation, Audio, & Music:
Jonny Hyman

Camerawork:
Raquel Nuno
Jonny Hyman

1890s Music “National fantasie” by William Paris Chambers, archived in Library of Congress
#BMWUSA #NEXTGen #BMWPartner #ad

Thank you to Draper and its Hack the Moon initiative for supporting PBS Digital Studios | Learn more at https://wehackthemoon.com.

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE

One of the fundamental questions humanity has always asked is how big is our Universe? For much of human history, people believed that Planet Earth was the very center of the entire universe. And Earth is pretty big. But compared the rest of the universe, we are infinitesimally small.

The animation in this video the Digital Universe data collection curated by the American Museum of Natural History. The software is used to visualize these datasets is OpenSpace, which is developed through a collaboration between AMNH, Linköping University in Sweden, New York University, and the University of Utah. The software and datasets are open source and are free to download and explore. https://www.openspaceproject.com/

Credit: From the ESO Supernova to the end of the Universe at 00:52
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hy2cxmHuEAs
Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser/spaceengine.org

Credit: Cepheid Variable 4:06
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXJBrRmHPj8
NASA, ESA, M. Kornmesser

I know, this video is a bit different from most Space Time videos. It’s part of a PBS miniseries called Stellar, done in collaboration with Diana Cowern from @physicsgirl and Joe Hanson from @It’sOkayToBeSmart. Over six episodes we travel to telescopes, go inside space research centers, and chat with amazing scientists. Next up is Joe’s episode where he explores where life might be outside our solar system.

Check out Joe’s episode here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoxGOL-Ow9w

Check out the other episodes in this series:

The Quasar from The Beginning of Time | STELLAR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqCPn…

Seeing a Black Hole with a Planet-Sized Telescope | STELLAR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUpKt…

I Visited the First Gravitational Wave Detector! LIGO | STELLAR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtp71…

How We’ll Find the Aliens in Our Solar System! | STELLAR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfqpYDVhXd8&t=2s

Stellar is a part of the PBS Summer of Space. There’ll be lots of awesome space related content all summer long on PBS. See what’s happening at https://www.pbs.org/summer-of-space/

#SummerOfSpacePBS #astrophysics #space

Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by: Sophia Chen, Matt O’Dowd, Andrew Kornhaber, Eric Brown
Directed by: Andrew Kornhaber & Eric Brown
Producer: Randa Eid
Director of Photography: Eric Brouse
Sound: Justin Pope & Brett Van Duesen
Production Assistant: Marifisia Bel
Editing: Pavel Ezrohi, Tom Levin, Rebbecca Senn
Graphics: Murilo Lopes
Assistant Editing: Daniel Sircar
Produced By: Kornhaber Brown

Check out the new Space Time Merch Store!
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Apollo astronauts trained in nuclear bomb craters at the Nevada National Security Site. But why?Thanks Audible! Start listening with a 30-day trial and your first audiobook plus two Audible Originals free when you go to http://audible.com/veritasium or text veritasium to 500500

I found this story fascinating because in a way a nuclear bomb crater is more like a meteorite impact site than an impact site itself. Consider: Barringer Crater was claimed to be a meteorite impact site but geologists dismissed it as a volcanic formation. It was only after studying nuclear bomb craters and the minerals found there that geologists concluded the energy and pressures that created Barringer Crater were too high to be from volcanic activity and therefore must have formed from a meteorite impact.

Special Thanks to:
Nevada National Security Site
The National Atomic Testing Museum
Jonny Hyman and Verse: https://youtu.be/7bUUGzi-AAY
Active Galactic for footage of craters in Arizona: https://youtu.be/yhoooBpndog

Special thanks to Patreon supporters:
a human, Alfred Wallace, Arjun Chakroborty, Brent Stewart, Bryan Baker, Chris Vargas, Chuck Lauer Vose, Clip Tree, Coale Shifflett, Colin Bellmore, DALE HORNE, Daniel Milum, Donal Botkin, Eric Velazquez, Illya Nayshevsky, James Knight, James Wong, Jasper Xin, Joar Wandborg, Johnny, June Kang, Kevin Beavers, kkm, Leah Howard, Listen Money Matters, Lyvann Ferrusca, Manuel Zürcher, Mathias Göransson, Michael Bradley Wirz, Michael Krugman, Mohammed Al Sahaf, OddJosh, Philipp Volgger, Pindex, Roberto Rezende, Robin DeBank, Ron Neal, Sam Lutfi, Stan Presolski, Tige Thorman, Warrior8252

