Stephen Hawking gets it right again

Summary

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Science In Action – "Stephen Hawking Gets It Right Again"

BBC World Service | Host: Roland Pease | Date: September 18, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode spotlights a landmark confirmation of Stephen Hawking’s key theory about black holes, made possible by an unprecedented observation of gravitational waves from a black hole merger. The show also covers the European Space Agency’s (ESA) adventurous new "Comet Interceptor" mission—designed to chase a yet-to-be-discovered comet—alongside a preview of the Vera Rubin Observatory’s solar system survey capabilities. Wrapping up, the episode addresses funding uncertainty for NASA’s Juno spacecraft at Jupiter and its continued scientific value.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Hawking’s Black Hole Prediction Confirmed (01:50–09:26)

• Background:

  • Black holes are regions where gravity is so strong not even light escapes.
  • When two black holes merge, they create gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime detectable billions of light years away.

• Recent Event:

  • On January 14, 2025, a black hole merger produced the clearest gravitational wave signal yet, allowing scientists to test Hawking’s area theorem.

• Expert Guest:
  Alberto Vecchio (University of Birmingham), one of the hundreds credited on the discovery paper.

• Key Insights:

  • This event had a signal-to-noise ratio three times stronger than the famous original 2015 detection.
  • The two black holes, each ~30 times the mass of the Sun, spiraled together at up to 50% the speed of light before merging.

• Hawking’s Area Theorem:

  • Hawking predicted the total event horizon area after black hole mergers can never decrease—only stay the same or grow.
  • Using gravitational wave data, scientists calculated the event horizon areas before and after the merger, confirming the total did indeed increase.
  • Vecchio likened the pre-merger area to "the area of the United Kingdom" and post-merger to "the surface area of Sweden" ([09:09]).

• Notable Quote:

  “One of the remarkable discoveries made by Stephen Hawking is that black holes have an area that can never shrink in time, can only grow. And so this was a way of testing this prediction...”
  – Alberto Vecchio ([06:57])

• Memorable Explanation:

  “If you know the radius, you can work out the surface area of a football... Take a black hole, it’s exactly the same thing.”
  – Alberto Vecchio ([08:18])

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2. ESA’s Comet Interceptor – Waiting for a Target (10:32–16:05)

• Mission Overview:

  • ESA plans to launch a spacecraft without a predetermined target, a first for the agency.
  • The Comet Interceptor will “wait” near the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point until a suitable, newly discovered comet approaches from the outer solar system.

• Expert Guest:
  Colin Snodgrass (University of Edinburgh, project scientist)

• Mission Goal:

  • Intercept a "pristine" long-period comet—its first visit since the solar system formed, fresh from the Oort Cloud.

• Mission Design:

  • Main spacecraft plus two smaller probes for high-risk, close flybys.
  • Will gather most data in a 24-hour window during close approach.

• Risks & Rewards:

  • Encounter may be at velocities up to 70 km/s; even small dust grains could destroy a probe.
  • These risks are justified by the potential to study untouched comet material up close.

• Notable Quote:

  “We're building the spacecraft and then looking for the comet.”
  – Colin Snodgrass ([10:58])

  “The peak of the activity is really, you know, a day of frantic data collection in a six-year mission.”
  – Colin Snodgrass ([15:45])

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3. The Vera Rubin Observatory: A Game-Changer for Comet Discovery (16:05–22:02)

• Context:

  • Comet Interceptor’s success depends on early detection of incoming comets before they race past the Sun.
  • The Vera Rubin Observatory, just coming online, is key to this effort. It will conduct the “Legacy Survey of Space and Time” (LSST).

• Expert Guest:
  Meg Schwarm (Queen’s University Belfast, Rubin and Comet Interceptor teams)

• Capabilities:

  • Can image 45 full moons at once, surveying the night sky every three days.
  • Will enable detection of faint, distant comets months or years ahead of previous possible times.
  • Anticipated to identify thousands of new comets, with most solar system objects found in the first two years.

