Why is infrared astronomy so hard? How do we fit giant telescopes into tiny rockets? What will the James Webb uncover? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION (AUTO-GENERATED)
Imagine trying to look at the stars with a telescope. Like, it's nighttime. There's no clouds. You're far away from the city. There's it's absolute perfect conditions.
The sky is just lit up with a million stars, and you've got a nice, big, fancy new telescope with one of those motorized mounts and a computer, and you just say, go to Orion, and it, like, goes to Orion, and it's all awesome. Right? And you look through the eyepiece, and you're ready to go, and you're you look through, and you wanna see that big zoomed in and, like, it's gonna be great. It's gonna be great. And then someone walks up to you and shines a giant flashlight right into your face.
That would kind of maybe make stargazing a little bit challenging, don't you think? You're wanting to look at the stars, but then there's a giant flashlight right in your face. You can only do stargazing when it's dark. That's why we do it at night because there is no sun to get in the way of all the stars. That was why we do it away from cities, so there's no city lights.
That's why we don't do it with supposed friends shining flashlights in your face when you're trying to do this. You have to do it dark. You have to get rid of the light pollution if you want to do some stargazing. That's for visible optical astronomy. Think about trying to do infrared astronomy, which is like optical astronomy, but not.
It's just in a different wavelength. It's with wavelengths longer than red. Infrared. It's below the red. So red, you can't even see it anymore.
That's just infrared astronomy. You can imagine that many things in the universe give off infrared radiation, and so you might imagine if your, say, eyeballs were able to detect infrared light, there might be lots of interesting things to see on the night sky. The night sky look look a little different in infrared than it does in visible. You might even, you know, be able to do some science with it, but you have to fight light pollution. You have to fight infrared light pollution.
And what gives off infrared radiation? Hot things. Know of any hot things around? Well, there's cities, you know, the heat from buildings and everything, that that's kinda warm. You are kind of warm.
You are literally giving off infrared radiation. That's right. We're all glowing. All humans glow, just not invisible light, but we glow in infrared light because we're kind of warm from our metabolism and every and everything. Oh, yeah.
There's also the whole entire planet Earth. The Earth is kind of warm, getting warmer, and it gives off infrared radiation. So imagine trying to stargaze where the ground itself is glowing. That's the challenge with infrared astronomy. In infrared, if you built an infrared telescope and looked up at the sky, the ground around you and the buildings around you and the people around you are glowing.
It's gonna be kind of hard to see the infrared stuff in space, and infrared astronomy from the ground is really, really tough. Plus, there's this whole thing called the atmosphere, which has a lot of carbon dioxide and getting more of it and lots of water in it and lots of methane, and these molecules absorb a lot of infrared radiation. You know, that's the whole point of the greenhouse gas thing is that they're really good at absorbing infrared radiation. So if there's some infrared radiation coming from a distant star or whatever or a planet making its way through space, totally fine, makes it to Earth, wants to hit your telescope, but instead gets sucked up by the atmosphere. And so we don't get to see it from the ground.
So it's this plus the fact that the Earth is warm makes infrared astronomy from the ground, not just really, really tough, but really, really, really, really, really, really tough. That is quintuple tough for those of you keeping count. So space it is, folks. We gotta go we gotta do it. We gotta go to space.
Yes. We can do infrared astronomy from the ground. In order to do it, what we do is, one, we find, like, a giant mountain to get as little atmosphere between us and space as possible. Then we take our detectors, and we chill them out. We cool them down very, very, very, very cold.
And then we look at only specific wavelengths of infrared that actually do make it through the atmosphere, and it's a huge pain in the neck. Space is so much better, and we've had lots of infrared space telescopes like the Spitzer and the infrared space observatory, which is a pretty straightforward name if you ask me. And the next up, the next big infrared space telescope is the James Webb Space Telescope. Now it's usually dubbed the James Webb. And by the way, James Webb Space Telescope and I are very casual, very informal between us, so I just call it James.
James is usually dubbed the successor to the Hubble. It kinda is, as in the sense, is the next big major open observatory telescope, but also not really. Hubble was primarily an optical instrument. It has visible wavelengths, the same wavelengths that your eye can capture and a little bit of ultraviolet and a little bit of infrared, but mostly optical. It took pictures like a superhuman eyeball, and it was launched at a time when even for optical telescopes, going to space was the best option.