Filmed by Raquel Nuno
Story and Editing by Derek Muller and Jonny Hyman
Music and Animation by Jonny Hyman
Produced by Casey Rentz

Thanks to LastPass for sponsoring PBS DS. You can check out LastPass by going to https://lastpass.onelink.me/HzaM/2019Q3JulyPBSspace

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE

Our universe started with the big bang. But only for the right definition of “our universe”. And of “started” for that matter. In fact, probably the Big Bang is nothing like what you were taught.
A hundred years ago we discovered the beginning of the universe. Observations of the retreating galaxies by Edwin Hubble and Vesto Slipher, combined with Einstein’s then-brand-new general theory of relativity, revealed that our universe is expanding. And if we reverse that expansion far enough – mathematically, purely according to Einstein’s equations, it seems inevitable that all space and mass and energy should once have been compacted into an infinitesimally small point – a singularity. It’s often said that the universe started with this singularity, and the Big Bang is thought of as the explosive expansion that followed. And before the Big Bang singularity? Well, they say there was no “before”, because time and space simply didn’t exist. If you think you’ve managed to get your head around that bizarre notion then I have bad news. That picture is wrong. At least, according to pretty much every serious physicist who studies the subject. The good news is that the truth is way cooler, at least as far as we understand it.

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Support Space Time on Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime

Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Matt O’Dowd
Graphics by Leonardo Scholzer
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Produced By: Kornhaber Brown

Big Bang Supporters:

Anton Lifshits
David Nicklas
Fabrice Eap
Juan Benet
Justin Lloyd
Morgan Hough

Quasar Supporters:

Mark Heising
Mark Rosenthal
Tambe Barsbay
Vinnie Falco

Hypernova Supporters:
Chuck Zegar
Danton Spivey
Donal Botkin
Edmund Fokschaner
Hank S
John Hofmann
John R. Slavik
Jordan Young
Joseph Salomone
kkm
Mark Heising
Matthew
Matthew O’Connor
Syed Ansar

Gamma Ray Burst Supporters:

Adrien Hatch
Alexey Eromenko
Andreas Nautsch
Bradley Jenkins
Brandon Labonte
Carlo Mogavero
Daniel Lyons
David Behtala
DFaulk
Dustan Jones
Geoffrey Short
James Flowers
James Quintero
John Funai
John Pollock
Jonah
Jonathan Nesfeder
Joseph Dillman
Joseph Emison
Josh Thomas
Kevin Warne
Kyle Hofer
Malte Ubl
Mark Vasile
Nathan Hitchings
Nick Virtue
Paul Rose
Ryan Jones
Scott Gossett
Sigurd Ruud Frivik
Tim Jones
Tim Stephani
Tommy Mogensen
Yurii Konovaliuk
سلطان الخليفي

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE
↓ More info below ↓

Check out the new Space Time Merch Store!
https://pbsspacetime.com/

Support Space Time on Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime

When we finally have a quantum internet you’ll be able to simultaneously like and dislike this video. But we don’t. So I hope you like it. The world is widely regarded as being well and truly into the digital age, also called the information age. No longer are economies and industries solely characterised by the physical goods they produce, and in fact some of the largest companies in the world produce no physical goods at all: digital information is a commodity in its own right. As discussed in a previous episode, this worldwide digital economy is fundamentally reliant on certain cryptographic processes. Currently these processes work in the realm of classical cryptography, but one day soon this may not be enough and so quantum cryptographic methods and algorithms are being developed. However, it’s one thing to design a protocol, it’s something else entirely to build a system to support it. To understand what needs to be done we need to get to the foundations of quantum mechanics – we need to talk about quantum information theory.

Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Graeme Gossel and Matt O’Dowd
Graphics by Leonardo Scholzer
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Produced By: Kornhaber Brown

Big Bang Supporters:

Anton Lifshits
David Nicklas
Fabrice Eap
Juan Benet
Justin Lloyd
Morgan Hough

Quasar Supporters:

Mark Heising
Mark Rosenthal
Tambe Barsbay
Vinnie Falco

Hypernova Supporters:
Chuck Zegar
Danton Spivey
Donal Botkin
Edmund Fokschaner
Hank S
John Hofmann
John R. Slavik
Jordan Young
Joseph Salomone
kkm
Mark Heising
Matthew
Matthew O’Connor
Syed Ansar

Gamma Ray Burst Supporters:

Adrien Hatch
Alexey Eromenko
Andreas Nautsch
Bradley Jenkins
Brandon Labonte
Carlo Mogavero
Daniel Lyons
David Behtala
DFaulk
Dustan Jones
Geoffrey Short
James Flowers
James Quintero
John Funai
John Pollock
Jonah
Jonathan Nesfeder
Joseph Dillman
Joseph Emison
Josh Thomas
Kevin Warne
Kyle Hofer
Malte Ubl
Mark Vasile
Nathan Hitchings
Nick Virtue
Paul Rose
Ryan Jones
Scott Gossett
Sigurd Ruud Frivik
Tim Jones
Tim Stephani
Tommy Mogensen
Yurii Konovaliuk
سلطان الخليفي

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE
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Support Space Time on Patreon
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Energy too cheap to meter – that was the promise of nuclear power in the 1950s, at least according to Lewis Strauss chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. That promise has not come to pass – but with some incredible new technologies, perhaps it still could. The question is – should it?

Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Matt O’Dowd
Graphics by Leonardo Scholzer
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Produced By: Kornhaber Brown

If we want to convert mass into energy, fission gives the most bang for our buck. Unfortunately that “bang” can be literal. Use of nuclear energy may risk the proliferation of nuclear weaponry, and there’s also the problem of nuclear waste, and the specter of horrible accidents. This last one was painted in terrifying detail in the recent dramatization of the Chernobyl disaster. Nuclear reactors sound scary because the disasters are pretty epic. However the reality is that far, far more people die from straight up air pollution due to coal-fired power plants than ever died in a nuclear reactor accident. In fact the radioactivity around coal-fired plants is also higher due to the trace but completely uncontained radioactive products of coal burning.

But the most compelling attraction is that nuclear power doesn’t directly produce carbon emissions. In fact nuclear power may be our most sure path to reducing carbon emissions and halting climate change. But can we do nuclear power safely enough? There are modern ideas – including the much-hyped thorium reactor – that suggest maybe we can. Before we can understand those we’ll need to review how nuclear reactors work.

Big Bang Supporters:

Anton Lifshits
David Nicklas
Fabrice Eap
Juan Benet
Justin Lloyd
Morgan Hough

Quasar Supporters:

Mark Heising
Mark Rosenthal
Tambe Barsbay
Vinnie Falco

Hypernova Supporters:
Chuck Zegar
Danton Spivey
Donal Botkin
Edmund Fokschaner
Hank S
John Hofmann
John R. Slavik
Jordan Young
Joseph Salomone
kkm
Mark Heising
Matthew
Matthew O’Connor
Syed Ansar

Gamma Ray Burst Supporters:

Adrien Hatch
Alexey Eromenko
Andreas Nautsch
Bradley Jenkins
Brandon Labonte
Carlo Mogavero
Daniel Lyons
David Behtala
DFaulk
Dustan Jones
Geoffrey Short
James Flowers
James Quintero
John Funai
John Pollock
Jonah
Jonathan Nesfeder
Joseph Dillman
Joseph Emison
Josh Thomas
Kevin Warne
Kyle Hofer
Malte Ubl
Mark Vasile
Nathan Hitchings
Nick Virtue
Paul Rose
Ryan Jones
Scott Gossett
Sigurd Ruud Frivik
Tim Jones
Tim Stephani
Tommy Mogensen
Yurii Konovaliuk
سلطان الخليفي

Thank you to Draper and its “We Hack the Moon” initiative for supporting PBS Digital Studios.
Learn more at https://wehackthemoon.com.

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE

Check out Physics Girl visit LIGO to see where they discovered Gravitational Waves
https://youtu.be/jtp71NT0GNg

Recently, the oldest quasar ever seen was discovered by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, the Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, as well as the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona. In this first episode of the PBS DS mini-series, STELLAR, Matt travels to the top of Mauna Kea to visit the Gemini North telescope and see just how they found this ancient Quasar and it’s massive black hole.