• Notable Quotes:

  “We're going to go sit and wait in space and hope somebody finds something for us to see. But it's really fortuitous timing ... [with] Rubin Observatory being built.”
  – Meg Schwarm ([16:51])

  “The solar system is going to completely change, at least in terms of what we know about it, over the next two years from Rubin Observatory.”
  – Meg Schwarm ([21:45])

• Memorable Moment:
  Schwarm explained the “dirty snowball” nature of comets and the challenge of detecting them before they become active ([18:05–19:53]).

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4. NASA’s Juno: At the Crossroads (22:02–26:56)

• Mission Status:

  • Launched in 2016, Juno has exceeded its original goals, now operating on a mission extension.
  • Current funding for science operations ends in late September 2025.

• Expert Guest:
  Scott Bolton (Southwest Research Institute, Principal Investigator for Juno)

• Achievements:

  • Gathered data on Jupiter’s interior, atmosphere, and moons.
  • Provided the clearest evidence yet of a massive volcanic eruption on Jupiter’s moon Io.

• Future Prospects:

  • There’s a proposal for a further three-year extension (to 2028), currently under review.
  • Juno remains in good health despite harsh radiation, with resources and instrumentation functioning well.

• Financial Considerations:

  • Operating costs are in the “tens of millions” per year versus billions to build a new mission.
  • The value proposition is strong given the cost already invested.

• Notable Quotes:

  “You're leveraging an asset and you've already paid mostly for it. ... In this case, I think it probably is valuable, certainly the review of our proposal suggested that.”
  – Scott Bolton ([25:35])

  “To reproduce Juno would probably be billions and to run it each year is probably tens of millions.”
  – Scott Bolton ([26:30])

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• “Black holes have also beautiful simplicity because regardless of the past history, what remains is an object that is just described by two numbers.”
  – Alberto Vecchio ([06:00])

• “You wait around for, I don't know how many years you might have to wait before you get something you want. You're then flying by, you hope that it survives the mission.”
  – Roland Pease ([15:27])

• “It's a 10 year survey, but we don't have to wait all the 10 years to find [the comets].”
  – Meg Schwarm ([21:05])

• “No, I'm waiting and, and hopeful that things will work out. We'll see.”
  – Scott Bolton, on Juno’s uncertain future ([26:56])

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Segment Timestamps

| Segment | Start | End | |-------------------------------------------------------------|------------|------------| | Hawking’s Theory & Black Hole Merger | 01:50 | 09:26 | | ESA Comet Interceptor Mission w/ Colin Snodgrass | 10:32 | 16:05 | | Vera Rubin Observatory & Comet Hunting w/ Meg Schwarm | 16:05 | 22:02 | | NASA Juno Mission & Future Funding w/ Scott Bolton | 22:02 | 26:56 |

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Summary Takeaway

This episode celebrates breakthroughs in gravitational wave astronomy, notably affirming Stephen Hawking’s area theorem, while also highlighting the bold, patient strategy of the Comet Interceptor and the observational might soon to be brought by the Vera Rubin Observatory. The story of Juno underscores how continued investment in long-lived missions can yield extraordinary scientific returns—as well as the sometimes precarious nature of space science funding.

The show’s tone balances scientific wonder with practical realities, offering a hopeful outlook on what the next years may reveal across the cosmos.

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Transcript

[Roland Pease]

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[Roland Pease]

Welcome to Science in Action from the BBC World Service with me, Roland Pease. Later we're hearing about the European Space Agency's plans to chase a comet.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

The fact that we have this next generation telescope coming on really allows the fact that you could have this somewhat bonkers mission, right to build a mission where you don't know where you're going.

[Roland Pease]

And about the NASA mission to Jupiter that's running just fine but could be turned off in a couple of weeks.

[Scott Bolton]

The instruments are still functioning, the spacecraft's functioning, we are going through more and more radiation, so it's certainly getting degraded, but everything seems to be working quite well to the point that you could do a lot of science with it. If we are able to continue, we.