You know, back in the eighties and nineties, if you want really, really good pictures of stuff in space, you had to go to also space. You had to get up there. You had to get past the atmosphere, and that's because all of the wibbling and wobbling that our atmosphere does all the time really, really messes up starlight. It makes twinkling, which is pretty, but is a real pain in the neck when it comes to serious astronomy. Astronomers would prefer to work in a vacuum because it's so much nicer.
And back in the day, thirty years ago, if you wanted to correct for the atmosphere, you had to get away from the atmosphere. You could go up in space, hence the Hubble. But nowadays, we have these things called adaptive optics, which I'd love to do a whole episode just on adaptive optics and how it's used. Short, super short version is you shoot a laser up and through the air. You watch the laser wiggle around, and then you have little motors attached to your mirror that are always constantly correcting for that wiggling.
So it cancels out the effects of the atmosphere, and that's what lets us build huge, giant, ridiculous proportioned telescopes on the ground. And, you you know, the case for optical astronomy in space just isn't very strong except for some very, very special cases, which, again, I'd be happy to talk about if you ask. But James isn't optical because that's not where the most bang for the buck is when it comes to space observatories nowadays. It's the twenty first century, folks. We gotta make smart decisions.
Space observatories are expensive. Man, you thought your last dinner out was expensive? That's nothing. If you're ever wondering why we don't have, like, a million space telescopes, it's because it's so expensive. It is so hard to get stuff into space.
It's something I have trouble appreciating is just how many dollars it takes to get something up into space. And space telescopes are big and bulky and heavy, and that just costs a lot of money. If you want the same size telescope in space as on the ground, it's like something like a hundred times more expensive, not a thousand. It's just ridiculous. Also, space observatories tend to be small because, one, there's a weight limit on the rocket.
The rocket can only lift up something so heavy, so you have to make it light, and the rocket itself is only so wide. And you know how astronomers are with their apertures and everything. You know, the bigger the better. You know, the the bigger the mirror, the bigger the dish, the more light you can collect, the more distant you can see, the fainter you can see. You like big stuff, but you can't have a mirror wider than the rocket itself because rockets really don't work that way.
Like, you imagine a rocket and you just stick this, like, giant mirror on it and, like, yeah. It's fine. It's fine. We're good. We'll we'll get up into space somehow.
You know, it's not like tying stuff onto the top of your car just to make it it just it's that that's not gonna work. So you can only have so big of a mirror to get up into space. And it's also slow. You know, like, the data rate is just it's in space, and talking to space is slow. It's like dial up days.
It's horrible. So if we want to have space observatories, they have to have a really, really compelling case to justify the expense, to get away with having a relatively small mirror, to to have a limited observing program. Like, it has to be, like, we gotta make it worth it, and infrared was the next obvious choice. Because we've had infrared observatories before, and we see a strong science case for even more infrared space observatories. But still, like, okay.
So it's gonna be an infrared observatory. We're gonna put in space because infrared astronomy on the ground is kind of challenging, and space is so much nicer, but telescopes are still limited by the size of the rocket. It can't be wider than the width of the rocket itself, or can it? James is gonna have a mirror over 20 feet across. That's six and a half meters across.
That is a tiny bit wider than our widest available rockets. How, you might ask? Good thing you asked. It's by having a lot of smaller mirrors all folded up inside the rocket like a little origami flower. And then when it gets to space, it will, hopefully, unfold itself into the big mirror.
So we're using, James is gonna have a segmented mirror. It's not just one giant thing. It's a bunch of smaller mirrors, like 18 of them, I think, all folded up nice and pretty, so it all packs into the rocket, goes to assassination, then piece by piece unfolds to make this big mirror. This is a pretty risky thing. Moving parts in space is hard.
Like, just being in space is hard. Moving parts in space is even harder. Like, this thing has to unfold just right because if it doesn't, there is no more James. James is dead if this thing doesn't unfold right, if all those 18 mirrors don't make it happen. And we only get one shot at it.
We only get one shot. You remember the Hubble repair mission? You know, they sent Hubble into orbit, and we got our first images back, and they were all blurry because the people in charge of grinding the mirrors made a mistake. And it was, like, it was a huge mess in the early nineties, But Hubble was, like, 350 miles away. It was an orbit around the Earth, and so we're able to send the space shuttle up to it, with literally a corrective lens to it.
