Quantum Blueberry Moon

nooM yrrebeulB mutnauQ

Hey Earthlings, 

What’s up. I noticed we have some new Earthlings with us. Warmest of welcomes to you, Earthlings. Earthlings. Earth-lings. Eaarthlinnngs. Lol, autocorrect is not happy about that last one; it’s firmly making sure I know it. Anyway, I’m glad to be back. I’ve missed saying the word Earthling. It makes me feel connected to any possible non-Earthlings out there. “Titanlings” on Saturn’s moon Titan, maybe?

Oh actually, on that note … 

We may have an unfortunate update? (Haha, yeah that was a set up.)

With hints of a worldwide ocean hidden beneath its icy crust, Titan, one of Saturn’s 146 moons, has long been a tantalizing target for those who hunt for life beyond Earth — life as we know it, I mean. NASA even has a mission dubbed Dragonfly, slated to launch in 2028, that’ll send a flying, bug-shaped, robotic craft to the world. The agency really wants to scope out the situation over there. I mean, Titan is believed to host liquid-water volcanoes and gaseous great lakes. From the data we have, it appears to offer a terrific lead on where we’ll find life elsewhere in the solar system! However, per a new study, scientists aren’t so sure the trail we’re following will lead to the pot of viable organic molecules we dream of.

Basically, in order for such molecules on Titan to lead to life we’re familiar with, they’d need to be able to sink from the moon’s frozen surface down to a possible underground liquid ocean. At -290 degrees Fahrenheit (-179 degrees Celsius), Titan’s surface is simply too cold to allow life to thrive. Closer to the core, however, it’s more likely to be a bit warmer. But here’s the issue. 

In order for those molecules to sink, the idea is that comets impacting the moon would provide, like, tunnels, in a sense, for the molecules to fall into. And the new study suggests comet impacts on Titan are likely too sparse to allow for such a mechanism. Furthermore, the team also thinks it’s possible this issue may arise for other icy moons life-hunting scientists are targeting. Take Jupiter’s moon Europa, for instance. I guess we’ll see when Dragonfly gets there?

There’s Saturn and Titan^

Over the last week, things have not been looking great for the Voyager 1 probe. You know, the spacecraft that launched in 1977 shortly after its twin, Voyager 2. The one that became the first craft to exit the solar system’s gravitational tides and enter interstellar space. The one that gave us that stunning Pale Blue Dot image and the one that holds the famous Golden Record meant to carry proof of Earthling culture to the great expanse. Yeah, that one. It hasn’t been able to communicate with ground control for several months, and the team’s still trying to fix it. Hope still exists, but continues to dilute. If you want a deep dive into that, I’ve got a story I wrote on the topic linked just here.

There’s the Pale Blue Dot up there. That dot is Earth.

Crossing my fingers for some good news about V1. The end of Ingenuity’s Mars mission crushed me honestly (the little helicopter that’s been accompanying the Perseverance rover in studying the Red Planet.) Percy is now alone.

In non-space news, I have two cool updates to share with you. 

First off, scientists have finally figured out why blueberries are blue. Apparently, there’s a waxy outer layer on each blueberry with nanostructures that scatters blue and ultraviolet light. We humans obviously can’t see ultraviolet light, as it falls beyond the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, but we can indeed see blue. It’s thought that birds, animals that can see UV light, see blueberries as blue-UV? Imagine that.

There’s also been a slight, albeit important, update in the world of quantum computing. It has to do with something called “quantum error correction,” which is kind of the number one limiting step in the pipeline toward building a fully capable quantum computer. As its name suggests, a quantum computer is a computer that runs on 0’s and 1’s like your standard computer does, except it invokes the principles of quantum mechanics. 

If you want a deep rundown on how this all works, you can look around this article I have here. But if you’d rather not, what you need to know is quantum mechanics suggests things can exist in a sort of limbo between two states at the same time (superposition) until that limbo is cracked by some mechanism. And, while a thing is in superposition, it can be “entangled” with something else in superposition such that the two are kind of in sync. If one’s superposition is broken, so is the other’s superposition. But while they’re entangled, they can share the limbo state and thus transfer information instantaneously. This is very oversimplified, but you get the idea.

In a quantum computer, the 0’s and 1’s can be in superposition and get entangled with one another, opening doors to absolutely mind-bending computational power. Each bit in the computer is called a qubit. However, qubits are obviously extremely delicate, constantly performing a dance in the quantum realm with the risk of totally shutting down if their superpositions get messed up. That’s where quantum error correction comes in. It’s like a security blanket against losing all that precious superposition information. Once superposition is lost, everything earned in superposition goes with it. 

Usually, to error correct, scientists just stuff their quantum hardware with more qubits. They’re like backup qubits. I once interviewed a quantum computing expert who told me that “To have one pretty high-quality, logical qubit — it's not perfect, but it's good — it's something like 1,000 physical qubits for one.”

That was a couple of years ago, but, I mean, wow?

Okay, phew, SO, it would appear that one team managed to come up with a better, working solution. “The company has achieved an increase of 14% in the lifetime of a single qubit without using the ‘brute force’ redundancy of additional physical qubits.” Yes I just wrote all that to tell you about this single sentence. I’m quite excited for quantum computing to make some leaps. 

I know I said I was done with space, but I just remembered something important. Earlier this year, we saw NASA’s first attempt at the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program come to fruition with the launch of the private company Astrobotic’s Peregrine Lunar Lander. In short, CLPS is the agency’s way of making moon science more efficient by enlisting private companies to make a lunar mission’s vehicle and lander, then just throwing a few science experiments onboard. Peregrine carried a few other items onboard as well, such as some bitcoin type stuff (honestly I don’t know what that physically means in this case so don’t @ me) and even the creator of Star Trek’s ashes. 

But… so… Peregrine failed. 

It went on a pretty intense adventure after launching (in the wrong direction) and ultimately burned up in Earth’s atmosphere. The second CLPS attempt was recently launched, thanks to private company Intuitive Machines. Interestingly, among other payloads, it carries an art installation courtesy of Jeff Koons (he’s famous for those inflatable dog balloon statues you see around.) We’ll see how that goes, but we’ve already got some very pretty pics from the lander, named Odysseus.

OH, and I can’t let you go without discussing Zoozve! If you’ve been on Twitter lately, I’m sure you’ve seen some chatter about a Radiolab episode in which co-host Latif Nasser accidentally named a solar system object. You’ve gotta either listen to the episode linked just here or you can read my story in which I spoke to Nasser riiight here. 

Mk, that’s all from me. See ya!

-Mona