[Roland Pease]

Start with a proof of one of Stephen Hawking's key theories about black holes. These are regions of space so dense that even light can't escape them, so there's obviously little to be learned by simply watching them. But when two of them collide, they stir up spacetime so violently the ripples can be detected just about from billions of light years away. Indeed, it was 10 years ago this month the first such merger was detected by ligo, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory in America, a short whoop signaling the giant masses as they orbited the last few times before uniting as one. Since then, around 300 more mergers have been recorded, including one on 14 January this year that rang so clear it gave this unique test of Hawking's theory. The audio version doesn't really capture the immensity of the event. But I've seen this described as the loudest and as the clearest signal yet. Gravitational wave detectorist Alberto Vecchio told me each is equally good.

[Alberto Vecchio]

It is clearest or loudest in the sense of what we call the signal to noise ratio. So how much the signal dominates the noise in the instruments. And this has been, you know, three times as large, based on this criterion, than the very first detection, which was from a system of sufficiently similar in terms of masses, distance, and so on.

[Roland Pease]

Was it quite close or was it.

[Interviewer]

Again, sort of hundreds of millions of light years away?

[Alberto Vecchio]

Oh, this was about 1.3 billion light years away. So I traveled for more than a billion years across the universe, and, you know, in January, it reached us and we managed to detect it and the.

[Roland Pease]

As it were, the vital statistics of the black holes.

[Alberto Vecchio]

So this is a binary. Two black holes orbiting around each other like the Earth orbits around the sun. So because they radiate energy in gravitational waves, they get closer and closer. These are physical objects that are 30 times the mass of the sun, which is packed into a region of about 100 kilometers. So is, you know, the distance between, I don't know, Birmingham and London, something like this. We pick them up when they are roughly at a separation corresponding to the, you know, the size of the United kingdom. So about 1,000 kilometers apart. We observe the last 10 kilometers, 20 orbits in this stance where they move around at about, you know, 10%, 30%, 50% of the speed of light. And because they are getting closer and closer, at the end, they merge, they smash into each other. And we capture, you know, all this energy is pumped into these perturbation of space and time that we call gravitational waves.

[Roland Pease]

And we just pick up that tiny.

[Interviewer]

Tiny movement across all those billions of light years.

[Roland Pease]

So, so the headline on this is that this is a test for the first time of a prediction by Stephen Hawking.

[Alberto Vecchio]

Yeah, I mean, there are different elements that are connected. So what we are really talking about is testing the behavior of these objects that we call black holes. And just to be clear, black holes are, if you want, a product or were initially a product of mathematics. You know, Einstein writes down the equations, and then people try to solve them and derive the solutions of these equations that describe, for example, what, you know, a black hole is a mass in a particularly small, confined region of space time. And so these predictions are quite astonishing. You know, we consider black holes as monsters that are formed through very complicated processes in astrophysics. But it turns out that black holes have also beautiful simplicity because regardless of the past history, what remains is an object that is just described by two numbers. So the mass and, you know, how fast they rotate, the spin. And there is a famous solution that describes the behavior of these objects, which is due to Roy Kerr, who is a New Zealander mathematician that worked out this in the 1960s. Now, really trying to understand the behavior of these objects really follows these beautiful laws of general relativity and mathematics is highly trivial because we do not find black holes nearby. And so this is a test really, that these black black holes behave according to what has been worked out by, you know, Kerr and others following on the footstep of Einstein's. And one of the also remarkable discoveries made by Stephen Hawking is that their black holes have an area that can never shrink in time, can only grow. And so this was a way of testing this prediction that the area from the two black holes, when they form a new one, has become larger.

[Roland Pease]

So the area, this is like the.

[Interviewer]

Balloon, as it were, that surrounds them, from which light cannot escape.

[Alberto Vecchio]

Exactly. So you have these two spheres, if you want the black hole, the horizon, the black holes that then would merge into a single one, which is the black hole that is formed and the sum of the two balls. The surface area of the two balls has got to be smaller than the surface area of the new ball.

[Roland Pease]

I mean, what you're saying sounds a.

[Interviewer]

Bit weird to me because obviously these are black, so we can't see the area of these things. You're telling me that the way that the black holes are stirring up space time before and after the collision gives.

[Roland Pease]

You a proxy, In a sense, it's a way of interpreting the area of these objects.