Now we have, you know, the Hubble that we know and love today. That was, like, 350 miles away. James will be 1,000,000 miles away. 1,000,000 miles away. Good luck getting a repair mission out there.
If one of those mirrors doesn't unfold, we're not sending a crew out to fix it, folks. We just don't get a James. We just don't get a space telescope. It's just game over. That's one of the reasons I'll get to this towards the end of the episode.
One of the reasons why there's been so many delays and cost overruns is because we only get one shot at it. And if, if it messes up, just just I can't even say how bad it would be, so I'm not gonna talk about it anymore. Why does it have to be a million miles out, you might ask? We're not just doing it for fun. Like, I know.
Let's put a telescope in space, but a million miles away in space, that'll No. No. No. We're doing it. We're putting James a million miles away from the Earth because the Earth is too dang hot.
You can do infrared astronomy in orbit around the Earth, like the Spitzer Space Telescope is relatively close to the Earth, but you have to actively cool all the instruments because heat means infrared radiation. The colder you make something, the less infrared radiation that will be, the less light pollution you will get from your telescope itself. If you're close to the Earth, just the Earth is so warm, you have to actively cool your spacecraft, and you have to be very careful of how the telescope is used. You can't even point it towards the Earth or it would just, like, fries the electronics. And all this active cooling limits the lifetime of the instrument because you're gonna need a coolant like a refrigerator, and it's only gonna work for a limited amount of time.
And you're just not gonna have an instrument anymore when it's done. And remember, James is 21 feet across. Its primary mirror is 21 feet across. That whole thing has to be chilled. That whole thing has to be, like, less than 50 Kelvin.
That's a lot of real estate to keep that cold. Active cooling on this size of a dish isn't really gonna be an option. Even if you were able to have it be near the earth, just cooling that whole thing down just just isn't gonna work. So instead, we need to send it really, really far away. And it's not just anywhere a million miles away.
We're placing it in a very special place in our solar system called l two. L two as distinct from l one, l three, l four, and l five. This is l two. So these l points, also called Lagrange points or Lagrangian points, if you have one object orbiting another, like, say, I don't know the Earth orbiting the sun, there are five places in that orbit where the gravity cancels out. So one, l one, is easy to identify.
That's between the sun and the earth, you know, closer to the earth and the sun, but it's where the gravitational pull from the sun balances the gravitational pull from the earth, and everything's in equilibrium. That's l one. There's three other Lagrange points that I'm not gonna talk about, and then there's l two. L two is on the opposite side of the earth away from the sun. And any two gravitating objects or orbiting objects will have this set of Lagrange points.
The Earth and the moon have their set of Lagrange points. Sun and Jupiter have their set of Lagrange points, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. L two is on the far side of the Earth. And believe it or not, this is a point where the gravity cancels out. This is the point in the orbit or place a distance from the sun, a position where, normally, if you were to just place something out there, that thing will want to drift behind the Earth.
Like, because it's in a further orbit, so it'll be moving slower. The Earth is in a closer orbit. It'll be moving faster. The Earth will just race ahead of that point. But the gravity of the Earth itself tugs on that point.
Like, you imagine the Earth races ahead, and that's a little gravitational tug because now there's an Earth kinda sorta in front of this point. So the gravity pulls that point along, and then the earth raises ahead, but then the gravity pulls along like a dog on a leash looping around in orbit around the sun. So this point l two is this outer orbit beyond the earth where all the gravity cancels out, and it's a handy place to be. It's a handy place to be because you can hang out near there. Two things.
One, the Earth will always be between you and the sun, and you can just point in one direction. You can always look at the Earth. Like, you're not moving relative to the Earth. You're kept kind of in lock with the Earth at this point. It's not a physical thing.
It's not like you can go there and plant a flag or something. It it's a it's just a place of very unique gravity. It's a mathematical thing. But the point is another nice thing about l two, besides the fact that you always know where you're gonna be relative to the Earth, is that it doesn't require a lot of effort to stay nearby because it's a it's a neutral gravity point. You're not getting hang out at the point itself because it's very unstable even though the gravity is zero there.