Stellar is a brand new miniseries done in collaboration with Dianna Cowern from @Physics Girl and Joe Hanson from @It’s Okay To Be Smart Over six episodes we travel to some of the world’s most important telescopes, go inside amazing space research centers, and talk with brilliant scientists. Next up, Dianna from Physics Girl visits LIGO observatory in Washington that detected the very first gravitational waves. Then Joe Hanson visits one of the telescopes that was part of world spanning Event Horizon Telescope.

You’ll be able to see future episodes on the Physics Girl and It’s Okay to be Smart YouTube channels, as well as the PBS Digital Studios Facebook page.

Stellar is a part of the PBS Summer of Space. There will be lots of awesome space-related content all summer long on PBS. See what’s happening at https://www.pbs.org/summer-of-space/

#SummerOfSpacePBS #astrophysics #space

Special Thanks to Joy Pollard and Gemini Observatory for all their help making this episode.

Check out the new Space Time Merch Store!
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Support Space Time on Patreon
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Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by: Sophia Chen, Matt O’Dowd, Andrew Kornhaber, Eric Brown
Directed by: Eric Brown and Andrew Kornhaber
Producer: Randa Eid
Director of Photography: Eric Brouse
Sound: Tobi Nova
Production Assistant: Anna Bosketti
Editing: Pavel Ezrohi
Graphics: Murilo Lopes
Assistant Editing: Daniel Sircar
Produced By: Kornhaber Brown

To learn to think like a scientist check out http://Brilliant.org/SpaceTime

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE

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Black holes are really only dangerous if you get too close. Ha, who am I kidding. It turns out they may be responsible for ending star formation across the entire universe.

Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Matt O’Dowd
Graphics by Leonardo Scholzer
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Produced By: Kornhaber Brown

When we first realized that black holes could have masses of millions or even billions of times that of the sun, it came as a bit of a shock. They were discovered as the driving force behind quasars, where matter is heated to extreme incandescence before its plunge into vast black holes. But if that weren’t enough, we soon realized that every single decent-sized galaxy contains such a supermassive black hole. By the beginning of the 21st century it became clear that black holes and the galaxies that contain them are very closely connected. The bigger the galaxy, the bigger its supermassive black hole. That might not sound surprising. What was weird was how closely they were connected. There’s a tight correlation between the mass the central black hole and the mass of the stars in the galactic bulge – that’s the central ball-like part of a spiral galaxy, or the entirety of an elliptical galaxy, and every bulge contains a supermassive black hole around one-one-thousandth its mass. And there’s an even tighter relationship between the black hole mass and the speed that stars are moving in their random orbits within the galactic bulge – the so-called stellar velocity dispersion – which itself depends of the total mass of the galaxy, including dark matter.

Big Bang Supporters:

Anton Lifshits
David Nicklas
Fabrice Eap
Juan Benet
Justin Lloyd

Quasar Supporters:

Mark Heising
Mark Rosenthal
Tambe Barsbay
Vinnie Falco

Hypernova Supporters:
Chuck Zegar
Danton Spivey
Donal Botkin
Edmund Fokschaner
Hank S
John Hofmann
John R. Slavik
Jordan Young
Joseph Salomone
kkm
Mark Heising
Matthew
Matthew O’Connor
Syed Ansar

Gamma Ray Burst Supporters:

Adrien Hatch
Alexey Eromenko
Andreas Nautsch
Bradley Jenkins
Brandon Labonte
Carlo Mogavero
Daniel Lyons
David Behtala
DFaulk
Dustan Jones
Geoffrey Short
James Flowers
James Quintero
John Funai
John Pollock
Jonah
Jonathan Nesfeder
Joseph Dillman
Joseph Emison
Josh Thomas
Kevin Warne
Kyle Hofer
Malte Ubl
Mark Vasile
Nathan Hitchings
Nick Virtue
Paul Rose
Ryan Jones
Scott Gossett
Sigurd Ruud Frivik
Tim Jones
Tim Stephani
Tommy Mogensen
Yurii Konovaliuk
سلطان الخليفي