[Alberto Vecchio]

Absolutely. So it's, the area is very well defined mathematical object that according to the theory, depends only, as I said, on these two numbers. In the very same way, if you want to measure the area of football, you know, if you know what is the radius, then you know what is the surface area. We all do in, you know, algebra and math in school. And you take a black hole is exactly the same thing. The area is a very well defined physical quantity and has an important meaning. You know, that if general relativity is correct, then this depends only on two quantities, this mass and the spin. You know, what is the relation between the two. You measure mass and spin, therefore you measure the area and you carry this through the area.

[Interviewer]

What's it like? I presume it's not as small as a football.

[Alberto Vecchio]

It's a sphere, it's a large sphere. And you know, in this specific case, the area was of the two black holes before they merged was roughly the area of the United Kingdom, and then when they merged, essentially became twice as large. Is like the surface area of Sweden.

[Roland Pease]

Alberto Vecchio of Birmingham University, one of the hundreds of researchers listed on the paper announcing the new discovery. I think they may still outnumber the actual number of detections on last week's programme. From the planetary science conference in Finland, you heard about the race to get space probes into orbit to meet asteroid Apophis when it flies close past Earth in 2029, as well as the race to turn every available telescope towards the just discovered interstellar comet 3I Atlas as it briefly races through the inner solar system. But sometimes patience is needed. And much of the talk there was of the European Space Agency's comet interceptor mission, which will sit in space, close to Earth until the right kind of comet comes flying in from the outer reaches of the solar system and then start chasing it. I wracked my brains. Is this the first time a mission has been launched without having a specified target? Edinburgh University's Colin Snodgrass, one of the project scientists, believes it is, yes.

[Colin Snodgrass]

I think it might be the first one. It's certainly a novelty for ESA to plan a whole mission and to build it, to launch it and potentially even launch it into space before we know where we're going. This is exactly the opposite way you would normally do a space mission. You'd normally start with the object you want to see, figure out how you would get there and then figure out, you know, how much fuel would that take and design your spacecraft accordingly. And instead, yeah, we are, we're going the other way around. We're building the spacecraft and then looking for the comet.

[Interviewer]

So once it's launched, it's just be sort of drifting around the sun, waiting for the message head off somewhere.

[Colin Snodgrass]

So it's, it's going to, it's going to loiter in space and it's going to loiter around a point called the Lagrange point, the second Lagrange point for the Earth sun system. What that is is it's kind of a gravitational sweet spot where you can park something in space with using little fuel. The reason why we are going there is because we're meant to launch with the Ariel Space Telescope, which is an ESA mission which is going to launch to study exoplanets. It's also going to go to L2. So that's a good place if you want to just park in space and wait for something. So we're going to go there and then look for a comet.

[Interviewer]

And what kind of comet is it that you're interested in?

[Colin Snodgrass]

So what we're looking for is we're looking for a new comet, something that's coming into the inner solar system for the first time since these things were formed. So these are what we call long period comets, comets that we've not seen before. These things could have orbital periods thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. This was formed when the planets were forming. It's now, since that time been at the very edge of our solar system, an area called the Oort Cloud, which, where it's in kind of deep freeze. And now it's for the first time venturing back in. So what you're seeing is a really pristine example of what the solar system looked like when it was forming.

[Interviewer]

And that's because comets, when they go through a bit like Halley's comet does every, whatever it is, 80 or so years, it gets cooked a little bit each time. So it's not the way it was billions of years ago.

[Colin Snodgrass]

Exactly. One of the things that we learned from the ESA Rosetta mission, which was the mission, the first mission to orbit a comet, stay with one for a while as it went past the sun, we saw just how much the surface changed in one passage past the sun. And 67P the Rosetta target, it goes past the sun every six or seven years. So it's, you know, very evolved, Halley. Yeah, as you say, it's. Even though it's a long time, it's like, you know, a human lifetime orbit, it's a long period for us, but this is nothing on the age of a solar system. So it's been past the sun many, many times.

[Interviewer]

And so what does the mission comprise of? And you know, so you get the message, here's a comet to go and visit. What's the, what happens next?