Everything cancels out there. It's like being at the top of a hill. Like, any little nudge, it will move you away from l two. So you can't just hang out there, but you can orbit around it. And we actually have several satellites, several missions, several observatories hanging out near L 2, and James is going to join them at this special point where it's easy to stay in contact with the Earth and you don't have to work so hard to stay exactly where you are or at least orbiting around that point where you are.
And still, even a million miles further away from the sun than the Earth is hanging out at L 2 like all the cool observatories do. Get it? Cool. Literally. Chill.
Never mind. It's still not cold enough out there because of the sun. So we've taken care of the Earth. By getting a million miles away from the Earth, we're good. But a million miles away from the Earth, the sun is still warm.
Like, you go out on a nice sunny day and you feel warmth, that is from the infrared radiation of the sun. It is pumping out infrared like nobody's business. So to keep James cold, he needs a shield, a shield from the sun, a sunshield, if you will. It's five layers. Each layer is huge, like 22 meters by by 10 meters, and I'm perfectly aware that in this episode, I am freely and wantonly mixing imperial and metric units, and we're just gonna have to get used to that.
But each each layer is 22 meters by 10 meters, and but the layers are just 25 micrometers thick. That's like a human hair, super, super thin, stacked together with gaps in between them, and they're super reflective, like incredibly highly reflective material. And the point is to block the sun's rays. It's an absurdly expensive space umbrella. Okay?
A parasol. It's so James doesn't get a tan when it's hanging out at the l two. One side of the sunshield is always going to point towards the sun, and it will keep the rest of James in its shadow, keeping it under 50 k, which is negative 220 degrees Celsius or minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Just cold. Just cold.
So we can do all of its infrared telescope goodness so that the actual instrument itself, the mirror, the the housing, the the electronics, all that is just kept cold so it doesn't ruin the infrared astronomy. So it doesn't introduce any light pollution. And this is good enough for all but one instrument. One of the instruments onboard James is gonna require it to be even colder, like, below 15 k, and that's gonna have its own additional cooling system that will eventually run out. But the rest of the instruments could, in principle, run forever, but what's gonna limit the lifetime of James is it has to stay in orbit around l two.
It's gonna hang out near l two, and it's also gonna point from place to place. It's gonna look over here. It's gonna look over there. It's gonna look up here. It's gonna look down there.
All those maneuvers are gonna cost fuel, and there's only a limited supply of fuel. So engineers are designing it, hoping it'll last ten years. The actual mission is supposed to be five years long, but there's gonna be enough fuel on board to hopefully last an entire decade. So it's not gonna be a case of the Hubble where I mean, the Hubble is way past its prime. It should have been retired and replaced decades ago, but it wasn't.
And it just kinda keeps limping along. We're able to repair it, etcetera, etcetera, add new instruments. James is one and done. We're gonna put it out there. It's gonna head to l two.
It's gonna unfold, hopefully. By the way, the sunshields also have to unfold because, as you might imagine, 22 meters is slightly wider than the width of a rocket. So both the sunshield and the mirrors will be folded up inside the rocket. If everything unfolds smoothly, then the James is gonna be able to do its science for five to ten years. And when it comes to instruments, it's pretty straightforward.
It's got two main cameras, one for something that we call near infrared, which is wavelengths close to red, like, just redder than red, and then one for mid infrared, which is wavelengths, as you might imagine, a little bit further from red. And there's one more called far infrared that James isn't even gonna touch because it's can't get cold enough for that. It's also gonna have two spectrometers in the same wavelength range and also a guidance sensor so it can orient itself. It will pick out guide stars, like, okay. Okay.
I know that star. I know that star. I know that star. I'm gonna orient on that. I'm gonna keep that one position.
I know exactly where that one is so I can very, very carefully adjust the rotors on this thing so I can keep pointed at a target. Also, with that guidance sensor is another near infrared camera and spectrometer. The near infrared cameras, by the way, have these nifty little things called coronagraphs, which are just little, little, tiny discs that are specifically designed to block out the light from distant stars. Like, just cover up a star. Just a little like, bring a little sticker on it.
Just and look for the stuff around those stars. But it's not going to take a bunch of pretty Hubble like pictures. You know, we love all these oohs and ahs from Hubble, all the gorgeous pictures. Everyone goes nuts over. No one goes nuts over Spitzer space telescope pictures.