[Colin Snodgrass]

So it's actually made up of three spacecraft. So the main spacecraft will fire the rockets, head us off towards meeting a comet. The spacecraft will have very fast flight by. It's not like Rosetta, we go into orbit. It's more like the Giotto mission to halley in the 80s. We'll go shooting past this comet at high speed. But to increase the amount of information we can get, we're actually carrying two smaller probes that go with the main spacecraft that they're released just before we get there. And so the main spacecraft has a reasonably distant flyby, maybe 1000km or so so within the comet coma environment, but not in the very heart of it, where the most of the dust and gas is and where it would be a very dangerous place for the spacecraft, frankly. So we send these probes on trajectories that go much closer and they send back detailed information from up close, but they are expendable. And so they can take the risk of getting the real close up view, but they will likely at some point meet a destructive and exciting end.

[Interviewer]

I mean, that's the interesting thing with comets is in a sense, when they're spraying out material as they warm up and the gases evaporate and so on. For astronomers, that's really good because you get so much surface material to see, you see so much of it, you can get a very strong signal, but you also, I guess, want to see what the hard stuff underneath it is. The snowball beneath.

[Colin Snodgrass]

Exactly. And I mean really to get an actual image of the nucleus, the solid part of the center of a comet, this thing's only a few kilometers across. Normally, even though a comet trachoma is tens of thousands of kilometers. And so to get that view, you really need the spacecraft to get there and see the close up view. And then doing this with a fast flyby mission means that you'll get those views, but you're going to fly through this atmosphere, all this dust and gas that's coming off the comet and you're going to fly through it very, very fast. So the encounter velocity we could be meeting this thing at is in tens of kilometers a second. Up to 70km a second is the speed that spacecraft will meet the comet. That means that every little grain of dust is a rifle bullet. And spacecraft don't really like a hail of rifle bullets.

[Roland Pease]

So this is quite dangerous.

[Interviewer]

So you wait around for, I don't know how many years you might have to wait before you get something you want. You're then flying by, you hope that it survives the mission.

[Roland Pease]

I mean, how many, I don't know.

[Interviewer]

If it's weeks, days or hours of intensive activity will there be for you?

[Colin Snodgrass]

So I mean, the vast majority of the data we'll collect is basically within kind of 24 hours of the closest approach. It's really, you know, a, we'll obviously be getting some information at kind of lower resolution as we approach from the distance and we'll kind of look back after we pass with the main spacecraft. But yeah, the peak of the activity is really, you know, a day of frantic data collection in a six year mission.

[Roland Pease]

Cometary scientist Colin Snodgrass talking to BBC Science in Action at The European Planetary Sciences Conference last week, the comet interceptor mission can only work if they get enough warning of an incoming comet. Typically, new comets are already racing towards the sun when they're first detected. Their time in a solar system may be just a few months, but that's where the super powerful Vera Rubin telescope in Chile comes into play. Officially inaugurated earlier this year and about to go into full service in November, its sensitive optics should pick up approaching comets long before conventional telescopes can, which is the head start of comet interceptor needs. Astronomer Meg Sharm told me, yeah, it's.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Kind of a risky thing to be like, we're going to go sit and wait in space and hope somebody finds something for us to see. But it's really fortuitous timing that comet interceptor, you know, mission was accepted while Rubin Observatory is being built. And so it's really nice pairing. So the VC Rubin Observatory is been under construction for years now, but it is going through the last stages of commissioning. And so this telescope is the next generation amazing sort of technology. It has a big field of view, can cover about 45 times the size of the full moon in a single exposure. So it goes wide, but it goes deep as well. So we get basically the ability to survey the entire night sky within three days. And so it's, this telescope will execute the legacy survey of space and time and basically create the world's largest movie of the night sky over a decade.

[Interviewer]

And that will include the things in our solar system which are moving bit by bit each night.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Yeah, it's going to include moving solar system objects. It's going to include everything that goes bang and, you know, that are supernovae, astrophysical transients, variable stars, all of these things. And that's really exciting that finding moving objects in the solar system is one of the key priorities.

[Interviewer]

The point about comets is that they're, I mean, I think we still call them dirty snowballs. They're what, sort of hundreds of meters or kilometers across. As long as they're far out in the solar system, they're completely cold, so there's nothing to see. How, you know, how do you find them?

[Roland Pease]

Yeah, how do you find them?

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Well, one is a couple things is that they may not be just a dirty snowball because we do see some comets that are out, you know, at very large distances that are active. And so carbon monoxide is active throughout most of the solar system. And so when you want water ice driven sublimation, where it's the water ice that's driving it as it sublimates from ice to gas that's more in the inner solar system. But comets, probably most that we are detecting or we think that the Legacy survey space and Time will discover might be active out at those distances.

[Roland Pease]

Oh, right. Because I'm so used to the idea.

[Interviewer]

Of things waking up and becoming visible around the orbit of Jupiter or something like that, or maybe Saturn.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

There's a few that are, that are, you know, a little bit beyond that that are starting to appear to be active. Not every comet. And so that's one of the big things is why are some versus others. But even with all of that, because the LSST sees so deep. It's the widest and deepest solar system survey we've ever done. We're going to find thousands of comets. And so even between the, you know, if we're thinking between Jupiter and Saturn, we're going to find a lot. Even between Mars and Jupiter, we're going to find a lot of comets. And so this is really prime for being able to help out comet interceptor because LSST will be able to find the target that comet interceptor will go to.

[Interviewer]

And the target is going to be one that's coming for the first time into the solar system from way beyond Pluto.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

The hope is it's a dynamically new comet, meaning it's its first time entering the solar system, and that has been hanging out in the Oort Cloud, loosely bound to the solar system, and gets knocked in sort of by the gravitational effects of passing stars and the galactic tides.

[Roland Pease]

Just give me a sense of the.

[Interviewer]

Timescale of all this, because comets, which I'm familiar with, by the time they've been first seen, until they come close to the sun and then disappear out into the distance again. It's sort of a matter of a year, months or something like that.

[Roland Pease]

I mean, can you give them enough.

[Interviewer]

Warning for them to be ready to be in the right place?

[Narrator/Advertiser]

There's, I think the studies that have been done really do show that there's a good chance of finding something. And part of it is because the, you know, Rubin Observatories has the ability to go so deep and it's covering skies so quickly. Most of the things that are detectable now, we'll find 80% of those in the first two years. Now with comets, they're on very centric orbits, they're very far away. We will continue to find more comets over time. But of the things that would be totally observable and detectable by the Rubin Observatory, we get the inventory of those within the first two years.

[Interviewer]

I Mean, I guess in a funny way, whatever you're going to, it's a.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

10 year survey, but we don't have to wait all the 10 years to find them. What we're picking up is all those later years we're picking up those comets that are coming inward or turn on and become brighter. Right. Or ones that are moving inward and become, have now close enough for us to see because they've become bright enough. But it means that there's anything that should be within 24.5 magnitude, roughly should be within the limiting magnitude of the LSST survey, should be able to be found in roughly the first two years. So that I think makes it exciting in the right time frame for Common Interceptors launch. And also they have the ability to hang out for a little bit at the, you know, the Earth's ground point. So they're going to sit at L2, you know, where JWST is, and they can hold out there for a while, which is good. The solar system is going to completely change, at least in terms of what we know about it. And I think over the next two years from Ruben Observatory. And then we get to take a deeper and closer look at it when Common Interceptor gets to go look at one of these Rubin discoveries.

[Roland Pease]

Meg Schwarm of Queen's University Belfast, an astronomer on both the Vera Rubin Telescope and with the Comet Interceptor team waiting patiently for the right comet. Patience has played well with NASA's Juno mission which has been orbiting Jupiter on a slowly evolving path since 2016. Getting ever changing pictures of the giant planet, its violent radiation belt and its main moons. It operated so well that after its original specified run, it got an extended mission, basically funding for science, staff and ground operations in 2021. But that funding runs out in under two weeks. And principal investigator Scott Bolton of Southwest Research Institute doesn't know what's next.