I mean, it will take pictures. It literally has a camera on it. James literally has three cameras. It will take pictures, but those images will be infrared images. They will not be what we can see with the naked eye.
And, of course, the James team and NASA are gonna release images, but they'll be mapped to human wavelengths so that we can oh and ah appropriately. But it will not be anything close to what you can see with your naked eye. It's just not how it works. The mapping will be like, okay. This wavelength in infrared, we'll call blue.
This wavelength, we'll call green. This wavelength, we'll call lime green. This wavelength, we'll call Kelly green. This one, we'll call pine green. There's gonna be a lot of greens.
Okay? Arbitrarily deciding this for NASA. It'll be mapped. So they'd be pretty pictures, but it will be nothing like what you can see with the human eye, but they will be full of information. And believe it or not, James is gonna get a ton of science done, hopefully, if it actually unfolds.
One of the biggest things that James is gonna go after is the young universe. You see, galaxies are made of stars. Right? Stars pump out a lot of visible light. Mhmm.
We could see the stars in our own sky from our own galaxy. We can look at distant galaxies, and they light up. They're really pretty. We can see them with with our eyes, with visible light. But the farther away you go in space, the further back you're going in time.
So, you know, Andromeda Galaxy is two and a half million light years away. That's how what we're seeing now isn't Andromeda as it is now. It's Andromeda as it was two and a half million years ago. You look at a very distant galaxy from, say, let's say, 10,000,000,000 light years away. That's not how it is now.
That's how it was 10,000,000,000 ago. This is fine. That's still visible light. You know, a galaxy that grew up 10,000,000,000 ago is still pumping out a lot of visible light, but what's happened in those ten billion years is the expansion of the universe. And the expansion of the universe stretches out light.
It increases the wavelength of light. You can imagine as light is sailing through the universe and then space underneath it is stretching, it's like pulling those wavelengths. This is called cosmological redshift. This is like how we know that the universe is expanding. And you get to a certain point in distance with faraway galaxies where a distant galaxy simply isn't visible anymore.
Even though it's pumping out tons of visible light, the light on its way here has been stretched down into the infrared. So it's perfectly possible to take a picture of a blank spot in space and see nothing, even if you had the world's most powerful telescope, but then you swap it out with an infrared telescope and, bam, you see all sorts of galaxies from the very young universe. It's specifically designed the wavelengths. The reason they chose these wavelengths, one, was, like, cooling and cost and what they could reasonably do, but this set of wavelengths, the near and mid infrared, is very interesting for cosmology because that's the wavelength range where we expect to see some of the first galaxies to ever appear in our universe. We have no images of the first galaxies to appear.
We have some very, very young galaxies, but we don't have the first ones, and we don't have the first stars. We we have no information. From when our universe was about, you know, a few hundred million years old, nothing. We don't have any pictures because we need a big giant infrared telescope to do it. James Webb, James, will hopefully give us our very first pictures of the first galaxies to appear in the universe.
That's huge. That's not the only young thing that James is gonna take pictures of. It's also gonna take pictures of baby solar systems, newly forming stars. Why infrared? Well, if you have a cloud of dust and gas, it's probably gonna be hot.
Most things in space are generally hot. But if you wanna crunch it down and squeeze it together and compress it to form a star, you actually have to cool it off. Because if it's too hot, it just won't congeal. It won't get together. It has to be cold to clump together to actually form a star.
So we see stars forming in the coldest pockets of gas in the universe, and if they're cold, they're not emitting visible light, they're emitting infrared light. So infrared radiation lets us map out these nurseries in way better than we can in the visible. And we can also peek inside of them because if there's something hot inside of them, like, say, of newly forming star, then there's gonna be a lot of infrared radiation coming out of that, and we can take a picture of it. And James is going to be an exoplanet hunter. Not a survey instrument like Kepler or TESS is not gonna collect thousands or millions of exoplanets, but instead, it's gonna be very, very judicious.
It's gonna look at exoplanets that are very promising, that look especially interesting. It will use its coronagraph to block out the light from a star, and it will look at the infrared light emitted by the planets themselves. You know, Johannes said, like, the Earth is warm, planets are pretty warm things. With an infrared camera, you can just take a picture of a planet from the light that it itself is emitting. James is gonna do it.