[Scott Bolton]

So the first phase of the mission, we call it the prime mission, and that's what you originally wrote the proposal for and that's what you got selected.

[Interviewer]

For and that's what you spend, I don't know, a billion dollars or something.

[Scott Bolton]

Yeah. In order to get this. And then we wrote a first extension. And because Juno's rather unique, many times a mission will get extended, but it really is going in the same region and not changing. While we were still at Jupiter, we were exploring new parts of Jupiter's system in this first extended mission, which gave us the satellite flybys.

[Interviewer]

You've been going past the moons which.

[Scott Bolton]

Were incredibly important, plus you were able to answer questions about Jupiter's interior and its atmosphere, basically addressing some of the mysteries of the discoveries that we made in the prime mission. So they were. It was very important. That first extended mission went from the summer of 2021 through September of 2025 just now. And so last year, well ahead so that we could develop the proposal. And they had time to review it. We wrote the next extension, which would be from 2025 in September or October, I should say, through 28. 2028, three years. And that is what's sort of waiting to be decided.

[Interviewer]

The mission is still in good shape, is it?

[Scott Bolton]

The mission is in good shape, surprisingly, because we're going through a lot of radiation. We still have resources, Propellant instruments are still functioning, the spacecraft's functioning. We are going through more and more radiation. So it's certainly getting degr. But everything seems to be working quite well to the point that you could do a lot of science with it. If we are able to continue and.

[Interviewer]

There is more science to be done.

[Scott Bolton]

And there is more science. And again, we're going to go into another new region now, the inner moon region, where rings and radiation belts are. We're going to get slammed with a lot of radiation, but it's virtually an unexplored region.

[Interviewer]

So these are the small rings. They're created by dust particles, I guess they're visible, but from the ground. But this is.

[Scott Bolton]

They're very different than Saturn's rings. Yeah. So they're really going to teach us about how ring dynamics work. And also because Jupiter's magnetic field is embedded in these and it's very strong, you have a unique laboratory to understand something called dusty plasmas, which are very important probably in early solar systems and things that are forming. And then you have these inner moons and potentially other source bodies that maybe make the rings.

[Interviewer]

And you'll say that from the way you describe it, it's a pretty hostile environment. So you'd be a bit mad to propose a mission just to go there. But when you've got a mission that's already done all the stuff it really wanted, it's worth the risk.

[Scott Bolton]

Well, that's part of the advantage is you're leveraging an asset and you've already paid mostly for it. It's sort of like, you know, should you keep your car around past its warranty? And sometimes it's worth it, sometimes it's not. In this case, I think it probably is valuable, and certainly the review of our proposal suggested that. So I think that it is an efficient and a Kind of a bargain because, as you point out, Juno's right there with this incredible armor on it. But you also have to look at it, the whole picture, and say, okay, you know, NASA has to make a decision and that decision has to consider many, many things beyond Juno in trying to understand what they do.

[Interviewer]

But I presume you have a sense of the running cost, the maintenance cost.

[Roland Pease]

You know, I mean, I don't know.

[Interviewer]

How many people NASA pays to keep it going at the moment.

[Scott Bolton]

So Juno was, you know, to reproduce Juno would probably be billions and to run it each year is probably tens of millions.

[Interviewer]

So it's, it's.

[Scott Bolton]

So it's quite a bit. It's not nothing, but it's. But it's. But, but it's, it's a lot of a bargain.

[Roland Pease]

And so you're, you're just waiting for that decision.

[Interviewer]

You're losing a lot of sleep?

[Scott Bolton]

No, I'm waiting and, and hopeful that things will work out. We'll see.

[Roland Pease]

Scott Bolton, we talked to him also in May about the giant volcanic eruption bigger than anything on Earth, that Juno saw on Jupiter's moon IO at the end of last year. An example of what the mission can still offer if given a chance. You can find that program and an archive going back to 1994, including an interview by me on the dangers of an asteroid hitting the Earth. There's a hardy perennial that's on the Science in action [e-mail] in any case, I'm Roland Pease, the producer is Alex Mansfield. Thanks for listening.

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