It's gonna take direct pictures, direct imaging of exoplanets. It's gonna look at exoplanet atmospheres. You know how I said earlier that, you know, our atmosphere blocks a lot of infrared radiation because of all the carbon dioxide and the water and the methane. Well, if you're taking a picture, an infrared picture of a distant exoplanet, and if you see some missing wavelengths, then you know that that planet has a lot of carbon dioxide and water and methane. You can hunt for life.
You can hunt for strange things happening on those planets. It might be life. It might not be life. It's hard to tell, but, yeah, without further analysis. But James is going to hunt for special exoplanets.
He can't do it to all the exoplanets, so we're gonna use instruments like TESS, like the Kepler archive to pick out very promising ones. Say, hey. Hey. Hey. Hey, James.
James. James. James. Check this one out. Just just do it for me.
Just one hour of observation. That's all I need. Check this one out. Let me know what's going on in the atmosphere. James is also gonna look at anything else that's not very hot, brown dwarfs, molecular clouds, comets, Kuiper Belt objects.
There's just a lot of stuff in space that doesn't glow very brightly in the visible, but sure does in the infrared. Basically, anything that's hard to see, and it's gonna collect so much information, a treasure trove. I mean, we're still mining old Hubble data still, and we will for decades to come. The five to ten year mission from James is gonna produce, like, no joke, like a century's worth of information and data to pour over and analyze. Infrared astronomy is hard, and there's a lot to learn from the infrared sky.
James will be the master at it if it launches. Oh, that's the other thing. It's currently scheduled for March of twenty twenty one. As of the recording of this podcast, James actually exists. It's actually built.
It's actually there, and it's currently getting packed into its rocket housing to be launched. There's been huge delays and cost overruns. I mean, it's fourteen years late and $8,000,000,000 over budget. Same thing happened to the Hubble, so there's kind of precedent here. But like I said, it's going to one place that's very, very far away.
It's very challenging. It's a very ambitious design where you're fitting a telescope that really is too big for a rocket into a rocket and trying to launch it a million miles away and have it deploy and operate. Tough stuff. Tough stuff. And yet still, it's fourteen years late.
NASA does have a plan to prevent further cost overruns. They I've heard they've actually launched a Patreon campaign. That's right. You can go to patreon.com/pmsutter to keep the James Webb Space Telescope on track. That is not true at all, and I hope I don't get in trouble for saying that.
No. It keeps me on the air. It keeps all of my education outreach activities going, including this podcast, Guest of Space Man, including Space Radio, including the the art and science projects and the blogging. Like, I do a lot stuff that is supported directly by you, and I can't thank you enough. Patreon.com/pmsutter.
0 dollars of that will go to the James Webb Space Telescope. I just want that to be absolutely clear. Thank you so much for listening. Don't forget, there is a new AstroTur cruise in August of twenty twenty. We're going to check out some Mayan ruins.
Check out the Johnson Space Center. It's gonna be so much fun. Go to astro.tours for all that information. Speaking of cruises, in December 2021, I'm joining Poseidon Expeditions to be their resident expert to check out this total solar eclipse. That's on a cruise to Antarctica, folks.
Just search for Poseidon Expeditions. You can also email salesUSA@PoseidonExpeditions.com. You also call (347) 801-2610. That's not an AstroTur. That's not my company.
I'm just doing this thing for them where I'm getting hang up because I get to go see a total solar eclipse in Antarctica, which sounds pretty fun. I'd love for you to join me. So either do that one in December 2021 or join us for an AstroTor cruise in August of twenty twenty, or do both. Thank you so much to at Seth d Sanders on Twitter, at h on Twitter, white I on email, and Velho u on Facebook for the questions that led to today's episode. And once again, you can keep supporting.
Please, I really appreciate it. That's patreon.com/pmsutter. Big shout out to my top contributors this month, Matthew k, Justin z, Justin g, Kevin o, Duncan m, Corey d, Barbara k, Nudar Dude, Chrissy, Robert m, Nate h, Andrew f, Chris l, John, Elizabeth w, Cameron l, and Nalia. It's you plus all the other amazing space cadets that keep this show going. Check out askaspaceman.com.
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